BackStory

The following links and documents relate to the BackStory episode “Beyond Numbers: A History of the U.S. Census,” broadcast in December of 2010. You can listen to the entire episode here.

Click here to see our suggested bibliography of Census-related readings.

All Centuries

• The Census Bureau’s history page
• Census Bureau’s Measuring America: The Decennial Census from 1790 to 2000 (PDF) and Overview of Historical Census Issues (PDF)
• Cultural artifacts inspired by the U.S. Census, 1790-2000 (PowerPoint)
• Two videos, a historical overview (PDF), and other writings by census historian Margo Anderson
• The census meets Schoolhouse Rocks in The Amazing Apportionment Machine
• See how the center of our population moves over time (PDF)
• Census history + math
• Interactive census data: Social Explorer, Patchwork Nation, Hard to Count, The Interactive Census Project, National Historical Geographic Information System

18th Century

• Founders debate the census and apportionment in the Federalist Papers (esp. # 54) and Madison’s reports from the 1787 Constitutional Convention
• Congress debates the first census bill, 1790
• Returns of the first census of the United States (PDF)
• Historians discuss the first census and its constitutional grounding (PDF)
• A souvenir pitcher from 1790 Census

19th Century

• For the 1860 political cartoon mentioned on the show, see p. 6 of this article by census historian Margo Anderson (PDF)
• Statistical atlases of the U.S. for 1870, 1880 and 1890
• Francis William Edmond’s 1854 painting, “Taking the Census”
• The curious fate of the 1890 Census
• The Impending Crisis of the South, Hinton Rowan Helper’s economics-based anti-slavery argument, rooted in the 1850 Census results

20th Century & Beyond

• The 1940 Census questionnaire used by BackStory guest Al Marquart
• “The Boy with the U.S. Census,” a 1911 novel chronicling the experiences of a young census enumerator
• Census promotional videos over the decades
• The Brian Lehrer Show‘s Census Project
• Cal Stewart, vaudeville sensation, goofs on the census in character as “Uncle Josh” Weathersby (1919)
• Recording of actor John Kaiser playing the Irish character Michael Casey as census enumerator (1905)
• Census poetry by Langston Hughes and Robert Frost (hear another radio story about Frost’s poem here)
• A report on the environmental implications of the 2000 Census
• Oral histories with former Census Bureau employees
• Census results uncover a hidden history of racial cleansing
• The Census and WWII Japanese internment: USA Today & Scientific American
• 2010 Census Links: Block-level data interactive map; Population and apportionment interactive map; the first round of numbers are in!