Illinois
Illinois is a state in the Midwestern and Great Lakes region of the United States. It has the fifth largest gross domestic product, the sixth largest population, the 25th largest land area of all U. S. states. Illinois is noted as a microcosm of the entire United States. With Chicago in northeastern Illinois, small industrial cities and immense agricultural productivity in the north and center of the state, natural resources such as coal and petroleum in the south, Illinois has a diverse economic base, is a major transportation hub. Chicagoland, Chicago's metropolitan area, encompasses over 65% of the state's population; the Port of Chicago connects the state to international ports via two main routes: from the Great Lakes, via the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, via the Illinois Waterway to the Illinois River. The Mississippi River, the Ohio River, the Wabash River form parts of the boundaries of Illinois. For decades, Chicago's O'Hare International Airport has been ranked as one of the world's busiest airports.
Illinois has long had a reputation as a bellwether both in social and cultural terms and, through the 1980s, in politics. The capital of Illinois is Springfield, located in the central part of the state. Although today's Illinois' largest population center is in its northeast, the state's European population grew first in the west as the French settled the vast Mississippi of the Illinois Country of New France. Following the American Revolutionary War, American settlers began arriving from Kentucky in the 1780s via the Ohio River, the population grew from south to north. In 1818, Illinois achieved statehood. Following increased commercial activity in the Great Lakes after the construction of the Erie Canal, Chicago was founded in the 1830s on the banks of the Chicago River at one of the few natural harbors on the southern section of Lake Michigan. John Deere's invention of the self-scouring steel plow turned Illinois's rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmland, attracting immigrant farmers from Germany and Sweden.
The Illinois and Michigan Canal made transportation between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River valley faster and cheaper, new railroads carried immigrants to new homes in the country's west and shipped commodity crops to the nation's east. The state became a transportation hub for the nation. By 1900, the growth of industrial jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Illinois was an important manufacturing center during both world wars; the Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans in the state, including Chicago, who founded the city's famous jazz and blues cultures. Chicago, the center of the Chicago Metropolitan Area, is now recognized as a global alpha-level city. Three U. S. presidents have been elected while living in Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Barack Obama. Additionally, Ronald Reagan, whose political career was based in California, was born and raised in the state.
Today, Illinois honors Lincoln with its official state slogan Land of Lincoln, displayed on its license plates since 1954. The state is the site of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and the future home of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. "Illinois" is the modern spelling for the early French Catholic missionaries and explorers' name for the Illinois Native Americans, a name, spelled in many different ways in the early records. American scholars thought the name "Illinois" meant "man" or "men" in the Miami-Illinois language, with the original iliniwek transformed via French into Illinois; this etymology is not supported by the Illinois language, as the word for "man" is ireniwa, plural of "man" is ireniwaki. The name Illiniwek has been said to mean "tribe of superior men", a false etymology; the name "Illinois" derives from the Miami-Illinois verb irenwe·wa - "he speaks the regular way". This was taken into the Ojibwe language in the Ottawa dialect, modified into ilinwe·.
The French borrowed these forms, changing the /we/ ending to spell it as -ois, a transliteration for its pronunciation in French of that time. The current spelling form, began to appear in the early 1670s, when French colonists had settled in the western area; the Illinois's name for themselves, as attested in all three of the French missionary-period dictionaries of Illinois, was Inoka, of unknown meaning and unrelated to the other terms. American Indians of successive cultures lived along the waterways of the Illinois area for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans; the Koster Site demonstrates 7,000 years of continuous habitation. Cahokia, the largest regional chiefdom and urban center of the Pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, was located near present-day Collinsville, Illinois, they built an urban complex of more than 100 platform and burial mounds, a 50-acre plaza larger than 35 football fields, a woodhenge of sacred cedar, all in a planned design expressing the culture's cosmology.
