Cool new USGS website compiles 130 years of U.S. topographic maps in one place

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) recently launched their new Historical Topographic Map Explorer, which allows people to view topographic maps of the United States from 1884 onward, all on a single website.

This is one of the coolest websites I've stumbled on, since you can look at what most areas of the country looked like decades ago. The Atlantic's CityLab website published this article about the USGS's new website. While the map is zoomed into New Orleans, Louisiana each time you bring up the website for reasons unknown, you can zoom the map out and pan the map around to view the entire country. To bring up the old topographical maps, either enter a location into the search feature or click somewhere on the map, and a timeline of topographical maps for the location you either typed in or clicked on will appear at the bottom of the page. Click on one of links in the timeline in order to bring up an available historical map (blue link backgrounds in the timeline are less detailed maps that usually cover a larger area, green link backgrounds in the timeline are more detailed maps that usually cover a smaller area), and it will be overlayed over a modern map of the country. If your map doesn't appear, you'll need to zoom in, pan to the map area, or both. You can also bring up multiple historical maps simultaneously, although, should multiple maps cover the same area, you'll have to reorder the maps in the left sidebar by dragging and dropping, slide the transparency slider of one or more maps (located below the download link for each map), or both to see each map.

You can see how this country's cities, communities, roads, rail lines, etc. have evolved over the past 130 years with the USGS's new Historical Topographic Map Explorer.