Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 2d

❗Join us this Friday, October 10, for a Map Collections Showing as we delve into cities, neighborhoods and regions that either had just or were soon to experience a massive disaster❗

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 5d

To accommodate the expo, some of Boston’s leading citizens built a venue called Mechanics Hall. After the exhibition, it continued to be used as an event space and remained standing until the 1960s, when it was razed for the construction of a new event center—Prudential Tower.

Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 5d

The 1883 exhibition wasn’t as grand as some of the more famous expos, but it did have some international traction, with notable stands from Japan and China. It certainly had a pretty big impact on Boston, if only because of the changes it brought to the emergent neighborhood of Back Bay.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 5d

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nearly every major country showed off its greatest inventions and innovations at yearly “world’s expos.” In 1883, Boston hosted the “American Exhibition of the Products, Arts and Manufactures of Foreign Nations.”

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 5d

Remember that time Boston hosted the world’s largest tech convention? Yeah, we don't either 🥲

Map: New map of Boston giving all points of interest... (1883)
Images: Digital Commonwealth, Historic New England, The Huntington

#bpl #LMEC #maps #bostonmaps #localhistory

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 6d

In the spaces of everyday life, people of different races, ages, genders, classes, and backgrounds experienced the Revolution in different ways and can be observed through the objects they used.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 6d

This musket ball, excavated from the Boston Common, was likely left behind by British soldiers in 1775. It may have been dropped during daily activities as the British Army tried to subdue the colonial rebellion. This ordinary object offers a glimpse into the British Army’s 10 month siege of Boston.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 6d

This powder horn, signed “E.B.,” belonged to a British soldier occupying Boston from 1775 to 1776. It’s likely that E.B. decorated this horn himself, even carving a crown to symbolize his loyalty to the king. He also inscribed his contempt for the Patriots: “A Pox on rebels in their [crimes]."

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 6d

This spoon, excavated from Faneuil Hall and engraved with a portrait of King George I, may have stirred tea with sugar produced by enslaved labor in the Caribbean, reflecting Boston’s ties to a wider empire built on slavery.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 6d

The Revolution had a significant impact on civic landmarks and the intimate spaces of daily life. Each of these physical objects has a geographic story to tell, representing the five scales of our Revolution-focused exhibition, Terrains of Independence.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 6d

What are the odds the spoon you're using for your matcha will be a historic object one day? Well, it's greater than zero! ☝🏽😌

Objects: Pewter spoon with relief portrait of King George I [early 1700s], Powder horn with map of Boston and Charlestown (1777), Lead Musket Ball (1775)

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 10d

Satellite photos from 1995 form a new layer covering the entirety of Greater Boston. This pre-Big Dig view of Boston serves as a bridge between our most recent available atlas (1938) and modern aerial images. The 1995 satellite images show a very different Boston from today.

Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 10d

The 1798 Clough atlas is the oldest snapshot of the city out of any of our atlases. Completed between 1930-1940, Clough obtained documents from 1798 and pieced the information together in the form of this atlas. Clough's atlas offers a glimpse into Boston when it was still a town (not yet a city!).

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 10d

Now the most recent and oldest views of the city we have to offer, 2 new atlas layers have been added to the Boston coverage of Atlascope! New layers are only added when they are detailed enough to zoom down to the level of a single building and find details not yet provided by existing layers.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 10d

Atlascope is like onions—it has layers! You get it? We both have layers 🧅

Check out the newest layers on Atlascope with the link in our bio!

Map: Atlas of Boston neighborhoods based on the Direct Tax Census of 1798 (1900)
Images: Aerial imagery of Massachusetts (1990-1999)

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 11d

Hence, many cities claim to be part of the seven hills group, either because they were intentionally built that way or because it sounds better than a more accurate number (“thirteen hills” just sounds weird). It's probably not just a happy coincidence that Rome, Georgia was also founded on 7 hills.

Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 11d

Why seven specifically? It is a famously mystical number with religious significance going back to the ancient times. Furthermore, the idea of a city on seven hills has become a symbol of cosmopolitanism due to the connection with Rome, the “Capital of the World.”

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 11d

But why seven hills? For one, hills have historically been important to settlements, as they provide safety from flooding and are usually the cleanest parts of the city. Before commonly available street maps, hills also made for an easy way to orient oneself around an unfamiliar city.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 11d

Ancient Rome was famously founded on seven hills. In the modern world, however, it is far from the only city to hold that distinction. Besides the aforementioned Mass towns, over 30 cities in the US, and many more around the world, also claim to be built on seven hills, like Jerusalem and Istanbul.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 11d

🏔️What do Worcester, Newton, and Somerville have in common with Rome, Italy? (Supposedly?) all of them were founded on seven hills!🏔️

Maps: Pianta di Roma (1835), Map of Somerville, Mass (1852), Plan of Worcester made by H. Stebbins, dated 1831 (1831), Map of the town of Newton, Mass (1831)

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 14d

🔍Maps can foster curiosity and help young learners make sense of the world around them🔎

In this workshop, we’ll explore how to use both historic maps and mapping activities to build spatial thinking and support cross-curricular learning in elementary classrooms.

Register with the link in bio.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 17d

Just like the LMEC uses the Atlascope tool to make viewing old maps easier, historians of Rome have been trying to make the Forma Urbis Romae more easily accessible, for instance with the mappingrome.com project. The Severan Plan has been put up for public display just over a year ago in Rome.

Mapping Rome | Mapping Rome

Mapping Rome

mappingrome.com

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 17d

For centuries, historians have been trying to connect the Severan Plan with Rome’s modern layout to find out the exact placement of ancient buildings—this process is called georeferencing, and it’s something we at the LMEC do regularly with old maps of Boston.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 17d

Only a few fragments have survived, around 10% of the original plan. Moreover, we still don’t know when or why exactly it was made. However, it remains one of the only sources about the exact layout and daily life of the city of ancient Rome, the ancient world’s largest metropolis.

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Leventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 17d

Ancient Romans pioneered the art of city mapping with the Forma Urbis Romae, also known as the Severan Marble Plan. The plan depicted 2nd century Rome in great detail— in total, it was over 60 by 40 ft! The map was made up of 150 marble slabs, and took up an entire wall of a massive temple.

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