Tag: fall-2019

https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/fe6c4b15118e1d99ac23a4974bc0e7a6/exploring-the-puget-sound/index.html

I chose to map a tour in Washington from Seattle to Bremerton. Having grown up in Bremerton and made many visits to Seattle, I was interested to see what landmarks and locations were included in the tour and how they differed from the Bremerton and Seattle that I know. I chose to include on my map a lot of the landmarks that I had personal connections to, some of which I was surprised to learn the history of. The long history of the Navy Yard and Fort Ward did not surprise me. My grandfather worked on submarines and aircraft carriers at the Navy Yard and has always been sure to let us know what a heavy influence the shipyard had on the area; it’s no secret that Bremerton is a Navy town. My sixth grade class actually went on a field trip to the bunkers in Fort Ward where we ran around the tunnels with glow sticks and told ghost stories.

I was amused to see in the Guide that they include phonetic references in order to pronounce many of the Native American place names. It is a long running joke that Washingtonians are well-versed in such pronunciation, as they are commonplace in so many significant place names. The inclusion of the pronunciation instructions in the Guide speaks volumes to the egocentric narrative in which American history is written. It is almost comical in light of the chapter included at the beginning of the Guide on cultural diffusion with “the Indians.”

After comparing my map with those of the Green Book¹, I was disheartened to find that the closest location on the Green Book map was nearly 600 miles away in Eureka, California. It may be that NYPL Labs has yet to add any Washington locations if there are any, considering the Green Book map is a work in progress. Regardless, facing such severe limitations on travel due to segregation and prejudice makes this trip impossible for some. For Washington specifically, it is especially enlightening considering how widely Native American heritage is acknowledged in the state, and the glaring hypocrisies that arise with making reparations to one culture that Americans mistreated, while another is meant to be barred from establishments within nearly 600 miles.

Digital mapping helps to visualize these hypocrisies and the literal miles left to go to address them². This spatial history process also helped to picture how distance changed over time. For example, in the Seattle to Bremerton tour, a stop is made in Manette, requiring crossing over the Manette Bridge. This bridge was constructed only 10 years before the Guide was published; before that, visitors from the little lumber village would row to Bremerton. Mapping this distance shows how this tour itself has changed over time.

When I visited Los Angeles two years ago I did not expect to see the bizarre car-culture frenzy that I did. A monstrosity urban sprawl, coupled with inadequate public transit, made it almost impossible to get anywhere without a car. I selected the Los Angeles Guide because I was interested to see whether the private ownership of a car had always impacted tourism and the ability to move through space in LA. Although the Guide notes railroad stations, bus stations, services, and streetcars, in the general information section of the book, it does not make any reference to them throughout the tours. The Guide assumes that the audience owns an automobile and this implies multiple things. The first is that Guide seems to be created for an affluent audience who owns automobiles and has the time for leisure activities. This is reaffirmed by the landmarks that Tour 6 focuses on, such as a mineral spring, multiple camp sites, and private beaches. But more importantly, the assumption that the audience owns a car also implies that makers of the Guide knew that cars would play a significant role in America’s future. They even note that “the Los Angeles of the future is likely to evolve along highways.” ³

Similar to most other things we have learned about in this class, maps do not offer an inherently impartial and “objective” perspective on history. It’s easy to forget that maps are also manmade and subject to the bias of the creator. Power and privilege must be taken into consideration when using maps and analyzing spatial history, otherwise mapping can very easily become a tool of oppression.

Digital mapping can be useful for historians because “it can allow us to reconstruct, preserve, and visualize vestiges of the past.”⁴ Mapping Tour 6 on StoryMapJS was helpful because it allowed me to see how the urban sprawl was taken into consideration when selecting points of interest for the tours. Although it was slightly difficult to find the exact locations of certain places because some of them did not exist anymore.

The “Navigating the Green Book” project allowed me to see how compressed a “tour” would have been for an African American traveler in 1947. In comparison to the original tour, which spanned a larger distance, safe spaces for Black individuals would only involve a couple miles between West Hollywood and Central LA, with just three hotel accommodations. The comparison of these two geographic visualizations can be useful in helping people understand how radically different it is to navigate this country in a non-white body. As Sarah Bond argues, digital humanities projects can go beyond “amusing data aggregation” and they can actually create a deeper understanding about the impacts of racism.⁵

The state I wanted to examine for this assignment was Oklahoma. My mom is from a small town near Tulsa and I have been to visit many times. Oklahoma always surprised me because it is flat and dry but for some reason I found it beautiful and homey. I chose to do the one in the guide which took people from the Kansas state line to the city of Tulsa. Along the way I choose mainly all big cities and only two smaller stops. I found that many places in Oklahoma were once indian territories and so Indians either still lived around or the place was named based off the tribes. I found it interesting that the Airport in Tulsa used to be one of the busiest airports in the world. I never think people fly through Oklahoma so it surprised me. Another thing I found interesting was the Claremore stop. It was known for finding mineral water that healed people. I looked further into this and saw that there are now resorts there for healing people with the water. 

