On the tracks of General Waller – Mapping a biography

Dr. Vernon L. Williams is a military historian writing a biography of Littleton Waller, a general in the U.S. Marines in the late 19th-early 20th century.

Each chapter in the biography covers a specific region and time period of the general’s career. Vernon wanted several maps for each chapter to help readers understand all the places mentioned in the book.

The simplest maps to create were the cruising tracks of the USS Lancaster in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and the Philippines. For these maps I used geographic datasets for coastlines and countries. In early drafts we thought of including terrain imagery, but decided against it to keep the maps as clean as possible for all the labels needed.

The next type were more detailed region maps, with multiple routes and military positions. Vernon has spent decades resarching General Waller and shared some public domain historical maps with me, which helped with contemporary spelling of place names. I also used those maps as source material to manually digitize selected features for our maps.

Then there were a few detailed city and battle maps – some only required me to edit some GIS datasets, but some needed to be digitized from public domain maps. Vernon didn’t want to use those historical maps because they were quite cluttered, so I digitized only the required features to keep the maps clean and legible.

I had a lot of fun working on these maps, and Vernon enjoyed our collaboration, too – he said the maps were “exquisite”, which is a lovely compliment!

Vernon’s book will be published by TCU University Press in Fall 2024. I’ll share more details when available.

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