History major Steven Cowley '16 has published his research on 17th-century regicide fugitives in the UNH Inquiry Journal. A position as a research assistant sparked an interest in the seventeenth century and learning complex mapmaking skills through Geographic Information Science. "It’s easy to dismiss the value and complexity of the past if we assume that our technological achievements today mean that we have it figured out," Cowley told the Journal. He came to realize that, "I will never know how much I don’t know, and consequently what might seem a simple task may in fact be far more complicated than anticipated." Cowley is from Southampton, Massachusetts. His faculty mentor for his research was history professor Cynthia Van Zandt.
Research Abstract
by Steven Cowley
In mid-seventeenth century two of the judges who condemned King Charles I of England to death became regicide fugitives when his son came to the throne as Charles II. The two men fled to New England and eluded their Royalist pursuers for twenty years. I am attempting to track their travels and hideouts through standard historical research and, more recently, the use of Geographic Information Science (GIS), a form of digital mapping technology which organizes information in a geographical format by adding spatial coordinates to existing data to form a geodatabase. This article describes the application of GIS to test an eighteenth-century historian’s description of the regicides’ movements in Connecticut during the spring and summer of 1661.
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Written By:
Susan Dumais '88 '02G | College of Liberal Arts
