Santa Barbara’s streets are slightly off-kilter because surveyors used shrinkable rawhide

A quick overview of Santa Barbara

The central California city with the year-round Mediterranean climate weaves a fascinating history of indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and then US history. This three-minute overview touches on the city's layered story, distinct architecture, and many celebrities.

Santa Barbara’s Botanic Garden was the first to showcase the state’s native plants

Founded in 1926, the garden’s founders sought to showcase the state’s local flora as a matter of conservation, rather than the water-hungry exotics regularly being imported. This story focuses on how the garden’s design took a more natural and less formal direction.

Santa Barbara's Channel Islands revealed the oldest skeletal remains in North America

IN 1959, archaeologists found a human femur jutting out from a rock face on Santa Rosa Island. Using the then-new technology of radiocarbon dating, they measured the age of the remains at 13,000 years—the oldest in the continent.

Santa Barbara divers helped innovate deepwater diving technology

Divers in the Santa Barbara channel innovated a more efficient type of diving helmet in the 1960s that used helium to allow for longer, deeper excursions for oil surveying, abalone collecting, and more. These innovators have since set the standard worldwide for military and industrial diving.

A 1927 map shows where Paramount shot its many productions

The skeleton key of California identified in-state locations that would substitute for shooting films abroad. It includes some interesting choices, like establishing Wales along the Los Angeles coast.

An archive of the art of the Sanborn fire insurance maps

For a century, US insurance companies used Sanborn Fire Maps to decide the premiums customers would pay for fire insurance. These maps were designed to show the building materials used in each structure in 12,000 communities across 300,000 maps. While they have become obsolete, these maps are still useful for historians and urban designers, and anyone interested in lovely, original typography. Dive into the most artful Sanborn Fire Maps with this passion project collection.

How one biologist drew a national park's definitive map

Long before GPS, biologist John Cely mapped the swampy terrain of South Carolina's Congaree National Park by hand, and mostly from memory. The map was so accurate, it became the preferred resource for the park's rangers. This Atlas Obscura article explores how Cely acquainted himself with the park's particulars and how the map grew from an unofficial peculiarity into the park's definitive guide.

Ranchos were large land grants in California to Spanish, Mexican leading families

They were typically given to leading families or retired soldiers as means of settling the land with loyal people. The hundreds of ranchos have since shaped land-use policy in the area, determining plots of major cities and ranches today.

At the 100th birthday of Route 66, a look at what makes it distinctive

The iconic road from Chicago to Santa Monica was first laid out by Cyrus Avery, a member of the highway board, in the 1920s. Before the interstate system was created in the 1950s (rendering the route a tourist route), Route 66 became the site of major roadside attractions, food stops, and lore as early American drivers explored the countryside by highway. This visual-rich essay showcases its origins and how the route stands today.

Mapping early New York

Want to see how Wall Street (and New York City as a whole) has changed over time? Use this timeline and map to see Manhattan today overlaid with the precise boundaries of early land grants to the Dutch in the 1600s. Scroll through the progress of city building through the first century of European settlement there.

In 1974, Los Angeles’s Community Analysis Bureau built a smart city

Los Angeles utilized aerial imaging and cluster analysis to gather and interpret civic data, leveraging surveillance technologies developed by the Department of Defense during the height of the Cold War. Instead of being used for military purposes, data insights helped direct social services to high-poverty neighborhoods.

European colonists encountered barbecue by the 16th century

They called the food “barbacoa” and spread the technique throughout their territories, including the American colonies. The first recorded mention in English appeared in John Lederer’s travelogue of Virginia and the Carolinas in 1672.

The oddest shots captured on Google Street View

Ever wondered what you could see on Google Street View if you looked hard enough? With this delightful site, you can now explore the weird and wonderful things captured since the service debuted in 2007.

