Donald A. DeBats

A tale of two cities: Using tax records to develop GIS files for mapping and understanding nineteenth-century U.S. cities

Advances in geographic information systems (GIS) programs for both mapping and analysis make possible a new era of small-city studies. The author uses often-neglected tax records as a central part of the mapping process for two mid-nineteenth-century U.S. cities with populations of about 14, 000-Alexandria, Virginia, and Newport, Kentucky-that were respectively commercial and industrial in character. Approximately 80 percent of the inhabitants of these two cities in the nineteenth century have been relocated to their places of residence and associated-as individuals, families, and economic units-with all available social and political information. The result is an opportunity for a holistic analysis of two divergent cities representing key alternatives as the United States shifted from a rural to an urban nation.

Hide and Seek: The Historian and Nineteenth-Century Social Accounting

The problem of census undercounts, a familiar political issue for modern groups or instrumentalities that consider themselves underrepresented in the Census Bureau statistics, has only recently attracted attention from historians. While the modern “miss rate” is potentially high among some groups (the reason for the emphasis on the homeless in the 1990 census), the general rate of underenumeration appears to have diminished in recent censuses. The bureau acknowledges a net undercount of 5.6% of the population in 1940; the error declined gradually to an estimated 1.4% in 1980 (Burnham 1986; Anderson 1988; Edmondson 1988). Nineteenth-century censuses no doubt contained more serious errors. Although he did not have underenumeration specifically in mind, the administrator for the 1870 census said that “the censuses of 1850, 1860, and of 1870 are loaded with bad statistics. There are statistics in the census of 1870,I am sorry to say, where some of the results are false to the extent of one-half. They had to be published then, because the law called for it; but I took the liberty of branding them as untrustworthy and in some cases giving the reasons therefore at some length” (quoted in Sharpless and Shortridge 1975: 411). Strikingly modern quarrels surrounded the accuracy of the 1840 Boston and New Orleans censuses, while the errors in the 1870 enumeration of New York City and Philadelphia were sufficient to cause recounts of both cities (ibid. ; Knights 1971: 145).

Political Consequences of Spatial Organization: Contrasting Patterns in Two Nineteenth-Century Small Cities

The unique feature of geographic information systems (GIS) and other forms of historical data visualization is the capacity to hold and display large amounts of data associated with spatial reference points. This software can display all data for a given point, a single variable for all points, or, most important, any combination of variables across all reference points. In doing so, these systems bring to the screen instantly and cheaply a display of information once visible only in paper form, drawn slowly and expensively, first by cartographers and then by vector plotters. This project deploys GIS to help us understand the intersection of social and political life in nineteenth-century Alexandria, Virginia, and Newport, Kentucky—medium-sized cities with populations under 20,000. Commercial Alexandria, with a race-based labor system, and industrial Newport, with an immigrant labor system, present an analytically useful mix of commonalities and differences.

Mr Howard Goes to Washington: September 11, the Australian–American Relationship and Attributes of Leadership

Avoiding judgements on policy, this article provides, from the perspective of participants, an account of the events surrounding John Howards presence in Washington on 11 September 2001. It examines the significance of those events for the realisation of his governments goal of strengthening the Australia–US relationship and explores what his responses reveal about his leadership attributes, using a template (with an emphasis on emotional intelligence) used to evaluate leadership among US Presidents, which may have further application in the Australian context. The principal objectives of Howards visit to Washington in 2001 were to build a personal relationship with the Bush Administration, ‘rebalance’ Australias foreign policy by strengthening the political/military alliance with the US and prepare the ground for a free trade agreement. Recording the impact of the extraordinary events of that day on participants, we argue that Howard instinctively seized the opportunity to commit Australia to responses that accelerated the realisation of these objectives and that these outcomes were achieved through the intersection of deeply embedded convictions, well-prepared positions and attributes of Howards leadership that September 11 revealed.

