Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of the field, as its audience moves from being relatively narrow special-
ists - members of the HGIS community - to being historians in general
interested in a wide range of possible topics.
The three essays in part 1 belong in this final stage of conducting
spatial history. They cover three very different topics: railways and ag-
riculture in Britain and France, racial segregation in the urban United
States, and religion and conflict in Ireland. Beyond this, however, there
are some clear similarities. First, as was discussed in the introduction,
these three essays all follow social science-based approaches to quan-
titative sources, reflecting the origins of HGIS and the length of time
that it takes for a large project to move to this third stage. Second, all
are based on very large, national-scale databases, but in all cases the
databases are only of passing interest, relevant only because they al-
low the subsequent research to take place. In several cases significant
methodological work has also taken place (e.g., to allow data that show
changing administrative boundaries to be directly compared), but again,
this process is only of passing interest in these essays. Instead, all three
chapters are concerned with a particular applied research question or set
of questions within their topic, and each topic has a distinct geographi-
cal focus. Schwartz and Thevenin are concerned with the importance
of the distance that farmers had to cover to transport their goods to
market as the railway networks developed in Britain and France. Both
Beveridge and Cunningham focus on the geographical segregation be-
tween different communities: black from white in urban America and
Catholic from Protestant in Ireland, respectively. Third, in approaching
these topics all three essays combine a broad geographical scope - all of
Ireland, Britain, and France and comparisons of major U.S. cities - with
a thorough exploration of the detailed geographical paterns revealed by
GIS-based analyses. All three also cover long time periods of between
half a century and two centuries. Beveridge and Cunningham bring their
work as close to the present as currently available sources allow. They
were able to do so because of the ability of GIS to integrate data from dif-
ferent sources, in most cases censuses from different dates. W hile there
are similar sources for different dates, Schwartz and Thevenin and also
Cunningham were able to integrate other sources that would seem to be
unrelatable to their main source because all of the material is located in
