Spotlight at Stanford

The Ottoman, Safavid & Mughal Empires

Maps of Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, and Mughal India ca. 1500-1800.

The Rodolfo Lanciani Digital Archive

The "Fondo Rodolfo Lanciani" is currently housed at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte at Rome’s Palazzo Venezia. Assembled over the course of Lanciani’s lifetime, the collection is akin to a “paper museum” whose size and scope compare to that of the famous seventeenth century antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo.

10 Maps Over 200 Years

This exhibition, curated by David Rumsey, is the digital companion to a physical exhibition on display in the Rumsey Center from March 1 to May 31, 2023.

An Introduction to Finding, Analyzing, and Using Historic Maps

Please use responsibly.

Representing Geopolitical Complexity

Digital exhibition accompanying a physical exhibition and conference of the same name taking place at the David Rumsey Map Center on May 26-27, 2022

Indigenous Mapping

The Barry Lawrence Ruderman Conference on Cartography occurs every other year, and began in 2017. The conference speakers curate a physical exhibit on view at the Center. This website is a digital companion to that exhibit.

A Guide for Finding, Analyzing, and Using Maps in Projects

This website provides map-related resources for National History Day participants.

Maps of Tokyo spanning the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This exhibit features cartographic representation of Tokyo from 1832 to 1946, showing over a century of changes and including historical maps georeferenced onto current geographic data.

Travel-related ephemera from the 17th through the early 20th century.

The study of travel is often associated with maps. And yet, many of the most precious Japanese maps were never used by travelers. This collection of prints represents materials collected by travelers or produced for travelers. It spans a period of time in which there was dramatic change in modes of travel, printing, and viewing geographic space.

An exhibition that examines the 19th-century roots of information graphics.

The Art and Design of Expression in Historic Maps

An exhibit highlighting the symbologies, and other design elements, found within historic maps.

Detailed city plans created or published by the Army Map Service during World War II.

This collection focuses on mining maps throughout the western United States with an emphasis on detailed claims, locations, and bird's eye views. These materials highlight issues such as land use, resource extraction, settlement patterns, and the opening of the West.

100 years of field mapping

From the very start of Stanford University, geology students were sent into the field to learn mapping. John Casper Branner and John Flesher Newsom taught field mapping to budding geologists first on the campus and then in the Santa Cruz mountains. In 1903, an official course was inaugurated called, "Field Geology," taught by geology and mining professors Dr. Branner and Dr. Newsom. Summer field trips took place every year until 1987.

Photographs from the Ernest Nash Fototeca Unione Collection

This digital archive features over 1,295 photographs of Roman buildings, monuments, and sites taken by Ernest Nash throughout the mid-20th century. These pictures were digitized in partnership with the American Academy in Rome, which houses the Fototeca Unione, founded by Ernest Nash in 1957.

This exhibit commemorates the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. It highlights materials from the Stanford Libraries including pictures from the Alfred A. Hart photographs, maps from the David Rumsey Map Center, and materials from Special Collections.

A digital collection of African Maps at the Stanford University Libraries

The Maps of Africa at Stanford Libraries is a growing collection buoyed significantly by the acquisitions of the Dr. Oscar I. Norwich and Caroline Batchelor Collections. The maps featured here are a subset of the maps that are available.

This project has grown out of a book by the same name: South Africa, Greece, Rome: classical confrontations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). The aim of both is to bring together instances of South Africa's engagements with ancient Greece and Rome.

Architectural drawings, maps, prints, and aerial photographs of the Stanford University campus and associated land holdings

This exhibit showcases the growth of campus using illustrative materials from several University Archives collections, including the Maps Collection, the Architectural Drawings Collection, the Hanna House Collection, the Prints Collection, the Birge M. Clark Architectural Drawings, Peninsua-Times Tribune Photographs, Hatfield Aerial Survey Photographs, and the Stanford Historical Photograph Collection.

Gender, Sexuality and Cartography

The Barry Lawrence Ruderman Conference on Cartography occurs every other year, and began in 2017. The conference speakers curate a physical exhibit on view at the Center. This website is a digital companion to that exhibit.

Historical images of Stanford Medicine and of the field of medicine generally.

2nd Exhibit from the David Rumsey Map Center, January 22 - August 31, 2017

This is the second exhibit on view at the Rumsey Map Center, focused on Views.

This website features the inaugural exhibit from the David Rumsey Map Center.

Maps from the Glen McLaughlin Collection of California as an Island

California was depicted as an island on maps from 1622 until the middle of the 18th century and beyond. This collection is the most comprehensive known covering the maps of this cartographic curiosity.

A collection of maps and books featuring landmark maps from the California Gold Rush, exploration of the western coast of North America amongst other maps from the 16th to the 20th centuries.

Maps and Atlases from the Renaissance Period

The Renaissance Exploration Map Collection is the result of one of the largest Cartographic Digital Philanthropy projects undertaken by Stanford University Libraries. This was made possible by the generosity and commitment of an area collector who lent us the collection under our Cartographic Digital Philanthropy Program thus creating a large corpus of Cartographic Renaissance materials available for anyone to search, view and download at very high resolution.

Featuring how maps and art overlap in explorations of space - both geographical and metaphorical - this exhibition took place at Stanford's David Rumsey Map Center from April 25th to September 30th, 2019, and was co-curated by Emily Prince and David Rumsey.

The Forma Urbis Romae, or Severan Marble Plan of Rome is an enormous map, measuring ca. 18.10 x 13 meters (ca. 60 x 43 feet), that was carved between 203-211 CE and covered an entire wall inside the Templum Pacis in Rome. It depicted the ground plan of every architectural feature in the ancient city, from large public monuments to small shops, rooms, and even staircases.

'Mapping the Global Imaginary, 1500—1900' took place February 14—15, 2019, at Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center. This digital exhibition accompanies the papers presented at this conference.

The Office of Strategic Services was created during World War II in order to gather intelligence in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Thousands of maps were made to order and later distributed to libraries across the United States. These maps were either individually produced or were part of reports. The OSS was terminated in September 1945.

Fire insurance maps are produced to provide information to insurers about the composition and use of buildings in order to provide correct underwriting of policies. These maps, primarily produced in the United States by the Sanborn Company, are now historically important documents of the towns and cities from the start of the late 19th Century.

History of Cartography

The BLRCC occurs every other year, beginning in 2017 with this exhibit. The conference speakers curate a physical exhibit, and this website is a digital companion to that exhibit.

A growing collection of digital scans from the late 1400s to the 1950s.