Blog Post#3 1880 Birthplace Census and Historical Railroads

 

    The goal of this map was to show a comparison of historical railroad data with a birthplace census from 1880 in the United States. I was specifically interested in the Central Pacific Railroad and the census records for people who's birthplace was listed as China. In the mid 1900's the United States was dealing with a shortage of labor and then began hiring many individuals from China to help complete the railroads. In the map shown below I selected a field that represented people born in China and normalized the data by population. As you can see the map does show that almost all the people in the United States that were born in China are located on the west coast surrounding the area of the Central Pacific Railroad. By choosing China as the birthplace to be shown on the map it made the map fairly easy to interpret due to restricted area that this population is located. Though I believe being able to include a legend would very beneficial in the interpretation and understanding of this map. 



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