ABSTRACT
Urban historians and historical geographers have a long tradition of mapping demographic data to study residential patterns, the assimilation or segregation of immigrants and minorities, and processes of neighborhood change, despite the difficulty of working from printed or microfilm copies of city directories and census manuscripts and drawing maps by hand. Dubois’ study of Philadelphia was one of the earliest pieces of research of this type, including a detailed survey of the predominantly black Seventh Ward to depict the patchwork of poorer and more well to do blocks. 1 The early Chicago School sociologists used census data and data from many other sources to map the social characteristics of Chicago neighborhoods in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1976 Radford plotted locations of black and white residents in 1880 in Charleston, distinguishing between those residing on streets, in backyards, and on alleys. 2 In 1978 Rabinowitz mapped the streets block by block in four Southern cities to show the degree of racial segregation. 3 Groves and Muller similarly studied black residential concentrations in post-bellum Washington, DC. 4 Others have focused on white ethnic residential patterns in cities such as New York and Detroit. 5
