Edward L. Ayers. Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790–2020.

The practice of cartography dates to at least twenty-five hundred years ago, when ancient Babylonians sought to make sense of the world around them. Technological advances in the twenty-first century, however, enable modern cartographers to visualize data in stunning new ways. Historian Edward L. Ayers has teamed up with mapmakers Justin Madron and Nathaniel Ayers to produce Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790–2020, an engaging collection of maps that reveals new insights about the movement of people across the US South over the course of more than two centuries. By harnessing census data as well as information about soil composition, railroads, voting returns, and disease, Ayers, Madron, and Ayers have created dozens of maps that shed light on migration driven by westward expansion, the growth of slavery, emancipation, industrialization, two world wars, tax policies, and more.

Edward Ayers was inspired to write Southern Journey after viewing a map by Ayers and Madron showing how enslaved African Americans were compelled to migrate across the South. Together the three men decided to try to “map everyone in the South across all its history,” an ambitious project (129). To accomplish this task, Nathaniel Ayers and Justin Madron built a new geographic information system (GIS) of hexagons and county boundaries, then used census data to map populations “using area-weighted interpolation” (131). Edward Ayers wrote the accompanying text that interprets and provides historical context for the maps.

Ayers is the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities at the University of Richmond, while Nathaniel Ayers and Justin Madron work in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. Southern Journey, published by LSU Press, is a comprehensive book that follows other recent digital mapping endeavors, including the “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,” “Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina,” and “Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland,” projects that visualize the history of slavery, the US South, or its people.

The goals of Southern Journey are twofold. First, Ayers writes, they sought to “reveal patterns [they] could not see otherwise among the lives of millions of people, and to produce maps as clear and consistent as possible across more than two hundred years of American history” (ix). They strove to show the migration of the myriad individuals who moved through the expanding South during the country’s history, looking at the lives of “indigenous, enslaved, citizen, and immigrant people” (ix). The book is organized chronologically and divided into three parts that cover between seventy and eighty years each.

Part 1, “Creating the South, 1790–1860,” explores the nation’s earliest years through the outbreak of the US Civil War, beginning in 1790, when the first census was taken in the United States. In this section, Ayers includes maps depicting Black and white population growth as slaveholders and enslaved people moved westward, Native American land cessions, railroads, Louisiana sugar parishes, cotton production, and immigration.

Part 2, “The Restless South, 1860–1940,” begins with a discussion of the movement of Black and white refugees during the Civil War, with maps depicting emancipation and the locations of refugee camps. Ayers then examines postwar migration against the backdrop of industrialization and urbanization. He discusses World War I, the advent of the Great Migration, and the Great Depression as well in his analysis of maps primarily based on census data.

Part 3, “Arrival and Return, 1940–2020,” begins by examining the movement of Americans prompted by World War II. Ayers also analyzes the effects of the interstate highway network, the civil rights era, and economic changes on migration. Finally, he studies the “Great Return” of Americans to the US South in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He explores data on Latin American and Asian American immigration during this period as well. Other intriguing maps illuminating more recent trends show populations of self-identified Indigenous people, presidential election voting results from 2016, poverty levels, and a map of confirmed COVID-19 cases from the 2020 pandemic. The book concludes with a helpful appendix that further explains the book’s methodology and details the inclusion of maps adapted from other sources.

Southern Journey serves as an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in better understanding the history of the United States. It can be used as a reference tool for those hoping to learn about a particular time period or as a more general narrative about the US South and its people. At times the reader is left wanting a touch more of the human stories beneath the data; there are no images of the men, women, and children of diverse backgrounds and experiences who traveled across the South throughout the nation’s history. Nonetheless, one finishes the book impressed by the wide range of events and phenomena that prompted the movement of millions.