Book Review: Placing History: How maps, spatial data, and GIS are changing historical scholarship

Placing History: How maps, spatial data, and GIS are changing historical scholarship
Edited by Anne Kelly Knowles
Digital supplement edited by Amy Hillier

The editor of Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (2002) now introduces Placing History: How maps, spatial data, and GIS are changing historical data. These two books have more than an editor in common. Knowles states in the introduction that both books "aim to inspire professors, students and professionals in history-related fields to think geographically about the past and to imagine how geographic information systems (GIS) might help them pursue interesting questions." Knowles takes it one step further in the first chapter of Placing History, arguing GIS is "changing the practice of history."

Placing History is full of interesting ways GIS is changing history and inspiring historians. Authors of each chapter describe examples of GIS incorporated into a piece of history as well as how to teach it. Examples include Peter K. Bol's "Creating a GIS for the History of China," Geoff Cunfer's "Scaling the Dust Bowl," and Brian Donahue’s “Mapping Husbandry in Concord: GIS as a Tool for Environmental History.” The conclusion is "an agenda for historical GIS" by editor Knowles, Amy Hillier, Roberta Balstad.

The cd included with the book contains presentations by Knowles, Cunfer, Hillier and Bol on the topics of their chapters, animations by Cunfer, GIS projects and map layers by Cunfer, Hillier, and Bol.

If you are a UW-Madison student, faculty, or staff, please request this book from MadCat. If you are a Wisconsin resident, please request it through Wisconsin's Water Library Web site book request.