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Whale Tales, 1880

This post is about one of the prints available from Vintage Visualizations, a new Brainery-affiliated venture. For more info, check out our intro post here!

American whaling peaked in 1858, but it still found a place on this 1880 fisheries chart. That year, though whaling was still a lucrative business in Massachusetts, a paltry $408 worth of whaling was done in North Carolina.

The chart also includes a neat world...

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Land "Improvement" in the Industrious 1800s

This post is about one of the prints available from Vintage Visualizations, a new Brainery-affiliated venture. For more info, check out our intro post here!

"Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." That's what Theodore Roosevelt said about the Grand Canyon in 1903. But "improving" a piece of land can mean a lot of different things. In the case of this Industries chart from...

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Where on Earth was Northern Liberties?

In 1790, the very first United States Census found that Northern Liberties was the sixth most populous city in all of the United States, weighing in with around 9,900 residents. Granted, the country was pretty small back then, but it made me wonder what caused this Northern Liberties to completely fall off the map. 

As it turns out, Northern Liberties was located in present-day Philadelphia, just north of what is now Center City. It...

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