Sunday, May 8, 2016

This was a project for the ANTH 7909-002 Digital Humanities GIS seminar in the Spring 2016 semester at Louisiana State University. 

The aim of my project was to create an interactive map detailing the history of territorial expansion of the United States of America, specifically from the end of the Revolutionary War through the Gadsden Purchase.  This project could be expanded to include all territorial expansion of the United States, or even potentially to examine territorial expansion of various countries over time, but such an expansion is outside the scope of this assignment.

The shapefiles for this map were created in QGIS using state maps from the National Historical Geographic Information System (https://nhgis.org/) based on the decennial census through 1860 and also river and stream hydrography maps from the United States Geological Survey (https://www.usgs.gov) found on The National Map website (http://nationalmap.gov/).  The map was created by importing KML shapefiles for each land purchase, cession, or annexation into Google My Maps and entering appropriate description data for each entry.

Here is the map itself: