Society For Industrial Archeology

Iron & Steel Heritage Forum

presents

Dr. Anne Kelly Knowles – “Mapping American Iron with a Geographical Information System”

Thursday, November 5, 2026, 5 p.m. Eastern (US & Canada)

As a geographer, my first step in researching some aspect of history is to map what I want to understand. This presentation will explain what I discovered by mapping J. Peter Lesley’s Iron Manufacturer’s Guide published in 1866.

It’s a story of virtual travel through mountain landscapes, along American rivers, and down crowded streets in industrial cities. A geographical information system (GIS) was a tremendously helpful tool, but the biggest revelations dawned on me slowly after weeks and months of gazing at maps and thinking about the places where men tried, and sometimes failed, to make good iron.

Historical geographer Anne Kelly Knowles was McBride Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maine from 2015 to 2025. She previously taught at Middlebury College in Vermont and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Anne is the recipient of many grants, fellowships, and awards, including six grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In academic year 2026-2027 she is the Ina B. Levine Invitational Senior Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her range of interests is reflected in her monographs on Welsh immigration and the U.S. iron industry, edited volumes on historical GIS and the geographies of the Holocaust, and projects to create digital infrastructure to study Holocaust camps, ghettos, and survivor testimony. Anne is currently developing a narrative atlas of the Holocaust.

Her book of most interest to us is Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://zoom.us/j/97003469180?pwd=jvUPkjgwAbFOUDYj818XmYWQApu4sy.1

Meeting ID: 970 0346 9180
Passcode: 653248
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