While the site is now defunct, Oracles, Thinkquest.org site consolidated a series of country boundary data into shapefiles. Created as an educational site in 1996 and acquired by Oracle in 2002, the site went defunct in 2013. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, the shapefiles of country boundaries spanning between 2000 BCE and 1994 CE can still be accessed.
The data itself should be used with caution and only for small scale projects. Created by students, the archived disclaimer page explains that the data has a spatial error of roughly +/- 40 miles and the best available information, especially for the oldest years, is not the most reliable.
Access: Historical country GIS data from Thinkquest
Africa Data Sampler (1992-1994) Data from the World Resources Institute. Detailed coverages of African countries. Inlcudes political boundares and natural resource data.
ArcAtlas Our Earth (1996) Includes a wide range of data are from weather and precipitation to land use and social infrastructure.
Digital Chart of the World (1991/1992) 1:1,000,000 scale vector based map of the world. Contains geographic, attribute, and textual data. Primary source for data is the ONC (Operational Navigational Chart) from DMA (Defense Mapping Agency). The library has the ESRI version and the NIMA version (which is called Vector Map Level 0) on cd-rom. A more recent version of this is available for free from the University of Hawaii.
