Historiarum

I have a friend who rode his bicycle across the United States once. He told me the hardest part of the trip was not the Rockies in Colorado or the deserts of Nevada, but a hill on Rt. 30 (the old Lincoln Highway) near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He told me it wasn’t the steepest grade, but it went forever. Friends he was riding with were breaking down in tears-and this was the end of the trip.

While I did not experience any physical pain, I now too know the frustration of the hills near Gettysburg.

A few years ago someone gave me a giant military atlas of the Civil War. I don’t have a great interest in the Civil War, so I haven’t really looked at it much. I actually mostly used it to keep a series of posters in good condition. So I thought this assignment would be a perfect opportunity to utilize this book. After playing around with some of the really intricate maps (these were all drawn by army engineers and seem to me to be EXTREMELY precise), I quickly realized my artistic limitations necessitated something a little simpler. I settled on a map of Gettysburg that was relatively small and that seemed to match my artistic capabilities. So I laid my grid and began with the roads, and the creeks, and the buildings.

And then I hit the hills. Little did I realize that drawing those tiny little lines in the proper scale and direction would prove so difficult. As you can see, I was far more successful in some cases than others. But I realized that even these fairly straightforward military campaign maps require a high technical skill as an artist. I nearly gave up when it came time to do the lettering (again, something that seems relatively simple).

It was a fun exercise though, and took a lot of time and attention to detail. For example none of my 64 colored pencils really matched some of the colors in the map. Particularly the red used in the Confederate positions proved difficult, and I ultimately had to use a brownish-orange which I then traced over with a red pencil. Similarly I used a normal pencil to lay a foundation for the Union positions which I then covered with a blue pencil. But, as you can see I made mistakes, and they aren’t that easy to erase!

It didn’t take long to realize the great advantages a program like Illustrator affords us in projects like this. For the second map I chose facsimile of Peter Charles L’Enfant’s plans for the District that was republished by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1887. It was a relatively large map, with most of it filled with empty city blocks, so I narrowed the area to the section many are most familiar with.

The map seemed really interesting to me because we get to see L’Enfant’s vision for the city and its uses. However, this particular version is difficult to approach—hard to read, partially drawn, poorly organized. So it seemed a perfect candidate to bring into the modern era. I decided to mostly stick to the color scheme used by L’Enfant, although I decided to make the city blocks filled rather than outlined. This seems to me a better way to visualize the space which is rarely vacant. I also added circles for the fountains and the monuments (note the monument at the east end where Lincoln Park is now-very interesting). Finally, I decided on Myriad which seemed an appropriately readable and modern font to fit the feel of the map.

Ultimately, I don’t think the Illustrator map was any less time consuming. However, I think the results are starkly different. My D.C. map is amateurish, but not nearly as much as the Gettysburg one. Again, the bar is lowered. Hope is offered. Plans can be laid.

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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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In examining the different atlases and maps this past week, a thought kept reoccurring that I haven’t quite been able to work through. There seems to be a significant difference between these historical atlases and text-based historical analysis, mainly in that the writing is more sparse in these visually based works. This makes sense since the primary sources are the focus of the works, but it made me question how historians approach these materials.

It seems as though often visual culture is presented on its own, as if they speak for themselves. This is not always the case obviously, but the narrative explanations often seem thinner than traditional approaches. There seem to be several possible reasons for this. One that I wonder about is whether as text continues to carry less and less weight in our culture, and is supplanted by different forms of imagery, is there a natural inclination to highlight the visual and constrain the text? The question that would follow for me though, is if this is the case, how can we continue to present complex interpretations of history through a combination of primary sources, imagery, and text in an appealing package?

The other point that struck me was it seems as though in assessing the maps presented in Historical Atlas of the United States historians can use visual source material to reform the narrative structure of their work. While Hayes chose to present his narrative in a chronological fashion, I wondered if it might not have made more sense for him to have used a topical approach. It seems that in comparing maps of a “political” or “patriotic” persuasion from different times and places might have been more useful that comparing maps simple from the same era with each other. I’m not sure if visual imagery lends itself to this sort of thematic analysis better than text sources, but it seems to be the case.

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