GIS Data Sources: Historical

• NHGIS US boundary files every ten years for 1790 through 2010
• Atlas of Historical County Boundaries From Newberry Library; Shapefiles and KML. Every variation in county boundaries, not just decennial.
• Railroads and the Making of Modern America  19th century railroad line layers in KML and as an Esri geodatabase.
• USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection Georeferenced in geoPDF format
• NOAA Historical Shoreline Survey Viewer provides access to historical shoreline surveys conducted by NOAA and its predecessor organizations (about 7,800 surveys back to 1841) for viewing in Google Earth, as well as non-georeferenced scans for download.
• NC historical topographic maps From NCSU; includes georeferenced scanned images
• Georeferenced Historical Maps From UNC-Chapel Hill; NC county maps and maps of the Blue Ridge Parkway region

• Euratlas Historical Political Boundaries of Europe (Duke Only)
• Euratlas Ancient Rome Vector Map (Adobe Illustrator files; Duke Only)
• Ancient World Mapping Center at UNC Includes shapefiles of features from the Greco/Roman world
• Atlas of Rural Settlement in England 19th Century data
• China GIS Datasets From the China Historical GIS project of the Harvard Yenching Institute (CHGIS-HYI).  Free, but must register. Includes 1990 prefecture boundaries and coastline boundaries, as well as 17^th and 19^th century historical polygon and point files.
• Historical GIS Projects and Programs A Listing from the Association of American Geographers (AAG)
• Historical GIS Projects The Wikipedia listing

Geospatial Historian Blog  "A tutorial-based open access textbook ... designed to teach humanists practical digital mapping and GIS skills that are immediately useful to real research needs." Include instructions for georeferencing and vectorizing scanned maps using QGIS.

A Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Training Manual for Historians and Historical Social Scientists Provides an introduction to GIS for these disciplines, mostly using examples with the open-source software MapWindow GIS, along with some ArcGIS tutorials. Includes free manual as well as tutorial data.  Chapters are: 1. Geographically-Integrated History; 2. Getting Started with MapWindow GIS; 3. Datum and Map Projection; 4. Cartography; 5. Symbology and Data Management; 6. Basic Spatial Analysis; 7. Data Normalization; 8. From a Paper Historical Map to a Digital One; 9. Digitizing; 10. Raster Data; 11. ArcGIS Tutorials

Spatial Humanities Step by Step  From the University of Virginia. Includes postings on such topics as georeferencing historic maps or vectorizing their features.

Map Warper Tool for georeferencing scanned historical maps. Visitors can browse maps others have geo-rectified or upload their own to rectify. NYPL Map Warper is the same application hosted by the New York Public Library, but limited to maps from their extensive digitized map collections.