Fasttrack to America's Past
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Page 88


Page 89
 Pages 88 & 89 - Charting the First Census


Making the chart, page 88

   Students will need color pencils for these bar graphs.  Orange and green work well - remind students to keep the urban / rural color scheme consistent in both graphs. 

   Also, point out to students that each small division on the 1790 graph represents 0.1 million (0.1 million = one-tenth of a million = 100,000 people), so the top bar will be very short.

What the chart shows, page 88

   The first graph shows that the U.S. population in 1790 was overwhelmingly rural.  Only about 200,000 Americans lived in cities.  The second graph on this chart shows that in 2000, a large majority of Americans were living in urban areas.  Less than one out of five lived in a rural area. The graphs also show, of course, that there has been a very large overall population increase since 1790.


Making the chart, page 89

   Students will need a color pencil set for this pie chart, as well as a regular #2 pencil to make the labels.   Use a light color, such as yellow, for the largest slice, so the label and number that will be written inside it is not obscured.

What the chart shows, page 89  

   This chart shows that diversity was already a characteristic of the American population in 1790.  Just under half of the population was of English descent, even though all of the colonies were founded by Englishmen.

   People of African descent were the next largest group, at about 20 percent of the population. 

   Most of the rest of the population traced back to the countries of Western Europe.


Background for the chart question, page 89

   If updated to current population statistics, the pie graph would have to include many more groups.  For example, Asians and Hispanics would be fairly large slices of the pie.  Native Americans would be shown as a slice.  Countries of Eastern and Southern Europe would also be significant in the chart, and immigrants from the Middle East and India would be shown.






Copyright Notice

   Copyright 2018 by David Burns.  All rights reserved.  Illustrations and reading selections appearing in this work are taken from sources in the public domain and from private collections used by permission.  Sources include: the Dover Pictorial Archive, the Library of Congress, The National Archives, The Hart Publishing Co., Corel Corporation and its licensors, Nova Development Corporation and its licensors, and others.  Maps were created or adapted by the author using reference maps from the United States Geological Survey and Cartesia Software.  Please see the home page for this title for more information.