Monks Mound, the center of the site, is the largest Pre-Columbian structure north of the Valley of Mexico. It is 100 feet high, 951 feet long, 836 feet wide, covers 13.8 acres. It contains about 814,000 cubic yards of earth, it was topped by a structure thought to have measured about 105 feet in length and 48 feet in width, covered an area 5,000 square feet, been as much as 50 feet high, making its peak 150 feet above the level of the pl
Germans
Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe, who share a common German ancestry and history. German is the shared mother tongue of a substantial majority of ethnic Germans; the English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Since the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, German society has been characterized by a Catholic-Protestant divide. Of 100 million native speakers of German in the world 80 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry in the United States, Argentina, South Africa, the post-Soviet states, France, each accounting for at least 1 million. Thus, the total number of Germans lies somewhere between 100 and more than 150 million, depending on the criteria applied. Today, people from countries with German-speaking majorities most subscribe to their own national identities and may or may not self-identify as ethnically German.
The German term Deutsche originates from the Old High German word diutisc, referring to the Germanic "language of the people". It is not clear how if at all, the word was used as an ethnonym in Old High German. Used as a noun, ein diutscher in the sense of "a German" emerges in Middle High German, attested from the second half of the 12th century; the Old French term alemans is taken from the name of the Alamanni. It was loaned into Middle English as almains in the early 14th century; the word Dutch is attested in English from the 14th century, denoting continental West Germanic dialects and their speakers. While in most Romance languages the Germans have been named from the Alamanni, the Old Norse and Estonian names for the Germans were taken from that of the Saxons. In Slavic languages, the Germans were given the name of němьci with a meaning "foreigner, one who does not speak "; the English term Germans is only attested from the mid-16th century, based on the classical Latin term Germani used by Julius Caesar and Tacitus.
It replaced Dutch and Almains, the latter becoming obsolete by the early 18th century. The Germans are a Germanic people. Part of the Holy Roman Empire, around 300 independent German states emerged during its decline after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ending the Thirty Years War; these states formed into modern Germany in the 19th century. The concept of a German ethnicity is linked to Germanic tribes of antiquity in central Europe; the early Germans originated on the North German Plain as well as southern Scandinavia. By the 2nd century BC, the number of Germans was increasing and they began expanding into eastern Europe and southward into Celtic territory. During antiquity these Germanic tribes remained separate from each other and did not have writing systems at that time. In the European Iron Age the area, now Germany was divided into the La Tène horizon in Southern Germany and the Jastorf culture in Northern Germany. By 55 BC, the Germans had reached the Danube river and had either assimilated or otherwise driven out the Celts who had lived there, had spread west into what is now Belgium and France.
Conflict between the Germanic tribes and the forces of Rome under Julius Caesar forced major Germanic tribes to retreat to the east bank of the Rhine. Roman emperor Augustus in 12 BC ordered the conquest of the Germans, but the catastrophic Roman defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest resulted in the Roman Empire abandoning its plans to conquer Germania. Germanic peoples in Roman territory were culturally Romanized, although much of Germania remained free of direct Roman rule, Rome influenced the development of German society the adoption of Christianity by the Germans who obtained it from the Romans. In Roman-held territories with Germanic populations, the Germanic and Roman peoples intermarried, Roman and Christian traditions intermingled; the adoption of Christianity would become a major influence in the development of a common German identity. The first major public figure to speak of a German people in general, was the Roman figure Tacitus in his work Germania around 100 AD; however an actual united German identity and ethnicity did not exist and it would take centuries of development of German culture until the concept of a German ethnicity began to become a popular identity.
The Germanic peoples during the Migrations Period came into contact with other peoples. The Limes Germanicus was breached in AD 260. Migrating Germanic tribes commingled with the local Gallo-Roman populations in what is now Swabia and Bavaria; the arrival of the Huns in Europe resulted in Hun conquest of large parts of Eastern Europe, the Huns were allies of the Roman Empire who fought against Germanic tribes, but the Huns cooperated with the Germanic tribe of the Ostrogoths, large numbers of Germans lived within the lands of the Hunnic Empire of
French and Indian War
The French and Indian War pitted the colonies of British America against those of New France, each side supported by military units from the parent country and by American Indian allies. At the start of the war, the French colonies had a population of 60,000 settlers, compared with 2 million in the British colonies; the outnumbered French depended on the Indians. The European nations declared a wider war upon one another overseas in 1756, two years into the French and Indian war, some view the French and Indian War as being the American theater of the worldwide Seven Years' War of 1756–63; the name French and Indian War is used in the United States, referring to the two enemies of the British colonists, while European historians use the term Seven Years' War, as do English-speaking Canadians. French Canadians call it the Fourth Intercolonial War; the British colonists were supported at various times by the Iroquois and Cherokee tribes, the French colonists were supported by Wabanaki Confederacy member tribes Abenaki and Mi'kmaq, the Algonquin, Ojibwa, Ottawa and Wyandot tribes.
