The video of the WMS member meeting on December 6, 2023 is now available to view in the Members Area. The guest speaker was Dr. Imre Demhardt, University of Texas at Arlington. The title of the presentation is "The Changing Map of the Island of Enchantment: Puerto Rico and the Spanish-American War of 1898."

Each year the Washington Map Society offers the Ristow Prize in honor of the late Dr. Walter W. Ristow, one of the nation’s premier map librarians and cartographic authors.  Dr. Ristow was for many years head of the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress and was the founding president of the Washington Map Society.

Luis A. Robles Macías, a PhD candidate in History at Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), is the winner of the 2023 Dr. Walter W. Ristow Prize for Academic Achievement in the History of Cartography for his paper entitled "Polar Hemispheres: The Overlooked Alternative to Nautical Planispheres in Renaissance Iberia."  Luis obtained his engineering degree at the University of Seville and a Master of Science at the Institut Français du Pétrole (France) and McGill University (Canada) in 2001. He has since pursued a professional career in clean energy that has taken him to France, California, and Belgium. In parallel Luis became interested in the mathematical aspects of old maps and in the circulation of geographical knowledge in the Renaissance, which resulted in several academic publications. He eventually embarked on a PhD in History at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), devoted to the life and works of sixteenth-century mapmaker Juan Vespucci. The defense of the thesis is scheduled for January 2024. Luis has been a scientific advisor to the MEDEA-Chart European research project on portolan charts and since 2020 is the editor of Maps in History, the magazine of the Brussels Map Circle.  His winning paper will be published in a future issue of The Portolan.

Portolan Issue #118 has just been published and is now available on this website to members. Check out the Table of Contents here.

The video of the WMS member meeting on November 9, 2023 is now available to view in the Members Area. The guest speaker was Dale Loberger, a Certified GIS Professional (GISP). The title of the presentation is "Using GIS to Tease Information from Historic Maps in the Search for Old Roads."

The video of the WMS member meeting on September 12, 2023 is now available to view in the Members Area. The guest speaker was Richard Francaviglia from the University of Texas at Arlington. The title of the presentation is "The Role of Maps in Films about Exploration and Discovery: Some Latin American Examples."

Portolan Issue #117 has just been published and is now available on this website to members. Check out the Table of Contents here.

Portolan Issue #116 has just been published and is now available on this website to members. Check out the Table of Contents here.

The video of the WMS member meeting on June 14, 2023 is now available in the Members Area. The guest speaker was Rodney Kite-Powell from the Tampa Bay History Center. The title of the presentation is "Key West and the Florida Keys: Mapping the History of the Conch Republic."

The video of the WMS member meeting on May 19, 2023, at the WMS Annual Dinner, is now available to view in the Members Area. The guest speakers were Andrew Adamson of Heritage Charts and Frank Licameli of George Mason University.  Their presentation was titled " F. W. Des Barres' Great Folly."

The video of the WMS member meeting on March 16, 2022 is now available to view in the Members Area. The guest speaker was George Barros from the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, DC. The title of the presentation is "Open-Source Maps: Mapping the Russian Invasion of Ukraine."