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

Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library We use maps, geography, and history to understand the connection between people and places in Boston, New England, and beyond. The Norman B.

Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library is a nonprofit organization established as a public-private partnership between the Library and philanthropist Norman Leventhal. Its mission is to use the collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases for the enjoyment and education of all through exhibitions, educational programs, and a website that includes more than 3,700 digitized maps. The map

collection is global in scope, dating from the 15th century to the present, with a particular strength in maps and atlases from the New England region, American Revolutionary War period, nautical charts, and world urban centers. The Leventhal Map Center is located on the first floor of the Library’s historic McKim Building in Copley Square. It includes an exhibition gallery that features changing thematic exhibitions, a public learning center with research books, and a reading room for rare map research. Other elements include a world globe three feet in diameter and a Kids Map Club with map puzzles, books and activities. Educational programs for students in grades K to 12 are offered to school groups on site and in the classroom. More than 100 lesson plans based on national standards are available on the website, and professional development programs for teachers are scheduled regularly throughout the year. The Leventhal Map Center is ranked among the top ten in the United States for the size of its collection, the significance of its historic (pre-1900) material, and its advanced digitization program. It is unique among the major collections because it also combines these features with exceptional educational programs to advance geographic literacy among students in grades K to 12 and enhance the teaching of subjects from history to mathematics to language arts. The collection is also the second largest in the country located in a public library, ensuring unlimited access to these invaluable resources for scholars, educators, and the general public.

Is New England skiing going downhill?🎿 This map produced by the Boston Globe in 1948 was created at a time when American...
01/17/2025

Is New England skiing going downhill?🎿

This map produced by the Boston Globe in 1948 was created at a time when Americans were just beginning to see skiing as a recreational sport.

A little recognized fact is that many of the ski trails across New England were planned out and cleared as a part of the Works Progress Administration, a federal program created during the Great Depression that employed millions of people to work on public works projects. Present-day Gunstock Mountain is just one well know ski area that was created in part by the WPA.

Since skiing’s peak as an American pastime in the 1960s, ski areas have been steadily closing or merging into large, multi mountain resorts. But with winters the warmest they’ve ever been on record, the future is (unfortunately) looking hot for ski areas.

While the next few years may look a little uncertain, demand for ski areas is still in high demand: “Despite the changes to the seasons, skier visitation in Vermont has held steady at around 4 million visits per year”. We hope to see a new ski map soon and (hopefully) with many of the same mountains listed.

Map: The Boston Globe ski map of northern New England and Canada (1948)

Article: The Boston Globe

Who *wouldn’t* want to see a map depicting contagious diseases around the world?!  🦟🐀🕷️This map shows the locations of t...
01/15/2025

Who *wouldn’t* want to see a map depicting contagious diseases around the world?! 🦟🐀🕷️

This map shows the locations of tropical diseases around the world using text, illustrations and color to grab the viewer’s attention. Included at the foot of the map is a description of each disease, how it’s typically contracted, and how it’s most often treated.

15 diseases are represented here: malaria, yellow fever, dengue, typhus, plague, cholera, sleeping sickness, tularemia, Rocky Mountain fever, Japanese river fever, relapsing fever, helminthic diseases, yaws, leprosy, and leishmaniasis.

Created for LIFE Magazine in 1944, this map would have been highly accessible to the public at a time where millions of American soldiers were deployed across the globe during the Second World War.

Map: World map of the major tropical diseases (1944)

01/14/2025

In this talk, based on his recent book, The Map in the Machine, Luis F. Alvarez León examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, and a new Earth Observation satellite ecosystem. He develops a geographical theory of digital capitalism centered on the processes of location, valuation, and marketization to provide a new vantage point from which to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. By centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, Alvarez León shows how this system is the product not of seemingly intangible information clouds but rather of a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.

Luis Felipe Alvarez León is Associate Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. His work focuses on the political economy of geospatial data, media, and technologies. He is currently working on the geographies of autonomous vehicles, and the changing political economy of remote sensing. He is the author of The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism (University of California Press, 2024).

With tech developments happening faster than we know what to do with, it can be helpful to look into the past for some a...
01/12/2025

With tech developments happening faster than we know what to do with, it can be helpful to look into the past for some answers... 🖥️

Join co-curators Ian Spangler and Emily Bowe on Jan 16 for a virtual lecture at the Washington Map Society to discuss how the "Processing Place: How Computers and Cartographers Redrew Our World?" show came to be—and where it could go next.

