Background

American Panorama brings a great work of US historical scholarship into the 21st century. The project looks at key events and timelines that have shaped American history and is a major piece of digital scholarship by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps.

We contributed four interactive maps to the project—each of which tell unique and compelling stories around different aspects of American history.

Click to explore the following maps:
Overland Trails ➤
Foreign-Born Populations ➤
Forced Migration of Enslaved Americans ➤
Canals ➤

This project represents a significant investment in digital scholarship by the DSL. They are committed to advancing the art of telling stories about our rich and multi-faceted history through interactive maps. We have released the software we wrote to build these maps, and are working with the DSL (among others) to support their digital scholarship endeavors. The DSL plans to use our software to build around 100 maps in the next couple of years.

A stunning data visualization project. The New York Times