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... has country-by-country data on agriculture, education, employment, energy,environment, industry, economics, population trade and tourism. The site, by the United Nations Statistics Division, says it has more than 55 million records and will be adding more.
Dan Nelson pointed me to the The Spirit of Now's World Clock, which gives real-time estimates of the population, species extinction, military expenditures, oil pumped, cars produced, abortions and other measures by the year, month, week, day or as of now. He says you should also check out the site's life expectancy calculator, if you dare.
The Census Atlas of the United States is "the first comprehensive atlas of population and housing produced by the Census Bureau since the 1920s." It's available free online as a PDF or you can buy it for $165.
The Census Atlas is a large-format publication about 300 pages long and containing almost 800 maps. Data from decennial censuses prior to 2000 support nearly 150 maps and figures, providing context and an historical perspective for many of the topics presented.
A variety of topics are covered in the Census Atlas, ranging from language and ancestry characteristics to housing patterns and the geographic distribution of the population. A majority of the maps in the Census Atlas present data at the county level, but data also are sometimes mapped by state, census tract (for largest cities and metropolitan areas), and for selected American Indian reservations. The book is modern, colorful, and includes a variety of map styles and data symbolization techniques.
The bank explains:
"We’ve mashed up Google Maps with World Bank data to give you a visual entry point to browse our projects, news, statistics and public information center by country."
ResearchBuzz reports that STATS Indiana has "relaunched with a new design and new data." And it points out that despite its name, STATS Indiana "provides information on other states besides Indiana":
So what’s new on the site? More data is available for states, counties, and metro areas. Additional data includes IRS migration and income tax data as well as health data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You can get a PDF copy of the first Census on the U.S. Census Bureau's Web site:
The first enumeration began on Monday, August 2,1790, little more than a year after the inauguration of President Washington and shortly before the second session of the first Congress ended. The Congress assigned responsibility for the 1790 census to the marshals of the U.S. judicial districts under an act that, with minor modifications and extensions, governed census-taking through1840. The law required that every household be visited and that completed census schedules be posted in ''two of the most public places within [each jurisdiction], there to remain for the inspection of all concerned...'' and that' 'the aggregate amount of each description of persons'' for every district be transmitted to the President. The six inquiries in 1790 called for the name of the head of the family and the number of persons in each household of the following descriptions: Free White males of 16 years and upward (to assess the country's industrial and military potential), free White males under 16 years, free White females, all other free persons (by sex and color), and slaves.
GCensus is a project "to make geographic data freely and easily accessible to the public, without the need for expensive GIS software packages." It uses Google Earth and open source tools. The founder explains his motivation on ExtremeTech:
Possible applications range from the mundane-- ... one could look up the distribution of families and children in a city to find attractive neighborhoods in which to live--to the deeply significant, such as using easily accessible GIS to examine voting patterns and election districts to catch gerrymandering and, potentially, election fraud. The real goal of the project is to democratize information by making data (such as political and environmental data) that's currently publicly accessible in name only, truly accessible to the people.
Juice Analytics, a data consultancy, also offers free Google Earth files that use Census data to map population density, median age and male/female ratio by county and block group.
And if those interest you, you’ll also want to check out Census KML Data Visualization, a "blog to track experiments in geographic data visualization using Census data, Ruby, KML, and Google Earth."
Looking for statistics on a particular subject? Check out the appendix to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which provides a summary of sources of statistics. The guide tells you how frequently the statistics are updated, whether they're available on paper or on the Internet and the Web address of the organizations that offer them.
StateMaster is "a unique statistical database which allows you to research and compare a multitude of different data on US states":
StateMaster is from the creators of NationMaster, which does the same thing for the world and which Mary Ellen Bates writes about in her Tip of the Month.We have compiled information from various primary sources such as the US Census Bureau, the FBI, and the National Center for Educational Statistics. More than just a mere collection of various data, StateMaster goes beyond the numbers to provide you with visualization technology like pie charts, maps, graphs and scatterplots. We also have thousands of map and flag images, state profiles, and correlations.
We have stats on everything from toothless residents to percentage of carpoolers.
