Historical GIS Resources Thread

Reader mode

NeonHydroxide

I think QGIS is my new favorite tool for map making, but its great limitation is the shortage of historical shapefiles available online. This thread is to share freely available GIS resources which might be useful to AH and historical map makers. Post what you all find below and I will edit the post to include it!

CONFIRMED HISTORICAL DATA​
Sources which I know for a fact are currently openly downloadable and useful

Atlas of Historical County Boundaries - https://digital.newberry.org/ahcb/
Historical administrative boundaries: United States, 1629-present

Building the New Order - https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=51
Borders in Nazi-dominated Europe, 1938-45, eg Vichy France, the Reichkommisariats. Download link is dead but accessible via Archive. Warning - HUGE file, they have all-European shapefiles for every month of the war, most of which are identical to one another.

CensusMosaic - https://censusmosaic.demog.berkeley.edu/data/historical-gis-files
Historical administrative boundaries: Austria-Hungary 1910; Germany 1871-present; Albania 1918; Europe 1900-present; Kurland 1797; Poland 1770-1978; Serbia 1865-1895;

CHGIS - http://chgis.fas.harvard.edu/
Historical administrative boundaries: China, 221 BC - 1911; Japan, Tokugawa period

CShapes - https://icr.ethz.ch/data/cshapes/
Historical national borders: Global, 1886-2019
NOTE: low quality

Geo-Larhra (thanks to procrastinating2much!) - http://geo-larhra.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/?q=geocatalogue/vectors
Historical administrative boundaries of France, 1660 - 1789; international boundaries in Italy, 1815 - 1866

Danish Map Supply (thanks to Gust!) - https://www.kortforsyningen.dk/indhold/english
Administrative divisions of current-day Denmark from 1660 onwards

French Historical GIS - Historical administrative boundaries of France, 1790-4

HGIS Germany - https://www.digihist.de/html/hgisg/index.htm (download https://earthworks.stanford.edu/?q=hgis+germany)
Historical administrative boundaries and infrastructure, 1648-present

HGIS de las Indias - Historical administrative boundaries and other data for Spanish America, 1703 - 1808

HistoGIS - All sorts of international and interior boundaries of Central Europe, 19th-early 20th century. Mostly poor quality, unfortunately.

Historical Atlas of Canada - https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.5683/SP2/IQ7E0X
Historical boundaries and administrative divisions for Canada since 1670

Imperia project - Russian administrative divisions, 1820

IPUMS International - https://international.ipums.org/international/gis.shtml
Historical administrative boundaries for most of the world's countries. Only go back to the '70s or '80s for most.

Mapping Interstate Territorial Disputes - https://purl.stanford.edu/zc000fq4044
Actually good global dataset of territorial disputes since 1947 put together for an academic paper.

Railroads and the Making of Modern America - https://railroads.unl.edu/resources/
Infrastructure in the U.S., 1840-1870

RISTAT - https://datasets.iisg.amsterdam/file.xhtml?fileId=10335&version=3.0
Russian empire provinces and districts, 1897

Savoy Historical GIS - Administrative boundaries of Savoy, 1780

Skinner Regional Systems Analysis Dataverse - https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/hrs
French cantons 1806-1896, plus misc. local data on China and Japan

Third Republic France GIS - Historical French administrative divisions of all kinds, 1870-1940

Transcultural Empire - https://heidata.uni-heidelberg.de/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.11588/data/10064&version=2.1
Historical administrative boundaries and census data, Russia, 1897 and 1926.
Note: low quality. Don't use this, use the RISTAT dataset noted above.

US Congressional District Shapefiles - https://cdmaps.polisci.ucla.edu/
Political districts: United States, 1789-2012

Vision of Britain - https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data/
Historical administrative divisions, Britain, 1851-1971


OTHER USEFUL MODERN DATA​

DIVA GIS - http://www.diva-gis.org/gdata
Contemporary political data of all kinds: Global

EarthExplorer - https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/
Physical data of all kinds: Global

Geofabrik - https://download.geofabrik.de/
Service to download all OpenStreetMap data for given regions. Very useful for close-in maps but you'd better have a lot of RAM.

