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For David Rumsey, maps constitute the fabric of memory. They carry images of boundless worlds and the people who live there — past, present, and even the future. In the film A Stranger Quest by Andrea Gatopoulos, David takes us on a journey through time and space as he recalls why he started collecting. Over decades the collection grew into the intricate, innovative, and intimate story of his life and all the lives that have touched him.
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Welcome to the David Rumsey Map Collection. Here you can explore maps through a variety of viewers. Read the Blog to learn more about collection highlights, such as Urbano Monte's manuscript world map from 1587. Visit the physical collection at the David Rumsey Map Center at the Stanford University Library. Or take a virtual tour of the Map Center, which hosts events such as the recent Barry Lawrence Ruderman Conference on Cartography : Indigenous mapping.
The historical map collection has over 151,000 maps and related images online. The collection includes rare 16th through 21st century maps of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, the Pacific, the Arctic, and the World. The online map collection is a searchable database that allows you to make your own journeys into spatial representations of the past. Here you can see the history of cartography through primary sources from 1500 into the 21st century.
NEW: Random Browse the collection (desktop and tablet only). 250 images at a time. Refresh the link to see 250 more. We invite you to get pleasurably lost.
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United States Advanced search allows refined inquiries for precise results, while browsing encourages serendipitous exploration, honoring the legacy of library shelves. Popular collection categories include data visualization, celestial maps, atlases, globes, school geography, maritime charts, city atlases, pocket maps, children's maps, and manuscript maps. Subject and place examples: Pictorial, Geology, California, New York City, U.S. Civil War, Afghanistan, Moon, Mountains and Rivers, Migration, Languages, Religions, Railroads, Climate, Agriculture, Economics, and Zoological. Browse search facets: What, Where, Who, When. The collection supports the study of topics such as history, ethnography, technology, environmental science, genealogy, and art. Learn more
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Browse Lists of the Collection's many Atlases |
Explore - Georeferencer v4 Launched |
The Speed of the Earth returns to Burning Man 2026. Across a mile of open playa, bursts of light reveal something we can never feel: the Earth spinning beneath us at 1,156 feet per second. Created by Kevin Kelly, David Rumsey, Dean Putney, Seth Roche, and Sonny Roche, this https://t.co/zx2taxuup9
A remarkable Soviet atlas of the 1930s turns statistics into bold visual storytelling—using pictograms, isotypes, repetition, scale, color, and photomontage to make industrial, agricultural, and military data instantly understandable. #DataVisualization #SovietDesign #Isotype https://t.co/yYlegBRXMi
A milestone for https://t.co/JPwtKzIBjl: over 150,000 historical maps and related images are now freely available online. After 26 years, the site has welcomed 50+ million visitors, delivered 20+ million free downloads, and seen 250+ million map views. Thank you to everyone who https://t.co/OdYhMDmDTO
Imagine Wikipedia—without the internet. The Bouasse-Lebel Encyclopedia transformed the knowledge of the late 19th century into hundreds of beautifully illustrated educational wall charts covering anatomy, astronomy, engineering, agriculture, natural history, geometry, and more. https://t.co/kxAk3Zg0Dl
The title page and complete hand-colored plates from The Heavens Illustrated (London, 1844), a beautifully produced Victorian introduction to astronomy. Featuring 17 hand-colored illustrations of eclipses, the zodiac, planets, the Sun and Moon, and astronomical instruments, the https://t.co/d4rfnuvrs3
The 44-sheet Lunar Astronautical Charts (1967) were created in preparation for the Apollo 11 landing in 1969—the last hand-drawn maps of the Moon, and among the most beautiful. Here, a close-up of the Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility, between the Sabine C and https://t.co/GEjdFaLoyt
