Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library

Continued Conversations: Mapping the Mystic River

Join the Leventhal Map and Education Center with the Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA) for a conversation on the historic Mystic River and MyRWA’s past and present efforts to protect it. This talk will map the relationship between past land making projects and current coastal flood challenges, and what communities are doing to minimize harm. The Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA) was founded in 1972 with a mission to protect and restore the Mystic River, its tributaries and watershed lands for the benefit of present and future generations and to celebrate the value, importance and great beauty of these natural resources. Their vision is a vibrant, healthy and resilient Mystic River watershed for the benefit of all our community members. To achieve this, the Mystic River Watershed Association is protecting water quality, restoring important habitat, building climate resilience, transforming parks and paths, and inspiring youth and community members. This talk is virtual, free, open to the public, and will feature a Q&A session with our speakers. This talk is part of our Continued Conversations series in conjunction with our current environmental justice exhibition, More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape.

“The right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of a person…” #OnThisDay in 2015, the Supreme Court announced its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, ruling 5-4 that same-sex marriage cannot be banned in the United States and that all same-sex marriages must be recognized nationwide. This progression from The Guardian #maps the timeline of legalization of by state, beginning with Massachusetts in 2004 to federal legalization in 2015! #pride #pridemonth #pride🌈 #lgbtq #lgbtqia [Image description: Short video clip of map the United States. As the video plays, states are filled with light blue to designate that they “allow” same-sex marriage. Text at the top reads: “States allowing same-sex marriage in [insert year].”]

The support from our community makes our work possible! This video shows the amazing things we've been able to do over the past year with the support of donors from all walks of life. Our fiscal year closes on June 30, and now is our chance to plan out what's ahead of us. Can you support us with a small donation? Visit leventhalmap.org/donate

Urban Development and Community Resilience in Roxbury

Join us for a conversation with the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) on community land trusts, sustainable development, and community resilience in Roxbury. For over 38 years, DSNI has been empowering Dudley residents to organize, plan for, create and control a vibrant, diverse and high-quality urban village. Their efforts prioritize development without displacement, community power, and collective control. DSNI’s Executive Director, John Smith, and Director of Community Organizing, René Mardones, will talk us through DSNI’s origins and current initiatives as we walk through the neighborhood’s history through maps from our collections. This talk is virtual, free, open to the public, and will feature a Q&A session with our speakers. This talk is part of our Continued Conversations series in conjunction with our current environmental justice exhibition, More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape.

Paving Over People: Traffic, Air Pollution, and Health

Join us for a conversation with folks from the Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health Study (CAFEH) on the health risks of highway pollution. We’ll sit down with Lydia Lowe of the Chinatown Community Land Trust, Doug Brugge of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, and Ellin Reisner of the Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership to discuss their community-based participatory research (CBPR) air pollution studies. We’ll also take a look at maps from our collection that document the local history of freeway construction during the mid-twentieth century. This talk is virtual, free, open to the public, and will feature a Q&A session with our speakers. This talk is part of our Continued Conversations series in conjunction with our current environmental justice exhibition, More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape.

John McCurdy on Geographies of Contact between Soldiers and Civilians

Learn about how the urban military spaces of colonial cities shaped the course of the Revolutionary War Join scholar John McCurdy as we learn about the geographies of contact between soldiers and civilians—from urban squares to barracks and lodging houses—during the Revolutionary War. McCurdy’s work examines the small-scale spaces where the everyday realities of life during an imperial conflict became personalized. John McCurdy is Professor and Graduate Coordinator in the Department of History and Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University. His publications include Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2019), Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009), and “From Fort George to the Fields: The Public Space and Military Geography of Revolutionary New York City,” (Journal of Urban History, 2018). This talk is free and open to the public. We invite questions and comments from our live audience. Part of the Richard H. Brown Seminar on the Historical Geography of the American Revolutionary Era

By the end of the nineteenth century, streetcar traffic in Boston had grown hopelessly congested. The solution? A daring new piece of urban infrastructure to house the busiest lines underground. 🚇 Explore the story map here: https://geoservices.leventhalmap.org/map-stories/#tremont-subway/1

Interview Series: A Chat with Alex Hill

Join critical cartographer Alex B. Hill, the creator of Detroit in 50 Maps and numerous other map and design projects, for an information conversation with the Leventhal Map & Education Center. Alex will discuss his work bringing maps and digital information to bear on the social issues of Detroit, and explain how mapping is crucial for understanding the history of cities. This program is free and open to the public.

