In Traveling through Time, author John E. Ross will discuss how we can travel back to the earliest European discovery of America and settling of Virginia through readily available historic maps. He’ll show examples from extensive portfolios of online maps dating back to Diego Riberio’s 1529 sketch of coast of the western hemisphere. We will see how colonial Virginians were certain that seas of China and the Indies lay just beyond the Blue Ridge. Ross marvels at the accuracy of Louis Michel’s 1707 map of the Shenandoah Valley and the 1751 Jefferson-Fry map of Virginia that were with achieved instruments no more sophisticated than compass and pen. “Old maps allow us to see history where it happened,” Ross says. “We are extremely fortunate to have Eugene Scheel’s maps and books to help us understand how Northern Virginia came to be the place we appreciate so much today.”

Ross is the author of the bestselling natural and cultural history from the University of Tennessee Press: Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time. He is currently at a work on a similar book: Beyond the Blue Horizon: Virginia’s Great Valley and Ridges to be published in late 2024 by the University of Virginia Press. He and his partner, Meredith Whiting, live in Middleburg, Va. and are deeply involved in a number of preservation and conservation initiatives.