The prospective value and contributions of GIS and the discipline of geography for historical scholarship can be informed by examining past works that fused history and geography, particularly the genre of the historical atlas. This essay considers, in particular, the significance of Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States. Still unmatched to this day in its comprehensive and innovative spatial representation of American history, the 1932 Atlas suggests two opportunities for a twenty-first century historical atlas of the United States. First, though Paullin and Wright adapted several techniques to show change over time on the printed pages, GIS and other geovisualization technologies offer us increasingly powerful ways to show and explore historical change on maps. Second, even as their atlas drew upon historiographical theories, Paullin and Wright denied that their atlas was a work of interpretative history; by explicitly conceiving of and designing maps and atlases as interpretative works we can amplify their scholarly significance and impact.
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CITATION STYLE
Ayers, E. L., Nelson, R. K., & Nesbit, C. S. (2012). Maps of change: A brief history of the American historical atlas. In History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections (Vol. 9789400750098, pp. 195–210). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5009-8_13