Welcome to the 24th Carnivalesque! There are lots of great links here, so let’s get started.
Maps
Strange Maps discusses California’s history as an island, possibly home to the Garden of Eden.
George Goodall at Facetation writes on the influence of engineering on early modern maps. Why didn’t maps develop more quickly into the representational structures we recognize today? I’ve recently heard a number of interesting answers from the aesthetic angle to this question, but Goodall frames it as a question of technology and knowledge.
The Conventicle‘s H.C. Ross posts a series of links to maps of interest to students of Puritanism.
Early Modern America
Walking the Berkshires describes a fascinating episode of the American Revolution.
Mary Mark Ockerbloom at Merrigold discusses the life and poetry of Phillis Wheatley.
Language, Literature and Philosophy
Conrad H. Roth at Varieties of Unreligious Experience on the language of alchemy and the history of writing about the London Bridge.
Paul Robinson at Novice Philosopher wonders how Hume and Bayes never crossed paths.
Brad Pasanek at The Mind is a Metaphor explores the implications of mechanical imagery for the mind through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
John Holbo wants you to come talk about Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew at the Valve.
Simplicius at Blogging the Renaissance wonders how to avoid getting anti-Semitic responses to The Merchant of Venice.
Brett Hirsch at Sound and Fury explores the relationship of Jewishness to poison-making, and how poison makes a dog burst.
Loveliness
Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society posts this beautiful representation of Linnaeus’s “Flower Clock.”
Philobiblon visits the plague wall in Provence.
PK at Bibliodyssey gives us this extraordinary series of illustrations of a Tuileries Tournament.
Fun
Also at BtR, play along with this New-Yorker-style caption contest, from Truewit.
Mark A. Rayner at the Skwib brings us more of the The Lost PowerPoint Slides, Gutenberg Edition.
This Gaudy Gilded Stage offers the first two installments of Hottie of the Month, Sir Charles Sedley and William Congreve.
(And, of course, everything here and at the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room offers early modern content nearly as oft as you could wish it.)
The Long Eighteenth 
Here is a blogpost of mine linking to a web resource of rare, antique African maps , that might be of interest to some of you.