Anne Kelly Knowles

Inductive Visualization: A Humanistic Alternative to GIS

Growing numbers of humanities researchers are turning to geographic information systems (GIS) to map spatial data and to visualize spatial relationships. This article explains the limitations inherent in GIS as a research methodology for humanistic scholarship, then introduces inductive visualization as a promising alternative that in several ways is more suitable to the acutely perceived but imprecise, often highly relational spatial content in the kinds of sources humanists rely on. The authors present examples of both GIS-based visualizations and inductive visualizations from their research on the geographies of the Holocaust, with a particular focus on using this method to identify and analyze spatiality in survivor testimony. The article concludes with reflections on the value of this flexible methodology for teaching students spatial thinking and encouraging them to find powerful means of visualizing the spatial meaning of primary sources in their research.

Geography, timing, and technology: a GIS-based analysis of Pennsylvania's iron industry, 1825-1875

This article examines key questions about the development of Pennsylvanias mid-nineteenth-century iron industry. The analysis is based on new data and exhaustive examination of previously underutilized sources within the framework of a geographic information system (GIS). Hypotheses are tested on the timing of adoption of mineral-fuel technologies across the state; the temporal relationships between investment in ironworks, business cycles, and tariff policy; the substitutability of different types and qualities of iron; how transport costs affected iron prices; and the geographical segmentation of iron markets in the antebellum period. The findings reveal complex and dynamic patterns of regional economic development.

A Case for Teaching Geographic Visualization without GIS

This article argues for the value of teaching geographic visualization to non-geography majors by having them make maps manually, using punched mylar, colored pencils, and light tables instead of computerbased geographic information systems or mapping programs. The essay contrasts the experiences of attempting to teach principles of geographic visualization using ArcView GIS in an introductory human geography course and using manual methods in an upper-level research methods course in history. Several conclusions emerge: (1) using manual methods to visualize spatial information quickly gets students thinking geographically; (2) the ease of learning the fundamental concepts and techniques of geographic visualization using manual methods makes it possible to integrate visualization into courses outside the discipline of geography; (3) geographic visualization can tremendously enrich the study of history, prompting students to think in ways they might not otherwise; and (4) teaching visualization with mylar has distinct advantages for history courses because physical map layers reinforce the notion that places are palimpsests of change. Manual methods make it possible to teach geographic visualization at colleges and universities that have no geography department or GIS courses. Their use should be encouraged as an adaptable, inexpensive, effective way to promote geographic learning and geographic literacy in U.S. higher education.

Immigrant Trajectories through the Rural-Industrial Transition in Wales and the United States, 1795–1850

Abstract This essay offers the first detailed geographical analysis of Welsh emigration and settlement in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. The analysis is based upon the wealth of geographical and historical information contained in 1,771 immigrant obituaries. They show that Welsh emigration was a predominantly rural phenomenon up to mid-century, although emigration from industrial South Wales had begun by 1830 and important industrial settlements were well-established in the States by 1850. These data also reveal distinctive regional historical geographies of emigration. The second half of the essay compares the spatial and social characteristics of rural and industrial migration by tracing patterns of internal migration in Wales and the United States and by examining the life-paths of four individual migrants. This evidence suggests that many rural Welsh had some contact with industry and that their transition from an agricultural to an industrial way of life was more compl...

The Industrial Revolution in Iron: The Impact of British Coal Technology in Nineteenth-Century Europe (review)

automobility by scholars like Christoph Maria Merki and by this reviewer. The book’s layout mixes text, reproductions of illustrations, and quotations quite freely, strange juxtapositions that can either be annoying or inspiring. In my opinion, less would have been more. Still, the question remains: Has the author hit his aim? Considering that there were multiple aims, he has come close. His biography of Drais is authoritative, his assessment of the user history of the Laufmaschine and the early bicycle is fascinating to read, and his attempts to put the role of the “inventors” of the automobile in context should provoke mobility historians to some thought.

