American Geographical Society

About this museum

At 2311 East Hartford Avenue on the campus of the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, the American Geographical Society Library holds one of the largest and most historically significant collections of cartographic materials in the Western Hemisphere. Founded in New York City in 1851, the American Geographical Society was among the premier scientific organizations of 19th - century America - a body that sponsored expeditions, published research, and accumulated maps, atlases, globes, photographs, and geographical documents at a rate and quality that has few parallels in the history of American science. When the collection relocated to Milwaukee in 1978, it brought with it an archive of extraordinary depth and global scope.Maps are, among other things, a record of how humans have understood - and misunderstood - the world around them at different moments in history. A medieval map of the world reveals cosmological assumptions as much as geographical knowledge. A colonial - era chart of a coastline reveals what the charting power found worth recording and what it chose to ignore or suppress. A 20th - century thematic map of population, disease, or rainfall reveals the priorities and methods of a particular scientific moment. The AGS Library's collections span all of these traditions, making it a resource not just for geographers but for historians, anthropologists, architects, political scientists, and anyone interested in how spatial knowledge is made, used, and contested.The scale of the collection is genuinely hard to convey. Hundreds of thousands of maps, thousands of atlases, globes across the centuries, aerial photographs, nautical charts, and a research library supporting all of this material - the AGS holdings at Milwaukee represent one of the great concentrations of geographical knowledge anywhere in the world, largely unknown to the general public.The Library is located on the UWM campus in Milwaukee's east side, close to Lake Michigan. Access is free, consistent with the library's scholarly mission. Hours vary by semester and season, so contacting the library directly before visiting is advisable. Milwaukee offers a full range of cultural and culinary attractions alongside this exceptional and underappreciated scholarly resource.