ABSTRACT
Political history and spatial analysis are a long noted duality. A century ago (in 1914), in the United States, Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed ‘a geography of public opinion’ and called for a mapping of election results by towns and counties, and, best of all, election precincts to show ‘geographical influence’. While the work had been as yet ‘insufficiently carried out’, it had already revealed, Turner wrote, ‘a most significant geographical influence in American political history’. Conceding that there was no absolute ‘geographical control’, Turner called particular attention to the ‘areas influenced or controlled by geological factors wherein capitalistic considerations are strongest’, and their affiliation with Whig and Republican parties. 1