A masterpiece of precision and artistry: Guillaume Henri Dufour’s Topographische Karte der Schweiz (1833–1863). Created at an impressive 1:100,000 scale, this 25-sheet national map set a new standard for scientific cartography in the 19th century. Steel-engraved with https://t.co/GOfYnLYQwp
600 Swiss topographic maps from 1870 are often considered the finest ever produced, blending remarkable precision with exceptional artistry. They are known as the Siegfried Survey. See all https://t.co/Jph0EIYSFU https://t.co/M6hXeMwVMk
A striking fusion of state propaganda and modernist design, Nippon (1937) is one of the most ambitious Japanese photobooks of the interwar era—and a high point of both modernist bookmaking and cultural messaging. Photos become maps! See the entire book https://t.co/fd3cxUCHZr https://t.co/VjePOQIv9w
More than half of the glacial ice captured on this 1896 map of the Mont Blanc massif—straddling Switzerland, Italy, and France—has vanished, erased from the landscape within little more than a century. See full map: https://t.co/crfaeTwwIu https://t.co/IvKny3NFv7
The great glaciers of Tibetan Karakoram Mountains mapped in 1908 by H. Bystrom. These glaciers have not receded in the past 100 years. That is known as the "Karakoram Anomaly." Full map https://t.co/tcYA0mNU1K https://t.co/8YFJgJY8j1
Chronomapping Sunset Dunes in San Francisco by Ben Gitai. A living map that moves in time and space. https://t.co/QrGbKMFE7k https://t.co/J2gHQvIwsr
Qiu Zhijie’s all-seeing maps are transformative experiences that unsettle viewers’ sense of self and world. Unlike his earlier Mapping series, this group of 26 works integrates traditional Chinese brush-and-ink techniques, asking how calligraphy and painting can depict https://t.co/nndI0oFqgT
French astronomers Maurice Loewy & Pierre Puiseux took 6,000+ lunar photos over 500+ nights (1896–1910) They published the best 71 as an atlas that remained unsurpassed for 50+ years—hailed as “the ultimate achievement of nineteenth-century astronomical photography.” See all 71: https://t.co/4xxuFCcXz4
New York City Central Park and surrounds changes over time - 243 years in six maps: 1782, 1836, 1865, 1904, 1966, 2025. https://t.co/7PywCy85kq https://t.co/a7tYVpffgy
In 1647 Johannes Hevelius published Selenographia in Gdańsk, Poland, depicting the Moon’s phases across 40 plates. The first lunar atlas, it set the standard for decades and ranks among the finest scientific books of the 17th century. https://t.co/sYmFKFHevJ https://t.co/pIejOiifDg
9 beautiful Planets and Celestial Maps by Blanche Lambert - @blambertcarto / @AbPictoris See all 9 here https://t.co/786bHaWYDe https://t.co/W92gHTr96F
“Pacific Watershed: Land of Contrasts” (Richard Edes Harrison, 1945) — A dramatic bird’s-eye map of the American West showing the vast Pacific drainage system from the Columbia River to the Colorado and Great Basin. Highlights the region’s extreme contrasts—glaciers, deserts, https://t.co/UNTCsgNoeL
Simms Campbell’s 1933 “A Night-Club Map of Harlem” - a witty, vibrant portrait of the 1930s Harlem Renaissance. Created by the first nationally prominent Black cartoonist, it spotlighted clubs like the Cotton Club & Savoy Ballroom. Now exceedingly rare. https://t.co/KJZhAMyMpB https://t.co/wSOl5HDPy2
New acquisition for the Rumsey Map Collection: Huge Dioramamap San Francisco 2016 by Sohei Nishino. 170cm x 256cm https://t.co/RML60jOLJm https://t.co/suQi9YpoD3
MacKinnons Brook, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia - Drone footage, Oct 21, 2025. Left house restored by David Rumsey in 1988; right built by Rumsey in 1964. Both now part of an 8,000-acre conservation area of Nova Scotia Nature Trust. 5 km of roadless coastline. 25 km of trails. https://t.co/fahwbsJhir
Explore the oil geopolitics of the 1960s with Brian Orchard Lisle’s detailed 1965 “Map of the Near and Middle East Oil.” A striking artifact of petroleum history, it charts fields, pipelines & power. https://t.co/qzQqOVqmQu 7th edition of the Map of Near and Middle East Oil. https://t.co/vHh2cMz5ll
The Computer Tree II (1979, Management Information Corp.). A data visualization chart of computer evolution from Babbage & ENIAC through IBM, DEC, Fujitsu—branches of tech growth that might one day be called AGI’s roots. https://t.co/lWJlOr6j18 https://t.co/VoQfRM7DQj