Critical Map Reading in the Age of Misinformation

Join LMEC Assistant Curator Ian Spangler and BPL Media & Journalism Research Specialist Erica Husting for a public workshop on media literacy in the historic and contemporary cartographic landscape. We’ll uncover inaccuracies, dive into issues of viral misinformation, and review methods of map interpretation as we head into the final week of our Bending Lines: Maps and Data from Distortion to Deception exhibition. This workshop is the latest in our Thinking Spatially series. We invite questions and comments from our live audience.

Redistricting Roundtable

Join us for a talk on redistricting, digital mapping tools, and organizing efforts on the local and national scale.

Immigration on the South Shore

Join Assistant Curator Ian Spangler for a discussion about immigration on the South Shore with with our event partner, the Duxbury Free Library. We’ll explore the historic collections of the Leventhal Map & Education Center and the Digital Commonwealth and also look at census data over time using resources from various cultural institutions around Boston and Massachusetts.

Brighton By Map

What was the name of the building that once housed the Brighton Branch? What was Brighton like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? How has the area changed, and how has it stayed the same? Using Atlascope, the Leventhal Map & Education Center’s user-friendly portal for exploring urban atlases, we’ll dive into the historical geography of Brighton. Come learn about how the community has changed over time, and discover how to research the history of your own house and neighborhood.

Ashland By Map

How has Ashland, Massachusetts changed over time? Where can we find the names and locations of buildings and landscapes that have now vanished? How can maps tell geographic stories? Join the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library and the Ashland Public Library for a virtual exploration of some of the best historic digital maps of Ashland and the region. We’ll look at Ashland up close, answer questions in an interactive Q&A, and offer up resources for further research with maps and geography.

East Boston is one of the city’s densest and most diverse neighborhoods. 150 years ago, however, it was still mostly tidal flats. In this rich interactive, Tess McCann shares her thesis research on how speculators “improved” environmentally marginal land. Follow Tess through maps and photographs in our collection, and explore yourself to see what other evidence of this urban transformation you can find in the historic documents. https://www.leventhalmap.org/articles/mccann-east-boston/ [Image description: screenshot video of an interactive map story, showing sections of a map of East Boston, and a photograph of the same area.]

Kathleen DuVal on Seeing the Revolution From Beyond the Atlantic Coast

Join scholar Kathleen DuVal as she takes us on a journey through geographies of the American Revolution that are often omitted from the popular imagination of this time period. Places like Lexington, Saratoga, and Yorktown are all famously associated with the Revolutionary period. But what about the sites where American Indians, Europeans, and Africans came into contact and conflict on the borderlands of North America?

No matter which way you flatten a globe, it's going to require some kind of distortion! That's one of the basic lessons of cartography: squashing three dimensions into two will always involve warping, bending, or ballooning. Here, we've taken the text "Bending Lines" and shown what it would look like on a globe using several common global projection systems. Which of these views of "Bending Lines" is the most "correct"? Well, that's a trick question, since none of them really are. Some projections preserve shape, others preserve area, and still others make a compromise between the two. Visit the exhibition today—and prepare to have your own perspective get warped. https://www.leventhalmap.org/exhibitions/visit/ [Image description: a video of the words "Bending Lines" traced on a global projection, animated with various projection techniques so that the letters stretch and bend.]

With flooding interrupting service on the MBTA Orange Line this morning, remember that the history of our urban landscape also contains clues for the challenges that we're likely to confront with climate change. The Orange Line follows the route of the Stony Brook through parts of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain—the namesake for that line's Stony Brook train station. In this Atlascope view, you can see the former route of this watercourse, which has now largely been buried and culverted. But during an extreme weather event, those centuries of engineering interventions aren't enough to keep the water from recalling where it originally wanted to go. Stay safe as you travel around the city today! https://atlascope.leventhalmap.org/#view:share$base:001$overlay:39999059010718$zoom:18.51$center:-7914614.259391414,5209853.688577271$mode:glass$pos:470 [Image description: a video showing an 1873 map of Roxbury laid on top of a satellite view of modern Boston, following the course of the former Stony Brook.]

