The Exchange

The Urban Transition Historical GIS Project  uses historical census data to document the state of U.S. cities from the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. The site explains that "These were the decades of America’s urban transition, fed by rapid growth of industry and large-scale immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe that was directed primarily into cities. In 1880 nearly half of total employment was in agriculture, but this share dropped to about 25% by 1920, and by this time about half of the population lived in urban areas." Using the North American Population Project's  100% digital transcription of records from the 1880 Census, the "Urban Transitions" project has developed several additional resources to make possible analysis of social patterns at the level of individuals and households while also taking into account information about their communities.     Although the site is technical, both in the descriptions of d...

Montréal, l’avenir du passé (MAP) is Canada’s oldest and largest historical GIS. The project team has been working on a new phase, which will be available for use in the coming month. In anticipation of that release, one of the project's leaders, Robert C. H. Sweeney, has written an essay for NICHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), explaining the enhancements to the site: This exceptionally rich resource consists of four distinct elements: a new cartography of all properties in the city in 1903, detailing who owned what; an index of all household heads in the 1901 census linked to this map at the lot level; a 30% sample of the complete manuscript census returns of the city’s households; and a geo-referenced vector map of all 101,353 buildings in the city in 1912. These research tools for understanding Edwardian Montréal build on MAP’s earlier layers for 1880, 1846 and 1825, which are available online .  In detailing the work of the MAP group, Sweeney also dis...

The Business History Initiative at the Harvard Business School has launched a website "[t]o facilitate understanding the history of global capitalism in its broad societal context." "Historical Data Visualization" displays "historical data on broad economic, social and political trends both globally and within the United States." Materials include maps (both interactive and static), graphs, and datasets (many of which have raw data in Excel format), divided into categories such as "Commodities," "Corporations," "Managing Distance," and "Politics & Economics."

Common-Place is a "journal of early American life," published on-line in cooperation with the University of Connecticut and the American Antiquarian Society. As a digital project, Common-Place publishes a wide variety of information beyond reviews and articles--such as "Object Lessons" (on material culture) and "Tales from the Vault" (essays inspired by archival materials). The most recent issue, just published, contains two articles of particular interest to business historians. One is Justene G. Hill 's review essay on Calvin Schemerhorn's The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2015). The other is a "Tale from the Vault" by Pierre Gervais that focuses on market manipulation in the 1780s, based on a letter to flour dealer Levi Hollingsworth of Philadelphia.    Readers might also find of interest a "Notes on the Text" feature by Cybèle T. Gontar, who discusses the background ...

A historical GIS project of interest is "Mapping American Social Movements," directed by James Gregory at the University of Washington. According to the website, This collaborative digital project is assembling data and visualizations about dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics during the 20th century, including radical movements, labor movements, women's movements, many different civil rights movements, environmentalist movements, and more. . . . This project allows us to explore the relationships between social movements by bringing them together in time and space. It enables new understandings of how social movements interact and how they reproduce and change over time. The project is ongoing, with plans to add new data and topics over time. Currently the project includes data on the "activist geography" of the NAACP, the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist Party. Future topics ...

"Redlining," the process of marking off neighborhoods as less desirable, has a long history. According to the "Redlining Richmond" website, In the late 1930s the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal agency created to refinance homes and prevent foreclosures, surveyed real estate trends in the nation's largest cities. Working with local lenders and realtors, they assessed neighborhoods using a number of factors ranging from terrain to income levels to the "infiltration of a lower grade population" (by which they meant African Americans, Jews, and immigrants). . . . red "D" areas were "characterized by detrimental influences in a pronounced degree." Developers of the Richmond site at the University of Richmond have now combined with the T-RACES project ("Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California's Exclusionary Spaces") at the University of Maryland and researchers at Johns Hopkins Univers...

Jason Heppler , a Ph.D. candidate in western and digital history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and academic technology specialist, Department of History and Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), Stanford, has released an early "digital component" of his dissertation. " Machines in the Valley: Growth, Conflict, and Environmental Politics in Silicon Valley, 1945-1990 " "examines the environmental, economic, and cultural conflicts over suburbanization andindustrialization in California’s Santa Clara Valley–today known as Silicon Valley–between 1945 and 1990. . . . The project will go through iterations as I finish my written dissertation. The project will house several features, including interactive visualizations, dynamic narratives and analysis that extend upon themes covered in my chapters, and access to certain primary sources." A work-in-progress, the website features data (freely available), maps and other digital visualizatio...

