Chapter 5: Gis For History

GIS brings to the history classroom an exciting new palette of possibilities and challenges. For teachers who are looking for ways to engage their students in doing history (Levstik & Barton, 1996)—i.e., investigating, examining, and interpreting historical information sources—GIS can make authentic investigation of the past possible in unprecedented ways. With GIS maps, students can visualize the complexity of the American demographic, political, and economic landscape, making subtleties of data patterns visible as colors and shapes. Change over time can become an object of scrutiny, accessible for observation and discussion through a visual language. Students can explore geographic relationships among people, places, events, and human-made and natural resources, actively inspecting them from multiple perspectives.