Thursday, November 20, 2008

Map of the Week-Cotton Pickin' Democrats!

Yes these images have made the rounds of many other map blogs and yes I was supposedly done with Election 2008 but this is interesting. In my November 5th post I alluded to the county patterns and the possible race factor among others. Now we have courtesy of Allen Gathman from Southeast Missouri State University (Go Redhawks!) an explanation. He compared an 1860 map of cotton production to the pattern of southern counties that voted for Obama on this page. The Strangemaps blog took this a step further and actually overlaid the two maps. Each dot from the 1860 map represents 2000 bales of cotton.



There is the obvious racial component as the cotton belt counties have a higher concentration of African Americans. However, the Vigorous North blog takes this even another step beyond to show how the shallow ocean waters of the Cretaceous Period influenced the soil types and thus the suitability for cotton and thus the racial settlement patterns and thus the election results in the cotton belt counties.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is very interesting for me to read the post. Thanx for it. I like such themes and everything that is connected to this matter. I would like to read more on that blog soon.