MarineRegions - https://www.marineregions.org/downloads.php
Maritime borders and other data: global

National Park Service - https://public-nps.opendata.arcgis.com/
All sorts of data related to the U.S. National Park system

Natural Earth - https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/
Contemporary political and physical data of all kinds: Global
NOTE: As of time of writing their download servers are broken, but most files can still be accessed via Internet Archive

Overpass API - https://overpass-turbo.eu/
A tool to (more) easily access OpenStreetMap's download API in case you want to download a very specific feature. A bit complex but tutorials are available

Protected Planet -
www.protectedplanet.net

Home

Protected Planet is the most up to date and complete source of data on protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs), updated monthly with submissions from governments, non-governmental organizations, landowners and communities.
www.protectedplanet.net
Dataset of all protected areas around the world, eg natural parks, nature reserves, etc.

Revolutionary GIS - https://revolutionarygis.wordpress.com/
A fabulous blog with detailed higher-level administrative boundaries which aren't available anywhere else. See also the github here.

UNCONFIRMED DATABASES​
These sources contain lots of files which I have not gone through/downloaded myself, but might be places to look for what you need.

Ancient World Mapping Center - http://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/map-files/ (files here: http://awmc.unc.edu/awmc/map_data/)
A ton of files of all types about the ancient and Roman world. I haven't gone through them.

Berkeley GeoData - https://geodata.lib.berkeley.edu/

Harvard DataVerse - https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/harvard/?q=historical+GIS

Mapping Past Societies - https://darmc.harvard.edu/data-availability
Lots of ancient and medieval data. Mostly points, there are polygons but they look very low quality.

MIT GeoWeb - https://geodata.mit.edu/

Texas GeoData - https://geodata.lib.utexas.edu/

Wikipedia list of historical GIS projects - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histo...mation_system#Notable_Historical_GIS_projects
 
Last edited:
China and Manchukuo provinces, 1937
  • Index

    • NeonHydroxide

    I thought this might also be a good place to share resources I've been working on myself. Would greatly appreciate any info any of you all have which might help improve them, and please do let me know if they end up being useful to you!

    Republic of China provinces 1937
    x32mNyp.png

    Based on the CHGIS 1911 map noted above as well as manual digitizing from period maps. To my knowledge the only shapefile anywhere which attempts to show Chinese administrative divisions in the Republican period. Includes provinces, the big foreign leased territories, and disputed areas (eg the parts of northern Hebei annexed by Manchukuo after the Battle of the Great Wall). Some areas (esp. the Sichuan-Xikang border) are not accurate; these are noted in the attributes and I will post an update if and when I find maps which will let me make better versions. For now this should be good enough for large-scale mapping.

    Manchukuo provinces 1943
    XwAMOD8.png

    Manually digitized from this map. Shouldn't be relied on for anything but large-scale mapping. These are the 1943 provinces, but the polygons can be merged to get earlier borders (see here for how they were subdivided).
     
    Last edited:
  • Index
    • Nazi Germany administrative divisions
  • Index

    • NeonHydroxide

    Nazi Germany administrative divisions
    HzKmQWw.png

    Every de facto administrative division I could get my hands on for Nazi Germany and its occupied areas. Based heavily on CensusMosaic and Building the New Order files above, plus the raster administrative maps on Wikipedia, but also includes a lot of digitizing from historical maps, so as usual should not be relied on for anything close-in. While there is info on plans for other areas, e.g. integrating more occupied areas into Reichkommissariat Ukraine or the borders in the Caucasus, the exact borders would be speculation.
     
  • Index
    • Russian Central Asia (Turkestan) uyezds, 1914
  • Index

    • NeonHydroxide

    Russian Central Asia (Turkestan) uyezds, 1914 - OBSOLETE
    H7e3JAS.png

    (Административно-территориальное деление среднеазиатских областей Российской империи - just put here for any potential Russian-language search engine users)
    Digitized basically entirely from scratch from period maps. Same disclaimers from the above maps apply to this one but even more so, since some of the period sources conflict with one another and it seems that some of the border lines in very sparsely-populated areas were not really defined.

    EDIT MARCH 2022: I've updated this, please see this post for the new file:
    NeonHydroxide said:
    Russian Central Asia uyezds, 1914, updated
    P98ZoMi.png

    (Административно-территориальное деление среднеазиатских областей Российской империи). Now including the four oblasts which comprise modern Kazakhstan, with some minor fixes for Turkestan gubernia proper. My earlier file can be considered obsolete. Note that the level of uncertainty on these borders is much higher than even the Turkestan gubernia ones, ESPECIALLY in Ural Oblast, which is the bane of my existence. Use accordingly.
    Click to expand...
     
