On the Battle of Gettysburg from robert lee's Perspective

Anne Kelly Knowles likes places where history takes place. She traced this * * * to her childhood family trip in the 1960s, when her father packed his wife and four children from their home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, into a rented RV and embarked on an odyssey trip to a historic landmark in the United States. In this story, by using the cutting-edge technology in the field of geography, [×] is close.

Professor of Middlebury College can watch the previous videos of intellectual property protection plan: Anne Kelly Knowles: 20 12 Smithsonian American Innovation Award Intellectual property protection plan [×] Closing intellectual property protection plan [×] American Innovation Award winner 20 12 Drawing the most iconic landscape "intellectual property" in history with GIS.

During World War II, in Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, SS often set up concentration camps and reform-through-labour camps (crosses) near steel (blue) and machine tool production centers (red) to exploit prisoners' forced labor. (Toral Patel and Anne Kelly Knowles. Camp data provided by the American Holocaust Memorial) Anne Kelly Knowles uses geography and technology to trace history. At the top of Luther Theological Seminary, Li Can saw more brown fields (light gray fields) than historians noticed. Near the Dark Horse Tavern, longstreet will see his troops exposed to the surveillance of federal sentries. (Anne Kelly Knowles, Caitlin Absher and Will Rush) Photo Gallery

Someone actually tried to build a casino three miles from the ruins of the Battle of Gettysburg, and saw the Battle of Gettysburg for the second time. "We studied the road atlas and arranged trips to Little Bighorn Sheep and Mount Rushmore," Knowles recalled. "Historical landmarks are our thumbtacks on the map." Between scheduled stops, she and her father would jump out of the RV and take pictures of historical landmarks. "I am the only child who is interested in history. Decades later, Knowles' childhood trip became a pioneering cause of historical geography. Using innovative drawing tools, she injected new light into the white-haired historical debate. What did Robert Lee think in Gettysburg? -Sailing on new difficult terrain, such as mapping the mass shooting of Jews in Eastern Europe by Nazi death squads during World War II.

Knowles's research and her vigorous advocacy of new geographical methods also helped to revive a discipline that declined at the end of the 20th century, because many top universities closed their geography departments. Edward Muller, a historical geographer at the University of Pittsburgh, said, "She is a pioneer. Peter Bohr, a historian at Harvard University and director of the Center for Geographical Analysis, added: "The way she uses her spatial imagination to observe things and ask questions that others don't have is very original. Annie not only considers new technologies, but also how to apply maps across disciplines.

My own introduction to Knowles' works took place in August, when the Smithsonian invited me to introduce a person who won the magazine's creative award. Since the winner has not been made public, I was initially only told about the recipient's field. This worries me. My formal geography education ended with my sociology class in grade five. In this class, a teacher drew the route of the Amazon River on the Mercator projection map, making Greenland bigger than South America. I vaguely know that new technology has changed this once moldy subject. I hope the innovator I am asked to describe is a scientist from NASA or an engineer working in the Silicon Valley Climate Control Computer Laboratory.

From the beginning of the setting, no part of it has been proved to be true. Knowles, 55, is a professor at Middlebury College, which is close to Plato's ideal campus in New England. Its undulating lawns and beautiful buildings, mostly cut from Vermont marble, stand in a tall building overlooking the green hills and Adirondack Mountains. Knowles is suitable for her liberal arts, although she belongs to a major that she calls "quite masculine and eccentric". A slim woman, with short hair, blue eyes like cornflower, wearing a white tunic, loose linen trousers and clogs, looks at ease in Middlebury's Yankee/organic quirks.

But for me, the biggest surprise is Knowles' office in the geography department. I imagined her processing data in front of many flashing screens, and I found her typing on a humble Dell laptop.

"This technology is just a tool, what really matters is how you use it," she said. "Historical geography refers to putting the place at the center of history. When I asked her about math and calculation skills, she replied, "I add, subtract, multiply and divide." "

Her main tool is Geographic Information System (GIS), which is the name of a computer program, including satellite images, paper maps and statistical data. Knowles makes GIS sound simple: "This is a computer software that allows you to draw and analyze information in any additional location." But watching her browse GIS and other applications, I soon found that this is not your father's geographical location.

The first is the modern topographic map of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania that appears on her screen. "There are not enough details," she said, followed by the contour map of the same landscape drawn by 1874, which she tracked and scanned. "This is the origin of my cartoon weirdo," she said, fingering the map affectionately and noticing how it distinguishes broad-leaved forest, pine forest and orchard. These subtle details are crucial to her work.

Then, deploy defense industry software. She uses the functions of triangulation of irregular network and visual analysis, as well as the function of determining the position of grating surface where a group of observer features are visible. I'll simplify it here. Imagine that pixels and grids move around the screen in response to keyboard commands, which are as easy to execute as the mistranslated instructions attached to the electronic device last time. "GIS has a steep learning curve," Knowles admits.

Finally, a "map" appeared, which is not only color-coded and full of data, but also dynamic rather than static-Knowles compared it to layered reconstruction through three-dimensional glasses. The image has changed, and it only takes a few keystrokes to answer Knowles' question. In this case, she wants to know what kind of battlefield Manders can see on his second day in Gettysburg. A red dot indicates General Lee's vantage point from the top of Lutheran Theological Seminary. His vision shows a clear ground, and the blind spot is in the dark indigo shadow. Knowles even considered the extra view that Lee's boots could provide. "We can't explain the haze and smoke of fighting in GIS, although theoretically you can use game software," she said.

