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Tracing the evolutions of the categories used by the US census to classify Americans from the first census (1790) to 1940, this book shows the centrality of power relations and of racial ideologies in census-taking, with an emphasis on slavery, segregation, and immigration.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Illustrations and Tables
- Note on Terminology
- Introduction
- Part I: The Origins of the U.S. Census: From Enumeration of Voters and Taxpayers to "Social Statistics," 1790-1840
- Chapter 1: The Creation of the Federal Census by the Constitution of the United States: A Political Instrument
- Chapter 2: The First Developments of the National Census (1800-1830)
- Chapter 3: The Census of 1840: Science, Politics and "Insanity" of Free Blacks
- Part II: Slaves, Former Slaves, Blacks, and Mulattoes: Identification of the Individual and the Statistical Segregation of Populations (1850-1865)
- Chapter 4: Whether to Name or Count Slaves: The Refusal of Identification
- Chapter 5: Color, Race, and Origin of Slaves and Free Persons: "White," "Black," "Mulatto" in the Censuses of 1850 and 1860
- Chapter 6: Color and Status of Slaves: Legal Definition and Census Practice
- Chapter 7: Census Data for 1850 and 1860 and the Defeat of the South
- Part III: The Rise of Immigration and the Racialization of Society: The Adaptation of the Census to the Diversity of the American Population (1850-1900)
- Chapter 8: Modernization, Standardization, and Internationalization: From the Censuses of J. C. G. Kennedy (1850 and 1860) to the First Census of Francis A. Walker (1870)
- Chapter 9: From Slavery to Liberty: The Future of the Black Race or Racial Mixing as Degeneration
- Chapter 10: From "Mulatto" to the "One Drop Rule" (1870-1900)
- Chapter 11: The Slow Integration of Indians into U.S. Population Statistics in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 12: The Chinese and Japanese in the Census: Nationalities That Are Also Races
- Chapter 13: Immigration, Nativism, and Statistics (1850-1900)
- Part IV: Apogee and Decline of Ethnic Statistics (1900-1940)
- Chapter 14: The Disappearance of the "Mulatto" as the End of Inquiry into the Composition of the Black Population of the United States
- Chapter 15: The Question of Racial Mixing in the American Possessions: National Norm and Local Resistance
- Chapter 16: New Asian Races, New Mixtures, and the "Mexican" Race: Interest in "Minor Races"
- Chapter 17: From Statistics by Country of Birth to the System of National Origins
- Part V: The Population and the Census: Representation, Negotiation, and Segmentation (1900-1940)
- Chapter 18: The Census and African Americans within and outside the Bureau
- Chapter 19: Women as Census Workers and as Relays in the Field
- Chapter 20: Ethnic Marketing of Population Statistics
- Epilogue: The Fortunes of Census Classifications (1940-2000)
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Abbreviations
- Sources and Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Paul Schor is an associate professor of history at the Université de Paris.
Summary
Tracing the evolutions of the categories used by the US census to classify Americans from the first census (1790) to 1940, this book shows the centrality of power relations and of racial ideologies in census-taking, with an emphasis on slavery, segregation, and immigration.
