The why and how I made interactive Google Maps of Historic Events

by

George Stiller

I began making interactive maps of historic events because I kept going to Google Map to find the locations in the various books I had been reading. It struck me that it would enhance my reading if I created my own Google Map of the book.  Thus, I was able to zoom in on and track the locations and people while I was reading  about in both fiction and non-fiction books. Having developed several of these maps, I decided that I should share them with others who might find them interesting and try to teach others to map their reading. So I created my blog MyReadingMapped.

After a period of time, I noticed that the maps that got the most attention were those of historic events. So, I modified my blog to contain only maps on historic events. Then it dawned on me, that without a college degree, I have no credibility and that I am not a recognized authority on history. To solve that problem, I decided to find 100+-year old eFree Google Books, or online journals, written by the explorers themselves and even Wikipedia pages on the exploration that my map locations could be linked to on a by page basis for credibility.  Thus, the map becomes a library portal to all the knowledge on the Internet.

My first map of this type was the Interactive Civil War Map. I knew there would be great interest in the subject and I found the links and coordinates I needed on Wikipedia’s List of Civil War Battles, which was very confusing to use and required the visitor to use a complicated and time consuming process to get to a Google Map for each and every battle one-by -one. On the other hand, my map was designed to be easy to use, enabled you to zoom in on the battle and made all the battles visible at once so you can see how they relate to each other without the complicated process.   These maps enable you to zoom in on the actual locations, see the buildings, the forts, the ancient ruins, etc. and read the actual words of the explorer, see the terrain as they saw it 100+ years ago in terrain mode, and what it looks like today in satellite mode. These maps can even provide directions, hotels and other points of interest. Some maps include links to National Archive photos, Wikipedia pages, and animations from CivilWarAnimated or AmericanRevolutionAnimated.

After placing a few referrals on various online forums, interactive maps of historic events began to take off. My hope is that teachers would use it to inspire reading and writing to students who are currently fixated on an online media, and that travelers and followers of explorers would use these maps to plan their next vacation.

My most popular maps are the following:

• Interactive Civil War Map
• Sunken Ships of the Atlantic
• Explorations of Charles Darwin, Marco Polo, Mungo Park and Henry Morton Stanley
• The American Revolution
• Environmental Disasters

Until recently, all my maps were about explorers who had died a long time ago. The map on Mikael Strandberg’s 2004 Siberian Expedition was my first living explorer who was kind enough to allow me to do so and provided the materials I needed.  I now have twenty-nine Google Maps on historic events and two Google Map games called “Day of Atonement” and “Prag’s Google Street Road Rally.” It is of interest to note, the research involved and the creation of these maps has uncovered some errors in commonly held facts on history. I have found what I believe are errors in traditional exploration maps on Wikipedia in regard to Marco Polo and Cortès, and located odd details mentioned in books that affected history and you can read about them on my blog.

So today, start experiencing history digitally by making your own maps of an historic events and uncover your own discovery of little known facts that only a Google Map can reveal.

George Stiller is a retired marketing communications manager who began his 35 year career in advertising and marketing as paste up artist. As an ad agency art director, George has helped to establish Agfa-Gevaert as a worldwide leader in diagnostic medical imaging systems. As a corporate graphic design manager, George’s workflow improvements helped United States Surgical Corporation to become one of the fastest growing companies worldwide.  As a marketing communications manager for MechoShade Systems, George helped to establish the MechoShade brand as the third most recognized brand in the commercial shade industry and helped to develop the ImageShades you have seen at Levis and the Gap. Now that George is retired, he developed his blog, MyReadingMapped, and its 30+ interactive Google Maps on history.

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1. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. This is the way real climbs, real exploration should be done. Before you had set routes and ropes fixed to the mountain. This book presents the enthralling account, by the leader of the French expedition, of the first conquest of Annapurna – at that time, and at more than 8000 metres, the highest mountain ever climbed. It is a story of breathtaking courage and determination against appalling odds. In records of mountaineering, in tales of human endeavour, there is nothing so unforgettable as the account of the descent by the triumphant but frost-bitten men, after the monsoon had broken, through the flooded valleys of Nepal.

Many think this is the best adventure book ever written.....