Scholars have long debated whether Lee Myung-bak decided to launch a frontal attack in Gettysburg. How could such a special commander, an expert in reading terrain, not realize that this attack would be a disaster? The traditional explanation, especially the admirer of Lee Myung-bak, is his subordinate General james lang strait, who didn't carry out Lee Myung-bak's orders correctly and ran roughshod over when the joint forces assembled to repel an important Confederate attack. "Li thought,' where is longstreet? Why is he hesitating? Knowles said,

She carefully translated the outline of the battlefield into digital representation, which provided a new background for the behavior of the two people. The line of sight shows that Li Can can't see what longstreet is doing. He doesn't know the strategy of the alliance either. At the same time, longstreet saw what Lee couldn't do: in the open terrain where it was clearly visible, the allied forces gathered together and headed for Gettysburg.

Knowles has lived in Middlebury for ten years, but she is still working hard. Her current project is to map the Holocaust in collaboration with the American Holocaust Memorial and a team of international scholars. In the past, most holocaust maps were only located in death camps and slums. Knowles and her colleagues used GIS to create a "geographical map of oppression", including the development of concentration camps and the movement map of Nazi death squads, which brought Germans into the Soviet Union.

The first volume of this book will be published next year, in which Knowles and her co-authors admit that their work also raises some unforgivable questions about guilt and pain. For example, her colleagues' research shows that Italians may be more active in arresting Jews, as Bi Meng admits. Jews in Budapest wear yellow armbands, and the pedestrian street is occupied by non-Jewish businessmen and citizens, rather than being isolated from sight.

Knowles hopes that the ongoing work will not only help to understand the Holocaust, but also help to prevent genocide. She said: "Drawing a map in this way can help you see patterns and predict what might happen. More broadly, she believes that the new drawing technology can balance the written records that historians have traditionally relied on. . "One of the most exciting and important parts of historical geography is to reveal the danger of human memory." By injecting data from the map, she hopes that historical geography can play a corrective role, and teaching courses that may cause * * * outside the college. "We can learn to be more humble about our own judgments, what we know or think we know, and our judgments about the current situation."

Knowles is careful to avoid over-hyping GIS, which she thinks is an exploratory method. She also realized that it may produce "pure visual candy" and provide great visual effects without deepening our understanding of the past. Another problem is that it is difficult to translate complex maps and tables into meaningful words and stories. Research based on GIS can sometimes be as fascinating as the report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Aware of these defects, Knowles is going to publish a book, using GIS to serve general historical narration. "Mastering Iron" will be released on June 5438+ 10 next year, which is launched after the US steel industry from 1800 to 1868. Although the theme doesn't sound as fascinating as the Holocaust or Gettysburg, Knowles combines geographical analysis with more traditional sources and challenges the traditional wisdom about American industrial development.

This book, like many of Knowles' works, stems from her curiosity about this place and has experienced a mysterious connection with history. Many years ago, while studying Welsh immigrants in Ohio, she visited the ruins of a blast furnace in the early19th century. "It is covered with vines and looks like a magnificent ruin on the Yucatan Peninsula. A powerful and important thing, full of meaning and mystery. I want to know how that machine is made and used, how it works and how people feel about it.

It took years to find the answer. Using local history, old maps and intensive investigation entitled "Guide to Steel Manufacturers" in 1859 (Knowles said it was one of the most boring books on earth), she painstakingly created a database, including every steel plant she could find, from Voghs Village to Pittsburgh Rolling Mill. She also mapped the distance between canals, railway lines, coal mines and iron mines. The emerging patterns and individual stories run counter to the previous rough research on this subject.

Most of the previous explanations of iron and steel industry regarded it as relatively unified and primitive, mainly as the predecessor of steel. On the contrary, Knowles found that according to the local geology and geological conditions, ironworks are extremely complex and diverse. The steel industry is not just a stepping stone to the steel industry. Making iron is "your own business", which is very important for railway, textile and other enterprises; Therefore, it is the driving force of the national industrial revolution.

Knowles also vividly shows this potentially boring theme (according to a reporter she quoted, Pittsburgh looks like "hell is covered") and the stories of those who make and sell steel. This industry needs highly skilled workers who are "hard working" like Budlin, that is, "mixing a lot of white-hot iron at close range to remove impurities". On the other hand, entrepreneurs bear great risks. Many people failed, including tycoons who succeeded in other industries.

For Knowles, this history is very enlightening, even though her story ended a century and a half ago. As usual, she also emphasized the particularity of this place. "In the process of trying to export American capitalism, we didn't realize the local environment that helped enterprises succeed or fail. We should not assume that we have a good model and can simply export it.

Although Knowles' research focused on the coarse sand industry, genocide and the Gettysburg Massacre, she crossed the undulating farmland and returned to her home eight miles from Middlebury at the end of the day. On the way, she instinctively looked at this landscape painting and pointed out: "The forest coverage rate may have been much lower a hundred years ago, and it was all cleaned up at that time. You can see how small these trees are. They are growing for the second and third time.

Her old farmhouse has a wide pine wood floor, and there is a barn and apple trees in the yard. Most of her writing is done in a room, from which you can see the abandoned single-room school building. This faded rural environment is in sharp contrast with Knowles' global and digital world in his research. But for her, it's not severance pay. One constant in her life is that she has a keen sense of place since she was a child. "Our position on the map is very important," she said. "Spiritual space, too. We all need it. I found it here.