4 ATLASES

History of the United States Virgin Islands in maps

The United States Virgin Islands as it appears in 4 interactive history atlases, from 1789 to 2015: United States Virgin Islands. Each era below lists who ruled the land and when control changed, linked to the dated map that shows it.

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Map of women’s rights in January 1972, showing the United States Virgin Islands — MAP OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN JANUARY 1972

These maps are reconstructed from published sources · Cliopatria v0.2.1 historical polities · Natural Earth 1:10m countries and physical geography · Natural Earth 1:10m administrative references (US states and Berlin) · Roe v. Wade (1973), opinion and footnotes

Source details

Cliopatria contributors / Seshat Global History Databank. CC BY 4.0 · Selected source records; component selection, documented unions and date proxies; projected for display.
Natural Earth. Public domain · Property selection and semantic ID normalization; full coordinates retained. An upstream Egyptian ring self-intersection is repaired with area change below 1e-9 square degrees; see natural-earth-admin0-review.json.
Natural Earth. Public domain
US Supreme Court; Cornell Legal Information Institute. Factual historical evidence; no source prose reproduced

Modern reference outlines locate the historical thematic data. The underlying rights/protest classifications remain unchanged.

Germany uses dated East/West source extents together with a Berlin reference; Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union use reviewed historical extents. For Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, the 1953–68 references are retained where later Cliopatria records show military occupation rather than treaty-party territory.

reconstruction: 1953–1968 · reconstruction: 1958–1989; 1953–1972 · reconstruction: Cartographic device · vector: 1949–1990 · vector: 1953–1968 · vector: 1963–1975

Layer records and reconstruction methods

What was the United States Virgin Islands before it was United States Virgin Islands? The sections below follow this land through every era covered by the Maps of History atlases: who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed. Each line links to the dated map. Modern borders serve as an approximation, as each atlas says on the map itself.

United States Virgin Islands · Haiti and Kenya independence

The sugar colonies of St Croix, St Thomas and St John formed the Danish West Indies, today’s US Virgin Islands. In July 1848 enslaved workers on St Croix rose and forced the governor to proclaim emancipation, echoing Haiti’s revolution half a century earlier. Denmark sold the islands to the United States in 1917.