NOAA considers a historical map or chart any map or chart that is not used today because it is out of date. ... The collection includes some of the nation's earliest nautical charts, bathymetric maps, city plans, and Civil War battlefield maps.

What is a historical map definition?

Historical mapping may be described as images which show a particular event or time in the past, or just a contemporary map from a specific point in time, showing land use and settlement patterns as recorded at that point.

What is historical map used for?

Historians use historical maps for several purposes: As tools for reconstructing the past, to the extent that maps provide records of features, landscape, cities, and places that may not exist any more or that exist in dramatically transformed form. As records of certain historical processes and relationships.