This project produces and displays free interactive maps showing the historical geography of dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics since the late 19th century, including radical movements, civil rights movements, labor movements, women's movements, and more. Until now historians and social scientists have mostly studied social movements in isolation and often with little attention to geography. This project allows us to see where social movements were active and where not, helping us better understand patterns of influence and endurance. It exposes new dimensions of American political geography, showing how locales that in one era fostered certain kinds of social movements often changed political colors over time.
We do this by developing detailed geographic data about each movement, identitying locations where membership, activities, or other measures of support were concentrated. The links at left and below lead to over 120 interactive maps, charts, and data tables, with more to come. We started with maps and charts that show the activist geography of the Socialist Party, Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist Party, then developed similar maps on Black Freedom movements: NAACP, Congress of Racial Equality, SNCC, and the Black Panther Party.
We have added a battery of visualizations showing the geography of Chicanx/Latinx movements: United Farm Workers (UFW), MEChA, Raza Unida Party, Brown Berets, League of United Latin American Citizens, hundreds of Chicano movement periodicals published between 1966 and 1977, and also maps of the Immigrant Rights Protests of 2006.
And we have mapped the activities of the Woman Suffrage movement: National Woman's Party 1913-1922 and an exciting complex of timelines and maps showing the state by state progress of women's voting rights from 1838-1919. Another unit tracks the New Left and antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Also more than 2,000 Underground newspapers from the 1965-75. We are working now on the early history of the CIO unions and hope to explore the geography of many other movements as we move forward.
Project director James Gregory has recently published Remapping the American Left: A History of Radical Discontinuity in the journal LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History. Based on this project, the article develops new understandings about the dynamics of American radicalism. The American left has been more discontinuous and more innovative than its counterparts in most countries and operates in different ways. The essay maps five distinct left constellations over the last century and explores the question of how American radicalism has survived, how it has repeatedly reconstituted itself absent the supportive institutional apparatus of an electoral party. It is available free from the journal website linked here.