In San Antonio, Remembering More Than the Alamo

Innovators Are Using Digital Tools to Tell Stories of the City’s Black and Latinx History

In San Antonio, Texas, one memorial—the church-turned-fort-turned-shrine of the Alamo—dominates the landscape. At the Alamo, the artifacts, images, and captions on display tell a unified story: That martyrs died there for Texas independence and that their sacrifice will never be forgotten. The didactics urge the public to observe this history with solemnity and reverie.

Yet the story is one-sided. While there were many root causes of the Alamo siege, one of the most important was that Texas Anglos were fighting Mexican soldiers to uphold slavery. In San Antonio, as in many …

by William Deverell, Jessica Kim, Elizabeth Logan, and Stephanie Yi | October 12, 2023

The Genteel California Socialite Who Became the World’s Leading Female Arctic Explorer

In the Early 20th Century, Louise Arner Boyd Lived a Double Life—A Philanthropist in the States, and a Hero on the High Seas

by Joanna Kafarowski | February 12, 2019

Sailing towards the west coast of Greenland in the war-torn summer of 1941, the Effie M. Morrissey navigated its way through a narrow fjord and anchored off the town of …

How Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Swamp and Became a Modern Metropolis

By Building Canals, Laying Sewers, and Jacking Up Buildings, the Windy City Spurred Its Miraculous Growth

by Joshua Salzmann | October 11, 2018

In 1833, Chicago was a wilderness outpost of just 350 residents, clumped around a small military fort on soggy land where the Chicago River trickled into Lake Michigan. The site …

Why Isn’t Lake Champlain ‘Great’?

Despite Its Geological Kinship With Superior, Erie, and Ontario, the Narrow Body of Water Between New York and Vermont Gets Mocked by Midwesterners

by Mike Winslow | October 2, 2018

“The term ‘Great Lakes’ includes Lake Champlain.”

These seven words, quietly slipped into an appropriations bill by Vermont’s U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy in 1998, briefly elevated the national status of a …

The Epic Effort to Map the West

A Brilliant Geographer and Famous Photographer Teamed Up to Tackle the Nearly Impossible Task of Surveying 19th-Century California

By Tyler Green | August 22, 2016

We’ll start in the 1840s, when Western North America was almost wholly empty of European-Americans. To prepare the land for settlement, the United States government sent teams of explorers into …

What Disappears When Ancient Documents Get Digitized?

The Osher Map Library’s Online Archive Is Astoundingly Detailed and Inherently Incomplete

By Jacob Brogan | July 22, 2016

The Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine is a treasure trove for the cartographically inclined. Its collection, which contains close to 450,000 items, spans the centuries, covering …

geography