In the Kingdom of Coal: An American Family and the Rock that Changed the World (review)

growing use of coal for heating; of the need to pump water from everdeeper mines, thereby encouraging the development of the steam engine; of the application of steam power to the textile industry and the use of coke for smelting iron; of the manufacture of gas from coal for municipal lighting; and of the revolution in transportation wrought by the railroad. Along the way, she keeps the reader apprised of worsening air pollution and declining public health in large industrial cities, while at the same time reminding us that the advent of the coal age took tremendous pressure off previously prominent sources of fuel for heat and light—woodlands and whales. Following the history of industrialization from England to the United States, she brings her story to a temporary pause by describing what the burning of coal and other fossil fuels has done to levels of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere. Then Freese turns her attention to China, offering a brief history of the uses of coal there from ancient times to the present and showing that China reached many milestones, such as the smelting of iron, centuries before they came about in England. Focusing on the history of coal in China during the second half of the twentieth century, she covers the turmoil of the Mao Zedong era before providing an overview of recent developments, including the rapid construction of coal-fired power plants, the air pollution that coal has created in much of China, and the implications of China’s rapid industrialization for global warming. After soberly delineating these findings, Freese concludes her book by briefly highlighting the promises and pitfalls of alternative scenarios—for sequestering carbon while continuing to burn fossil fuels, and for energy futures not based on carbon. This book leaves the reader with a good understanding of how humanity came to live in such an energy-demanding condition and with a realization that the outlook for the future is not at all certain.

Wealth, Waste, and Alienation: Growth and Decline in the Connellsville Coke Industry (review)

Kenneth Warren has been remarkably productive in recent years. His oeuvre now includes a business biography of Henry Clay Frick (Triumphant Capitalism, 1996), a business history of the U.S. Steel Corporation (Big Steel, 2001), and this more modest but important study of the region that fed the fires of big steel and made Frick his fortune. Wealth, Waste, and Alienation is a well-crafted study of how an industry made a region and how capitalists wrested massive profits from land and workers. This book makes a number of contributions to the history of technology, business and industrial history, and labor history. It is the first comprehensive, modern study of the U.S. coke industry and is likely to stand as definitive. Warren clearly explains how the physical qualities of coal and coke affected their suitability for particular smelting technologies and the significance of changes in coke-making technology. His consideration of how the technology of logistics was crucial to the coke industry finally explains why it took so long for the Connellsville region to develop, a question Peter Temin raised almost forty years ago. I was struck by the quality of Warren’s writing about technologies that are deeply familiar to him after long years of research. I got bogged down in the more drawn-out discussions of management and labor relations, where Warren interrupts his own crisp language too often with lengthy quotations from business correspondence. As a cautious historian, however, Warren relies upon the gradual heaping up of literary evidence to nail the characters of his key players. Henry Clay Frick, the industrial magnate chiefly responsible for the development of the Connellsville coke region, was not a nice man. His ability to remain calm and calculating when others panicked served him well in the 1870s and 1880s as he acquired one failing or marginal coke works after another. During the region’s sometimes violent strikes, Frick did not flinch when company guards shot and killed workers; it was, he wrote, what troublemakers deserved. Warren’s most severe judgment of Frick and his fellow coke manufacturers comes in an exceptional chapter on the physical and social implicaT E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E

A Landscape Transformed: The Ironmaking District of Salisbury, Connecticut

This book examines the industrial ecology of 200 years of ironmaking with renewal energy resources in northwestern Connecticut. It focuses on the cultural context of peoples decisions about technology and the environment, and the gradual transition they effected in their land from industrial landscape to pastoral countryside.

Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio's Industrial Frontier

Anne Kelly Knowles traces a community of Welsh immigrants to Jackson and Gallia counties in southern Ohio. After reconstructing the gradual process of community-building, the author focuses on the pivotal moment when the immigrants became involved with the industrialization of their new region as workers and investors in Welsh-owned charcoal iron companies. The text sets the southern Ohio Welsh in the context of Welsh immigration as a whole from 1795 to 1850 and explores how these strict Calvinists responded to the moral dilemmas posed by leaving their native land and experiencing economic success in the United States. A wide variety of sources, including obituaries and community histories are drawn upon to reconstruct the personal histories of over 1700 immigrants.