Fire insurance maps are an important source of historical information about cities throughout the United States, and this delightful collection from the University of Hawaii offers a great selection of these valuable documents. Currently, the collection contains 78 total maps of various urbanized areas within the Hawaiian Islands. Most of the maps are focused on Honolulu and they reveal the early...

Most American historians and geographers are well aware of the Sanborn fire insurance maps which document the landscape of hundreds of different cities. They are tremendously useful to a wide range of scholars and researchers. What some people may not know is that the Dakin Publishing Company of San Francisco also worked to create similar insurance maps in the late 19th and early 20th centuries....