Okay, our next speaker is from history Dr LaDale
Winling. He is an assistant professor there, He has his
doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2010, specializes
in urban history, Public History, Digital History in
20th Century History. His current research looks at university
growth in urban development and US cities. He has
to research themes that currently involved G. I.
S. A mapping congress effort and red lining in
the U. S. And just to kind of
um as he's kind of getting things together here,
I'll mention a couple other items, teaches a graduate
class called digital history methods. And he also has
a I think been working with the library on a
thematic display of the redlining research. So with no
further ado once we have a presentation open, I'll
forget. Mhm. Jim tells me historians. There
we go. Yeah, I'm a humanist. And
I also use Mac. So like, whoa,
this is all very painful. Do we have any
humanists here? Okay, awesome. Great. Do
we have any social scientists here? All right.
Wonderful. Okay. So I should say that as
a historian, the uh standard practice is to read
ones paper. Right? I'm going to try to
deviate from that a bit. Um, but I
want to talk a little bit about, give you
some context for, right, your friends and neighbors
, um, in the humanities department and particularly history
at Virginia Tech, essentially. What is our engagement
or lack thereof with G. I. S.
How do we think about space? Um, and
about kind of dynamics of disciplinary change and then talk
about a project that I'm working on. That illustrates
some of the ways that historians are using GIS.
So let's see if this works. Oh, yes
. Great. So, Um, in the 1990s
, the reception of a number of European thinkers kind
of began forcing historians and other humanists to think more
directly about space. Right, so, um the
work of Michelle Fuko on really feb. David Harvey
harvey along with geographer Edward Soja prompted historians to consider
the meaning and the role of space and shaping human
activity along with sociologist Pierre Board too. And this
has come to be called this incorporation of these ideas
has come to be called the spatial turn in historical
study, right? Um and and so, kind
of Most prominent among these um is David Harvey's the
limits to capital. Published in 1980 to examine the
spatial dynamic in Marx's writings on capitalism is Marxist analysis
and form historians Who were interested in the space of
cities and urban development that was informed by something other
than political or cultural forces. Right? So the
60s and 70s, there's increasing uh technology available to
historians, punch cards, mainframes, right? It's
a wonderful world. And after kind of working with
this in social history, um, historians kind of
veer away from this to deal with right like texts
and the cultural turn and um kind of shifted away
from using computers and data for the most part.
Right? So there have been a split of historians
from geographers in the 1980s, as the discipline of
history took the cultural turn and became less allied with
the social sciences in general. Um, David Harvey's
work throughout the late 80s and early 90s, uh
kind of helped re bridge that gap. Right.
Very slowly. It became increasingly important for urban historians
, the translation of um, and really Febreze the
production of space maze made his ideas available to american
scholars and the idea right? Essentially, that there
was were ideological practices um and ideologies embedded in the
creation of right like residential spaces, living spaces,
urban spaces. Um, and that this was something
that could be kind of teased out um as well
as um pure board do the sociologist to talk about
habitats and the idea that kind of infrastructure and space
shaped human activity, right? These are these are
new ideas that right took a while for historians to
kind of grapple with and internalize, but I think
we're key in, you know, setting us on
the spatial turn, kind of an ongoing humanistic engagement
with space and right with the digital transformation of human
communication, I think also has a demand side effect
for Gs. Right? Like why would historians who
are interested in reading texts? Right? Use G
. I. S. Right. And it's important
to kind of grapple with uh these people's ideas for
for understanding how that transition transformation kind of came about
and is ongoing in fact, um and then write
everyone's favorite french intellectual uh Michelle falco. Um,
you probably have thrown down his discipline and punish in
disgust if you've come across it. Um, His
examination of um bentham might, um, panopticon and
the prison system in the 19th century is another way
in which historians who found food, common frico is
all the rage in the 19 nineties and was kind
of central to the cultural turn, also provided a
bridge to spatial thinking. The basic idea of the
panopticon is that you can arrange a prison in such
a fashion that individuals will be isolated in cells.
Um, and that they can be viewed monitor from
a central spot, right? So from the central
kind of like guard can watch all the prisoners at
once and it's like a wonder of efficiency um,
and shaped kind of development of prisons for like a
century to come. Right. Um a prominent kind
of postmodern geographer Edward Soja also kind of drew upon
these and was an important bridge to historians. Right
? So historians began to draw upon these theories and
ironically as part of the cultural turn right, shifting
them back in this one sense, um but further
use these in emerging histories of capitalism. Right?
So this is where somebody like harvey comes um become
plays a pivotal role. Yeah. Uh in 1991
, William Cronin, one of the most prominent,
his American historians right in the country, um rights
, nature's metropolis and this now classic work on the
development of Chicago, argued that the city emerged as
a great metropolis because it was an eastern financed market
for the goods produced in the fertile midwestern hinterland,
such as grain, livestock and timber. Right?
