31–40 of 40 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not true[1]. Perhaps the "population center of mass" is west of the Mississippi, but that is a different statistic. [1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_it_the_population_west_of_the...
It would be fun to actually compute the center of mass, knowing that people are not uniformly massive.
A beautiful illustration of manifest destiny.
However, the growth of the British Empire was probably faster during this time period.
I'm probably missing something, but the points c. 1850 seem way too south for me. The Confederates had around half of of the population of the Union ( http://www.mrnussbaum.com/civil_war/unionconfederacy.htm ) and yet the population center is just south from the Mason-Dixon line (but north of the initial front). Was the population concentrated around the border between North and South? The West didn't matter - Califo…
Settlement in the west skewed farther south than north during that period. Minnesota and Wisconsin were very sparsely populated when they were federal territories. To this day, most of the population concentration of Minnesota is almost four degrees of latitude from Minnesota's northern border.
For center of population, as for center of mass, position matters. The farther you are from the center of population, the greater your weight. One Floridian might contribute the same southward pull as ten Virginians.
The bottom line is that America was still an agricultural nation in 1850. The population of the northern states was biased towards the south, where farming was more productive. Meanwhile, the Deep South had a large slave population, because that was where the cotton grew.
Thus, Texas and Louisiana had far more people than Minnesota Territory. Mississippi had more people than Wisconsin. Alabama had more people than Michigan. And Georgia had more people than ... well, Ontario is not part of the United States.
Oh sure, there were a lot of people in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. But these states were just too far south to exert much of a northward pull.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Settlement in the west skewed farther south than north during that period. Minnesota and Wisconsin were very sparsely populated when they were federal territories. To this day, most of the population concentration of Minnesota is almost four degrees of latitude from Minnesota's northern border.
Exactly. For center of population, as for center of mass, position matters. The farther you are from the center of population, the greater your weight. One Floridian might contribute the same southward pull as ten Virginians. The bottom line is that America was still an agricultural nation in 1850. The population of the northern states was biased towards the south, where farming was more productive. Meanwhile, the De…
This doesn't seem to take into account the non-European population^1...? I guess that's fine if you state it -- just people the census was counting (not even all white people in US territories all the time). So this annoyingly helps sustain the myth that North America was an unpopulated forest until being 'settled' by 'settlers'. 1 ( http://www.census.gov/history/www/genealogy/decennial_census... ): "Prior to 1900, f…
So this annoyingly helps sustain the myth that North America was an unpopulated forest until being 'settled' by 'settlers'. Who believes in this myth?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another notable result of the 1980 census was that it was the first one where the majority of Americans lived west of the Mississippi River.
Distance, as well as population, is a factor in the mean center of population. Even today there isn't close to a majority of the population living west of the Mississippi.
