On the Use of Geographic Information Systems in Economic History: The American Transportation Revolution Revisited

Abstract

Transportation improvements in the nineteenth century loom large in the historiography of the profession during the twentieth century. This article describes the ongoing construction of a historical geographic information systems (GIS) transportation database designed to provide new insights into the impact of the transportation and communications revolution in the continental United States by providing evidence on the spatial dimensions of those changes over time. It also reviews some preliminary findings and reinterpretations based upon these data.am taking advantage of the opportunity afforded me by my presidency of the EHA to write what amounts to a personal memoir. It is something of an homage to data for data have been good to me. During my career, I have collected many different data sets; some as a research assistant, others as a principal investigator.

Railroads and American Economic Growth: A "Market Access" Approach

“…We are grateful to Jeremy Atack and co-authors for providing these initial GIS railroad files (Atack, 2013).…”

“…We then repeat this procedure for centroid connections to navigable rivers and canals. This refinement to the network database allows the empirical analysis to exploit precise variation on the intensive margin of county access to railroads and waterways as the density of the railroad network increases from 1870 14 Fogel's classification of "navigable" rivers may be overly generous in some cases (Atack, 2013). 15 We do not permit direct access to lakes and oceans at all points along the coast; rather, we restrict access to "harbors" where the coast intersects interior waterways.…”

Measuring one century of railway accessibility and population change in France. A historical GIS approach

“…The construction of historical geographic information system of railway networks is a growing initiative in the fields of GeoHumanities and economic geography (Atack, 2013;Kasraian et al, 2016;Martí-Henneberg, 2013a;Schwartz, 2015;Schwartz et al, 2011a). The first step in this part of our research was devoted to finding historical maps of railway lines and other evidence that would provide the opening and closing dates of lines and stations-to name the essentials.…”

American Banking and the Transportation Revolution Before the Civil War

“…The transportation data come from GIS databases developed by Atack from a variety of contemporary and retrospective sources including digitized maps, reports by various government agencies, compilations from travel guides, and the like (Atack, 2013). In particular, the basic Midwest rail data are from Paxson (1914) Data on canals are from Goodrich (1961), supplemented by 19th century sources such as Poor (1970) and various histories of the individual canal systems that provide dates on when specific sections of canals were opened to traffic (e.g., Whitford (1906) We use these GIS databases to construct a county-level panel from 1836 to 1861 with variables such as the number of railway miles in a county and indicators for whether the county had a port, river, or canal within its boundaries.…”