Tag: spatial history

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Bryan Winston: Mapping Mexican Migration Patterns through Mexico and the Midwest

I am Bryan Winston, a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Saint Louis University. This fall I am co-teaching an upper-level undergraduate course, History of the American West. My dissertation, “Mexican Corridors: Policy and Migration Flows in the Central United States, 1910-1950,” examines Mexican migration to and community formation in the states of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska. I highlight many sites of ethnic Mexican regional community formation, like Mexican consulates and community organizations while emphasizing themes of mobility, the construction of race, and transnationalism.

For the Six Shooters, I will explain the digital potential of my dissertation’s source base and showcase some of the datasets I have created. My presentation details the mapping capability of Mexican consulate passport registrations and U.S. naturalization records, which I examined while researching in Mexico City and Kansas City. Passport registrations and petitions for naturalization recorded places of birth, ports of entry, family history, and other locations along a migrant’s path through Mexico and the United States. I have geocoded many of these locations and use Carto to create maps that reveal migration patterns. I will also discuss where I hope to go with this project, such as layering migration patterns with maps of consulate jurisdictions, places of employment, and community institutions.

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Adam Arenson: Easy and Hard Methods for Tracking African North Americans in Historical Records

I’m a historian of North America and director of the Urban Studies program at Manhattan College, having previously taught at UTEP. My first two books are on Civil War St. Louis and Mid-Century Modern Los Angeles, as well as co-editing books on frontier cities and the Civil War West. I teach American West, urban history, regions and borderlands history, African American history, and places those fields intersect, especially in the nineteenth century.

I am excited to be attending the WHA in my hometown!

In my Six Shooter presentation, I will describe my ongoing research on African North Americans who crossed the U.S.-Canada border after the Civil War. While I have not found many narrative sources, I have found many data points of African North American migration. This presentation will describe ongoing efforts to visualize and analyze this data using government documents, geo-location scripts, and Tableau visualizations and the role of a New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Labs grant, my colleague Dr. Musa Jafar, and our undergraduate students in this research.

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Jay Taylor: Follow the Money

Hi all. I’ll be presenting on Follow the Money: A Spatial History of In-Lieu Programs for Western Federal Lands. This is a digital project constructed as part of the Spatial History Project at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. I’ve worked with co-author Erik Steiner and a team of programmers, historians, and geographers to assemble time-series maps of transfer payments from federal land management agencies to counties in the eleven far western states known as the “public lands states.” The data in this program illustrates how federal conservation laws created long fiscal relationships between land management agencies and state and county governments in the American West, and they graphically demonstrate the deep, often invisible, political economy that inheres in the federal domain. The maps also help illustrate the patchy, non-linear history of natural resource industries in the American West since 1906. Finally, the maps expose problems with the simplistic ways that advocates and scholars have represented the federal domain and Progressive conservation since the 1890s.