In his presidential address before the Economic History Association, published in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Economic History and freely available on-line here , Jeremy Atack described in detail his ongoing efforts to use Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques to create a transportation database for the United States. The essay is also featured in the blog of the Southwestern University GIS Laboratory. We have in the past on The Exchange provided links to projects using historical GIS for topics in economic and business history (see here , for example). Atack's address encourages us to feature more historical GIS examples: "Visualizing Ocean Shipping" and American whaling , both by Ben Schmidt on his blog, "Sapping Attention" "Visualizing US Expansion through Post Offices ," Derek Watkins "Locating London's Past" Atlas of the Rhode Island Book Trade in the 18th Century "History on the Move," Shane ...

Beyond Steel: An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture is a website produced by the Lehigh University Library, under the editorship of John K. Smith. The site highlights the Lehigh Valley's mid- nineteenth-century boom, late twentieth-century decline and continuing community readjustment. Through the digitization and presentation of letters, books, photographs, maps, essays, and oral histories the site will aid researchers in understanding not only the lives of railroad barons and steel titans, but also the experiences of average folks who worked and lived in the community. The website, which is updated when new materials are available, is divided into several sections, including "Business & Technology," "Society & Culture," and "Mapping." The latter category contains a Historical GIS rendering of Bethlehem in 1900 , based on "Sanborn fire insurance maps, Sholes' Directory of the Bethlehems, 1900-1901 , 1900-1902 Bethlehe...

Today is Global GIS Day , created to increase awareness of the technology of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and the importance of geographical knowledge in general. Historians and other social scientists are becoming increasingly interested in the potential of GIS tools in their own work (see the earlier Exchange posts on the subject here ). In recognition of the event, our resource today is "Mapping the Brew City."   According to the site's creator, Will Tchakirides, this Web exhibit aims to "explore questions of regional identity, consumer culture, and demographic change in postwar Milwaukee, Wisconsin." The website provides an overview of the city's brewing history, combining historical essays with illustrations, documents, and GIS-enhanced maps.

This summer, the Hagley Museum and Library created a channel on Historypin to organize and spotlight areas of its collection. Readers can find a description of the process here in the Hagley Library and Archives News. Historypin is a user-generated global archive of photographs taken in the past and present; many historical museums, archives, and societies have begun to use the site to make available coherent "stories" from their collections. For example, using the "tour" feature, Hagley materials are organized into "Making Black Powder in the DuPont Company Yards" ; for other Hagley photographic tours on Historypin, see here .     The Hagley channel on Historypin was developed by Della Hall of the University of Delaware.     Among the many other organizations with Historypin channels are the US National Archives and the Smithsonian Institution Archives .

An interactive map developed the metaLab folks at Harvard shows the changing publication geography of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations from its first edition in 1776 through 2001. To use the map at the Harvard site, one can select a date on the left-hand vertical bar and the map will show hotspots of publication locations; by clicking on individual points within the "hotspots," one can see the publication information for each edition; if one clicks on any city that appears, a box will show all the editions published in that city throughout the period covered. Alternatively, by selecting "play," one can allow the map to show the publication data sequentially for the whole period. One learns, for example, that there were 422 editions of The Wealth of Nations by 2010, that the first Moscow edition was published in 1895, and that an edition appeared in Shanghai (in Chinese) in 1901. For more details, click on the "about" choice, which will bring up a...

"Railroads and the Making of Modern America" is a digital history site at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, led by William G. Thomas III of Nebraska and Richard Healey, a geographer at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who focuses on historical GIS. The site's introduction explains: This project seeks to document and represent the rapid and far-reaching social effects of railroads and to explore the transformation of the United States to modern ideas, institutions, and practices in the nineteenth century. The railroad was the first and most complex national system in American history. The records of this system's colossal growth are as diverse as they are voluminous, ranging from massive and detailed corporate records to editorials, cartoons, poetry, songs, and even abandoned track lines in today's landscape. While many histories have addressed the railroad's importance, we need a new approach that takes account of how the railroad triggered unexpect...

Recently we mentioned a GIS site that visualized the growth of the United States through the establishment of post offices. Stanford University's Rural West Initiative provides a similar visualization through the founding of newspapers in its "Journalism's Voyage West." In addition to the primary map, which provides a visual representation of the number and locations of newspapers from 1690 to 2011, the site also includes historical background, an industry analysis, and other data visualizations , including the growth of daily and weekly newspapers, and German- and Spanish-language publications.

In an interesting use of GIS, Derek Watkins, a graduate student in geography at the University of Oregon, has created a visualization showing how formal U.S. territorial control expanded in North America from 1700 to 1900, as seen through changes in the spatial distribution of post offices. (The image here is static; follow the link to see the dynamic mapping.) Watkins also points to a similar project showing the growth of newspapers across the United States, 1690-2011, at Stanford's Rural West Initiative .   Business historians have long been familiar with the importance of the post office in business and economic development. See, for example, Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995; pb, 1998); Martin Daunton, The Royal Mail: The History of the Post Office since 1840 (1985); Patricia L. Maclachlin, The People's Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871-2010 (forthcoming, 2011); and R...