This 1984 pictorial map by William Burks III depicts Crazy Horse’s territory (1841–1877), blending Lakota iconography and a chronological border of key events, highlighting Native American history and culture. https://t.co/YNkP4eaW9f https://t.co/CIMnao88eY
A vivid 1948 pictorial map by G. Runge for Northwest Orient Airlines, highlighting postwar optimism & new transpacific routes. Bold colors & dynamic lines reflect the era’s drive for global connectivity. https://t.co/Fo97EjAJIh https://t.co/vGwbrPqfbi
1967 Red Guard map, “China as the Center of World Revolution,” shows Mao’s China as the epicenter of global revolution, spreading communist ideology worldwide during the Cultural Revolution. https://t.co/rPDAkn82Ks https://t.co/00lxJbDGg8
Striking 1943 WWII anti-malaria map by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), and the U.S. Army. Designed to warn soldiers about malaria, it uses bold colors and cartoonish humor to highlight global malaria risk zones. https://t.co/NBnrk3o8kV https://t.co/LgOjQG5q55
1958 Interplanetary Space Guide https://t.co/sM2WjNIpqk https://t.co/umR0aZbUVd
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Largest Early World Map - Monte's 10 ft. Planisphere of 1587 An extraordinary 60 sheet manuscript world map made in 1587 by Urbano Monte has been added to the David Rumsey Map Collection at Stanford University. At 10 foot square, this map or planisphere is the largest known early map of the world. It was hand drawn by Monte in Milan, Italy, and only one other manuscript copy exists. The digitally joined 60 sheet map image below is the first time the map Monte made has been seen as one unified map - as Monte intended - in the 430 years since it was created. See all the individual sheets here. Monte's map reminds us of why historical maps are so important as primary resources: the north polar azimuthal projection of his planisphere uses the advanced scientific ideas of his time; the artistry in drawing and decorating the map embodies design at the highest level; and the view of the world then gives us a deep historical resource with the listing of places, the shape of spaces, and the commentary interwoven into the map. Science, art, and history all in one document. Until now, Monte’s manuscript map was seen as a series of 60 individual sheets. The only assembled version is the small single page key sheet of the series. Now that we have joined all 60 sheets digitally, we can appreciate in a new way the extraordinary accomplishment that Monte made. The assembled map, just over 10 feet in diameter, is one of the largest—if not the largest—world maps made in the 16th century. The degree of detail and decoration is stunning and the entire production is surely unique in the history of cartographic representation. Read Full Blog Post |
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Georeferencer v4 is an improved and updated version of our prior Georeferencer v3. It allows you to overlay historic maps on modern maps or other historic maps. The overlaid maps reveal changes over time and enable map analysis and discovery. You can choose your own maps to georeference by Searching LUNA and using the Georeference This Map button or help us georeference the entire online map library using our Random Map link to georeference maps in our First Pilot Project of 6,000 maps of major cities and regions. Users who georeference the most maps will be recognized in the bar displays below. Recently Georeferenced maps can be viewed by image or by location. |
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The MapRank search tool enables geographical searching of the collection by map location and coverage, in a Google Map window. Pan and zoom the Google Map to the area of the world you want maps of, and the results will automatically appear as a scrollable list of maps with thumbnail images in the right side window. The maps in the right side list are ranked by coverage, with the maps that have coverage closest to your search window listed at the top. Mousing over any map in the list will show the map's coverage as a light red rectangle on top of the Google Map. Clicking on a map in the list will open it in the Luna Browser. You can filter your results with the When timeline, the What or Who keyword text window, and the Map scale windows, as well as search by place name in the Find a place window. Learn more
