Traveling through Time with John Ross

Maps are a magic carpet. One look takes us back in time. We can travel with Amerigo Vespucci along the coast of the western hemisphere that would be named for him. We can visit Ajacán, the Spanish mission established on the peninsula between the York and James rivers in 1570, 37 years before Jamestown. We can walk the streets of Winchester as James Wood laid it out in 1744. We can meet Native Americans where they lived and formerly enslaved Blacks in their Freedman villages.

In Traveling through Time, author John E. Ross will show and discuss some of the earliest maps of the region. And in commemoration of the 80^th anniversary of D-day coming up on June 6, he’ll take us to Normandy and show us the weather map for June 5, 1944 that gave Gen. Eisenhower confidence to launch the invasion of France after postponing it for 24 hours.

“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. Among his other books is The Forecast for D-day and the Weatherman behind Ike’s Greatest Gamble. He and his partner, Meredith Whiting, live in Middleburg, Va. and are deeply involved in a number of preservation and conservation initiatives.