Mapping Population Density in the US, 1870 (Francis Amasa Walker)

(His maps were so convincing, indeed, in framing a question of geographical organization, that they may have encouraged a narrative of continental integration only recently challengedВ by investigations into local and regional geographies.) In ways that prepared a basis for hisВ use of maps to express the contested electoral results of 1876, Walker treated maps as coherent statements about the nationвЂ™s divides otherwise not able to be articulated, as a basis to start debate about the well-being of its political economy. Although WalkerвЂ™s subsequent tabulation of the data on immigrants in the late nineteenth century led him to fear their arrival as threatening the nationвЂ™s productivity, based on his perception of the depth of racial differences to the national polity, and encouraged others to do so, he advanced the embodiment of statistics in geographic maps, in ways no doubt influenced by his close collaboration with his father, the economist Amasa Walker.

His extremely influential 1874 Statistical Atlas, based on the unprecedented 1870 US Census that he directly supervised and made the case before Congress about the undeniable need for funding, whose maps created an image of the challenges of national unity that remained in the republic in the wake of the Civil War in which he had fought: the Statistical AtlasВ extends the enterprise of the expanded Census, validating how statistics present a synoptic picture of the political economyвЂ“illustrating relations of the local to the polity across continuous United States as if processing part of a mental effort of consolidation.Д®ven before the unprecedentedly bitter electoral divide of 1876, Walker advanced maps as providing a new way to embody the polity through the visual records derived from statistical aggregates. If the nineteenth century America has been often described as an era of geographic integration, perhaps no one more than the ambitious statistician Francis Amasa WalkerВ created a new way of seeing the nation that foregrounded both the local differences that continued to divide the nation, but staked out the challenges for integration that the country faced in geographical terms.

Ischool polymath