The Maine Sunday Telegram and Maine libraries have put together a Literary Map of Maine (unfortunately not embeddable) that link the location of notable Maine books with the towns associated with them. Good idea for drawing attention to another aspect of a state's heritage. They limited it initially to 50 authors with plans to add later although they should have been as inclusive as possible and include as many writers and books as they could find.
It's interesting because the map covers all land owned by the universities not just the central campuses.
You can find more Boston maps at Radical Cartography.
Local activists and the Boston Police Department are using the Ning social network tool to build a crime and safety social network for Jamaica Plain residents and in the future for all of Boston.
"The brainchild of JP resident Joseph Porcelli, the project director at the NCWU, the site was designed to be “easy to navigate,” he said in a recent interview.
A map of the E-13 area of Jamaica Plain (Forest Hills and Woodbourne are in E-18.) divided into subneighborhoods appears on the first page. Clicking on the subneighborhood reveals green houses with flags showing which streets already have groups. Clicking on a house allows communication to begin.
Of about 100 crime watch groups in JP, 60 are on the site so far, Porcelli said. Each subneighborhood has a “network advocate” who helps with the area."
After Roxanne Quimby grew Burt's Bees into a giant business (and sold it to Clorox) she searched for a mission in life and found it in buying vast swathes of land in Maine for a future national park:
"Most of Roxanne's red rectangles are east of the park. She is stitching her own crazy quilt. These are plots of land she has bought. There are others she hopes to buy. Some are scattered and separate. By bargaining and swapping, she is trying to put together a whole. In concert with RESTORE, what she has in mind is a national park. "I feel like my reason for being put on this earth will have been fulfilled because this will live on after me. A park is a demonstration that there is something in America that I can love," she says, her counterculture philosophy re-emerging. "It's very democratic: A Mexican immigrant or a millionaire, for 10 bucks, they both get the same experience.""
In the process Quimby has stepped into the contentious feuding over whether the future of Maine is the declining forest industry or a growing tourist economy which depends on outsiders.
"By the summer of 2007, Roxanne Quimby had spent $39 million to purchase
80,000 acres of wilderness. Nearly 65,000 acres of it lies between
Baxter State Park and the East Branch of the Penobscot River. To her
mind, a park is the only reasonable destiny for this land: "If we leave
this to chance, we will not have the opportunity to make decisions
about what happens next."
In the process of making these purchases, Roxanne gobbled up hunting grounds, snowmobile trails, and some beloved primitive camps that families and hunters had passed down through generations. "I own it now," she proclaimed. "Buying the land also means I am buying the right to call the shots."
Maps of Boston exhibit at the BPL. The maps come from the donated collection of Norman Leventhal, developer of the Boston Harbor Hotel, including this map that shows the effects of the 1872 fire.
"In this journalistic presentation, the city is viewed from the east with the burned district highlighted by shading. The designated area includes that portion of today's Financial District bordered roughly by Summer, Washington, Milk, and Broad Streets. The most destructive of several great fires that occurred in Boston, the disaster engulfed more than 60 acres of some of the most valuable real estate in the city, destroying 930 businesses valued at approximately $100,000,000 (about $3.5 to $4 billion in current dollars)."
BU puts together a handy campus maps mashup with good accessibility info.
Nice annotated map of homes and workplaces associated with significant women in Boston and Cambridge. There are obvious ones like the Gardner Museum but also more obscure ones described pithily like the home of pioneering Cambridge architect Lois Lillley Howe at 6 Appleton St:
Howe entered the MIT’s two-year course in “Partial Architecture” in 1888. When she graduated, she worked as a draftsman with a local Boston firm. In 1891, Howe entered the nationwide design contest for the Woman’s Building at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. She came in second place behind her classmate Sophia Hayden and received $500. She earned her first commission to build a house in 1894 and six years later established one of the longest-lasting and most prolific women’s architectural firms with Eleanor Manning (1884-1973), another MIT graduate.
Howe lived to within 2 weeks of her 100th birthday and seems like she would have been quite a character.
Another individual was Margaret Fuller whose childhood home is at 71 Cherry St. in Cambridge:
Home to Margaret Fuller until the age of 16, this three-story, Federal style house is associated with Fuller’s expansive and politically-driven education under the direction of her radical father. Fuller’s Women in the 19th century , published in 1845, was the first major American exposition of feminism, and it was used as a primary source of information during the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY. Born in 1810, Fuller was considered a prodigy, reading Latin by age six. Though sometimes resentful that her father drove her education at such a breakneck pace, in Women in the 19th century, Fuller wrote about a girl, 'Miranda,' whose father had given her the advantage of treating her as a 'living mind.'"
There's also an interesting mention of the role the Cambridge YWCA played for working women:
Beginning in 1891, the Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association ... provided wage-earning women with low-cost housing, reading rooms, gymnasiums and classes. When young women "dependent upon their own exertions for support" left home for the cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they had few socially acceptable places to go to find lodging, guidance, instruction and companionship. At the time when the facility was constructed, Cambridge was one of New England’s busiest industrial centers, producing goods such as candy, bread and soup. Built during a period of expansion for the Cambridge YWCA, this building was constructed to meet the needs of single, working women.
More sites around Boston but a bit further afield.
