Brickmakers and Architects: Mapmaking and the Presentation of History

While many historians are showing an increased interest in GIS as a method for investigating history, attention to spatial analysis among historians dates to the emergence of the discipline. Maps were central tools used by some of the earliest self-consciously professional historians in the United States such as Frederick Jackson Turner and John Franklin Jameson. The rigorous use of thematic maps as sources of insight and evidence was one aspect of a science-like methodology that distinguished professional historians from earlier, amateur historians.

Maps and spatial analysis were important enough to Jameson that he labored for thirty years to develop what he described as a “first-rate atlas of American historical geography,” which was finally published in 1932 as the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States. Jameson once described the work he did shepherding works like the atlas as “making bricks without much idea how the architects will use them.” The architects he had in mind were subsequent generations of decidedly professional and professionalized historians who would use the maps in the atlas to produce learned monographs.

My colleagues and I recently released a digital edition of the Atlas enhanced with animations and data-rich maps. We might borrow Jameson’s metaphor and described ourselves as brickmakers too, but we have a decidedly different “architects” in mind for our edition of the atlas. For us, revisiting the Atlas is an opportunity not to reach those within but beyond the profession. Since we released our atlas two weeks ago it has already received more than 100,000 visits. Looking back to spatial analysis in the early twentieth century as way of defining history as professional discipline, this presentation will then consider the opportunities that historical mapmaking presents twenty-first-century historians to reach public audiences outside the profession.