Census and Social Structure


Book Description

First Published in 1978. The census of population is a key source for any study of nineteenth-century England. In association with parish registers and, from 1837, the civil registers recording births, deaths and marriages, population numbers and trends, the essential dynamic basis of population analysis, may be studied. For the present day student they are an incomparable storehouse of data for the historian and social scientist; indeed in almost any study of the nineteenth century we must sooner or later turn to the census for information.




Census and Social Structure


Book Description

First Published in 1978. The census of population is a key source for any study of nineteenth-century England. In association with parish registers and, from 1837, the civil registers recording births, deaths and marriages, population numbers and trends, the essential dynamic basis of population analysis, may be studied. For the present day student they are an incomparable storehouse of data for the historian and social scientist; indeed in almost any study of the nineteenth century we must sooner or later turn to the census for information.




Census 2020


Book Description

The decennial Census is the US Government's largest statistical undertaking, and it costs billions of dollars in planning, execution, and analysis. From a statistical viewpoint, it is critical because it is the only database that maps every inhabitant into a geographic location. By constitutional mandate, census data are the basis for reapportioning the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. The states use census data to redistrict their state legislatures and often to redraw boundaries for local elections. Census data inform the distribution of over $1.5 trillion in federal funding during the decade. This book details the fundamentals and significance of the 2020 Census for the non-specialist reader. It covers why the Census is the only statistical activity required by the US Constitution, the challenges of working towards an accurate and complete count, and what political ramifications flow from this process. Concise, timely, and comprehensible, this book provides helpful real-life examples while also offering an overview of the entwined statistical and political issues that surround the Census.




Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia


Book Description

Historians of the nineteenth-century rural South have long distinguished the antebellum agricultural system of plantations and gang-style slave labor from the family tenancy system that is thought to have developed only after the Civil War. In Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia, however, Frederick Bode and Donald Ginter demonstrate a far greater consistency in economic traditions than many historians have recognized. Through a detailed critical interpretation of the 1860 federal census, Bode and Ginter show that extensive family tenancy, and probably sharecropping, were not the creations of Emancipation and Reconstruction, but instead were widely present before the upheaval of the Civil War. Bode and Ginter's analysis of the 1860 census reveals a complex rural economy of plantation owners, slaves, and yeoman and tenant farmers. Though census agents lacked a category for reporting tenant farmers and therefore often devised their own methods for recording land tenure, Bode and Ginter examine the agricultural and population schedules to reveal coherent regional patterns of tenancy. In older areas of greater cotton cultivation, tenant farmers were relatively scarce; in areas of recently cleared land within the cotton belt, and even more strikingly in the upcountry, tenant farming was pervasive. Bode and Ginter's findings not only demonstrate the presence of antebellum tenant farmers and sharecroppers but also dispel the current conception of yeoman farmers reduced to tenancy on their return from the battlefields of the Civil War. They show, finally, how new regional patterns of tenancy followed the demise of slavery. Probing the shifting relations between races and social classes in the nineteenth-century rural South, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia revises the dominant scholarly view of the region's social and economic history by carefully measuring the true extent of the changes brought by the Civil War.




The American Census


Book Description

This book is the first social history of the census from its origins to the present and has become the standard history of the population census in the United States. The second edition has been updated to trace census developments since 1980, including the undercount controversies, the arrival of the American Community Survey, and innovations of the digital age. Margo J. Anderson’s scholarly text effectively bridges the fields of history and public policy, demonstrating how the census both reflects the country’s extraordinary demographic character and constitutes an influential tool for policy making. Her book is essential reading for all those who use census data, historical or current, in their studies or work.




Census and Identity


Book Description

Examines how states pigeon-hole people within categories of race, ethnicity and language.