    Last edited:
  • Index

    • NeonHydroxide

    Cattette said:
    You may be interested in this. I will occasionally upload historical shapefiles here. Thus far I've only completed one of the counties of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1918
    Click to expand...
    Super cool! Thanks for sharing. Is this based on CensusMosaic's A-H divisions? I've thought about using them for a map, but they're poorly labelled and have slivers which make them a pain to work with. I'll definitely take a look at your file.

    By the way, do you figure GitHub would be a better way to share files I make? I don't have a programming background so I've never used it before.
     
    Cattette

    Cattette

    NeonHydroxide said:
    Super cool! Thanks for sharing. Is this based on CensusMosaic's A-H divisions? I've thought about using them for a map, but they're poorly labelled and have slivers which make them a pain to work with. I'll definitely take a look at your file.

    By the way, do you figure GitHub would be a better way to share files I make? I don't have a programming background so I've never used it before.
    Click to expand...
    The divisions are only based upon this map from Wikimedia.

    Github is pretty useful if you have a big pool of files that you want to share but it's probably not extremely more practical than just having separate download links like you have now. Github is pretty easy to set up with the GitHub Desktop application so you won't need any programming experience if you want to switch platforms.
     

    athgtq16129

    NeonHydroxide said:
    Manchukuo provinces 1943
    XwAMOD8.png

    Manually digitized from this map. Shouldn't be relied on for anything but large-scale mapping. These are the 1943 provinces, but the polygons can be merged to get earlier borders (see here for how they were subdivided).
    Click to expand...
    Thanks a lot for these, however, a large portion of people in here might already know this, but the southernmost tip of the Liaodong peninsula did not belong to Manchukuo, it was Japan's Kwantung Leased Territory:
    551px-LudaLandLease-Territory.png
     

    qazse

    Gone Fishin'
    So I just recently stumbled across this.
    The Centennia Historical Atlas, which I'm sure many of you know about, has a Research edition available which gives you GIS-compatible KML shapefiles for its entire timespan (1000 - 2003)!
    You can learn more here!

    Only problem is... It's SUPER expensive. Like... $12,500 for a single license.
     

    NeonHydroxide

    qazse said:
    So I just recently stumbled across this.
    The Centennia Historical Atlas, which I'm sure many of you know about, has a Research edition available which gives you GIS-compatible KML shapefiles for its entire timespan (1000 - 2003)!
    You can learn more here!

    Only problem is... It's SUPER expensive. Like... $12,500 for a single license.
    Click to expand...
    Kind of astounds me hey have the gall to ask for such high prices when the data is pretty clearly low quality. Wonder who actually buys it.
     
    Russian gubernias and uyezds in Europe, 1914
  • Index

    • NeonHydroxide

    Russian gubernias and uyezds in Europe, 1914
    Q6FlMVf.png

    (Административно-территориальное деление европейских областей Российской империи)

    Full credit goes to the person who made this. All I did was download the underlying files and convert them to shp. As a result, a warning that the attributes are a bit of a mess, as they were intended to interact with Java rather than be part of a shapefile table. I might get around to fixing that at some point, but no guarantee. Also, a warning: the southeast border of this map looks like it is clipped to the modern borders of Russia. As a result, the file DOES NOT accurately show the border between Samara and Uralsk gubernias - a bit of Samara has been cut off. Fortunately, that is the only instance where this causes a problem.

    There are three layers of shapefile in this map - краи (territories), губернии, (governorates), and уезды (counties). I can tell you for a fact this is the only even close to good file of these divisions on the entire internet, English or Russian-speaking. Hope it is helpful for someone.
     
    Last edited:
  • Index

    • Helvetti

    Albania HGIS 1927
    Kosova.png

    Here is a preview of Kukës prefecture ('Kosovo prefecture' as it was called back then). The base map was traced from here.
    This HGIS project includes 4 layers available in SHP and KML:
    • Prefecture​
    • Sub-Prefecture​
    • Commune*​
    • Village​
    This project is currently a WIP and the files will be updated at certain milestones.
    Please do let me know of any mistakes so I can correct them. Cheers!

    *They were also known as Districts (as well as Provinces before 1928).
     
    Last edited:
    Reader mode
    You must log in or register to reply here.
    Top
    Top