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go beyond the headlines.

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.Never has it been easier to obtain up-to-date aerial views of Omaha. With Google Earth, you can find one in seconds, even less if you type Omaha right the first time. The Aerial Archives have an entire Nebraska collection, and if you’re wondering what the city’s LED streetlights mean for light pollution, the International Space Station is at your service.But it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when anyone hoping to see Omaha from the sky had to send off to the Chicago Lithographing Company for an exquisitely drawn, fastidiously reproduced print like the one below.Albert Ruger, “Bird’s eye view of the city of Omaha, Nebraska 1868,” Chicago Lithographing Co.In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these bird’s eye views were produced for thousands of towns and cities across the United States. There are all the ones you’ve heard of (Pittsburgh, hopefully) and all the ones you haven’t (Pittston, unfortunately). There’s Champaign, Illinois; Jefferson, Wisconsin; and Mystic, Connecticut, not to mention Wheeling, West Virginia, and New Ulm, Minnesota. If your home town isn’t in the Library of Congress’ expansive collection, you can still probably track it down somewhere.Of the many panoramas and aero views in existence, most were made by a handful of artists. One was Albert Ruger, a Prussian-born Ohioan who got his start drawing Union campsites in the Civil War. Another was the inevitably named Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler, who described the “unadulterated joy” he experienced sketching Middletown, New York. A third, Oakley Bailey, said he preferred the work to