"Daniel-San" wrote in message
. com...

...Want to see what your home town looked like 150 years ago? Look he

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/...ubjindex1.html

Fun. A good hour or two spent looking at towns I've never heard of.

Emphasis on the word "good". :-)


Not really sure what it is that makes me facinated with old things.
Perhaps a bit of romance for a 'simpler' life. Perhaps, dare I say it, a
bit of "pageantry?" I have no idea. I do know that I look at the dates on
every coin I receive as change. Why? Because I think it's cool to hold a
quarter (dime, whatever) that is sixty, or seventy, or more years old.
Certainly, a coin can't tell its story, but imagine how many -- and
whose -- hands have touched that coin in its 'life'. Imagine what was
purchased with it. Imagine what work was done to earn it. A simple
quarter -- a few grams of essentially worthless metals melted together and
emblazoned with a picture -- can tell so much, all without saying
anything. I'm no numismatist -- I don't care about any monetary value an
older coin may hold. Nor do I much care about the appearance of its mint
marks. I just like the fact that this little trinket has witnessed so much
of our history. In my bizzarro world, receiving a coin in the normal
course of a transaction that is that old just makes me a part of our
shared history. Buying an old penny from a collector, however, is
cheating.

So if I like quarters that much... imagine a map. Especially the ones of
the early colonial times. As an undergrad, I took a course that covered
the witch trials in Salem. (Interestingly, under the History and Women's
Studies rubrics.) Various theories were covered, and I suppose that some
of them may have held some merit, but what held my interest in the class
(other than, ahem, studying the women, of course) was the plethora of maps
available for study. They probably held some relevance to the topic at
hand, but who cared, I was into them for the stories they told. Buy a map
of town X today, and it'll show roads, hospitals, and some other points of
interest (assuming said points exist in town X, anyway). A map from the
17th or 18th century (and, to a somewhat lesser degreee, IMO the 19th and
early 20th, too) will show not only roads, but where _everything_ was. It
shows the pasture lands, the common areas, the shops, the . . . It's very
easy to get a feel for what the place may have looked like. A difficult
thing to accomplish with an atlas today. Maybe it's a simple function of
population growth, or changes in cartographic method, or whatever, but
maps today just tell you how to get somewhere.


I guess I've rambled a lot. I just like old stuff that tells a story. Even
if I have to imagine that story.

Moral of the above: Thanks for the link to the maps. Very good stuff.

Nice exposition on old stuff. And, speaking of expositions, somewhere in
that mess of aerial views is a stunningly detailed rendition of Chicago's
1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Wish I could tell you exactly where, but
I changed the file names when I downloaded them. I could email it to you if
you like. It's a 14 megabyte file, and you'll need a MrSID file viewer.
Don't know if you're familiar with the story of the exposition, but it's an
interesting one. The Museum of Science and Industry is the only original
structure remaining. I'd heard a bit about it from time to time, but didn't
know much about it until I read "The Devil in the White City" a couple of
years ago. The story as told by Erik Larsen is a fascinating account of how
an impossible job got done in an amazingly short time......not quite short
enough to make the proposed opening on the 400th anniversary of Columbus's
landing.....but it was done fast nevertheless. The only thing that saves
this from being a REALLY good book is that Larsen seems to have lost his
mind entirely and tried to interweave an inane tale of a serial killer who
was working Chicago at the time into the story of the exposition.....which
it has absolutely nothing to do with.

If you're still interested in that Salem business, Mary Beth Norton's "In
the Devil's Snare" is an excellent and highly detailed chronicle of the
events in and around Salem. That's the good news. The bad news is that she
fails miserably (embarrassingly, I think) to support her thesis. As you
doubtless remember, many theories have been proposed to explain the bizarre
series of events that led eventually to the deaths of 21 people. None of
them has been entirely satisfactory. Norton, borrowing a page from modern
psychology, proposes that the girls and young women at the core of the
accusations all shared a common exposure to depredations by the local Indian
tribes at the margins of settled lands and were all suffering from what is
now called post traumatic stress syndrome. An interesting idea, which the
author outlines pretty well in the introductory matter......and then
virtually ignores until the conclusion, beginning on page 295. It looks as
if she had no confidence at all in her thesis and only pasted some crap in
at the end because she was afraid that someone would remember it from the
beginning. Oh well, everything in between is pretty good.

Wolfgang