Introduction

Happy Independence Day! As a tribute to America’s birthday I decided to take a look back at the population counts since 1776. While a census of the nation was not completed until 1790, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were about 2.5 million people living in the United States’ original 13 States in 1776. Since then the nation has grown to more than 300,000,000 people in 50 states. The visualization below shows the population counts for every census and the population growth between each census.

Visualization

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Data Notes

The data for this visualization comes from information published by the US Census Bureau. You can find the source documents below.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2016/cb16-ff13.html

http://www.census.gov/history/pdf/measuringamerica.pdf

http://www.census.gov/2010census/data/apportionment-pop-text.php

After the data was acquired, it was cleaned in Excel. The visualization was then created in Tableau.

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