Register here: https://buff.ly/4a2VQAd

Map: Urban atlas, tract data for standard metropolitan statistical areas : Boston, Massachusetts (1975)

Every town in MA can be a tourist destination—just ask this map!The state of Massachusetts commissioned this map as a wa...
01/11/2025

Every town in MA can be a tourist destination—just ask this map!

The state of Massachusetts commissioned this map as a way to advertise its tourist locations and important historical sites. Created in part for tourists coming from the 1964 World's Fair in NYC, most towns on the map have its own fun fact, advertising at least one thing tourists can do in each city. Towns and cities that are't usually known as tourist destinations, like Worcester, are highlighted here.

The map’s borders are also filled with other activities and sites in Massachusetts that couldn’t be fit into the larger map. One example is , as seen at the top of the map. Although this map only dates back to 1964, it still reveals how people were informed of places to visit within their home state.

Can you find your town on the map?

Map: Historic Massachusetts: a travel map to help you feel at home in the Bay State (1964)

🔥What was it about Boston and Massachusetts in the late 1700s that made the region such a tinderbox for Revolutionary ac...
01/09/2025

🔥What was it about Boston and Massachusetts in the late 1700s that made the region such a tinderbox for Revolutionary activity?🔥

In the Leventhal Map & Education Center’s upcoming exhibition Terrains of Independence, maps will offer the entry point to a reconsideration of the Revolutionary War through the lens of locality and place. By emphasizing how physical landscapes and spatial dynamics influenced the trajectory of revolutionary activity, the exhibit calls us to rethink the familiar story of Boston as a “cradle of liberty.”

Terrains of Independence is curated by Katy Lasdow and Garrett Dash Nelson, President and Head Curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center.

Read the full exhibition prospectus article: https://buff.ly/40nEU47

How does digital tech impact the way we shop, work, play, and communicate? 🤔 Join us for a talk from Dr. Luis Alvarez Le...
01/07/2025

How does digital tech impact the way we shop, work, play, and communicate? 🤔

Join us for a talk from Dr. Luis Alvarez León on Jan 14 about his latest book, "The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism," to learn more about how digital tech intervenes in the spaces and places of your everyday life.

Register here: https://buff.ly/4046JwU

Curious about the stinkiest parts of mid-nineteenth century Boston? Look no further than this map 🤢 In 1874, the State B...
01/05/2025

Curious about the stinkiest parts of mid-nineteenth century Boston? Look no further than this map 🤢

In 1874, the State Board of Health of Massachusetts divided the Commonwealth into “health districts,” areas assigned to physicians tasked with documenting the locations of prevalent diseases. In addition to these health districts, this map depicts filled land as pale brown, “low and swampy” land in green, and salt marshes in pale orange.

Both the green and orange environments were viewed with suspicion by many Bostonians of the eighteenth century, not only because they were unprofitable, but also because they were seen as the sources of noxious air and contagious diseases. It's also important to note that the city had been dumping sewage directly into Boston Harbor for centuries at this point...

There was even a popular conspiracy theory (“miasma theory”) that claimed the foul odors themselves were enough to spread disease. In the years to come, Bostonians would increasingly seek out “breathing-places”: well-lit, dry, green spaces, where they might take in the fresh air for their health. A need for "breathing-places" was a main argument for the creation of Franklin Park and the Charles River Esplanade a few decades later.

Map: Map of Boston: showing health districts and undrained and filled land [ca. 1870–1879]

01/04/2025

What’s better than a beautiful pictorial map? 3 STUNNING pictorial maps 😌

These maps are a complete set of 3, depicting American geography, history, and culture at a time when the country was struggling to define itself. Done by artists William Gropper, Paul Sample, and Aaron Bohrod, these maps were funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a government project created in 1935 to help unemployed Americans during the Great Depression.

The WPA employed more than 8.5 million people to work on a variety of projects, from building roads and painting murals to conducting oral history interviews with formerly enslaved individuals.

The 3 maps in this series —"America, its soil," "America, its folklore," and "America, its history" —were marketed to fit perfectly in any home, office, library or school. All completed in a pictorial, almost painterly style, each map portrayed America favorably, and also acknowledged cultural pluralities and difficult historic events.

All three maps uplift the idea of America as a “melting pot”, though this idea was often culturally observed as assimilation and a loss of “non-American” traditions and culture. Though less useful for navigation, these maps helped inspire pride in the United States, the land it encompassed, and the people that gave it life.

