Hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in the segregated town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and later gave herself the pen name bell hooks in honor of her maternal great-grandmother, while also spelling the words in lower case to establish her own identity and way of thinking. She joined the Berea College faculty in 2004 and a decade later founded the center named for her, where "many and varied expressions of difference can thrive." One former student at Yale, the author Min Jin Lee, would write in The New York Times in 2019 that in hooks' classroom "everything felt so intense and crackling like the way the air can feel heavy before a long-awaited rain." She taught at numerous schools, including Yale University, Oberlin College and City College of New York. Hooks' honors included an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, which champions diversity in literature. "It all feels so pointed," he tweeted Wednesday. Author Saeed Jones noted that her death came just a week after the loss of the celebrated Black author and critic Greg Tate. Kendi, Roxane Gay, Tressie McMillan Cottom and others mourned hooks. Among her most famous expressions was her definition of feminism, which she called "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression." Rejecting the isolation of feminism, civil rights and economics into separate fields, she was a believer in community and connectivity and how racism, sexism and economic disparity reinforced each other. Her notable works included "Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism," "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center" and "All About Love: New Visions." She also wrote poetry and children's stories and appeared in such documentaries as "Black Is.
She drew upon professional scholarship and personal history as she completed dozens of books that influenced countless peers and helped provide a framework for current debates about race, class and feminism. Starting in the 1970s, hooks was a profound presence in the classroom and on the page. "It was a privilege to know her, and the world is a lesser place today because she is gone. Strong-Leek, a former provost of Berea College, wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
The result is an exploration of time as well as space, a marriage of historic cartographic masterpieces with innovative contemporary software tools."She was a giant, no nonsense person who lived by her own rules, and spoke her own truth in a time when Black people, and women especially, did not feel empowered to do that," Dr. Often the image has to be curved a bit for this to be accomplished. The GIS program then takes all these points (as many as 200 are made for very large maps) and uses them to recreate the digital image so it will fit into its modern geographical space. Georeferencing is done using a GIS program, which takes points on the old maps (cities, coast lines, rivers, streets) and connects them to the same points on a modern satellite map image or a modern street map or a modern map showing boundaries of countries and states. Then these digital images are transformed in a process called georeferencing, which makes them display in their correct geographical spaces in Google Maps and Earth. The original historical maps are first made into digital images by scanning them with high resolution digital cameras.
Cultural features on the maps can be compared to the modern satellite views using the slider bars to adjust transparency. Some of the maps fit perfectly in their modern spaces, while others (generally earlier period maps) reveal interesting geographical misconceptions of their time and therefore have to be more distorted to fit properly in Google Maps and Earth. Each map has been georeferenced, thus creating unique digital map images that allow the old maps to appear in their correct places on the modern globe. A limited group can also be seen in the Google Maps viewer on this website.Īll the maps contain rich information about the past and represent a sampling of time periods (1680 to 1930), scales, and cartographic art, resulting in visual history stories that only old maps can tell.
These maps may be viewed in Google Earth ( requires downloading the app) with our KML links in My Places or in the Gallery layer of Google Earth, Rumsey Historical Maps layer, or directly in the no download Google Earth Browser. The hundreds of historical maps in the Google Earth Rumsey Historical Maps layer have been selected by David Rumsey from his collection of more than 150,000 historical maps in addition, there are a few maps from collections with which he collaborates.