About that map: I was moved to re-locate a reference to the 1850 census. A few years ago, '12-'13? I came across a digital folio at Census or National Archive that compiled cartography, demography, and GNP stats by commodity by state. The drawings are beautiful, speaking of aesthetic.

Now, I'm having trouble recollecting the link from my local files (I'll get to that later). The search engines are giving me trouble serving "1850 GNP". Why is that odd? The term "GDP" didn't exist until Kuznets invented this econometry in the 1920s. The search engines want to serve me all sorts of white paper tripe published in the last 30 years, purporting to restate or analyze GDP[!], 1800-1890. (Did you know records of the 1890 census were destroyed by fire within the decade proceeding? Funny, that. I just found out a coincidence. According to historian Chas. Beard, Treasury bond records sold/redeemed under the 1st administration were destroyed by fire, too!)

So I get into the hot, NEW! Census Bureau website design. COME TO FIND OUT, front-end of the database has been profoundly arranged by "subject" (check out that list!) to deliver personal ephemera and "Americana" artifacts. Chief among services supporting "visitors"? Genealogy look-up tables and commercial vendors. Why is this a significant modification to knowledge management?

It's a set up, slick and insidious, for policy change coming down the pipe: citizenship and reparation. Mark my words.

Anyhoo, 1850 Census: The Seventh Census of the United States (pub. 1853), "curated"

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.