Maps: Paul Sample's America, its soil (1946), William Gropper's America, its folklore (1946), Aaron Bohrod's America, its history (1946)

For 1 year in Boston's history, you could walk through downtown Boston with a print of a map unique to your specificatio...
01/02/2025

For 1 year in Boston's history, you could walk through downtown Boston with a print of a map unique to your specifications to guide you around the city, printed and distributed for free from the “Walking Distance Locator” kiosk! 🤯

Installed by the startup Visual Media Inc., between 1989 and 1990, these granite kiosks printed small locator maps that marked select businesses within a 15-minute walk. Users could print maps using a directory that included such options as “Tanning salons” and “Toy stores.” Only businesses who paid a subscription fee could appear in the kiosk’s database (and thus, appear on the map).

Although the kiosks themselves didn’t last long, they did anticipate a kind of geographic—even navigational—advertising that has come to define our current moment through tools like Google Maps, which serves targeted advertisements based on a user’s location and profile.

Visit our newest exhibition, Processing Place, online or in person to learn more about computers and the field of cartography.

Map: Walking Distance Locator (1898)

The  #1 most searched map in our collection during 2024 is Gleason’s infamous “Flat Earth Map” 🫠 Though disbelieved and ...
12/31/2024

The #1 most searched map in our collection during 2024 is Gleason’s infamous “Flat Earth Map” 🫠

Though disbelieved and disproven for hundreds of years prior, there was a resurgence of “Flat Earthers” in the late 19th century. This map was included in Gleason’s 1890 book “Is the Bible from Heaven? Is the Earth a Globe?”

With its claims to show the earth “as it is” and “scientifically and practically correct,” Gleason's map appealed to the language of cartographic authenticity in order to make a competing claim about the truth.

Thanks for a wonderful 2024, we'll see you all next year!
💙 LMEC

Map: Gleason's new standard map of the world... (1992)

Isn't it funny there was already an "old Boston" over 140 years ago? 🧓 Noted historian and librarian, Justin Winsor crea...
12/28/2024

Isn't it funny there was already an "old Boston" over 140 years ago? 🧓

Noted historian and librarian, Justin Winsor created this unique map by superimposing the outline of the original Shawmut Peninsula onto an 1880 map of Boston. It was used as the beginning piece for the first volume of his "Memorial History of Boston, Including Suffolk County, Massachusetts", published in 1882.

To put how old Boston is into context, by 1882: the current was transitioning out of the "old library" and the Central Library was just being built, the Old State House had been replaced by the new one near the Common nearly 100 years before, and the Public Garden was added to the Common 200 years after the initial park was constructed.

Though drawn without the assistance of computers or aerial photographs, it remains one of the most vivid diagrams of the radical transformation and enlargement of the Shawmut Peninsula area during the 19th century.

Map: Boston old and new (1880)
Images: Digital Commonwealth

This seems like a great day to share a map of the Earth’s North pole! Though there’s no solid land at the North pole, it...
12/25/2024

This seems like a great day to share a map of the Earth’s North pole!

Though there’s no solid land at the North pole, it’s in the Artic Ocean in an area covered by floating ice between 6–10 feet thick. You can think of it like a giant iceberg. Despite being made of frozen covered in ice, the North pole is actually significantly warmer than the South pole, the North averaging about -30° F during the winter, while the South Pole gets down to an even frostier -76° F!

We can see why a certain someone chose to settle down in the North! Now, just where is St. Nick?

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the LMEC! 🗺️ 🎅

Map: A map of the North Pole with all the territories that lye near it, known to us &c. According to the latest discoveries, and most exact observations: agreeable to modern history (1732)

East Boston represent! 🙌 One of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city, East Boston has long been a hub of different...
12/22/2024

East Boston represent! 🙌

One of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city, East Boston has long been a hub of different cultures. The sponsor of this bird’s-eye view—the Cunard Steamship Company—and the emphasis on the docks in the foreground of the map are both reminders of the role that immigration has played in the history of the East Boston neighborhood.

At the time this map was published, the list of churches on the right side of the title hinted at the neighborhood’s diversity, with institutions like Congregational and Unitarian meeting houses sharing space with immigrants’ Methodist, Baptist, and Roman Catholic churches.

Like much of Boston in the late 1800s, Irish Catholic immigrants made up the largest single group of newcomers. Today, East Boston is a thriving center of the city’s Hispanic community, with Italian and Southeast Asian communities also represented.

Map: View of East Boston, Mass : 1879
Images: Digital Commonwealth

Today, let's look briefly at one of Bostonians' favorite talking points: New York City!This birds-eye view is of Central...
12/21/2024

Today, let's look briefly at one of Bostonians' favorite talking points: New York City!

