Digital Exhibits

  • Bloodless Battles and Neverending Negotiations: Maine’s Nineteenth Century Boundary Dispute

    Between 1798 and 1842, Maine’s northern border was a point of hot contention between the English and the newly formed United States of America.

  • Introduction & Credits

  • References to the Fore

    In this special, online exhibition offers a history of the printed urban maps of Portland, Maine, from the early nineteenth century to the great fire of July 4th, 1866. It is a history of how Portland was construed as a distinctive urban place, as a moral center of commerce, as a victim of perfidy, and as a site of remarkable and repeated rebirth and growth.

  • The Discovery of a Peninsula

  • The Island of California

    Although cartographers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries knew California was not an island, they continued to depict it in this way. This exhibition explores the reasons behind this ridiculous cartographic error, which persisted for over two centuries.

  • The Fall of the Noble Savage

  • The Lemuel Moody Archives

  • Lemuel Moody and the Portland Observatory

    The nautical charts and notes in this collection document Lemeul Moody’s work and legacy, as he observed Portland from his tower on Munjoy Hill.

  • The Age of Reason

  • Jerusalem at the Center