Comparing Individual-Level Returns with Aggregates a Historical Appraisal of the King Solution

0 ur intersection with the individual and aggregate inference problem came by way of historical electoral studies, specifically those focused on the mid-nineteenth-century United States when, as many historians have noted, the political engagement of the citizenry appears to have been remarkably energetic.’ A little more than twenty years ago, two of us-Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats ( 1978)-set out to explore that nineteenth-century political world through a remarkable set of largely unused records: the poll books. These records reveal individuallevel voter choices in a sequence of states beginning in Virginia and Kentucky and subsequently extending with the migration of constitutions and electoral rules to Illinois, Missouri, and Oregon. In those places, for substantial periods in the nineteenth century, all enfranchised voters assembled at polling places and then called out in a loud voice both their names and their political choices for all offces being contested. These individual decisions were duly recorded in the poll books not only to provide a record of the result but also to allow the aggregate count to be adjusted should the ballot of any individual be successfully challenged. We set out to retrieve and render machine readable the surviving runs of these data from the states in which viva voce voting persisted across time (Bourke and DeBats 1978).2 Unlike most of our colleagues working on nineteenth-century elections, then, we had available both individual and aggregate political data. Linking the names in the poll books to other nominal lists, especially to inventories such as tax lists, census returns, and land maps, gave us some capacity

It’s Not Just What You Have, but Who You Know: Networks, Social Proximity to Elites, and Voting in State and Local Elections

Individual-level studies of electoral turnout and vote choice have focused largely on personal attributes as explanatory variables. We argue that scholars should also consider the social network in which individuals are embedded, which may influence voting through variation in individuals’ social proximity to elites. Our analysis rests on newly discovered historical records revealing the individual votes of all electors in the 1859 statewide elections in Alexandria, Virginia and the 1874 municipal elections in Newport, Kentucky, paired with archival work identifying the social relations of the cities’ populations. We also replicate our core findings using survey data from a modern municipal election. We show that individuals more socially proximate to elites turn out at a higher rate and individuals more socially proximate to a given political party’s elites vote disproportionately for that party. These results suggest an overlooked social component of voting and provide a rare nineteenth-century test of modern voting theories.

Political Consequences of Spatial Organization

The unique feature of geographic information systems (GIS) and other forms of historical data visualization is the capacity to hold and display large amounts of data associated with spatial reference points. This software can display all data for a given point, a single variable for all points, or, most important, any combination of variables across all reference points. In doing so, these systems bring to the screen instantly and cheaply a display of information once visible only in paper form, drawn slowly and expensively, first by cartographers and then by vector plotters. This project deploys GIS to help us understand the intersection of social and political life in nineteenth-century Alexandria, Virginia, and Newport, Kentucky—medium-sized cities with populations under 20,000. Commercial Alexandria, with a race-based labor system, and industrial Newport, with an immigrant labor system, present an analytically useful mix of commonalities and differences.

The Power of the Map, and Its Dangers

The thoughts and musings of eleven scholars, on the future of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the field of humanities scholarship, are brought together in this volume. Their explorations test the very notion of GIS’s compatibility with the culture of humanities research. Along the way, they make some harsh assessments of the clash of cultures separating social scientific research paradigms from those operating in humanistic disciplines, and from these assessments a case could well be made that the development of a GIS relevant to the humanities is a bridge too far. Yet all eleven of these authors are in the business of constructing that very bridge, however much they disagree about the nature and utilization of GIS. The most impressive aspect of the “spatial turn”—the reinvigoration and reintroduction of spatial considerations as an explanatory factor—is its integrative capacity, uniting the powers of visualization and measurement across a range of paradigms, methodologies, and disciplines. Appropriately, GIS is at the heart of this turn, and at the heart of GIS is a limitless capacity to integrate information. The map has power because it resonates so powerfully with our cognitive capabilities in pattern recognition and our capacity to reason through vision.

Individuals and Aggregates

After more than a decades impressive achievement in the “new” social history and the “new” political history, two distinct though related problems require us to reconsider the data appropriate to these inquiries. First, recent commentators (Foner, 1974; Formi-sano, 1976) have pointed to the relative failure of research in these areas to converge, a failure made more obvious in the light of the programmatic optimism of the 1960s which held out the prospect of an integrated approach to the social basis of politics and to the political implications of social structure. Second, there has been in recent years some acknowledgment by historians (see below) of the vexing question of inferences across levels of data, a matter central to other social sciences and particularly pressing for historians of electoral behavior.