{"id":773101,"date":"2026-05-11T10:50:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T17:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcuser&p=773101"},"modified":"2026-05-11T10:50:53","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T17:50:53","slug":"cartographers-quest-to-map-us-history","status":"publish","type":"arcuser","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcuser\/cartographers-quest-to-map-us-history","title":{"rendered":"A Cartographer\u2019s Quest to Map US History"},"author":6921,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","transcript_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[493251],"tags":[493480,20422,279012,493481,493295],"arcuser_issues":[493467],"class_list":["post-773101","arcuser","type-arcuser","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gis-at-work","tag-american-revolution","tag-arcgis-pro","tag-charlie-frye","tag-florentine-films","tag-ken-burns","arcuser_issues-spring-2026"],"acf":{"short_description":"Esri cartographer Charlie Frye\u2019s work on Ken Burns\u2019s The American Revolution was an extension of a passion project that mapped his ancestry.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"For more than four decades, documentarian Ken Burns has helped shape Americans\u2019 understanding of their history. His distinctive filmmaking style has brought stories ranging from the Civil War to the history of jazz to life for millions of viewers. But how does a storyteller so reliant on the photographic record tackle events that predate photography?\r\n\r\nIn developing his 12-hour miniseries\u00a0The American Revolution,<\/i> which aired in 2025, Burns and his team at Florentine Films turned to a different kind of historical document\u2014maps. In depicting an era before cameras, maps provide a window into America in the late 1700s, showing locations in the context of conflict, change, and more.\r\n\r\nFor Esri chief cartographer Charlie Frye\u2014a specialist in GIS engineering and information product design who has worked at Esri since 1994\u2014helping Florentine Films with this effort was an extension of a passion project that mapped his ancestry and connected it to America\u2019s\u00a0Revolutionary War.\r\n

A Personal Quest<\/h2>\r\nFrye\u2019s journey began with a simple suggestion.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy wife thought I needed a hobby because I was working too much,\u201d Frye said. \u201cSo, I started in on\u00a0genealogy\u00a0and I found out I had an ancestor who fought at the Battle of Breed\u2019s Hill.\u201d The battle, often called the Battle of Bunker Hill, took place near Boston, Massachusetts, in June 1775.\r\n\r\nThat ancestor was Isaac Frye, a second lieutenant who, as his descendant soon discovered, served for a longer continuous period than any other officer in the Continental Army. This discovery sparked a quest that has spanned more than 20 years.\r\n\r\nFrye, a geographer and information scientist, used GIS to organize his research, plotting his ancestor\u2019s movements and battles. He quickly ran into a fundamental problem\u2014the world of 1775 was quite different from the world of today.\r\n\r\nTo fully understand Isaac\u2019s story, Frye had to envision Isaac\u2019s world. Eventually, this project grew into a massive undertaking\u2014creating a comprehensive GIS repository for the entire American Revolution, including roads, towns, forts, and tribal territories from hundreds of\u00a0historical sources. It was Frye\u2019s deep, personal, and technical\u00a0expertise\u00a0that eventually led him to work with Florentine Films."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":773103,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

Mapping a Revolution<\/h2>\r\nWhen\u00a0Burns\u00a0and his team were in the production stage of\u00a0The American Revolution<\/i>, they faced the challenge of illustrating a complex, eight-year war without photographs. While there are some historical paintings and sketches\u2014along with diaries, letters, journals, and military records\u2014these resources often lack the geographic detail needed to show troop movements or understand the strategic landscape. Maps were the answer\u2014but not just any maps. As Frye explained, historical maps present their own challenges for a modern audience.\r\n\r\n\u201cEighteenth-century maps don\u2019t bring people into the picture,\u201d he explained. \u201cThey\u2019re generally very difficult to orient to because they\u2019re not the geography we\u2019re used to\u2014it\u2019s not the mapping convention that we\u2019re used to.\u201d\r\n\r\nFor one thing, floods and storms have shifted the locations of waterways over the years. Coastal cities have reshaped shorelines. Many contemporary\u00a0manmade\u00a0features\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0yet exist. In fact, Frye said, the average person in the 18th century never even saw a map; maps were\u00a0mainly available\u00a0only to wealthy and powerful individuals.\r\n\r\nFor\u00a0The American Revolution<\/i>, Florentine Films wanted to create maps that felt authentic to the period but could also be\u00a0immediately\u00a0understandable to a 21st-century television audience. This required collaboration. Frye provided the geographic backbone\u2014a massive geodatabase with thousands of curated features, each with a citation tracing it back to a specific historical document, including\u00a0nearly 150\u00a0maps.\r\n\r\nFrye passed this data along to design director and visual effects expert Molly Schwartz, who designed the visual style, and animator Brian Lee, who brought the maps to life. The team produced more than 90 maps for the series, many going through 10\u201320 drafts.\r\n\r\nThis process was managed by Florentine Films coproducer Mike Welt, who made sure that each map aligned with the film\u2019s narrative. Welt and Schwartz scrutinized every detail, from town name spellings to wilderness trail locations.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere was a crossover point where the maps became part of the storytelling,\u201d Welt said. \u201cWe worked hard to show\u00a0an accurate\u00a01775 continent beyond the 13 colonies\u2014and when people who have otherwise been erased in most of our histories appear on the map, they become present and they matter. It reframes the story for viewers.\u201d\r\n\r\nFrye also went through every map at least three times to make sure every place was correct. This process allowed the filmmakers to depict everything from the grand sweep of the Great Wagon Road (which ran from Pennsylvania to southern colonies) to the brutal details of the Battle of Breed\u2019s Hill with unprecedented accuracy."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":773106,"image_position":"left","orientation":"vertical","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

