Category: Uncategorized

ActiveHistory.ca post: Map the History of Redlining, It Works

The history of redlining matters. For decades, the government sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created maps that defined African American neighbourhoods as high risk, which resulted in people not having access to a Federal Housing Administration insured mortgage in these districts. Ta-Nehisi Coates used the research in Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Robert Conot’s American Odyssey, Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis and Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto to develop the case for reparations in his 2014 cover story in the Atlantic.[1] He convincingly argued that long after the end of Slavery, government policy actively limited economic opportunities for African Americans, created segregated cities and the significant gap in wealth between white and black Americans: “From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market“.

A year earlier, Dustin A. Cable, at the University of Virginia, created the interactive Racial Dot Map based on data from the 2010 census. The map shows the stark racial divides in many major cities. The impressive level of detail, with a single dot for every person in the United States census, creates visually and analytically powerful maps. The divided racial geography of a cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee is startling and prompts a historical question: how did this happen? Coates brought together decades of urban social history and historical demography, along with his own journalism, to help answer this question for Chicago.

ActiveHistory.ca post: The Polish Government, the Holocaust and Jan Grabowski

“‘Who controls the present, controls the past,’ wrote George Orwell, and the Polish authorities seem to have taken Orwell’s words to heart.”[1] On September 20th, University of Ottawa historian Jan Grabowski published an op-ed in Macleans highlighting the dangers of a new law working its way through Poland’s parliament that threatens historians and others with up to three years in jail if they “accuse the Polish nation, or the Polish state, [of being] responsible or complicit in Nazi crimes committed by the III German Reich.”[2] Grabowski continued:

…in the face of the new legislation, historians who argue that certain segments of Polish society were complicit in the extermination of their Jewish neighbours in the Second World War will now think twice before voicing their opinion. What about those who would like to study the phenomenon of blackmailing of the Jews, known in Polish asshmaltsovnitstvo? What about those who would like to talk about the role of the Polish “blue” police who collaborated with the Germans in the extermination of the Polish Jewry? What about those who want to shed light on the deadly actions of the Polish voluntary firefighters involved in the destruction of Jewish communities?[3]

Lukasz Weremiuk, the Chargé d’affaires at the Polish Embassy in Ottawa responded a week later arguing Grabowkski’s article “contains a list of strong, but often groundless opinions and accusations toward Poland.”[4] I highly recommend people read Grabowski’s full article on the Maclean’s website along with the response from the Polish Embassy and Grabowski’s further comments.

This recent controversy caused me to reflect on my 2015 visit to Kraków and Auschwitz-Birkenau. My dad and I drove from Munich to Poland and spent a couple days in Kraków before driving back via the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps.

Mapping Infant Mortality Rates in London and West Ham

The maps below show the changing geography of infant morality from 1880 through to 1910. The maps include the London and West Ham, which remained independent throughout this time period. Infant mortality rates increased across London during the final decade of the nineteenth century and were particularly deadly during the final years of the century. As the last map in the series (1906-10) and the chart below both clearly show, infant mortality rates improved significantly during the first decades of the twentieth century. I’m working on the final revisions of a chapter that explores the relationship between environmental conditions in West Ham and the unhealthy 1890s along with the vast improvements in the decades that followed and figured it would be interesting to share these colour maps and the interactive chart online.

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Most of the data comes from the Vision of Britain website, which also provided the boundary layers. The data for West Ham comes from the Annual Reports of the Medical Officer of Health.

[1]

[1] Charles Sanders, “Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health 1923” (West Ham: Public Health Committee, 1923), 40; Graham Mooney, “Did London Pass the ‘Sanitary Test’? Seasonal Infant Mortality in London, 1870-1914,” Journal of Historical Geography 20, no. 2 (April 1994): 161, doi:10.1006/jhge.1994.1013.

“This work is based on data provided through www.VisionofBritain.org.uk and uses historical material which is copyright of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project and the University of Portsmouth”

Digital Approaches to 19th Century Globalization

By Jim Clifford
First Published on ActiveHistory.ca
The map below drew a lot of attention on Twitter when I posted a few weeks ago in advance of a presentation I gave at an environmental history conference in early July. It was retweeted, not just by friends and fellow environmental historians, but also by Shawn Donnan, a World Trade Editor at the Financial Times. I think it gained traction because it helps visualize something historians and students who take our classes know, but might not be general knowledge: globalization did not begin in the late 20th century with the rise of industrial economies in Asia.

Extensive trade networks predate Columbus and the flow of silver from mines in the Americas through Europe and to China linked and transformed the world economy during the Early Modern period. The scale of global trade and communications has changed significantly over the centuries, but globalization has very deep roots.