This birds-eye view is of Central Park, observed from the junction of 59th St. and 5th Ave. Printed six years after work on the park began, the area would undergo another 12 years of construction before its completion in 1876.

While already beautiful just 1/3 of the way through construction, Central Park is an unfortunate example of a process called "Urban Renewal". Urban renewal is "a strategy for redeveloping and revitalizing substandard, decadent and blighted open areas" for other uses. But who gets a say in which areas are "substandard"?

Seneca Village was a middle-class settlement of freed African Americans (the first of its kind in the city) that was forcibly seized by the City of New York in order to create Central Park. The village was taken under eminent domain in the mid 1850s and all of the residents were forced to relocate - a very difficult task when few would sell to African Americans and being a land owner was a requirement to vote. In this map of Central Park, there is no trace left of Seneca Village.

Boston itself is no stranger to neighborhoods undergoing drastic change in the name of urban renewal. Many areas of Boston were significantly altered or completely destroyed because of urban renewal, like the frequently-cited historic West End neighborhood. At the time of its demolition in the late 1950s, the West End was full of families, businesses, and landmarks that had been in that part of Boston for generations.

While New York’s Central Park and Boston’s TD Garden & Government Center areas are now notable in their own right, it’s important to remember that some really special communities had to be dismantled for them to be built.

Maps: Martel's New York Central Park : respectfully dedicated to the park commissioners (1864), Map of the lands included in the Central Park, from a topographical survey, June 17th, 1856 (1856)

Images: Digital Commonwealth

The only thing more difficult than naming a baby? Naming a state 🙃The map displayed here was produced after the American...
12/20/2024

The only thing more difficult than naming a baby? Naming a state 🙃

The map displayed here was produced after the American Revolutionary war, when “settlement” of the 'Old Northwest' was newly accessible and popular by American colonists. It’s important to note that this land was already being lived on and stewarded by indigenous people of the region and had been that way for hundreds of years.

Intended to create an orderly and diplomatic process with the indigenous inhabitants of the region, primarily with the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy including the Mohawk, Oneida, and Seneca Nations, the Continental Congress imposed the Land Ordinance of 1784. This legislation regulated the governance of the territory, and divided the region into ten states, each with specified boundaries (outlined in light red).

Thomas Jefferson proposed ten names for the states, which are included on this map. While most are quite similar to their official names, others are incredibly different. Just look at Cherronesus (Michigan) which is derived from the Greek word for “peninsula” and Metropotamia (the Indiana/Ohio area)!

Eventually, the proposed 10 states were condensed into 7 and the names were changed to the ones we have now. But how fun is it to think about what could have been?

Maps: A map of the United States of N. America (1784), Map of the public land states and territories (1864)

Who doesn't love a little bit of magic during the holidays? This map of Fairyland depicts places from nursery rhymes, fa...
12/18/2024

Who doesn't love a little bit of magic during the holidays?

This map of Fairyland depicts places from nursery rhymes, fairy tales, Arthurian legends and the folktales of many cultures.

Bernard Sleigh, the cartographer, initially sketched a map of fairyland to entertain his children, adding characters and places from their favorite stories. This map was published in 1917 and intended to decorate nurseries.

After Sleigh retired in 1937, the print was turned into a decorative fabric for Rosebank Fabrics. The print was so popular that Rosebank commissioned Sleigh to design other fairy tale patterns for fabrics.

See if you can spot Humpty Dumpty, the Argonauts, and Peter Pan's house on Never-Never Land!

Map: An anciente mappe of Fairyland (1917)

Reintroducing this New England gem: ✨ The White Mountains ✨ Combining folk art with a detailed tourist map, this unusual...
12/15/2024

Reintroducing this New England gem: ✨ The White Mountains ✨

Combining folk art with a detailed tourist map, this unusual map views the White Mountains from the northwest. In the center, the mountains were drawn in landscape format surrounded by unique vignettes including “Harry Crawford Killing a Lynx”. Along the top are a railroad map and views of waterfalls, while symbolic images of hotels, stage coaches, and trains alert readers to the region’s tourist amenities.

Leavitt, a laborer, mountain guide, and self-taught mapmaker, created this pictorial map as one of the earliest drawn maps of the White Mountains. Reflecting his regional bias, he located Lancaster, his hometown, and the Connecticut River in the center foreground.

Map: Leavitt's map with views of the White Mountains, New Hampshire: 1871 (1871)
Images: Digital Commonwealth

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700 Boylston Street
Boston, MA
02116

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Thursday 11am - 5pm
Friday 11am - 5pm
Saturday 11am - 5pm
Sunday 1pm - 5pm

Telephone

(617) 859-2387

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