2024—present
RESEARCH
I make maps during both the research and writing phases of my dissertation work on the People’s Blockade. These maps combine historical data culled from USGS maps, departments of transportation and other state agencies, and historic aerial photography with contemporary elevation data. In some places, I include anecdotal information from blockaders I’ve interviewed—for example, the location of the campground from which participants mounted blockades near Naval Support Base Bangor in Washington State. In other places, I incorporate archival information like blockaders’ hand-drawn diagrams of blockade sites or written accounts of their actions.
Each map requires a slightly different workflow, but they all begin with ArcGIS, or sometimes Google Earth, and finished in Adobe Illustrator.
These images represent works in progress—please do not distribute them without asking me first
Monmouth County, New Jersey, circa April 1972. Site of the first blockade actions.
Drawn by Ben Barsotti Scott from historic maps from the Monmouth County Planning Board (1971), New Jersey Department of Transportation (1972) and United States Geological Survey (1964, 1969) and contemporary data from the New Jersey Office of GIS (2025) and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (2026).
The longest running iteration of the People’s Blockade happened near Naval Support Base Bangor, in Washington State. The diagram below situates the Bangor base, Hood Canal, and blockaders’ campsite in the regional context of the Puget Sound and Kitsap and Olympic Peninsulas. Organized independent of the AFSC or any other national organization, these blockades confronted six commercial freighters carrying munitions from the Bangor base to the US war in Southeast Asia and one US Navy support ship, the USS Sacramento. Blockaders established a campsite at the base of the Hood Canal Bridge, the retractable bridge through which ships passed as they departed for the Pacific. Blockaders rotated lookout duty, alerting the group when they saw ships sitting low in the water at the Bangor base, evidence of their nearing full of cargo.
Drawn by Ben Barsotti Scott from historic maps from the United States Geological Survey (1962) and contemporary data from the United States Geological Survey (2026), Washington State Department of Transportation (2022) and King County (2026).
This diagram tracks the camera movements in two passages of an experimental film compiled by Bangor blockader Jack Nilles, a University of Washington physicist. Nilles documented the group’s actions and internal dynamics with a handheld Super-8 camera. In 1973, he compiled his footage into an experimental film, now digitized and accessible here. Rather than orient the viewer immediately with a full shot of the canal and its surrounding terrain, Nilles intersperses short pans across the canal with his own footage of blockades, moving and still images of the campground, and still photographs of the munitions transported by the Navy and its contractors. This diagram shows Nilles’s tight framing of those pans, which center the camera on the Hood Canal and admitting only the most critical elements of its shorelines: the base, the bridge, and the campsite (visible at minute 2:07—just south of Termination Point). I understand this fragmented and hyperlocal attention to the Hood Canal as evidence that Nilles organized his film primarily for a local audience. The film situates the US war in Southeast Asia insistently at one of its most important points of departure and suggests that military production has been installed as a permanent fixture of the homefront economy and domestic landscapes of Western Washington. My dissertation situates this local and insistently material approach to US warfare within a larger ethics of the local I identify in the People’s Blockade and its related materials.
This diagram tracks the camera movements in two passages of an experimental film compiled by Bangor blockader Jack Nilles, a University of Washington physicist. Nilles documented the group’s actions and internal dynamics with a handheld Super-8 camera. In 1973, he compiled his footage into an experimental film, now digitized and accessible here. Rather than orient the viewer immediately with a full shot of the canal and its surrounding terrain, Nilles intersperses short pans across the canal with his own footage of blockades, moving and still images of the campground, and still photographs of the munitions transported by the Navy and its contractors. This diagram shows Nilles’s tight framing of those pans, which center the camera on the Hood Canal and admitting only the most critical elements of its shorelines: the base, the bridge, and the campsite (visible at minute 2:07—just south of Termination Point). I understand this fragmented and hyperlocal attention to the Hood Canal as evidence that Nilles organized his film primarily for a local audience. The film situates the US war in Southeast Asia insistently at one of its most important points of departure and suggests that military production has been installed as a permanent fixture of the homefront economy and domestic landscapes of Western Washington. My dissertation situates this local and insistently material approach to US warfare within a larger ethics of the local I identify in the People’s Blockade and its related materials.
Locator map and detail map for the water and rail blockades near Bangor, Kitsap County, Washington. by Ben Barsotti Scott from historic maps from the United States Geological Survey (1962) and contemporary data from the United States Geological Survey (2026), Washington State Department of Transportation (2022) and King County (2026).
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