So Cronin used s a s graph to map bankruptcies
right, illustrating who was financing the new companies and
paying for the growth of the city? Uh In
fact, he felt obligated to have and kind of
extended discussion of like, why am I mapping these
things and how based on bankruptcy records that he found
in the National Archives and things like this? Right
. So does this have it? Now, does
this have a point you? So the point is
, here's Chicago and this is these are the counties
where people had lent money and where money was owed
when Chicago companies went, went bankrupt. Right?
So clearly Cook County in Chicago was a source of
investment as well as western massachusetts and new york city
. Right. New york city was in Manhattan at
the time, was the most prominent finance here of
Chicago enterprises. And you may know that this is
the place where um western railroads, right? They
all come through Chicago. First they started out to
ST louis but then Chicago took this over and all
the eastern railroads terminated in Chicago. Um and then
right, grain and livestock from here. From here
and then it was sent either by rail or around
the Great Lakes to the east and to um into
europe. Right, And this is financing within the
midwest. So, um Cronin, who was just
the most recent president of the American Historical Association uh
kind of directing and leading the field was an early
adopter of this uh huh. Um in another classic
study from the late 90s Tom. Sugrue examine race
and the Postwar grappling over urban space and jobs in
Detroit in the origins of the urban crisis. Right
? So if you read anything in the last five
years about Detroit in the in the media, you
know, it probably draws upon or quotes a group
on something along these lines. Um now assessing the
efforts of white neighborhoods and policymakers to maintain and intensify
segregation. So grew argued that geography is destiny,
that the opportunities that you have in your household,
your local community and your local schools have a profound
influence on your life opportunities right into. While this
is much more, I kind of policy oriented history
. He draws upon census data in mapping, mapping
software to illustrate the growth of the african american population
in Detroit. And it's uh segregation, right?
And this has become an important work for urban historians
. Thinking about cities and thinking about space. I'll
contrast this with Mark Grant of enters the strength of
weak ties, which talks about, right, how
you get jobs, right? His his sociological research
was on uh people who lived in the northern suburbs
of Chicago, right? The idea was that it
wasn't your immediate family or your closest friends who gave
you the connections that got your jobs. It was
your kind of second order, right? The people
with whom you had weak ties um that got you
your jobs right? And the implications are essentially,
if you are segregated in um right neighborhood without many
employment opportunities without great educational opportunities than um right,
your overall opportunities are limited for mobility, economic development
and so forth. And so this is why historic
this matters for historians. Uh huh. So,
as space has come to be seen as a humanistic
factor influencing everyday life. Politics and culture, historians
have begun to use it as a frame for analysis
, a lens for examining many situations. And with
a digital turn in history, scholars have begun to
think about data, right? Not simply kind of
paging through archives, but I like working with data
. Right? Uh huh. So, a project
that I want to briefly talk about is redlining.
So the homeownership loan corporation. So red line is
the process of drawing geographic boundaries around areas of the
city, designating some neighborhoods are blocks, good investments
and others as bad investments for residential real estate,
largely on the basis of race. Right? This
has gone on throughout the 20th century. Now,
this would mean under privileges, underprivileged areas and minority
populations. We denied resources like investment capital or real
estate financing, which would exacerbate existing problems of inequality
, poor school funding, limited mobility opportunity, right
? It's basically a process of re inscribing and reinforcing
the ghetto by keeping money out. Right? So
this term comes from a New Deal program, the
homeownership loan Corporation, or Hope that was intended to
help save the country from the financial catastrophe of the
Great Depression In early 1933, approximately a quarter of
the nation's homes were in default. The federal government
created the homeownership loan Corporation to help refinance the nation's
homes and to create a guarantee program for mortgages going
forward, faced with the possibility that the federal government
could at some point beyond the hook for a large
number of residential homes that it needed to resell right
. The federal government had to assess like what's a
good investment, what should we guarantee? What should
we refinance? Um And a set of practices arose
for evaluating the desirability, quality and resale potential of
homes within metropolitan areas. This is an example of
a map which is tied to area descriptions. Security
maps were created by federal bureaucrats recruiting local real estate
financiers, realtors and housing experts to give detailed characteristics
of neighborhoods within 232 137 U. S. Cities
from those descriptions of rent, condition tenure and demographics
, federal authorities assigned a color coding rating system for
neighborhoods A. Was the best which was green D
. Was the worst which was read home owners and
potential buyers in red coded areas. Found it more
difficult to get financing or found it more difficult to
or found it difficult to get equal terms with a
federal guarantee. The successor to the homeownership loan Corporation
was the Federal Housing Administration F. H. A
. Which continues the mortgage guarantee program to this day
even though not using the exact same um practices.
