Page 3 - World Digital News Today

The National Highways Association (NHA) was established in 1911 to promote the development of an improved national road network in the United States. Under the slogan "Good roads for everyone!" the NHA advocated the building and permanent maintenance by the federal government of a system of 50,000 miles (some 80,500 kilometers) of highways. This map, issued by the NHA in 1913, shows 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) of national highways proposed for Alabama. The NHA employed engineers to ...

This 18th-century Dutch map, produced in Amsterdam by the publisher Isaak Tirion (circa 1705--circa 1769), shows the northern coast of South American and its offshore islands, including Curaçao, Bonaire, and neighboring islands; Trinidad and Tobago; and Grenada. Guiana is divided, from west to east, into Spanish, Dutch, and French sections, corresponding roughly to a part of present-day Venezuela and present-day Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. The territory to the south of Guiana, in pres...

This photograph is an aerial view of the circus lot of the Russell Bros. Circus at Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1932. The availability of trucks following World War I led to a rapid growth of the trucking industry in the United States. Circuses quickly adapted to the new technology by creating "truck shows" or circuses that traveled overland via truck. Truck shows brought the circus to smaller towns across the country previously inaccessible by rail. This image shows a typical medium-size...

This hand-colored engraved plate by Johann Theodor de Bry (born in Liège in 1561, died in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1623), is from the German edition of de Bry's Grands voyages (Great voyages), an enterprise begun by de Bry's father, Theodor de Bry (1528--98). The work ultimately consisted of ten illustrated volumes on the colonization of the Americas. This 1599 engraving is a bird's-eye panoramic view showing the city, harbor, and river of Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic)...

This 1929 photograph shows the interior of John Robinson's Circus during a spectacle, or "spec," performance of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the American circus, the spec developed as a procession that took place around the hippodrome track inside the big top, or circus tent, featuring as many of the performers and animals as the circus director was able to costume. John Robinson's Circus was especially known for its dazzling productions of King S...

In 1874-75, the Russian government sent a research and trading mission to China to seek out new overland routes to the Chinese market, report on prospects for increased commerce and locations for consulates and factories, and gather information about the Dungan Revolt then raging in parts of western China. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Iulian A. Sosnovskii of the army General Staff, the nine-man mission included a topographer, Captain Matusovskii; a scientific officer, Dr. Pavel Iakovlevich Piasetsk...

This map of colonial Guiana (present-day Suriname) is the work of Jan Jansson (died 1664), a Dutch cartographer who married into the Hondius family of illustrious mapmakers. Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612) and his sons, Jodocus and Henricus, engraved maps of the Americas and Europe, and were instrumental in popularizing the work of Gerard Mercator, the developer of the Mercator Projection that allowed navigators to use a flat map reflecting the curvature of the globe. The Hondius family published an...

Adrien-Hubert Brué (1786-1832) was a French geographer and cartographer who as a young man accompanied the explorer Nicolas Baudin on his 1800-1803 voyage to New Holland (Australia). Brué returned to France to become an important geographer, associated with the Institut Geographique de Paris and geographer to the king. His Grand atlas universel (Large universal atlas) was first published in 1816 and issued in revised and updated editions in 1825, 1830, and 1838. Shown here is Brué's ma...

This watercolor by Manuel María Paz (1820--1902) shows the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy (also called Sierra Nevada de Chita or Sierra Nevada de Güicán), as seen from the town of Moreno, Casanare Province (present-day Casanare Department), Colombia. At more than 5,000 meters, these peaks form the highest part of the Cordillera Orientale, the longest and widest of the three Andean mountain ranges. Paz was born in Almaguer in the province of Cauca. He joined the Colombian army at a young age and s...

This photograph is from a collection of 65 projectable lantern slides relating to the Arab Revolt of 1916-18, an important theater of operations during World War I. By supporting the revolt against Ottoman Rule, the British sought to weaken the Ottoman Empire, which was aligned with Germany and Austria-Hungary. For their part, the Arabs hoped to secure independence and create a unified empire embracing the region from Aleppo, Syria to Aden, Yemen. The photographs depict many of the protagonists ...