Boston's "skinny house" or "spite house" went up for sale this week for $1.2 million. Located at 44 Hull Street in the North End, this diminutive house boasts 1,165 sq. ft. over 4 floors and is 6.2 feet at its narrowest. Although the history is murky, legend has it that two brothers inherited their father's property when he died. While one was off serving in the Civil War, the other built a house that took up most of the lot. When the other brother returned, he built a skinny dwelling in the narrow lot remaining to spite his brother, blocking his view and light. The exact date of construction is unclear, but you can see the property evolve in this Atlascope view between 1867 and 1888. [Image Description: A short video shows the change over time from an 1867 atlas to an 1888 atlas of 44 Hull Street. A photograph shows the "skinny house" in Boston's North End.]

Michele Navakas on Liquid Landscapes and the Edges of America

Join scholar Michele Navakas as she explores the “liquid landscapes” of places like Florida in the eighteenth century, helping us reframe our understanding of the American Revolutionary period through cartography and landscape history. Navakas examines a rich archive of historical documents that show how diverse groups of people met, struggled, and mixed in regions where boundaries themselves were hard to define.

Earlier this week, an oversized truck crashed into the Roosevelt Circle bridge on I-93 in Medford, leading to emergency repairs and tangled traffic. In Massachusetts, some of our bridges date back more than a century. Here, we've taken GIS data about bridges from MassDOT and animated it by the year of construction. There are hundreds of bridges that were first built in the 1800s! This animation also shows how infrastructure and residential development changed over time in Massachusetts. In the 1920s and 30s, you can see an explosion of new bridges on state highways. Then, in the late 1950s, notice how the interstate highway system's bridges all get put up in a short amount of time in corridors throughout the state. The very oldest bridge in the data set goes back to 1764! Do you know where it is? Check out our Instagram story for the answer at https://www.instagram.com/bplmaps [Image description: a video with point icons showing bridges in Massachusetts, beginning in 1850 and running until 2019.]

South Boston By Map

Get excited about the historical geography of South Boston!

Brookline By Map

Join the LMEC and the Public Library of Brookline for a dive into the historical geography of Brookline, and using maps for research!

Angles on Bending Lines: Brian Jefferson on geographic information systems and the war on crime and drugs

In this conversation series, we talk with experts about why we should be careful about geographic information in modern data. How is data collected, and how does it get fixed into categories and numbers? Who gets to own data sets, and who gets to make decisions using them? What sorts of public responsibilities should shape the social lives of data? Brian Jefferson is an associate professor of geography at the University of Illinois whose work explores capitalism, digital technology, and the state in urban contexts.

Boston By Map 5/27

Join the Leventhal Map and Education Center for a virtual session on historical geography! Bring your lunch, map questions, and enthusiasm.

Angles on Bending Lines: Morgan Currie on cultural mapping for cultural equity

In this conversation series, we talk with experts about why we should be careful about geographic information in modern data. How is data collected, and how does it get fixed into categories and numbers? Who gets to own data sets, and who gets to make decisions using them? What sorts of public responsibilities should shape the social lives of data? Morgan Currie is a lecturer in data and society at the University of Edinburgh whose work focuses on open data, automation in social services, activists’ data practices, civil society and democracy, participatory mapping, and social justice among other topics.

Angles on Bending Lines: Luis Alvarez León on how maps and geographic data underpin the digital economy

In this conversation series, we talk with experts about why we should be careful about geographic information in modern data. How is data collected, and how does it get fixed into categories and numbers? Who gets to own data sets, and who gets to make decisions using them? What sorts of public responsibilities should shape the social lives of data? Luis Alvarez León is an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College whose work focuses on the political economy of geospatial data, media and technologies.

Angles on Bending Lines: Matt Bui on how communities use—and refuse—data about themselves

In this conversation series, we take a critical look at how geospatial data can warp our world. Matt Bui is an assistant professor and faculty fellow at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology who examines the intersections of digital, data, and racial justice in everyday life.

Newton By Map

Come learn about how the Newton community has changed over time, and discover how to research the history of your own house and neighborhood.

Boston By Map 4/21

Join the Leventhal Map and Education Center for a virtual session on historical geography! Bring your lunch, map questions, and enthusiasm.

This week's #TeachingwithMaps tool is this fun interactive from our Bending Lines exhibition that lets you and your students experiment with a human head projected multiple ways. The idea of distortion on maps can be hard to understand until you see this guy's forehead and chin stretch out on a Mercator projection. Try it out: https://www.leventhalmap.org/digital-exhibitions/bending-lines/interactives/projection-face/ [Image description: A video cycles through multiple images of an illustration of a human head projected on four different maps to illustrate how the head is distorted differently on each one.]