Social Stratification in the United States


Book Description

The must-have new edition of the classic book-and-poster set, based on the most recent census data, depicting who owns what, who makes how much, who works where, and who lives with whom Generations of teachers, union organizers, and activists have relied on this book-and-poster set, originally published in 1979, to illustrate the magnitude of America’s growing economic divide. Today, income inequality is at an all-time high, and this completely updated eighth edition, drawn from the 2020 Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census, brings together fresh primary data to provide a clear picture of the U.S. social structure and the considerable demographic and economic changes of the past four decades. Folded inside the companion booklet, the removable poster depicts color-coded figures that make it possible to compare social groups at a glance and to understand how income distribution relates to race, sex, education, and occupation. With charts and careful explanations, the booklet contextualizes and expands on the poster. Rose’s graphic depiction of the census data makes clear at a glance complex concepts, including the way recent economic growth has been skewed toward the wealthiest households, that a gender gap persists in the workplace, and that, on average, African Americans and Latinos still earn far less than other Americans. This new edition of a uniquely visual depiction of American society will be an essential resource and a touchstone for the current debates over education, inequality, poverty, and jobs in our country.




Counting Americans


Book Description

How could the same person be classified by the US census as black in 1900, mulatto in 1910, and white in 1920? The history of categories used by the US census reflects a country whose identity and self-understanding--particularly its social construction of race--is closely tied to the continuous polling on the composition of its population. By tracing the evolution of the categories the United States used to count and classify its population from 1790 to 1940, Paul Schor shows that, far from being simply a reflection of society or a mere instrument of power, censuses are actually complex negotiations between the state, experts, and the population itself. The census is not an administrative or scientific act, but a political one. Counting Americans is a social history exploring the political stakes that pitted various interests and groups of people against each other as population categories were constantly redefined. Utilizing new archival material from the Census Bureau, this study pays needed attention to the long arc of contested changes in race and census-making. It traces changes in how race mattered in the United States during the era of legal slavery, through its fraught end, and then during (and past) the period of Jim Crow laws, which set different ethnic groups in conflict. And it shows how those developing policies also provided a template for classifying Asian groups and white ethnic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe--and how they continue to influence the newly complicated racial imaginings informing censuses in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Focusing in detail on slaves and their descendants, on racialized groups and on immigrants, and on the troubled imposition of U.S. racial categories upon the populations of newly acquired territories, Counting Americans demonstrates that census-taking in the United States has been at its core a political undertaking shaped by racial ideologies that reflect its violent history of colonization, enslavement, segregation and discrimination.




Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2012


Book Description

The Statistical Abstract of the United States, published since 1878, is the standard summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. It is designed to serve as a convenient volume for statistical reference and as a guide to other statistical publications and sources. The latter function is served by the introductory text to each section, the source note appearing below each table, and Appendix I, which comprises the Guide to Sources of Statistics, the Guide to State Statistical Abstracts, and the Guide to Foreign Statistical Abstracts.




The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure


Book Description

How do you draw a map of 100,000 places, of more than a million flows of people, of changes over time and space, of different kinds of spaces, surfaces and volumes, from human travel time to landscapes of hopes, fears, migration, manufacturing and mortality? How do you turn the millions of numbers concerning some of the most important moments of our lives into images that allow us to appreciate the aggregate while still remembering the detail? The visualization of spatial social structure means, literally, making visible the geographical patterns to the way our lives have come to be socially organised, seeing the geography in society. To a statistical readership visualization implies using data. More widely defined it implies freeing our imaginations. The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure introduces the reader to new ways of thinking about how to look at social statistics, particularly those about people in places. The author presents a unique combination of statistical focus and understanding of social structures and innovations in visualization, describing the rationale for, and development of, a new way of visualizing information in geographical research. These methods are illustrated through extensive full colour graphics; revealing mistakes, techniques and discoveries which present a picture of a changing political and social geography. More complex aspects on the surface of social landscapes are revealed with sculptured symbols allowing us to see the relationships between the wood and the trees of social structure. Today's software can be so flexible that these techniques can now be emulated without coding. This book centres on a particular place and time; 1980s Britain, and a particular set of records; routine social statistics. A great deal of information about the 80s' social geography of Britain is contained within databases such as the population censuses, surveys and administrative data. Following the release of the 2011 census, now is a good time to look back at the past to introduce many new visualization techniques that could be used by future researchers.