Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems

Objectivity and Selectivity in Historical Inquiry

. . . Memory gives us access to the past, but not a direct vision of it. Thus all we can claim is to have a point of contact with past events, enabling us perhaps to divine their true shape in some degree, but not such that we can check our reconstructions by comparing them with it to see how far they are correct. For the rest, the sole criterion of truth available to us, in history as in other...

Recognising Geographical Entities in Scottish Historical Documents

The American Historical Association

The 101 annual meeting of the American Historical Association offered a number of good panels in labor history. Several sessions featured papers on working people in the early modern and modern eras, in the Third World as well as in Europe and the United States. Nearly all presentations bore the influence of the New Labor History, which suggests that the genre no longer confines itself to the f...

Geographical Information and Historical Research: Current Progress and Future Directions

Information about places is ubiquitous in the study of history, events occur, people live, and phenomena flourish in more or less identifiable locations. To a greater or lesser extent, all historians make use of geographical information. Potentially, there is a great potential for the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in the discipline. However, GIS with origins in the earth science...

Male response to historical and geographical variation in bird song.

In many species, individuals discriminate among sexual signals of conspecific populations in the contexts of mate choice and male-male competition. Differences in signals among populations (geographical variation) are in part the result of signal evolution within populations (temporal variation). Understanding the relative effect of temporal and geographical signal variation on signal salience ...