The Bakersfield Sound challenged the music's creeping respectability

As country music leaned towards the slick Nashville Sound in the 1950s, several artists operating outside that city reacted with rougher sounds more reminiscent of honky tonk and early rock ‘n’ roll. It came to be known as the Bakersfield Sound, reflecting the California agricultural region.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

The discovery of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was initially dismissed as ‘girl talk’

Marie Tharp identified the structure when mapping the ocean floor using sonar data, but her colleague, who did not favor continental drift, was unconvinced. Famed filmmaker Jacques Cousteau even tried to disprove her work with underwater footage, only to validate her maps.

This flat map is still wrong, but it's the least wrong of all flat maps

While flat maps can never be as perfectly scaled as a globe, they're far more practical than carrying around a sphere. Researchers set out to minimize six major errors of flat maps, including boundary cuts and skewed proportions, by simply squashing...

He was one of the first writers to cover surfing

For his 1872 travelogue “Roughing It”, Mark Twain visited Hawaii and described a then-peculiar sport: surfing. He even recalls his own attempts to catch a wave, writing, “I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me.”

John Steinbeck's 'Sea of Cortez,' a travelogue through the Gulf of California, is still used by ecologists today.

The term 'gerrymander' dates back to a 1812 Boston dinner party

The term "gerrymandering" arose when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry approved a state senate map with a district so contorted it resembled a salamander. Critics dubbed it the "Gerry-mander," cementing the term for partisan map manipulation.

The 1974 anarchist protest in Denmark that later inspired SantaCon

An interview with one of the participants explains what the performance art group that planned the event was hoping to achieve. Hordes of Santas walking down the street with a giant goose, attacking buildings with backhoes and pickaxes, handing out “presents” stolen from department stores, and eventually being arrested.

Stonehenge was part of a much larger prehistoric landscape

Long before Stonehenge was built, the Salisbury Plain was already dotted with ceremonial sites, burial mounds, and large-scale earthworks. These landscape maps reveal a densely inhabited region shaped by sophisticated prehistoric communities with ambitious public projects.

The Richter scale was only intended to quantify Southern California earthquakes

The scale, designed to rate the energy of the largest seismic waves released by an earthquake, was calibrated to the region’s crust and mantle properties. Since the 1970s, seismologists have instead used the moment magnitude scale, which considers all waves of released energy.

Before the Panama Canal, there was the Panama railroad

The first ship to cross the isthmus of Panama went not by sea but by land: The paddlewheel steamship Explorer was taken apart and transported by rail, an effort that generated “more trouble than profit,” according to one account.

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

Dishonest brokers called ‘curbstoners’ once competed by placing signs on properties

In the 1910s, yards would be littered with dozens of signs representing competing and potentially dishonest salesmen. The concept of the “open house” developed during this period, as real estate agents would occupy a single home all day for what they called “open inspections.”

The team responsible for the first interplanetary sundials included Bill Nye

While reviewing designs for instruments to be carried by future Mars rovers, Nye suggested adapting the function of a calibration tool, which would be used by the Spirit and Opportunity rovers to help calibrate the brightness and color of their panoramic cameras on the Martian surface.

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

The original copy of the Declaration of Independence is not a pristine document, and even features a smudged anonymous handprint in the bottom left corner.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Artificial coral reefs have been 3D printed from nontoxic, biodegradable terracotta clay, which coral polyps have used as a foundation for rebuilding marine ecosystems.

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

Stars appear to twinkle because turbulence in the motion of molecules in Earth's atmosphere causes light to bend and wiggle rapidly on its way to the surface—a phenomenon called scintillation.

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Recent research found that the brain doesn't seem to massively rewire following amputation—upending earlier beliefs about the cause of phantom limb pain.

El Niño, Spanish for 'the boy,' was named after Jesus Christ because the phenomenon resembled the weather changes observed around Christmastime.

The Great Salt Lake's distinct dual coloration results from high-salinity organisms that only live in the northern portion and produce a purple protein.

The first horror movie is believed to be George Méliès' 1986 short 'The Haunted Castle,' which pioneered the use of special effects

Abraham Lincoln was almost assassinated weeks before his inauguration as he traveled from Illinois to DC through Baltimore in 1861; it took two independent claims for Lincoln to be convinced the threat was real

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.