Uncovering Hidden Histories<\/h2>\r\nThe project did more than just illustrate known events\u2014it revealed forgotten histories and challenged long-held assumptions. One of the most significant outcomes was a set of maps depicting the locations of North America\u2019s Indigenous tribes in 1607 (just before European colonization began) and in 1775, and another at the outset of the Revolutionary War.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis was a map showing something I\u2019d never seen before,\u201d Frye said, explaining that he compiled it using the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s Handbook of North American Indians<\/i>.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe purpose was to show that the vast majority of North America was populated by more than five million people\u201d prior to European settlement, Frye said, a contradiction of the deep-seated myth that Europeans colonized an empty or sparsely populated continent. \u201cI don\u2019t know if today\u2019s school textbooks show this, but mine and my generation\u2019s textbooks did not.\u201d\r\n\r\nBy\u00a0locating\u00a0these people on maps, the project provides a powerful visual counternarrative. Specifically, by depicting North America before and after more than a century of wars, disease, and colonial policy, the maps show the devastating impact on Indigenous populations.\r\n

Sharing a Vision<\/h2>\r\nFrye\u2019s work on the documentary is just part of his mapping journey. He was recently awarded a Heller Fellowship at the University of Colorado\u00a0Colorado\u00a0Springs. The fellowship, cosponsored by the university\u2019s department of geography and environmental studies, has given Frye a platform to share his methods and expand his vision.\r\n\r\nFrye also plans to transform his personal repository of maps into a collaborative resource that other historians, authors, and students can use and contribute to.\r\n\r\n\u201cI started with ArcMap side by side with ArcCatalog to provide previews of the scanned archival maps,\u201d he said. \u201cDuring the COVID-19 shutdown, I learned that the ArcGIS for Personal Use accounts included access to ArcGIS Pro, so I moved my work to ArcGIS Pro. I share everything via ArcGIS Online.\u201d\r\n\r\nFrye's other plans include developing workshops to teach others how to build a historical GIS from the ground up.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m trying to figure out how I describe that process so that somebody else can do it a lot faster, or at least without so many do-overs,\u201d he said.\r\n\r\nFrom a hobby that grew out of a desire to connect with his own past, Frye\u2019s work has blossomed into a contribution to America\u2019s collective memory. His maps provide countless viewers of\u00a0The American Revolution<\/i>\u00a0with a new, more intimate understanding of the nation\u2019s founding. His fellowship promises to empower a new generation of storytellers and historians with the tools to explore their own questions about the past.\r\n\r\nFor Frye, the goal is to encourage deeper and more nuanced engagement with history, moving beyond simplified narratives to appreciate the complex realities our ancestors faced.\r\n\r\n\u201cI want people to get out of the habit of thinking history is something you funnel down to a sound bite,\u201d Frye said. Instead, he explained, \u201cyou should take those sound bites and unpack them and figure out what they really meant.\u201d"}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"\nA Cartographer\u2019s Quest to Map US History | Spring 2026 | ArcUser<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Esri cartographer Charlie Frye\u2019s work on Ken Burns\u2019s The American Revolution was an extension of a passion project that mapped his ancestry.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcuser\/cartographers-quest-to-map-us-history\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Cartographer\u2019s Quest to Map US History\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Esri cartographer Charlie Frye\u2019s work on Ken Burns\u2019s The American 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