London V2 Rocket Sites...Mapped in Google Maps

Here is a really neat history project on Google Maps, an interactive map of London showing where each V-2 rocket landed during the war. London V2 Rocket Sites...Mapped: "Autumn 1944, and London was under attack from space. Hitler's 'vengeance' rocket, the V-2, was the world's first ballistic missile, and the first man-made object to make a sub-orbital spaceflight. Over 1400 were launched at Britain, with more than 500 striking London. Each hit caused devastation. The 13 tonne rocket impacted at over 3000 miles per hour. There was no warning; the missile descended faster than the speed of sound and survivors would only hear the approach and sonic booms after the blast . . . ."

"These famous tragedies are well documented, but over 500 rocket strikes, many with significant death toll, remain obscure. We've mapped out some of the impact sites above, with more to follow when we can access further information. Make sure you zoom in and check satellite view. Commonly, an area hit by a V-2 is now covered with a car park or 1960s housing estate. These areas are usually devoid of mature trees, and still stand out over 60 years on."

Here is a direct link to the map. This sort of project is not that difficult to do. A teacher and students would create a Google Map of any sort of historical event that lends itself to a geographic presentation. Journeys of famous explorers, the locations of cemeteries and historic sites, battles in a particular war, the life journey of an individual, or historic photos of your own community can become a Google map!

Via Metafilter, as so often is the case here!

Marco! Polo!

Here is fun project at the blog Indulgence & Sin: A Historian's Craft.

Blogger and grad student Rachel Leow has a copy of Marco Polo's Travels, and an internet connection and she is not afraid to use them. The result is a fun use of Google Maps, an illustrated journey of Marco Polo with photographs and illustrations pulled off the web and links to relevant websites for many of the places mentioned by the explorer. Here is a direct link to her full scale Google map.

This approach has a lot of potential, especially for teachers. So many history topics could be explored geographically--exploration, famous journeys, wars and battles, historic trails, historic sites in a community. Google Maps offers a way to have students work on a collaborative project that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Exploring Washington's Geographic Past

Interesting article this week in the Washington Post. The Beginning of the Road looks at a project to digitally recreate the topographic history of Washington DC. A (slightly) interactive map allows viewers to compare the outline of the city today with the geography of 1791. The most striking change is that the Potomac is half as wide today as it was in the time of Thomas Jefferson, and that the World War Two, Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are all located on land reclaimed from the river--as we see on the graphic above. The green rectangle represents the mall. (See also the little video embedded in the body of the first story.)

The effort to digitally explore the geographic history of Washington is similar to what the The Mannahatta Project is doing in in New York (see this post). As the digital tools become less expensive and awareness of the possibilities increases we can expect to see similar projects across the nation. In fact you can get similar results with digital image of an early city map and Google Earth by using the overlay function.

The Mannahatta Project

The Mannahatta Project: "The aim of the Mannahatta Project is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today. The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted." See a slideshow of their preliminary results over at the New Yorker website. The slideshow is an internet sidebar to an article about the project that was published in the October 1 2007 issue of the magazine and an abstract may be found here.

Historic landscapes reconstructions rely on history (old maps, land deeds, travelers' accounts) and science (soil and vegetation analysis, climatology) and anthropology (how humans used and altered the land). The latter is especially significant as we discard the concept of "wilderness" and come to understand the extent to which the American landscape was man made, even before Columbus landed. (see Charles Mann's article "1491" for an overview of the research).