Fighting took place along the frontiers between New France and the British colonies, from the Province of Virginia in the south to Newfoundland in the north. It began with a dispute over control of the confluence of the Allegheny River and Monongahela River called the Forks of the Ohio, the site of the French Fort Duquesne in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the dispute erupted into violence in the Battle of Jumonville Glen in May 1754, during which Virginia militiamen under the command of 22-year-old George Washington ambushed a French patrol. In 1755, six colonial governors met with General Edward Braddock, the newly arrived British Army commander, planned a four-way attack on the French. None succeeded, the main effort by Braddock proved a disaster. British operations failed in the frontier areas of the Province of Pennsylvania and the Province of New York during 1755–57 due to a combination of poor management, internal divisions, effective Canadian scouts, French regular forces, Indian warrior allies.
In 1755, the British captured Fort Beauséjour on the border separating Nova Scotia from Acadia, they ordered the expulsion of the Acadians soon afterwards. Orders for the deportation were given by Commander-in-Chief William Shirley without direction from Great Britain; the Acadians were expelled, both those captured in arms and those who had sworn the loyalty oath to the King. Indians were driven off the land to make way for settlers from New England; the British colonial government fell in the region of Nova Scotia after several disastrous campaigns in 1757, including a failed expedition against Louisbourg and the Siege of Fort William Henry. William Pitt came to power and increased British military resources in the colonies at a time when France was unwilling to risk large convoys to aid the limited forces that they had in New France, preferring to concentrate their forces against Prussia and its allies who were now engaged in the Seven Years' War in Europe. Between 1758 and 1760, the British military launched a campaign to capture French Canada.
They succeeded in capturing territory in surrounding colonies and the city of Quebec. The British lost the Battle of Sainte-Foy west of Quebec, but the French ceded Canada in accordance with the Treaty of Paris. France ceded its territory east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, as well as French Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to its ally Spain in compensation for Spain's loss to Britain of Spanish Florida. France's colonial presence north of the Caribbean was reduced to the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, confirming Great Britain's position as the dominant colonial power in America. In British America, wars were named after the sitting British monarch, such as King William's War or Queen Anne's War. There had been a King George's War in the 1740s during the reign of King George II, so British colonists named this conflict after their opponents, it became known as the French and Indian War; this continues as the standard name for the war in the United States, although Indians fought on both sides of the conflict.
It led into the Seven Years' War overseas, a much larger conflict between France and Great Britain that did not involve the American colonies. Less used names for the war include the Fourth Intercolonial War and the Great War for the Empire. In Europe, the French and Indian War is conflated into the Seven Years' War and not given a separate name. "Seven Years" refers to events in Europe, from the official declaration of war in 1756—two years after the French and Indian War had started—to the signing of the peace treaty in 1763. The French and Indian War in America, by contrast, was concluded in six years from the Battle of Jumonville Glen in 1754 to the capture of Montreal in 1760. Canadians conflate both the American conflicts into the Seven Years' War. French Canadi
Kincaid Mounds State Historic Site
The Kincaid Mounds Historic Site c. 1050–1400 CE, is the site of a city from the prehistoric Mississippian culture. One of the largest settlements of the Mississippian culture, it was located at the southern tip of present-day U. S. state of Illinois. Kincaid Mounds has been notable for both its significant role in native North American prehistory and for the central role the site has played in the development of modern archaeological techniques; the site had at least 11 substructure platform mounds. Artifacts from the settlement link its major habitation and the construction of the mounds to the Mississippian period, but it was occupied earlier during the Woodland period; the site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964 for its significance as a major Native American mound center and prehistoric trading post along the Ohio River. Adjacent to the Ohio River, the site straddles the modern-day counties of Massac County and Pope County in deep southern Illinois, part of an area colloquially known as Little Egypt.