2. The worst journey in the world by Aspley Cherry-Garrard. This book gave me and Johan Ivarsson great insights into the cold during our Siberian Expedition. One of the youngest members of Scott’s team, Apsley Cherry-Garrard was later part of the rescue party that eventually found the frozen bodies of Scott and three men who had accompanied him on the final push to the Pole. This is his account of an expedition that had gone disastrously wrong. No episode in the history of human endeavour reads more harrowingly than Scott’s last expedition to Antarctica. Scott reached the South Pole in January 1911 to find Roald Amundsen had beaten him to it; then perished with his companions on the way home. ‘Yet, “tragedy”‘, Apsley Cherry-Garrard was to write a decade later, ‘was not our business.’ Cherry-Garrard was just 24, the youngest but one of the team when he joined Scott. Left behind for the final leg, in accordance with Scott’s original plan for a four-man advance, it fell to Cherry-Garrard eight months later to be a member of the search party which discovered their frozen bodies. The experience permanently damaged his mental health. For the rest of his life he was haunted by the fear that, but for what he perceived as an error of judgement on his part, they might have survived. Yet this book, his story of that and earlier expeditions, is in no way self-indulgent or sensationalist. Despite his name, aristocratic birth and classics degree from Oxford, Cherry-Garrard was no arrogant nobleman. Rather, this not especially robust but intelligent man well understood that polar exploration requires a singular fortitude pushing beyond brute strength to what Ranulph Fiennes was later to term mind over matter. Cherry-Garrard’s descriptions of the conditions suffered are rendered all the more diabolical by prose as stark as the landscape traversed. As for hyperbole, the ‘Worst Journey’ of the title in fact refers to an earlier expedition investigating nesting sites of the Emperor penguin. A work of supreme dimension, this masterpiece remains as compelling today as when it was first published 80 years ago.

3. The Heart of the Hunter by Laurens Van der Post. A beautiful book about travels among the Bushmen. In this stirring sequel to “The Lost World” of the Kalahari Laurens van der Post records everything he has learned of the life and lore of Africa’s first inhabitants. He explores the very sources of the Bushmen’s spirit and imagination – their dreams and stories, the legends that guide them and inspire them in their daily battles with that harshest of environments, the Kalahari.

CuChullaine O´Reilly on his famous ride!

4. Arctic dreams by Barry Lopez. An amazingly inspiring account from the northern part of the globe. The European picture of the Arctic is usually of snow and ice: the inhospitability of the terrain and the frigid wastes of the tundra contribute to our incapacity to imagine ordinary life there. In this magisterial book Barry Lopez draws on this hazy understanding of the far north to provide a compelling account of the land and its hold upon the psyche.It is a book which could be compared to Chatwin for its combination of travelogue and poetic vision. Yet the beauty of the prose and the thought-provoking evocations of modern culture’s shifting relationship with the environment are in a league of their own. Here are sparkling descriptions of the lives of caribou, muskoxen, polar bears and narwhals, and extraordinarily moving passages which meditate on the nature of our relationship with the world, the inter-dependence of ideas, desire and science and the possibility of dignity and compassion in the contemporary world.It is a measure of the respect which Lopez has for his subject that his book exemplifies the supreme importance which he ascribes to the ethics of respect in the face of all existential paradox:”There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light”.

5. Khyber Knights by CuChullaine O´Reilly. A very good friend of mine. It is an account of perilous adventure and forbidden romance in the depths of mystic Asia. A real modern day tale! It is also a book of insights to the human soul. It has everything an adventure book should have!

6. Scott and Amundsen by Roland Huntford. The best book about the race to the South Pole between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. It is not much liked by many British, but as somebody who is brought up in snow and cold, and know a bit about polar exploration, I think it is very accurate. Roald Amundsen should have been give much more acclaim for his fantastic life and discoveries. It is a very dramatic book,but gives a very good background on both of them.

Courtesy Robin Davidson. Probably the best account of an adventure I have read written by a female explorer.

7. Tracks by Robyn Davidson. Even though most of my recommended books are about males, most likely because they are described and written in a way that appeals to me and my way to explore, I think that books about adventure and exploration written by women, generally are better as a whole. Women are more honest, lie and brag about themselves much less and are much more emotional. This book as excellent. In every way and should be read by everyone who is thinking about doing adventures and Expeditions. It is a bout her 1700 mile trek with camels across the Western desert of Australia.

8. The voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. I had no idea that Charles Darwin was such a good writer. The book is a must in many ways, since quite a few of his ideas regarding the evolution of mankind began developing here, but it is also a great travel book full of adventures and insights into all these countries that the Beagle passed on its 5 years journey.

Annapurna - Maurice Herzog classical account of the first 8000 meter mountain to be climbed.

9. The incredible voyage by Tristan Jones. Amazing book by an amazing fella. His passage with his boat through South-America is just unbelievable. He is a very good writer and this will be a classic in the future. With a singleness of purpose as ferocious as any hazard he encountered, Tristan Jones would not give up – even after dodging snipers on the Red Sea, capsizing off the Cape of Good Hope, starving on the Amazon, struggling for 3,000 miles against the mightiest sea current in the world, and hauling his boat over the rugged Andes three miles above sea level to find at last the legendary Island of the Sun. And beyond lay the most awesome challenge of all – the tortuous trek through 6,000 miles of uncharted rivers to find his way back to the ocean.

10  Arabian Sands by Wilfried Thesiger. By now, I have read the book many times. It is part poetry, part the meaning of life, but most a great read about his amazing explorations in the Arabian desert, and most of all, in Rub Al-Khali. Thesiger himself sums it up himself, by saying in his foreword:

No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can hope to match.

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