Blog Post #4

For this week’s assignment, we were tasked to read Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship, edited by Anne Kelly Knowles and by Amy Hillier. The book examines the merit of GIS and how the tools of GIS can be applied to history or in other words, historical GIS. So, what is historical GIS? GIS stands for geographic information systems, so historical GIS is when you apply mapping tools and other spatial data tools to a historical context. A good example of this would be mapping the path a slave ship such as the Amistad took from its point of origin to its final destination and all of the points it stopped along the way. There is a great deal of information on this slave ship so you could map its path with relative ease. However, this information is widely known and I am sure has been mapped in the past. I will talk about several other good examples of historical GIS later in my blog post that are also discussed in the book we read for this week. There is a great deal of value in teaching both historical GIS and GIS on a broader level to undergraduate, graduate, and even grade school students. Many students are visual learners and when you apply GIS in a classroom setting and teach them to use mapping and spatial data it can open a lot doors many students didn’t know they had. It also makes learning more accessible for students and in other cases easier to understand. It opens a world of possibilities both literally and figuratively.

Initially, there were many skeptics when GIS came to the forefront of academia and as it is addressed in chapter nine of our book many people believed it was just a passing fancy and would soon fade into obscurity. As we can see, it is at the forefront of many fields including history and many more technical fields. What the implications for GIS are is that it gives historians and other researches unprecedented access to new data that before this digital age that we are in, we did not have access to. It makes our research that much more ground breaking then it was previously and that much more pivotal to our field and academia as a whole. As such these are also the ways in which GIS is changing and enriching scholarship. As historians, we are able to now add these amazing GIS tools. We now have the option to choose to present our research on a three-dimensional map with unprecedented access to even greater amounts of data.

Historical GIS is useful when trying to gain a better understanding or to teach others about mapping out Gettysburg. Even what Robert E. Lee could see from any given point at Gettysburg can be taught and mapped by students with the proper information. It is even possible to map and scale the size of the Dust Bowl using the proper mapping tools. I myself have been to visit the battlefields at Gettysburg for a travel abroad course during my previous master program. This was one of many Civil War battlefields we visited on this trip but you cannot go on a Civil War battlefield trip and not visit the biggest one. Personally, no matter where you go on the battlefield you will be in awe of the sheer size of the battlefield. Understandably the battlefield looked likely somewhat different during the Civil War. To get to the question, what could General Robert E. Lee see during the battle of Gettysburg; depending on where he was standing at any given point, for example, during the battle there was another battle that had broken out days later on hill known as Little Round Top and the hill next to it known as Big Round Top. This was a very pivotal point in the overall battle of Gettysburg largely due to the fact that there were a lot of casualties that took place here. The Union Army held the high ground. The Confederate Army would attempt to advance up Little and eventually Big Round Top but would find great difficulty in doing so because the Union held the higher ground. Ultimately, the Confederate Army would be pushed back into the Devil’s Den. So, due to the fact that this battle took part on day two of the three days battle of Gettysburg and also perhaps to avoid being killed in one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War the Commander and Chief of the Confederate Army Robert E. Lee spent day two of the battle at Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary. In attempt to boost the morale of his troops General Robert E. Lee “watched from the rear of the Confederate line” as his men were killed (Knowles, 236). However, it is possible to map digitally what Lee saw on these days since there is historical documentation for it.

            What do you think of when you hear the Dust Bowl? Personally, I think of John Steinbeck’s book The Grapes of Wrath that every child had to read when I was growing up in grade school. I think of a mass scale dirt and dust cloud that wiped out much of the crops and cattle on the Great Planes of the United States. It covered Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, as well as, North and South Dakota. Since the Dust Bowl killed off much of the cattle and crops, many farm owning families were left destitute both in terms of food and income. The Dust Bowl also left the Great Planes parched and barren due to a drought that came with the seeming apocalypse for many people and families. Again, as there is all data and information to be found to support how large the Dust Bowl was so using these figures you can map out how large of an area it covered, which states, counties, cities, town, etc. were affected the worst by the Dust Bowl, and on what scale. This data could be mapped on a geographic map as well as a table or graph. Some of this data has already been presented in our textbook on pages 107, 108 113, 115, and 116. We can always try to attempt to analyze research in new and different ways, however.

            GIS and historical GIS has such great potential to unlocking so much new information and giving academics and non-academics alike access to new information that even a generation ago people did not have access to. GIS has potential for advancing other fields as well.

Anne Kelly Knowles and Amy Hillier, ed. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. California, ESRI Press, 2008.