Brandon Plewe on the 1900 Utah Census (S4 E7)

**Brad Westwood** (0:08)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history about Utah accessible to the widest audience. We hope if there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, we hope this is the place.
Today's podcast centers on the 1900 US census and the residential population and the urban geography of Salt Lake City. If you subscribe to the podcast or this is your very first time listening to us, we hope you'll go back and listen to the dozens of other prior episodes. Please also rate and review Speak Your Piece on iTunes and Google and elsewhere. Find me if you have an idea, you know someone who should be interviewed and you think this would be a good topic, please contact us at Speak Your Piece by emailing us at askahistorianatutah.gov. My guest today is Geographer and Professor Brandon Ploo, who has been teaching at Brigham Young University in Provo since 1997 After earning a double bachelor's of science in cartography and mathematics in 1992 from BYU, he went on to get a PhD as well as before that, his MS in Geography from the State University of New York in Buffalo or at Buffalo.
Now, if you follow Brandon on social media, you'll know he is a committed hiker and explorer of Utah and the world and a committed trail preservationist.
Brandon's research focuses include historical cartography or map making and map uses related to Mormonism, the American West and Utah, along with GIS, Geospatial Database System Designing. And we're going to be talking a lot about that today. We'll also ask Brandon to explain more about just what is all this mapping that's going on. Specifically, we're going to discuss the most recent article in the Utah Historical Quarterly that he has published entitled Placing Immigrants in Salt Lake City. Welcome, Brandon, and good morning.

**Brandon Plewe** (2:31)
Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having me up here.

**Brad Westwood** (2:35)
Brandon, there are a number of things, but before we really get into the article, I think it's best if we kind of frame up just what geography, this whole spatial perspective, how it plays in the pursuit of history. What would you say?

**Brandon Plewe** (2:49)
So, in my own story, I actually do, I made a career out of doing historical geography and historical mapping.
And I actually got into history, not because I enjoy history, because I love history, no offense, but because I hated history. It made no sense to me as I would, as I would try to read and try to make sense of things. It just, it just didn't make sense.

**Brad Westwood** (3:11)
Well, you're a mathematician. To a certain degree.

**Brandon Plewe** (3:14)
Yeah, we're science. So I would, just all those names and dates and such, I read books on history and I just, it doesn't make a lot of sense. So for me, being able to visualize it, make it into a very visual thing and see the history, see the narrative, how the narrative plays out in time and space. That's what makes sense to me.
And I figured if that's the way it worked for me, maybe there's other people out there that can understand history better by being able to see history more. So that's kind of where I got into this. I also got into it because history is a very fruitful area for, I like to deal with uncertainty and things that are hard to represent.
Mapping kind of expects everything to be nice and clear cut and history just doesn't work that way. And so it's become a very fruitful area for me to study kind of the oddness and the weirdness about how to represent things that are rather a challenge.

**Brad Westwood** (4:12)
But you really do have this commitment to the data sets. I mean, you try to gather all the, I don't know, near scientific efforts at understanding spatial issues. And that offers a lot for history, because history, as you said, can be incredibly emotional and driven by politics. And, you know, it's just it's pretty much the stories of individuals and their own biases.
And so you kind of press people when you do things in a more systematic, geographical way.

**Brandon Plewe** (4:42)
Yeah, I mean, everything happens somewhere, right? And sometimes I suppose that doesn't matter where it happened. But sometimes it matters a great deal where it happened. It helps us to understand both how the context of an event, let's say, how the environmental context played into that. So how, you know, let's say the people who settled here in Salt Lake, how were they influenced by the area around them? But also how did they build this area? You know, how did they have an influence on the place here? So we're both influenced by place and by location. And then we in turn have an influence on those places. So that gives us, that's kind of where geography comes into play. So what we'll often do, kind of where geography comes into this is, you know, I put stuff on maps.