A History of Migration
In Podcast Form!
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve recently been writing on a different platform, called Silk. However, I’m not sure if my Medium followers have gotten in on the fun. Silk’s a great platform with lots of cool tools, like the ability to embed interactive data. Medium doesn’t have that tool, and after the massive fail that is the newest Medium redesign, I went platform-hunting. I’ll still be writing on Medium, but will be using Silk for projects that require more interactive data features.
Thus far, I have three posts on my Silk. You can find them here:
A Century of Regions
This post uses a novel dataset of migration going back to 1900 for each state, and shows the history of migration in the US. In particular, it shows how many of our usual perceptions of migration narratives, like the Sunbelt/Frostbelt story, don’t match up to a detailed reading of the evidence. You can take a quick look at one of the visualizations below.
A Century of Migration
This post is simply the methodology post for the above. Check it out if you’re curious about the actual nuts-and-bolts of historic research and migration studies.
Where Americans Live
For this post, I strung together 385 years of state-level population data. Yeah. That’s as much as it sounds like. Using numerous sources and methods, I built what I think is probably the longest generally available time series on US state-area population. This voluminous data can be used to show which states grew fastest in what time periods, the history of state populations, and the population share of each state over time. Check it out. One sample visualization is below:
This work all relates to a new project I’m doing, called…
Destiny’s Manifest
The Story of American Migration
A friend and I will be co-hosting a Podcast tracing the history of migration in America. The first episode will air in mid-January, with a new episode each 2 weeks after that. We’ll step beyond the numbers and look into the stories of the people whose migrations shaped the United States, from the history of Kentucky bourbon to why Minnesota is full of Scandinavians, along with the expansion of slavery, the Trail of Tears, the Mormon trek to Utah, and numerous other stories.
Within the next 2 weeks, I’ll post a Kickstarter and a website offering more details, so stay tuned!
Oh, and as an added bonus, my wife will literally sing to you about the history of migration. Not even kidding.
If you like this post and want to see more research like it, I’d love for you to share it on Twitter or Facebook. Or, just as valuable for me, you can click the recommend button at the bottom of the page. Thanks!
Follow me on Twitter to keep up with what I’m writing and reading. Follow my Medium Collection at In a State of Migration if you want updates when I write new posts. And if you’re writing about migration too, feel free to submit a post to the collection!
I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