The Statistical Abstract of the United States is now more useful. Whereas before it was served as a series of hard-to-use PDF files, you can now browse each section on the main page and go directly to a link to download an Excel spreadsheet with the data you want. The PDF files, which are the same as the print edition, are still there if you want them.
ZipInfo, a ZIP Code database vendor, offers a free ZIP code lookup that will give you a ZIP's county, FIPS code, time zone, area code, latitude and longitude and its Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area.
"The State and Metropolitan Area Data Book features more than 1,500 data items for the United States and individual states, counties and metropolitan areas from a variety of sources." This latest edition of the book includes data on population, housing, cost of living, personal income, new businesses, bankruptcies, agriculture, natural resources, construction, finance, transportation, government employment and more. And you can download Excel files of the data.
Neighboroo uses color-coded Google maps and data to describe U.S. neighborhoods. That includes demographics, crime, education, home prices, cost of living, air quality and more. They're also seeking "guroos." It defines a guroo as "someone who is an expert in national or local trends who wants to share their insights with our users. Neighboroo will soon offer a service for guroos around the nation to share their wonderful and fascinating knowledge."
The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) "is a project to create and freely disseminate a database incorporating all available aggregate census information for the United States between 1790 and 2000":
The great bulk of the United States summary census data exist in machine-readable form, but they are largely inaccessible. Approximately 670 gigabytes of data covering the period 1790 through 2000 exist or are in preparation, but they are scattered across dozens of archives and stored in incompatible formats on CD-ROM, magnetic tape, or paper.
Only a small fraction of these data are available on the Internet, and even those offer only primitive documentation an extraction tools. Moreover, census summary data cannot be effectively exploited without clear definitions of each geographic unit, but high-quality electronic boundary files exist only for the 1990 census year.
It's still in beta and incomplete, but here's a chart showing the data it will be making available.
Elliott Jaspin of Cox News Service used Census records dating back to the Civil War and years of research to document "America's Hidden History of Racial Expulsions":
Beginning in 1864 and continuing for approximately 60 years, whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions, driving thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white.
In at least a dozen of the most extreme cases, blacks were purged from entire counties that remain almost exclusively white, according to the most recent census data.
Some of the places Jaspin highlights in "Leave or Die" are in Kentucky and Indiana:
Marshall County, Ky., where in 1908 vigilantes led by a local doctor posted notices telling blacks to leave. More than 100 armed and hooded men raided the town of Birmingham, picked about a dozen people at random and tortured them. An elderly black man and his two-year-old grandchild were killed. Nearly two-thirds of the blacks left. ...
Laurel and Whitley, neighboring counties in Kentucky, where in 1919 whites, believing that the arrival of a black railroad construction crew had spawned a crime wave, rounded up blacks at gunpoint, herded them to the train station and forced them to leave. ...
Washington County, Ind., where blacks were driven out between 1864 and 1867, apparently by whites alarmed that the Emancipation Proclamation could allow blacks to vote and become full citizens. Two black men who did not leave were killed. ...
Vermillion County, Ind., where in 1923 the then politically powerful Ku Klux Klan drove the expulsion of blacks from the mining town of Blanford after a white girl said she was assaulted by a black man.
IPUMS-International offers "the world's largest collection of publicly available individual-level census data. The data are samples from population censuses from around the world taken since 1960." The site currently has data from 47 censuses representing 13 countries and 143 million records. The quick reference gives the countries and years represented. They hope to add 100 more samples in the next four years.
The U.S. Census Bureau has released its latest State and Local Government Finances data online. The data, for 2003-2004, covers revenue, expenditure, debt and assets.
The U.S. Census Bureau's International Data Base is "a computerized data bank containing statistical tables of demographic and socioeconomic data for 227 countries and areas of the world."
The latest version of the Statistical Abstract of the United States is out and you can get it online for free. But why they put only hard-to-use PDFs online and don't make it easier to search on the Web is beyond me. Maybe they just want to push sales of the print version ... I always buy one, and it's usually the first place I turn when I need an obscure statistic.
