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This map of the Persian Gulf is by the French cartographer Jacques-Nicolas Bellin (1703-72). Qatar is shown as Catura. Cities on both the Arabian and Persian sides of the gulf are indicated, and the map shows a river emptying into the gulf at the port of Julfar (present-day Ra's al-Khaymah, United Arab Emirates). The scale is in common leagues, and there are no latitudinal or longitudinal lines. Trained as a hydrographer, Bellin was attached to the French Marine Office and specialized in producing maritime maps showing coastlines. His maps were in the tradition of Nicolas Sanson (1600--166...

This 1740 map is by the French cartographer and hydrographer Jacques-Nicolas Bellin (1703-72). It was published by order of Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Count de Maurepas (1701-81), secretary of state under King Louis XV. The map focuses exclusively on the coastlines, and provides no detail about the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. It shows pearl banks along the coast from Bahrain to Julfar. Qatar is noted ("Katara"), but the peninsula that it occupies is not accurately drawn. Kuwait is not shown, but the island of "Peleche" is indicated. The Red Sea is indicated as M...

Histoire de la nation métisse dans l'Ouest canadien (History of the Métis nation in western Canada) presents the history of a people, born out of a unique cultural mix and a fierce fight for survival. Canada's Métis people developed as the mixed-race descendants of Native American women and European colonists who traveled to Canada from France, and later from Britain, to explore and to trade. The Europeans were eager to tap into the wealth of the great Canadian West, and much of the work focuses on the tensions caused by the frantic expansion of the whites to the west and the int...

This pamphlet, published anonymously in Amsterdam in October 1662, concerns the establishment of a settlement on the South River (as the Dutch called the Delaware River) in New Netherland by the Dutch Mennonite and social reformer Pieter Cornelis Plockhoy. The pamphlet consisted of proposals sent to the magistrates of the city of Amsterdam to gain their support for the settlement, which Plockhoy intended to be for poor and needy families and based on reformist principles. The pamphlet was partly intended to reassure investors that the settlement would also be a profitable enterprise. A number ...

This lithograph of the Fairmount Waterworks, on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, shows one of America's earliest municipal water-treatment systems. Powered consecutively by steam engines, waterwheels, and pumps that lifted water to reservoirs on a hill (Faire Mount), the waterworks and its beautiful setting were a tourist attraction from the beginning. The plant was designed by Frederick Graff, and the result was an innovative engineering success and beautiful buildings reflecting the contemporary fashion for Greek Revival architecture. This print is by John Caspar Wild (circa 1804-46...