Have You Looked at Historypin Lately? - Create a Local History Project

Historypin is probably my favorite service for locating geo-located historical imagery. After writing my post about Views of Venice I explored Historypin for the first time in a few months and enjoyed exploring some of the Historypin channels and tours of geolocated imagery.

Some of the Historypin channels of note for teachers of US History are those of the Library of Congress, The Smithsonian, and Historic New England. A personal favorite of mine, although it doesn't have broad appeal, is the Hagley Museum and Library that my grandfather used to take me to as a child in Delaware. On all of the Historypin channels you will find, at a minimum, galleries of historical images geolocated onto Google Maps. Many of the channels also include a tour that you can flip through to view connected image sets.

Applications for Education
Historypin is largely a crowd-sourced effort. Your students could contribute to an existing Historypin project or create projects of their own. Historypin allows anyone with a Google account to place images within the setting of current Google Maps Streetview imagery. Your students could create a Historypin project of their own by going to your local history society, scanning historical images, and placing them into a map. (Try using the CamScanner app for iOS and Android to scan images without having to use a dedicated scanner).

Now You Can "Go Back in Time" In Street View

For years now we've been able to look at historical imagery in Google Earth by using the time slider. Now a similar feature is available in Google Maps. As announced on the Google LatLong blog, now when you're viewing an image in Street View you may see a little clock icon in the upper-left portion of the screen. When you see a clock icon while viewing a Street View image you can click the icon to roll-back the view to a previous image. Google began publishing collections of Street View imagery  in 2007. The number of images available will vary from location to location.

Applications for Education
Going back in time with Street View imagery could be a good way for students to see how some places have changed over the last seven years. This could be particularly useful when looking at locations that have suffered some type of natural disaster like a flood or earthquake. For older imagery on Google Maps, take a look at History Pin.

Historic Map Works - Browse Hundreds of Historic Maps

One of my favorite Google Earth layers is the David Rumsey historical maps collection. This morning, through Google Maps Mania, I learned of another good place to find historical maps.

Historic Map Works is an online gallery of hundreds of historical maps. On Historic Map Works you can browse for maps by continent, country, state, and province. Contrary to my initial experience, downloading the map images is not free. But, you can view more than half of the maps as Google Maps overlays using Historic Map Works's free Historic Earth Basic.

Applications for Education
Historic Map Works could be a good place for students to find old maps to compare with current map views. One of the more interesting sets of maps on Historic Map Works is the Antiquarian maps collection. Have your students look through that collection to see how cartographers drew the world in the 14th and 15th Centuries.

Another good historical maps tool that I like is History Pin.

Post edited to clarify that downloading map images is not free, but viewing the maps is free.