Fall 2025 | Yale University
For almost forty years, scholars have spoken of a “spatial turn” in history—or of “spatial history” as a new methodological sub-field—that promises to use new sources, new tools, and new theoretical commitments to ask new historical questions. Now with the easy availability of GIS software and historical GIS data, the spatialization of history has come to seem even more urgent. But how does one actually do spatial history? And what does it mean to think geographically? This seminar is an attempt to zoom out from the rhetoric of the “new,” the “turn,” or any particular research tool in order to investigate the broader intellectual intersection of history and geography. Our approach will be optimistic but circumspect; we will explore the history of geography as a discipline, dive into recent spatial theory, take a critical stance towards maps, GIS, and other forms of digital scholarship, and spend a lot of time helping each other with our own research in progress.
The course is divided into three parts. It begins with theoretical approaches to space and spatial history by both geographers and historians. Second is a more practical methodological analysis of the uses (and abuses) of maps, including reflections on historical GIS and the digital humanities. The course then ends with several weeks of round-table workshopping.
General
PART I: THEORETICAL APPROACHES
September 4: Academic Geography and its Discontents
Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), introduction, chapters 4 and 5
Martin Lewis review of Schulten, The Geographical Imagination, in The American Historical Review 107 (Feb 2002), p. 226
Neil Smith, “‘Academic War over the Field of Geography’: The Elimination of Geography at Harvard, 1947–1951,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (June 1987), pp. 155–172
Geoffrey J. Martin, “Geography, Geographers, and Yale University, c. 1770–1970,” in Geography in New England, edited by John E. Harmon and Timothy J. Rickard (New England/St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society, 1988), pp. 2–9
Ellen Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geographie (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), preface, table of contents, and chapter 1
Harlan H. Barrows, “Geography as Human Ecology,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 13 (March 1923), pp. 1–14
H. C. Darby, “The Problem of Geographical Description,” Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers) 30 (1962), pp. 1–14
Felix Driver, “The Historicity of Human Geography,” Progress in Human Geography 12 (1988), pp. 497–506
September 11: French Possibilism and the Annales School
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989 (Cambridge UK: Polity, 1990). Feel free to skim chapters 4 and 5.
Lynn Hunt, “French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm,” Journal of Contemporary History 21 (April 1986), pp. 209–224
Lucien Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History, translated by E. G. Mountford and J. H. Paxton (New York: Knopf, 1925; orig. 1922), table of contents, introduction, chapter 1, and conclusion
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, (orig. 1949). Online you’ll find a translation of the preface to the first edition, the table of contents, the introduction to part 1, and “Geohistory and Determinism.” You should also look at the book itself (on reserve) and skim all of part 1—aggressively!
Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée” (1958), in On History, translated by Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 25–54
September 18: Neo-Marxism and Postmodern Geographical Theory
Richard Peet, “The Social Origins of Environmental Determinism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (September 1985), pp. 309–333
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (Verso, 1989), chapter 2
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; orig. 1974), chapter 1
Henri Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value,” in State, Space, World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009; orig. 1979), pp. 185–195
David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), introduction and conclusion.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), “the argument” and
chapter 14
September 25: The Long Shadow of the Spatial Turn (Where Do We Go From Here?)
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), introduction and “Politics and Space/Time”
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), introduction and chapter 1.
Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits In Places: Landscape And Language Among The Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), introduction, chapter 1, and epilogue.
Martin W. Ball, “‘People Speaking Silently to Themselves’: An Examination of Keith Basso’s Philosophical Speculations on ‘Sense of Place’ in Apache Cultures,” American Indian Quarterly 26 (Summer 2002): 460–478.
Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 2 (2013): 20–34.
PART II: VISUAL COMMUNICATION AND SPATIAL ARGUMENT
October 2: The Rhetoric of Maps
Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), introduction, Chapter 10, and Epilogue
Edward Tufte, “The Fundamental Principles of Analytical Design,” in Beautiful Evidence (Cheshire: Graphics Press, 2006), pp. 122–139
Monica L. Smith, “Networks, Territories, and the Cartography of Ancient States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (2005), pp. 832–849
William Rankin, Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World (New York: Viking, 2025), introduction and chapters 1–3.
Historical Atlas of Canada, three volumes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987–1993).
Historical Atlas of Maine (Orono: University of Maine Press, 2015).
October 9: From Historical GIS to Spatial History
Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008), foreword, preface, and chapters by Anne Kelly Knowles and Ian Gregory
Ian Gregory, Don DeBats, and Don Lafreniere, eds., The Routledge Companion to Spatial History (London: Routledge, 2018), introduction and chapter by David Bodenhamer.
Also skim one or two of the empirical chapters from the above edited volumes, based on
your own interests.
Richard White, “What is Spatial History?” (2010)
William Rankin, “Mapping Time in the Twentieth (and Twenty-First) Century,” in Caroline Winterer and Kären Wigen, Time in Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Mei-Po Kwan, “Feminist Visualization: Re-Envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic Research,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (2002): 645–661.
Anne Kelly Knowles, Levi Westerveld, and Laura Strom, “Inductive Visualization: A Humanistic Alternative to GIS,” GeoHumanities 1 (2015): 233–265. Also browse the maps and graphics in Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs (Harvard University Press, 1962).
Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France (London: Collins, 1988; orig. 1986).
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Christopher Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge: Harvard, 2014).
Cameron Blevins, Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City (Ohio University Press, 2024).
October 23: The Digital Humanities, Digital History, and Visual Scholarship
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), chapter 6.
Johanna Drucker, “Graphical Approaches to the Digital Humanities,” in Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds., A New Companion to Digital Humanities (Wiley, 2016), 238–250.
Gary Wilder, “From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographic Turns,” American Historical Review 117 (June 2012): 723–745.
Cameron Blevins, “The Perpetual Sunrise of Methodology,” 5 Jan 2015
Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen, “Arguing with Digital History: Patterns of Historical Interpretation,” Journal of Social History 54 (2021): 1005–1022.
Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright, “History Can Be Open Source: Democratic Dreams and
the Rise of Digital History,” American Historical Review 126 (Dec 2021), 1485–1511.
Browse projects from the following spatial humanities labs (or any others you know!):
PART III: RESEARCH IN PROGRESS
October 30: From Readings to Research (Bill Lays Down His Cards)
William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the
Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
William Rankin, “How the Visual Is Spatial: Contemporary Spatial History, Neo-Marxism,
and the Ghost of Braudel,” History and Theory 59 (Sept 2020): 311–342.