The Kincaid site was the subject of major excavations by the University of Chicago from 1934–1941, during which a number of anthropologists and archaeologists who had notable careers were trained under the direction of Fay-Cooper Cole. Exploration with new technology and excavations by teams from Southern Illinois University since 2003 have yielded significant new data; the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency owns and operates an area including several mounds in Massac County. This includes the majority of the estimated 141-acre area contained within a wooden palisade, as well as an undefined area of additional occupation to the west; the Pope County portion is owned. When the University of Chicago excavated Kincaid in the 1930s and 1940s, nine mounds were identified on the site's Massac County portion. In 2003, a tenth mound was identified. Chicago archaeologists excavated around this mound, but they chose to exclude it from their list of possible mounds due to a lack of clarity about its identity.
Identification of this portion of the site as an artificial earthwork came after Southern Illinois University returned to the site in 2003 to re-excavate the hills that were thought to be possible mounds. The Chicago excavators in the 1930s documented a prehistory in the Kincaid area stretching back thousands of years, into what is now known as the Archaic Period; the Chicago crew recognized this period as the Faulkner Component, described as a pre-pottery culture. Except for the lack of pottery, it was otherwise like the subsequent cultures of the Early Woodland, such as the Adena culture. Teams documented more intensive occupation in the ensuing Early Woodland and Middle Woodland periods, it was similar to the contemporaneous Adena and Hopewell cultures that began during this time period throughout eastern North America. This involved a more sedentary lifestyle, semi-agricultural culture characterized by the use of limestone-tempered ceramics and the presence of semi-permanent housing; the extensive occupation is chronologically classified as the Baumer phase.
The Baumer phase occupants of Kincaid used no Havana Hopewell culture motifs when decorating their pottery as did other Crab Orchard peoples but used cord and fabric marking. They preferred more limestone and grog tempering in their clay paste. Excavations prior to the construction of an informational kiosk and viewing platform in 2003 revealed six Baumer phase pit features dating to 250 BCE to 1 CE. One of the pits contained the intentionally buried remains of a small domestic dog, a rare find for the area. Occupation continued into the Late Woodland period; this period is known as the Lewis culture. The most notable occupation at Kincaid, however, is the Mississippian culture, which developed from the local Lewis community about 1050 CE. Kincaid was a near neighbor of Cahokia, only 140 miles away, is thought to have been influenced by its development as the major site of Mississippian culture; the people built at least 19 earthwork mounds during this period the characteristic Mississippian platform mounds.
Since 2003 teams from Southern Illinois University have been conducting more intensive research. A large central plaza, constructed by filling and leveling, was built at the center of the community. Although none of Kincaids earthworks rivals the size of Monks Mound at Cahokia, the largest is big by Mississippian standards and ranks 12th in size amongst all known Mississippian mounds; the site itself ranks 5th in size in number of mounds constructed at the site. The remaining platform mounds' heights range from 8 feet to 30 feet. Large buildings atop the main mounds seemed to indicate temples or council houses. Carved figurines in coal and fluorite seemed to characterize the local iconography, with images showing connections to the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Trade for chert resources appeared to extend into Missouri and other parts of Illinois. Several examples of Mill Creek chert, which came from quarries near by, were found at the site. Mississippian culture pottery painted with a negative resist are characteristic of the site.
In the 1930s, the Chicago team excavated a major burial mound, Pope Mound 2, yielding further evidence for hierarchical social structures and Kincaid's status as a chiefdom. The mound contained a number of stone bo
France
France the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean, it is bordered by Belgium and Germany to the northeast and Italy to the east, Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic and Indian oceans; the country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres and a total population of 67.3 million. France, a sovereign state, is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Other major urban areas include Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nice. During the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by a Celtic people. Rome annexed the area in 51 BC, holding it until the arrival of Germanic Franks in 476, who formed the Kingdom of Francia.
