Historiarum

Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, edited by Anny Kelly Knowles is packed with provocative essays that offer a series of case studies about how m GIS, mapping, and plotting can be used to represent and convey historical information. The essays are intriguing in part because of their diversity, and the breadth of topics (from military to social history), geography (from Salem, MA to Rome, Italy), and time (from 1000 BC to the twentieth century) covered makes a strong case that historical mapping is an extremely flexible and useful research and educational tool.

While a number of them stood out for lending truly creative approaches to historical practices, Benjamin C. Ray’s “Teaching the Salem Witch Trials” in many ways captured the unique potential that mapping can offer. In the process of creating a digital library so that his students could examine primary materials related to Salem, Ray created a database of related metadata that, due to a grant requirement from the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (whose website contains some fascinating projects), included geolocation material.

Ray’s essay captures a great deal of the utility that geolocation offers historians. First, although his description is brief, he highlights the advantages that complex databases and computing offer in analyzing data. Gathering materials together is only a part of working through a historical problem. Computational databases offer an effective way of rendering research in ways that can foster the process of making sense of data. Allowing for multiple juxtapositions of individual data sets (such as geolocation with economic and religious concerns) can indicate connections which might not be readily apparent. As Ray shows, computing spatial (time and place) relations can be particularly illuminating.

Additionally, both Ray’s research and work in the classroom indicates that mapping data is good historical practice. He notes that while earlier scholarship about Salem employed maps, the precision of GIS as well as the ability to plot a multitude of data, allowed him to rethink some of the historical questions surrounding the trials. Ray’s maps not only contributed to the relevant scholarship of Salem, but also introduced students to important lessons about “doing history.” His essay argues strongly that mapping can be a vital part of scholarly best practices. But they also bring history alive in the classroom and give students an introductory access point to working through primary sources themselves.

“Teaching the Salem Witch Trials”, along with the other essays in Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, shows that maps can be taken beyond simple illustration and are more than gimmicks in the historian’s bag of tricks. Instead they are powerful analytical and teaching tools, and can be primary carriers of historical arguments rather than decorative illustrations.

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Jeremy Black’s Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past covers a lot of ground in its two hundred pages. Black assesses a great deal of the history of mapmaking, historical or otherwise, stretching back to China in 2100 BC. However, much of his work focuses on, or tangentially nods toward the role of maps in nation building. Black indicates these ideas early, commenting on a twelfth century Chinese atlas, “This work, apparently the oldest printed historical atlas, is fascination because it reveals that from the outset the selection of maps and presentation of material in historical atlases involved issues of politics and propaganda.”(2) He goes on to successfully trace this idea across time and place. For example the importance of territory demarcation among imperial European maps, the ethnographic works of Nazi Germany, or Soviet highlights of industrial and technological growth under Communism. (66, 126, 157)

Interestingly, many of the atlases Black examines were created for use in schools. This emphasizes that maps are not simply referential documents, despite their placement in most library stacks. Rather maps are also instructive, directing the readers attention to certain characteristics and creating narratives by omitting others. While it is important to use a critical and even skeptical eye when examining maps, this is not necessarily a flaw in maps as a medium. Instead, it means that they are more like texts than we imagine. While there has in recent years been a greater effort to include images among other historical evidence, there seems no reason why they should be limited to just this use. In creating historical maps we can also impart meaning beyond the visual representation of place. They can become paragraphs, and atlases essays or books. This is exciting to think about with regards to our final projects, which can potentially make complex historical arguments through images rather than texts.

For example, Black mentioned an innovative mapmaker from the middle of the twentieth century, Richard Edes Harrison.(230) Harrison was known for making birds-eye view maps, a concept I didn’t quite understand until I saw an example (there were none in the book-this was my one complaint with Maps and History, not enough maps!). Here you can see the unique perspective Harrison created by turning the map on its side, almost giving the viewer the feeling of looking at a globe.

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However, another map of Harrison’s really caught my eye. “The world according to Standard” presents a fascinating depiction of trade routes, energy consumption, American colonial exploits, and diplomacy. The tagline accompanying the map reads, “How a great oil company works in time of peace and how the war is affecting it.” As Black notes in Maps and History, “If the self-referential sections of historical atlases can be self-reverential, they are, nevertheless, crucial to the assessment of the visual message of the maps.”(66) While I think Black unnecessarily privileges text in his assessment of atlas introductions, it is clear that they they serve an extremely useful and powerful narrative function. The one line situated just below the Standard Oil map sets the stage for the entire image, with Standard set as a great world power on whom even entire countries, especially the prominently featured United States, rely. Not only does this map illustrate how maps can by imparted with large amounts of explicit and implicit meaning, it also shows how a few words can wield much greater power when coupled with images.

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