Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord
(New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004) examines conventional but untested
beliefs about early agriculture in New England.
A very different paper on agricultural history is A. W. Pearson and
P. Collier, “The Integration and Analysis of Historical and Environmen-
tal Data Using a Geographical Information System: Landownership and
Agricultural Productivity in Pembrokeshire c. 1850,”
Agricultural History
Review
46 (1998): 162-76, which provides an early, but still effective,
description of what GIS is and what it has to offer to historical research,
as well as providing a study of agricultural paterns in rural Wales in
the mid-nineteenth century. Other work in this area includes W. Big-
ler, “Using GIS to Investigate Fine-Scale Spatial Paterns in Historical
American Indian Agriculture,”
Historical Geography
33 (2005): 14-32;
P. C. Brown, “Corporate Land Tenure in Nineteenth Century Japan:
A GIS Assessment,”
Historical Geography
33 (2005): 99-117; R. Hunter,
“Methodologies for Reconstructing a Pastoral Landscape: Land Grants
in Sixteenth Century New Spain,”
Historical Methods
43 (2010): 1-13;
G. Gong and J. Tiller, “Exploring Vegetation Paterns along an Unde-
fined Boundary: Eastern Harrison County, Texas, Late Spring, 1838,”
Social Science Computer Review
27 (2009): 363-79; N. Levin, E. Elron, and
A. Gasith, “Decline of Wetland Ecosystems in the Coastal Plain of Israel
during the 20th Century: Implications for Wetland Conservation and
Management,”
Landscape and Urban Planning
92 (2009): 220-32; and
J. W. Wilson, “Historical and Computational Analysis of Long-Term
Environmental Change: Forests in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia,”
Historical Geography
33 (2005): 33-53.
Demogr aphy
Demographic studies are another area in which historical GIS has made
significant contributions to wider fields, perhaps reflecting GIS's origins
in quantitative approaches. Some of these studies blur the distinction
between the historical and the contemporary by exploring long-term
change up to the present day. These include a range of British papers that
explore long-term changes in mortality paterns, including D. Dorling,
R. Mitchell, M. Shaw, S. Orford, and G. Davey Smith, “The Ghost of
