Page 4 - World Digital News Today

Gerard Mercator's 1590 Sclavonia, Croatia, Bosnia cum Dalmatiae parte (Slavonia, Croatia, Bosnia, and a part of Dalmatia) is the best representation of Bosnia made up to that time. One of the oldest items in the cartographic collections of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the map was published by the well-known Blaeu firm in Amsterdam. Shown are villages, towns, rivers, and mountains. The scale is in German miles. The map is in Latin, but it gives place names in...

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 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 ...

The draining of swamp lands, continued penetration of rail lines, and expansion of highways all paved the way for the Great Florida Land Boom of the mid-1920s. This image, taken a few years before the speculative rush reached its peak, shows the promotion of Florida as both a paradise for residents and a cash engine for potential investors. Cities such as Miami and St. Petersburg grew tenfold in population in less than two decades as the amount of money being invested in home construction and ho...

On the night of September 18, 1931, anti-Japanese activists set off explosions on the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railroad in Manchuria, northeastern China. The Japanese army used the incident as a pretext to invade Manchuria, and quickly occupied key Manchurian cities. China appealed to the world's powers for help. The Council of the League of Nations, supported by the United States, sought to negotiate a peaceful solution to the conflict. In early 1932, the Council dispatched an inquir...

Rafael Romero Quesada, better known by his pseudonym, Alonso Quesada (1886-1925), was an important modernist poet living on Gran Canaria, in the Canary Islands archipelago of Spain. He was also literary critic and translator, who explored many forms of creative writing, among them fiction, theater, and journalism. Shown here is Smoking room: Cuentos de los ingleses de la colonia en Canarias (Smoking room: Stories of the English people of the Canaries; the cover is actually marked "Smocking-...

Early in the 19th century, as wagon trains streamed into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, settlers came upon vast numbers of abandoned earthworks that they attributed to a sophisticated race of long-gone mound builders. Giving rise to often-loaded questions about human origins, the mounds and the artifacts found within them became the focus of early American efforts toward a science of archaeology. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848) was the first major work in the nascent discip...

In 1604, a decade after the death of Gerhard Mercator (1512-94), one of the great cartographers of all time, the globe maker, engraver, and publisher Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612) bought the plates to Mercator's atlas from his grandsons. Hondius then worked with his brother-in-law, the engraver Pieter van der Keere, to add about 40 new maps to Mercator's atlas to create what became known as the "Mercator-Hondius Atlas," published in Amsterdam in 1606. Later operated by his sons a...

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 manuscript, tinged with blood and found between the sash and shirt of Agustín de Iturbide after his execution by firing squad on July 19, 1824, is an emotional defense of Iturbide's public career. A former Royalist officer who joined the Mexican struggle for independence, Itrubide was crowned emperor of Mexico on May 21, 1822, under the name Agustín I. However, he was unable to achieve peace and abdicated on March 19, 1823, and went into exile. Without knowing that he had been decla...