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Historic U.S. Maps
Guide picks
There are a plethora of fantastic historic maps of the United States online that show the development of the nation.

U.S. Boundary Changes & Expansion
How did the United States acquire all of its territory? This article and map tracks the growth of the U.S.A. across North America through the variety of treaties, purchases, wars, and Acts of Congress that gave the U.S.A. the geography it has today.

Township and Range: The United States Public Lands Survey
From your About.com Guide, learn how and why the western U.S. has a checkerboard pattern on the land.

1891 Grain Dealers and Shippers Gazetteer
Scanned maps from an atlas of railroad maps from the late ninteenth century. Detailed and fascinating.

1895 U.S. Atlas
Huge (some over 2MB) scanned maps of each state from a turn-of-the-century atlas. Well worth the wait of the download time. Also includes some data on population and whether each town had a post office, express office, or railroad at the time. An excellent resource!

American Revolution and Its Era
This Library of Congress collection contains dozens of scanned online maps from the second half of the eighteenth century with the subtitle, "Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies, 1750-1789."

Boundaries of the United States
An animated map showing the development of national and state boundaries in the United States.

Civil War Maps: Geographic Locations
Online maps from the Civil War era, from the Library of Congress.

Digital Map Collection
U.C. Berkeley's Map Library has scanned in hundreds of excellent historical maps from their collection. Many are of California but there are many from around the world as well. Select one of the three buttons to browse and then modify your search using the search box at the bottom of the listing.

David Rumsey Collection
This is truly an amazing collection of historic maps of the Americas. The collection of several thousand images can easily be searched, browsed, and each map can be viewed at a variety of zoomed levels. This is the place to start for historic map research online.

Historical Map and Chart Collection
An extensive collection of coastal maps from the archives of the NOAA Office of Coast Survey. By downloading the maps as tif files, you'll get much better resolution than through the gifs.

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