If you found the map of Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill on last Monday’s post by Abigail Adams—“My bursting Heart must find vent at my pen”—helpful in visualizing what she described, I’m delighted. As you can imagine, I have done, and still do, a lot of fossicking through letters and diaries in libraries and historical societies. (Don’t you like that word “fossicking”? It’s informal Australian, and originally meant searching for gold in abandoned workings. I really like the notion of women’s letters and diaries being thought of as “gold.”)

I am so excited, however, when I find a site online that has everything one could possibly want in one place, in this case, historical maps—on the website of The Florida Center for Instructional Technology. Located in the College of Education, University of South Florida, at Tampa, the Center was established to encourage the integration of technology into classroom instruction in the state’s schools by providing leadership, instructional materials, and support services. Its online publications and products are impressive, and teachers anywhere (and others, like me) can use them free of charge, the only requirement being to credit the institution. Maps ETC provides more than 5,000 royalty-free historic maps from around the world. This was the source for the map I used in the Abigail post. I could spend hours exploring the clip art, photographs, historic documents, audio files of literature, lesson plans—you name it—the site offers. There is even a category called Tech-Ease offering assistance with technical matters. I heartily recommend this site to teachers, students, readers, researchers, and lovers of cartography. Sources like this give one hope that education in these United States can and will be improved. Maybe this blog can be of some help too.