Edward L. Ayers

The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia

The essays in the _The Edge of the South_ provide a welcome addition to the literature on the nineteenth-century American south .

What Lincoln Was Up Against: The Context of Leadership

In the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, we justly celebrate his character, ideals, and strategies, finding new depths in his virtues. It is tempting to imagine that the halting and hard-won evolution of Lincoln’s ideas and strategies on emancipation marked the moral growth of white America during the Civil War. But that story, implicit and explicit in many portrayals of Lincoln, embodied in our monuments to him and inscribed in our favorite quotations, underestimates Lincoln’s greatest accomplishment.

Maps of Change: A Brief History of the American Historical Atlas

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.