On the green book maps I typed in Baxter springs Kansas as my starting point and Tulsa Oklahoma as the end. I saw that there were no stops along the way that were considered “safe” stops. In the heat map view of the same location there was only some faint blue places but none on my path. I was not shocked to see this because I know that the south was more racist at the time.  I can really see now how “Digital mapping and database construction can allow us to reconstruct, preserve, and visualize vestiges of the past”. I knew the south was a hard place to live and travel for people of color but seeing it laid out on a map and knowing they would have to travel for thousands of miles with no safe place to stop is eye opening. I think seeing it mapped out like this can make a person understand it more. Comparing the Green Book maps to my first map , I can conclude that all of the neat tourism stops were only for white people. People of color would not get to safely experience any of these back then. I think this is interesting because the American Guide series were written to  “convey the “true” America to its people “ and I feel in a way it did but comparing the three different maps conveys more about true America then the single guide.

Bond, Sarah. Mapping Racism and Assessing the Success of Digital Humanities. October 2017, https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/10/20/mapping-racism-and-assessing-the-success-of-the-digital-humanities/

The American Guide Series: American Culture defined: The American Guide Series. Digital Exhibits. http://exhibits.usu.edu/exhibits/show/americanguideseries/americanguideseries

Mulligan, Shannon. Kansas line to Tulsa OK, November 2019. https://storymap.knightlab.com/edit/?id=kansas-line-to-tulsa-ok

These guidebooks were vital to westward bound travelers as there was little other method of knowing the exact routes or ares that one would travel through. There is no luxury of GPS or tourist guides like we have today which exemplifies the importance of these early forms of automobile guides. These WPA guides for regions of the US cover multiple cities on multiple routes while detailing the regions and cities along such route. Schaffer’s book on these guides details how the guides went through multiple reworkings in order to provide the best detailed tour guide of these regions as possible. The wording and structure of the guides seem to make it targeted toward more wealthy people as tourism was not a big industry during this time period. ⁵

I learned much about the northern areas of Texas by doing this project. The guide provides details on many of the cities and towns that the routes pass through which give a good feel and scope of the area. These maps can tell us a lot about the history of the areas they cover as well as the rise of tourism in the US. These maps also give us an insight to the racial inequalities of the time as well. When making the project map, I noticed that many of the cited cited racial historical events such as native american lands and white expansion into such lands which shows just some of the racial tensions at the time. After comparing my map to the The Green Book one it revealed even more racial inequalities. The path in the American Guide Series was anything but ideal for black travelers. The Green Book path shows that the nearest hotel for colored people to the destination was literally across two state lines. Sarah Bond’s article on mapping racism also shows the same inequalities. She covered how the spatial mapping of racism at the time shows an extra layer to the treatment that these people felt. It also details the multiple kinds of maps that scholars have been working to show these inequalities. ⁶ . https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/496d63689e291ecc46a4a31be0418a47/texas-guide/index.html

While doing this skill assignment, I realized that the American Guide series seemed to focus a lot on the culture and geography of states, instead of really honing in on issues. This statement, however, only really applies to the New York American Guide from 1940 because this is the one that I analyzed and used for my map. For actual research purposes, I would have to read multiple guides from different states to see what those writers and editors chose to emphasize on. No matter what the state, like Marguerite Shaffer quoted in her See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1888-1940, all guides sought out to attempt to create a “‘literature of collective of self-consciousness, a people’s and a nation’s biography, a story of human and physical geography.’ In both its scope and design, the WPA American Guide series manifested this desire to document and design a unique and indigenous American culture” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 203). ⁷

In the “Navigating the Green Book” feature by the New York Public Library, I was really surprised to see so few establishments available for people of color in 1947. I was expecting to see a lot more locations open, especially in the North. While looking at it, I thought to myself about how Victor Green went about receiving information about these different establishments. Perhaps, there were more that catered to Black customers, but Green simply didn’t have that knowledge in 1947. In comparison to the 1956 map, the 1947 one seemed to unfortunately lack, in my opinion, enough places to service Black Americans. Seeing the 1956 map made me consider whether or not establishments were moving towards a more tolerant and progressive business structure and started to allow Black people into their stores, or did Green simply learn more information over the decade. In Sarah Bond’s article, “Mapping Racism and Accessing the Success of the Digital Humanities,” she talks about the fact that “people of color have been using maps to visualize racism for a long time,” including W.E.B DuBois and Booker T. Washington in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Bond, 2017, p. 1). ⁸ I think the Green Book series in a way is a continuation of this trend set by prominent Black activists to show America how racist and detrimental it is towards people of color.

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I chose the American Guide to New York titled, “New York: A Guide to the Empire State.” I mapped out Tour 21, which featured locations starting in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and ending in New York City, NY. What I found from the coverage of most locations was that the writers tended to focus on the geography of these specific places. Information about the state itself was featured in other sections. The Tour barely talked about the present-day, as in 1940 when the guide was written, locations and the people who inhabited them, but rather the locations in a historical context, as well as their relation to highways and local routes. This is a big contrast to the Green Book. The Green Book didn’t feature as many locations and it only strictly focused on culture (restaurants, lodging, etc.) and not history. There’s history to be found in both, though. In looking at these books, it’s easy to decipher treatment of ethnic Americans at the time. At least for the New York American guide, foreign-born, Black, and Native Americans are all spoken about statistically, and if not statistically, then either not at all or simply blown over. However, the Green Book is essentially always radicalized. Although it’s just a map with safe places for Black Americans to stop on their travels, it’s a historical statement over the fact that guides like that existed in general.