In the Beginning
was the story.
Everyone has their narrative for every issue. The question, how does the past inform the present, is something people really need to grapple with. Understanding our changing world first begins with understanding how the world came to be this way.
As an American, my viewpoint focuses on the United States. I have mapped hundreds of elections and aimed to understand the why of American political coalitions. By understanding the elections of the past, we can understand how and why the Democratic and Republican parties’ priorities came to be, and how that influenced their trajectories in the more recent past.
Similarly, I have begun to look into data from Europe and elsewhere outside the United States. Together, we will go into the data and tell stories that have not been told and bring to life old tableaus of history. Given my work with current election data, I feel that my old posting space on Twitter has outlived its purpose. Particularly, as the reality of the site’s ownership has changed the userbase, I feel that the historical analysis deserves a new home where longer-form content can flourish. This Substack will be a digital museum of cartographical history. The maps and visualizations themselves are interesting to look at from an aesthetic perspective, but also because they tell stories of people that inhabited places and took decisions.
Our first post will go live soon. As a hint - May 2025 is eighty years since the final fall of the old central European empires…
And in the meantime, please subscribe and share!