"The Stratified Record upon Which We Set Our Feet" : The Spatial Turn and the Multilayering of History, Geography, and Geology

In Thomas Mann’s tetralogy of the 1930s and 1940s, Joseph and His Brothers, the narrator declares history is not only “that which has happened and that which goes on happening in time,” but it is also “the stratified record upon which we set our feet, the ground beneath us.” By opening up history to its spatial, geographical, and geological dimensions Mann both predicts and encapsulates the twentieth-century’s “spatial turn,” a critical shift that divested geography of its largely passive role as history’s “stage” and brought to the fore intersections between the humanities and the earth sciences. In this paper, I draw out the relationships between history, narrative, geography, and geology revealed by this spatial turn and the questions these pose for thinking about the disciplinary relationship between geography and the humanities. As Mann’s statement exemplifies, the spatial turn itself has often been captured most strikingly in fiction, and I would argue nowhere more so than in Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996), both of which present space, place, and landscape as having a palpable influence on history and memory. The geographical/geological line that runs through both Waterland and Fugitive Pieces continues through Tim Robinson’s non-fictional, two-volume “topographical” history Stones of Aran. Robinson’s Stones of Aran—which is not history, not geography, and not literature, and yet is all three—constructs an imaginative geography that renders inseparable geography, geology, history, memory, and the act of writing.

Acid damage to vegetation following the Laki Fissure eruption in 1783 - an historical review

Grattan, John and Pyatt, Brian. 'Acid damage to vegetation following the laki fissure eruption in 1783 - an historical review' The Science of the Total Environment. 26 August 1993. 151 pgs 241-247

Geography

This chapter focuses on the barriers to all students achieving their full potential that are rooted historically in the disparate understanding of geography itself. How the subject is delivered is scrutinized from both the historical and a pragmatic perspective but, importantly, the link between past and present is highlighted as key if the subject is finally to be embedded as a cohesive, mainstream subject that allows students to fully understand the realities of their world.

Error sensitive historical GIS: Identifying areal interpolation errors in time series data

Historical GIS has the potential to re-invigorate our use of statistics from historical censuses and related sources. In particular, areal interpolation can be used to create long-run time-series of spatially detailed data that will enable us to enhance significantly our understanding of geographical change over periods of a century or more. The difficulty with areal interpolation, however, is that the data that it generates are estimates which will inevitably contain some error. This paper describes a technique that allows the automated identification of possible errors at the level of the individual data values.

The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle - 1812 July

Specific pages with War of 1812 content in this volume: Page 77: The American senate declares war on Great Britain. Click on the pdf links to the right to view the monthly issue. The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle was a monthly periodical published in England during the years of 1736-1833. The volumes of interest from 1812-1815 were written and compiled by Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman. These volumes were printed in London by Nichols, Son and Bentley at Cicero's Head, Red Lion Passage and Fleet Street. The magazine contains accounts of important historical events, abstracts of foreign occurrences, letters from noted figures, articles on geography, biographical entries for prominent people, poems, statistics, obituaries, reviews of books and more.

The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle - 1812 August

Specific pages with War of 1812 content in this volume: August: Page 179: The official American declaration of war. Click on the pdf links to the right to view the monthly issue. The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle was a monthly periodical published in England during the years of 1736-1833. The volumes of interest from 1812-1815 were written and compiled by Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman. These volumes were printed in London by Nichols, Son and Bentley at Cicero's Head, Red Lion Passage and Fleet Street. The magazine contains accounts of important historical events, abstracts of foreign occurrences, letters from noted figures, articles on geography, biographical entries for prominent people, poems, statistics, obituaries, reviews of books and more.

The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle - 1812 July to December Index and Supplement

Specific pages related to the War of 1812 include: Pages 655, 656, 657: Battles on the Niagara Frontier, with the death of Major General Sir Isaac Brock at the Battle of Queenston Heights on October 13, 1812. Page 670: Oct 13 - Obituary for Major General Sir Isaac Brock. Click on the pdf links to the right to view the monthly issue. The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle was a monthly periodical published in England during the years of 1736-1833. The volumes of interest from 1812-1815 were written and compiled by Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman. These volumes were printed in London by Nichols, Son and Bentley at Cicero's Head, Red Lion Passage and Fleet Street. The magazine contains accounts of important historical events, abstracts of foreign occurrences, letters from noted figures, articles on geography, biographical entries for prominent people, poems, statistics, obituaries, reviews of books and more.

The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle - 1812 September

Specific pages related to the War of 1812 include: Pages 282 to 283: Mention of border hostilities, the occupation of the town of Sandwich (in Canada, near Detroit (present day Windsor, Ontario) and a riot in Baltimore. Click on the pdf links to the right to view the monthly issue. The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle was a monthly periodical published in England during the years of 1736-1833. The volumes of interest from 1812-1815 were written and compiled by Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman. These volumes were printed in London by Nichols, Son and Bentley at Cicero's Head, Red Lion Passage and Fleet Street. The magazine contains accounts of important historical events, letters from noted figures, articles on geography, biographical entries for prominent people, poems, statistics, obituaries, reviews of books and more.

The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle - 1812 October

Specific pages related to the War of 1812 include: Page 385: The capture of Fort Detroit; battles at Plattsburgh and Sackett's Harbour. Page 389: On 10 October 1812, Major General Sir Isaac Brock was knighted. Click on the pdf links to the right to view the monthly issue. The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle was a monthly periodical published in England during the years of 1736-1833. The volumes of interest from 1812-1815 were written and compiled by Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman. These volumes were printed in London by Nichols, Son and Bentley at Cicero's Head, Red Lion Passage and Fleet Street. The magazine contains accounts of important historical events, abstracts of foreign occurrences, letters from noted figures, articles on geography, biographical entries for prominent people, poems, statistics, obituaries, reviews of books and more.

The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle - 1812 November

Specific pages related to the War of 1812 include: Pages 490: Fall of Major General Isaac Brock at the Battle of Queenston Heights and victory by Major General Roger Shaeffe. Click on the pdf links to the right to view the monthly issue. The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle was a monthly periodical published in England during the years of 1736-1833. The volumes of interest from 1812-1815 were written and compiled by Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman. These volumes were printed in London by Nichols, Son and Bentley at Cicero's Head, Red Lion Passage and Fleet Street. The magazine contains accounts of important historical events, abstracts of foreign occurrences, letters from noted figures, articles on geography, biographical entries for prominent people, poems, statistics, obituaries, reviews of books and more.