Many geographers have argued for the need to incorporate change over time into their analyses (see, for example, Haggett 1965; Hägerstrand 1970; Thrift 1977;Marsh et al. 1988); however, changes to administrative boundaries often mean that demographic statistics collected at two different dates cannot be directly compared. This has made it very difficult to study longitudinal change without resorting to undesirable levels of aggregation, typically to county level in Britain or state level in the United States. This article describes a technique that makes significant advances toward eliminating this problem: a researcher using this technique can compare statistics by standardizing all relevant data on a single set of administrative units. My article builds on the work of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project (Gregory and Southall 1998) and uses net migration as an example.The geographical information system (GIS) is not yet complete, so the article focuses on the methodological issues. These issues could be applied to a wide range of problems in historical geography. More broadly, it is hoped that the article will give some idea of the potential for using GIS to analyze spatially referenced data in the context of social science history.

In the five centuries since Gutenberg introduced printing with movable type, Western society has been thoroughly infused by print culture.This culture, a complex mosaic of numerous factors, has recently become the focus of extensive historical research.The history of print culture, frequently referred to as the “history of the book,” concerns those aspects of a society that relate to the production, distribution, and reception of printed materials, whether canonical works of literature or ephemeral items such as newspapers and handbills. Authorship, publishing, regulation, bookselling, libraries, and reading are some of the aspects examined. Because print culture permeates all of society, the study of its history has captured the interest of a wide range of researchers: an array of historians of various types and periods (e.g., social, labor, cultural, and legal historians; historians of religion and ideas; and historians of science and technology), literary scholars (of various periods and genres), sociologists, information scientists and librarians, geographers, and bibliographers, among others. As might be expected, scholars of this diversity bring a wide breadth of perspectives to the subject.

Social science historians bring a wide range of topical interests and methodological skills to the investigation of historical conditions. Those with an interest in the changing distribution and locational relationships of social, demographic, economic, political, cultural, physical, and other phenomena may now be considering the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for historical analysis. As an urban form historian and mapping scientist who uses GIS to document, visualize, and interpret spatial history, I am writing this account of my development of a GIS spatial history of Tokyo with the hope that it will convey the benefits and challenges of using GIS for historical research.

The argument of this article starts with three key theoretical postulates: First, regional-scale explanation differs in important respects from either aggregate macroeconomic studies of development at the national level or microeconomic and business historical studies of individual firms. Second, neoclassical economic theory is unsuitable as a basis for the analysis of regional economic dynamics, and a different framework, called adjustment theory, should be used in its place. Third, utilization of adjustment theory in the historical geographical domain leads directly to the deployment of both the concepts and methods of geographical information science as the foundation for empirical inquiry.

Key features of reproductive behavior in China vary systematically through space and time. In this article we present an analysis of fertility change in regional space, using a 1% household sample from China’s 1990 population census. Elsewhere,we use the same data to analyze reproductive strategizing, but here we pursue the big picture with a straightforward analysis that takes reported births as an uncomplicated indicator of fertility.The article has three objectives: first, to introduce a novel, multilevel spatial model of regional structure constructed using a geographic information system (GIS); second, to demonstrate the potential for longitudinal data derived from onetime censuses to contribute to historical demography in conjunction with regional analysis; and third, to document the manner in which China’s fertility transition has unfolded in regional space.