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Awesome Historical Maps Awesome

Claudius Ptolemy, 13th Century, world map

Map collections, search tools, research guides, and resources for exploring historical maps and cartography.

Contents

Map Collections

World

Maritime

Military and Campaigns

WW1
WW2

Africa

Asia

East Asia

China
Japan
Korea
Taiwan

South Asia

Southeast Asia

Middle East and Levant

Caribbean

Europe

Central Europe

Austria-Hungary
Belgium
Czech Republic
Germany
  • Landkartenarchiv - Archive of German mapping including world atlases, national maps, topographical maps, road maps, panorama maps, railway maps, postal code maps, city maps and special maps.
  • Virtual Map Forum - Collection of historical and georeferenced maps of the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB), with a focus on Central Germany and the period from 1700 to 1950.
  • German Maps: Topographische Karte 1:25,000 (BYU) - 3,527 enlargeable high-resolution sheets of the German national topographic survey at 1:25,000 scale, held at Brigham Young University.
  • Bayerische Landesbibliothek Online: Historische Karten von Bayern - Searchable collection of historical maps of Bavaria spanning four centuries, from the Bavarian State Library's digital platform.
Switzerland
  • Basel University Library - Maps of Switzerland and elsewhere, with a choice of resolution.
  • Kartenportal.CH - Swiss metacatalogue aggregating over half a million maps from libraries and archives across Switzerland and beyond, with unified search.
  • e-rara: Swiss Rare Books Digitization Platform - Collaborative digitization platform from Swiss libraries making rare books from the 15th to 19th century freely available, including a significant body of atlases and cartographic works.
The Netherlands
France

Eastern Europe

Hungary
Poland
Ukraine

Mediterranean

  • Ancient World Mapping Center - Continues the work of the Classical Atlas Project that produced the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, refining the geographic dataset for the ancient Mediterranean world.

Northern Europe

Denmark
Estonia
Finland
Sweden

United Kingdom & Ireland

England
Hampshire
  • Old Hampshire Mapped - Comprehensive catalogue of Hampshire (UK) maps and related items, illustrated from the County Museums Service Collection.
London
Ireland
Scotland
Wales

North America

United States

Military
American Revolutionary War
US Civil War
Maine
  • PastMaps - Collection of historical maps from Maine and more (paid).
Minnesota
New York
  • The NYC Space/Time Directory - Digital time-travel service for New York City from the New York Public Library, using historical maps and collections rich in geospatial data.

Canada

Mexico

South America

Research Guides

General Research Guides

Guides by Topic

Historical Maps in GIS

Guides by Region

Further Reading

Tools

Applications

  • QGIS - Free, open-source desktop GIS used for creating, editing, visualising, analysing and publishing geospatial information. Training material. Tutorials. LinkedIn Learning.

  • ArcGIS Online - Completely web-based GIS useful for viewing, sharing and editing data, with an increasing amount of published open GIS data. Tutorial.

  • MapAnalyst - Software application for the accuracy analysis of old maps, computing distortion grids and other types of visualizations that illustrate geometrical accuracy and distortion. Paper.

  • Map Warper - Open source map geo-rectification, warping and georeferencing application.

  • Georeferencer - Crowdsourced georeferencing for map library collections.

  • HiRoNEx - Python tool for automatic, fully unsupervised extraction of historical road networks from historical maps.

  • MapReader - End-to-end computer vision pipeline for exploring and analyzing images at scale, developed to analyze large collections of historical maps.

  • desCartes - Recognises roads on old maps and converts them to vector lines for GIS applications and historical transport network analysis.

  • Allmaps - Curating, georeferencing and exploring for IIIF maps across libraries, archives and museums worldwide.

  • StoryRoute - AI-powered GPS audio tour guide that generates location-based historical narrations as you explore cities, landmarks, and heritage sites, using LLMs and OpenStreetMap geospatial data.

Search Tools

  • Old Maps Online - Search catalog that allows visitors to explore and discover the beauty of historical maps depicting a past geographical place of their interest.
  • National Library of Scotland's Map Finder - Search tool for finding historical maps of Scotland and beyond from the National Library of Scotland.
  • MapRank Search - Geographic search interface for the David Rumsey Map Collection, allowing discovery of historical maps by location and date.

QGIS Extensions

APIs

Other Historical Map Data

  • World Historical Gazetteer - Collection of content and services that permit world historians, their students, and the general public to do spatial and temporal reasoning and visualization in a data rich environment at global and trans-regional scales.
  • Pleiades - Community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places, publishing authoritative information about ancient places and spaces under open license.

Dealers

Other

Organisations

Links

Useful Awesome Lists

Digital Humanities

Geospatial

Contribute

Contributions welcome! Read the contribution guidelines first.

Footnotes

This list includes resources from various institutions worldwide dedicated to historical cartography and mapping.

Star History

Star History Chart

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