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The interdisciplinary field of historical geographic information systems (HGIS) took root and flourished at the Social Science History Association (SSHA) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This essay first recounts the growth of HGIS at SSHA and beyond. It then considers challenges that GIS continues to pose for historians and other scholars, such as the unfamiliarity of its conceptual framework and the time and expense often involved in building HGIS databases. The bare-bones visual culture ofSocial Science Historymay inhibit submissions by HGIS scholars, whose work typically includes color maps. Yet the enduring methodological and interdisciplinary interests of SSHA members provide a strong basis for continuing involvement by historians who use GIS. The essay closes with new directions in HGIS scholarship, including study of empirical uncertainty, historical gazetteers, textual analysis linked to GIS mapping, and comparison of topology and topography.

"Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world's dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry. In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, Knowles reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel. Richly illustrated with dozens of original maps and period art work, all in full color, Mastering Iron sheds new light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions."--Publisher's website

The importance of space and time to research within and across a wide range of disciplines has long been recognised. Continuing this tradition, in its call for visionary white papers NSF states, �The landscape is vast and complex, stretching across temporal and spatial dimensions and multiple levels of analysis& in a dynamic and fragmented yet interconnected world.� Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS) has the potential to create truly interdisciplinary understanding of spatio-temporal processes and the connections and disruptions between them across multiple scales. As a method, HGIS is proving increasingly effective in exploiting space and time, place and period, drawing upon a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative sources. HGIS has gained practitioners in many disciplines, including geography, political science, history, economics, sociology and environmental history. In these fields and others, it is generating cross-disciplinary research. Funding research and increasing capacity in this field will result in a step-change in our understanding not just of the past but of how societies and economies have developed to reach their current situation.

"This book explores the geographies of the Holocaust at every scale of human experience, from the European continent to the experiences of individual human bodies. Built on six innovative case studies, it brings together historians, geographers, and geographic information scientists to interrogate the places and spaces of the genocide. The cases encompass the landscapes of particular places (the killing zones in the East, deportations from sites in Italy, the camps of Auschwitz, the ghettos of Budapest) and the intimate spaces of bodies on evacuation marches. Geographies of the Holocaust puts forward models and a research agenda for different ways of visualizing and thinking about the Holocaust by examining the spaces and places where it was enacted and experienced"--