The Treaty of Verdun of 843 partitioned Francia into Middle Francia and West Francia. West Francia which became the Kingdom of France in 987 emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages following its victory in the Hundred Years' War. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a global colonial empire was established, which by the 20th century would become the second largest in the world; the 16th century was dominated by religious civil wars between Protestants. France became Europe's dominant cultural and military power in the 17th century under Louis XIV. In the late 18th century, the French Revolution overthrew the absolute monarchy, established one of modern history's earliest republics, saw the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which expresses the nation's ideals to this day. In the 19th century, Napoleon established the First French Empire, his subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a tumultuous succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870.
France was a major participant in World War I, from which it emerged victorious, was one of the Allies in World War II, but came under occupation by the Axis powers in 1940. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and dissolved in the course of the Algerian War; the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, remains today. Algeria and nearly all the other colonies became independent in the 1960s and retained close economic and military connections with France. France has long been a global centre of art and philosophy, it hosts the world's fourth-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and is the leading tourist destination, receiving around 83 million foreign visitors annually. France is a developed country with the world's sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP, tenth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of aggregate household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, human development.
France is considered a great power in global affairs, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a leading member state of the European Union and the Eurozone, a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, La Francophonie. Applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name "France" comes from the Latin "Francia", or "country of the Franks". Modern France is still named today "Francia" in Italian and Spanish, "Frankreich" in German and "Frankrijk" in Dutch, all of which have more or less the same historical meaning. There are various theories as to the origin of the name Frank. Following the precedents of Edward Gibbon and Jacob Grimm, the name of the Franks has been linked with the word frank in English, it has been suggested that the meaning of "free" was adopted because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks were free of taxation.
Another theory is that it is derived from the Proto-Germanic word frankon, which translates as javelin or lance as the throwing axe of the Franks was known as a francisca. However, it has been determined that these weapons were named because of their use by the Franks, not the other way around; the oldest traces of human life in what is now France date from 1.8 million years ago. Over the ensuing millennia, Humans were confronted by a harsh and variable climate, marked by several glacial eras. Early hominids led a nomadic hunter-gatherer life. France has a large number of decorated caves from the upper Palaeolithic era, including one of the most famous and best preserved, Lascaux. At the end of the last glacial period, the climate became milder. After strong demographic and agricultural development between the 4th and 3rd millennia, metallurgy appeared at the end of the 3rd millennium working gold and bronze, iron. France has numerous megalithic sites from the Neolithic period, including the exceptiona
National Historic Landmark
A National Historic Landmark is a building, object, site, or structure, recognized by the United States government for its outstanding historical significance. Of over 90,000 places listed on the country's National Register of Historic Places, only some 2,500 are recognized as National Historic Landmarks. A National Historic Landmark District may include contributing properties that are buildings, sites or objects, it may include non-contributing properties. Contributing properties may or may not be separately listed. Prior to 1935, efforts to preserve cultural heritage of national importance were made by piecemeal efforts of the United States Congress. In 1935, Congress passed the Historic Sites Act, which authorized the Interior Secretary authority to formally record and organize historic properties, to designate properties as having "national historical significance", gave the National Park Service authority to administer significant federally owned properties. Over the following decades, surveys such as the Historic American Buildings Survey amassed information about culturally and architecturally significant properties in a program known as the Historic Sites Survey.
Most of the designations made under this legislation became National Historic Sites, although the first designation, made December 20, 1935, was for a National Memorial, the Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, Missouri; the first National Historic Site designation was made for the Salem Maritime National Historic Site on March 17, 1938. In 1960, the National Park Service took on the administration of the survey data gathered under this legislation, the National Historic Landmark program began to take more formal shape; when the National Register of Historic Places was established in 1966, the National Historic Landmark program was encompassed within it, rules and procedures for inclusion and designation were formalized. Because listings triggered local preservation laws, legislation in 1980 amended the listing procedures to require owner agreement to the designations. On October 9, 1960, 92 properties were announced as designated NHLs by Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton; the first of these was a political nomination: the Sergeant Floyd Monument in Sioux City, Iowa was designated on June 30 of that year, but for various reasons, the public announcement of the first several NHLs was delayed.