So um these maps, along with the area descriptions
giving and I should say we know about this from
um starting from a 1980 Journal of Urban History article
which families in the National Archives well documented the collections
all remain. And um. Right, this is
this is this is a publication. This is this
journal article, right? Essentially where representing um this
like this is what he drew by hand because that's
how historians role. So the National redlining digital research
project is an effort to digitize these maps to geo
reference them to digitize area descriptions and to enable a
data driven research project. This will allow historians to
evaluate the effects of the program across the country,
the functioning of the federal public private partnerships in finance
at mid century, as well as to interrogate the
veracity of local realtors, demographic data and links to
other neighborhood data. Right? So it's not like
they're actually drawing upon census data, which had yet
to be aggregated at this point based on the 19th
, 1940. Um and so essentially they called up
local leading real estate agents and said like, how
would you divide this city up into neighborhoods? And
what do you think the rents are? What do
you think the demographics are? Right? And if
you uh if areas were predominantly african american, um
immigrant or jewish, then there are much more likely
to be given a c yellow rating or to be
a D. Red line rating. In addition,
this presents the opportunities to examine the spatial implications of
red lining, both on a broad geographic scale and
in much finer grain analysis. So this is on
part of a hulk map from Chicago, the south
side of Chicago. This is Washington park, where
if Chicago had gotten a 26 2016 olympics, um
that's where kind of the olympic stadium would have been
. This is where the University of Chicago is,
there's the midway place on and Jackson Park. So
um this is where the 18 93 Columbian Exposition was
held. And the reason that the term Midway,
where you play the games at carnivals and things like
that comes from, um, this one from 18
93. And um, for those of you who
are perhaps blue ribbon drinkers, the reason that it's
Pabst blue ribbon is because at one first prize for
a alcoholic beverages at the Columbia Exposition. So digitizing
geo referencing these and putting it together with other,
ironically new deal sources like aerial photography from the soil
conservation service, um, will allow us and what
we have as well as sanborn maps see here can
allow us to give a much finer grained analysis than
simply scrawling A and B. Kind of on a
piece of paper as well as um, now using
the available census data, both in aggregate, um
as well as 1940 is down to the individual level
to understand right, essentially what the effect of this
program was on people's lives on neighborhood, um kind
of continuity and investment. Um and to understand a
bit more broadly the role of this program and kind
of federal policy in shaping the fate of cities,
right? Um kind of a test trial example of
this is run by the Digital Scholarship lab at University
of Richmond, and this is um Richmond's redlining map
, which has actually had the area descriptions digitized.
Uh huh and put into a sequel database. Uh
and then it's available for navigating over through the web
through interactive web application. Um And I would say
there's there's a wide variety of applications, not just
policy analysis, but really down to some of the
central work of historians dealing with kind of fine grain
effect on people's lives. Um Because looking at these
, for example, Sanborn Mass. We can find
buildings both here in the maps as well as in
the aerial photography, the soil conservation service photography and
can isolate individual buildings and see five people, five
people's kind of information in the 1940 census. And
so in a particular building 6100, see uh huh
right here, there's a three flat which is now
demolished and swallowed up as part of the University of
Chicago campus who's sociologists in fact were central to the
development of um, not only uh kind of urban
policy at mid century and going forward, but also
um, I guess improvement of census data gathering.
Um, you know, we can find actually the
people who live there and track them. So there
are three families who lived in this three flat,
including the head Of one of these families who migrated
. His grandparents were Spanish and who himself migrated from
Mexico up to the south side of Chicago, um
, and earned at this point,$1400 a year
in salary while living south of the midway just as
this area was being, not only was in the
midst of a dramatic demographic transformation as a result of
the great migration, but then as a result,
because the university of Chicago and city of Chicago kind
of panicked about this, um, and urban renewal
, a robust 30 year kind of process of redevelopment
for the benefit of the University of Chicago, um
, to demolish and redevelop that area for expansion of
campus and isolating the university from its broader community.
So being able to track with what happened to the
people there, I think is also, it's just
as important as understanding, um, you know,
what kind of the national policy practices and quantitative efforts
are. But having the spatial framework enabled by GIS
, I think is important to me and increasingly important
to historians, um, into irrespective of the technology
, which every time I, you know, see
the scientists work. I'm just like totally in awe
. Right? Um, and I just want a
little piece of that. All right. Um,
but for historians write the question of why. Um
, not only comes first. Right. Many many
of us have we've already answered that, but on
every project, on every document, right? We
ask why, what is the motivation and what does
this tell us about? Right the world around us
and like what the best way to understand our lives
and in this case the legacy of new deal policy
and investment in the midst of the Great Depression is
. So thank you. Okay, questions. Okay
, good. I'm curious if you I mean,
I know this is more contemporary, but it strikes
me as a really interesting method for exploring things like
flood maps or other sorts of disaster maps that intersect
really interestingly with some of these building maps and zoning
and red line. I'm just curious if that's yeah
, so, you know, among people identify as
special historians, there has been some of this tracking
, for example, right? Like where floodplains are
and why those areas in many cases are populated by
right, like poorer minority. Give me uh,
groups. Um, and in part, right,
like actually infrastructure was developed consciously, historians have discovered
to disadvantage these areas, right? Like in some
cases at the um, you know, for the
benefit of the broader city, but for the really
significant detriment of these particular communities, Right? And
so in the new deal more broadly right? The
reason that we think of like, oh yes,
like amazing public investment. And, um, it
comes about because it was built upon white supremacy and
right disadvantaging further, um, african americans to,
to satisfy political constituencies. And so, um,
there's some of that, like, it's a,
it's a movement and we have a lot to learn
. Thanks. Again, we really appreciate it frank
things in here.