Story Maps are ways to tell stories using interactive maps, text, and images. Developed by ESRI, the platform ArcGIS StoryMaps allows users to create accessible, informative, and compelling digital presentations that emphasize spatial perspectives. This site presents the ESRI StoryMaps that I have created, including those made with colleagues, and students. The site will be updated as new stories are produced.
Water and Wellbeing in Colonial Rio de Janeiro by Alida C. Metcalf, 2023.
The theme for the Social Science History Association’s 2023 annual conference is “Pursuits of Wellbeing,” which is particularly relevant to the history of water in cities. This StoryMap explores the colonial water infrastructure of Rio de Janeiro.
Jean de Léry in the Guanabara Bay by Alida C. Metcalf, 2021.
Based on a ten month visit to Brazil in 1557, the French Calvinist Jean de Léry wrote one of the most significant accounts of life in the Guanabara Bay before the founding of the city of Rio de Janeiro. This StoryMap reconstructs Léry’s account using his words, images, and dialogues (written in Tupi and French). Utilizing two other contemporaneous accounts, the flora, fauna, and natural environment is reconstructed and mapped.
Henriqueta’s Day on the Streets, Rio de Janeiro, 1850s by Sandra Lauderdale Graham and Alida C. Metcalf, 2020.
O cotidiano de Henriqueta, nas ruas de Rio de Janeiro, nos anos de 1850 tradução de Ludmila de Souza Maia, 2020.
This StoryMap is retrieved history, pieced together from the trial records of Henriqueta, an African street seller who arrived in Rio via the violent slave trade. Henriqueta eventually saved enough to purchase both her freedom and her husband’s, or so she claimed and he disputed. Henriqueta’s divorce trial, freedom papers, marriage vows, police testimony, and civil court property settlements are complemented with contemporary maps, drawings and paintings to recreate the spaces of the streets, fountains, markets, and church yards where Henriqueta and thousands of other African women like her lived and worked.
Rio de Janeiro: A Colonial City until 1850 by Mary C. Karasch with Alida C. Metcalf, Bruno Sousa & Lívia Tiede, 2020.
Rio de Janeiro: uma cidade colonial até 1850 tradução de Ludmila de Souza Maia, 2020.
This StoryMap presents a spatial history of Rio de Janeiro from its sixteenth-century founding until 1850. The text written by Mary Karasch recounts this history, and it appears alongside the temporally accurate digital map of the city that lies at the heart of imagineRio. Themes covered are discovery and early settlements, the growth of a garrison town guarded by fortifications, the evolution of a commercial and bureaucratic city in the South Atlantic, which was transformed by the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in 1808 amid the harsh realities of African enslavement and the African slave trade. In spite of Rio’s dramatic population growth, colonial legacies, including slavery, slowed Rio’s emergence as a modern capital city by 1850.
Rio de Janeiro in the Time of the King by Alida C. Metcalf with Rice students Jamie Donnelly, Gabrielle Humphrey, Sarah Gao, and Ranie Lin, 2020.
Era no tempo do Rei tradução de Lívia Maria Tiede, 2020.
Memórias de um Sargento de Milícias / Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant, a novel by the Brazilian writer Manuel Antônio de Almeida is set in Rio de Janeiro during a unique moment in Brazilian history, when the entire royal court (having abandoned Lisbon as Napoleon was poised to invade in 1807) arrived in Rio, dramatically changing life for all. This StoryMap is the result of a group project in HIST/LASR 251 “Brazil: Continuities and Changes,” an undergraduate class at Rice University taught in the Spring Semester, 2020. Alida C. Metcalf designed the assignment and laid out the introduction and structure of the story map, while students selected a theme from the novel to research and map. The maps were created by the students who worked with Rice GIS specialist Bruno Sousa.
Seeking the Carioca Aqueduct by Alida C. Metcalf, 2018.
Em busca do aqueduto da Carioca tradução da autora com revisão de Ludmila de Souza Maia, 2018.
Constructed over several decades in the seventeenth century and finished with a monumental double arched water bridge (the Arcos da Lapa) in 1750, the Carioca Aqueduct delivered fresh water to the city of Rio de Janeiro. With the exception of the Arcos da Lapa, the path of the aqueduct is unknown to modern residents. This StoryMap describes a walk along Rua Almirante Alexandrino in 2014 and documents what are the likely remains of the historic Carioca Aqueduct in Rio de Janeiro.