NHLs are designated by the United States Secretary of the Interior because they are: Sites where events of national historical significance occurred. More than 2,500 NHLs have been designated. Most, but not all, are in the United States. There are the District of Columbia. Three states account for nearly 25 percent of the nation's NHLs. Three cities within these states all separately have more NHLs than 40 of the 50 states. In fact, New York City alone has more NHLs than all but five states: Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York. There are 74 NHLs in the District of Columbia; some NHLs are in U. S. commonwealths and territories, associated states, foreign states. There are 15 in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, other U. S. territories. S.-associated states such as Micronesia. Over 100 ships or shipwrecks have been designated as NHLs. About half of the National Historic Landmarks are owned; the National Historic Landmarks Program relies on suggestions for new designations from the National Park Service, which assists in maintaining the landmarks.
A friends' group of owners and managers, the National Historic Landmark Stewards Association, works to preserve and promote National Historic Landmarks. If not listed on the National Register of Historic Places, an NHL is automatically added to the Register upon designation. About three percent of Register listings are NHLs. American Water Landmark List of U. S. National Historic Landmarks by state List of churches that are National Historic Landmarks in the United States Listed building, a similar designation in the UK National Historic Sites and Persons, similar designations in Canada National Natural Landmark United States Memorials United States National Register of Historic Places listings Official National Historic Landmarks Program website A History of the NHL Program List of National Historic Landmarks National Historic Landmarks: Archaeological Properties Historical Landmarks - United States Lighthouses
1890 United States Census
The Eleventh United States Census was taken beginning June 2, 1890. It determined the resident population of the United States to be 62,979,766—an increase of 25.5 percent over the 50,189,209 persons enumerated during the 1880 census. The data was tabulated by machine for the first time; the data reported that the distribution of the population had resulted in the disappearance of the American frontier. Most of the 1890 census materials were destroyed in a 1921 fire and fragments of the US census population schedule exist only for the states of Alabama, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, the District of Columbia; this was the first census in which a majority of states recorded populations of over one million, as well as the first in which multiple cities – New York as of 1880, Philadelphia – recorded populations of over one million. The census saw Chicago rank as the nation's second-most populous city, a position it would hold until 1990, in which Los Angeles would supplant it.
The 1890 census collected the following information: The 1890 census was the first to be compiled using methods invented by Herman Hollerith and was overseen by Superintendents Robert P. Porter and Carroll D. Wright. Data was entered on a machine readable medium, punched cards, tabulated by machine; the net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the number of data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the volume of scheduled publications, the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators, was to reduce the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census. The total population of 62,947,714, the family, or rough, was announced after only six weeks of processing; the public reaction to this tabulation was disbelief, as it was believed that the "right answer" was at least 75,000,000. The United States census of 1890 showed a total of 248,253 Native Americans living in the United States, down from 400,764 Native Americans identified in the census of 1850.
The 1890 census announced that the frontier region of the United States no longer existed, that the Census Bureau would no longer track the westward migration of the U. S. population. Up to and including the 1880 census, the country had a frontier of settlement. By 1890, isolated bodies of settlement had broken into the unsettled area to the extent that there was hardly a frontier line; this prompted Frederick Jackson Turner to develop his Frontier Thesis. The original data for the 1890 Census is no longer available. All the population schedules were damaged in a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, D. C. in 1921. Some 25 % of the materials were presumed another 50 % damaged by smoke and water; the damage to the records led to an outcry for a permanent National Archives. In December 1932, following standard federal record-keeping procedures, the Chief Clerk of the Bureau of the Census sent the Librarian of Congress a list of papers to be destroyed, including the original 1890 census schedules.
The Librarian was asked by the Bureau to identify any records which should be retained for historical purposes, but the Librarian did not accept the census records. Congress authorized destruction of that list of records on February 21, 1933, the surviving original 1890 census records were destroyed by government order by 1934 or 1935; the other censuses for which some information has been lost are the 1810 enumerations. Few sets of microdata from the 1890 census survive, but aggregate data for small areas, together with compatible cartographic boundary files, can be downloaded from the National Historical Geographic Information System. Mayo-Smith, Richmond, "The Eleventh Census of the United States". In: The Economic Journal, Vol. 1, p. 43 - 58 1891 U. S Census Report Contains 1890 Census results Historical US Census data from the U. S. Census Bureau website Hollerith 1890 Census Tabulator by Columbia University "The Fate of the 1890 Population Census" from the National Archives website
Massac County, Illinois
