Five Good Collections of Historic Maps for Classroom Use

Last week I wrote a blog post featuring the newly published historic map collection hosted by the Internet Archive. That collection, the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, is the latest of the historic map collections that I’ve featured on this blog over the last fifteen years. Here are some others that I’ve featured and used in my own classrooms over the years.

Old Maps Online is an online map that you can browse and search to find historical maps to view online, to download, and to print. You can search the map by entering a location or you can just pan and zoom around the world to find historical maps. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use Old Maps Online.

The Library of Congress housed hundreds of thousands of maps covering a huge array of topics from maps used by fire insurance companies to population density to maps of military battles and campaigns. The LOC’s collection of maps of military battles and campaigns contains more than 4,000 maps that are free to view, download, and reuse. The vast majority of the maps are from the 18th and 19th centuries although there are about 600 maps covering World War I and II.

In this video I provide a short overview of the two places on the Library of Congress’s website that I recommend students search and browse to find images and maps that they can use and reuse.

Map-based Lesson Plans

DocsTeach is one of my go-to resources for history teachers. DocsTeach provides thousands of primary sources that teachers can use to build online and in-person history lessons for middle school and high school students. Some of the pre-made lesson activities hosted on DocsTeach are based on maps. Some of those map-based lessons are:

King’s Topographical Collection

Flickr’s The Commons is a great place to find all kinds of interesting historical photographs from museums and libraries all over the world. The British Library’s King’s Topographical Collection hosted on The Commons contains more than 17,000 historical maps and images related to maps. The King’s Topographical Collection is comprised of maps and drawings produced between 1500 and 1824. You can browse through, view, and download all of the maps and drawings in the collection. Unfortunately, the ability to search within the collection on Flickr is limited to just using “control+F” to search for words on the displayed page. When you do find something you like, click the download button on the image to save it in resolution of your choice.

topoView

topoView is a good place to find historical maps that you can import into Google Earth. topoView is a USGS website that provides historical maps dating back to 1880. You can download the maps in variety of file formats including JPG and KMZ. In the following video I demonstrate how to find and download historical maps on the topoView website.

Applications for Education
One of my favorite uses of Google Earth in history classes is overlaying historical maps on current map views. Doing that can provide students with context for places they read about in history lessons. Doing that also provides a good way to see how places change over time. Watch the video below to see how that’s done.

Five Good Collections of Historic Maps for Classroom Use

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