Congressmen who enslaved people

Using old Census records and documents, Julie Zauzmer Weil, Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez for The Washington Post tallied the congressmen who enslaved people over time. There were more than 1,700 enslavers over Congress’s first 130 years.

The grid (or tile) map above shows the timeline for each state, showing the percentage of officials who were enslavers from 1789 to 1923. Periods before states gained statehood status are faded out.

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History of slavery in America

USA Today looks at some of the numbers on 17th century slavery in America. The format, with zooms in and out and shifts to different views, focuses both on scale and the individuals.

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Graphs from 1900 that depict a snapshot of African American life

In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois and his students drew a series of charts for The Exhibit of American Negroes. They’re not all winners, but these were hand-drawn in 1900, so there’s some leeway there. There are also a handful of graphics that use graphic devices that we sometimes mistake for modern methods, like cartograms to compare values and a bent bar graph to allow smaller values some space on a zoomed-in axis.

The stacked bar graph above, which shows marital status by age, struck me especially because I made a similar chart for the current population. I am like, so 1900. [via @michalmigurski]

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Slavery in the United States, by decade

Peak Slavery

Mapping slavery from a historical perspective is a challenge, because many old maps and estimates are at the county level. Boundaries changed and counting methods changed, which provides for variation over time and geography. Cartographer Bill Rankin tries to find balance between accuracy and readability in a set of maps that show slavery in a grid layout from 1790 to 1870.

Rankin made a map for each decade, but the most interesting one that shows all the data at once. Size of each circle represents the peak number of slaves per 250 square miles. Color represents the year this peak occurred.

[This] map shows the peak number of slaves in each area, along with the year when slavery peaked. Except in Delaware, Maryland, and eastern Virginia, slavery in the south was only headed in one direction: up. Cartographically, this map offers a temporal analysis without relying on a series of snapshots (either a slideshow or an animation), and it makes it clear that a static map is perfectly capable of representing a dynamic historical process.

See the complete set.

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Animated map shows Trans-Atlantic slave trade

Slave voyages

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database provides records for thousands of voyages between the 16th and 19th centuries. Andrew Kahn for Slate mapped about 20,000 of them. Portugal and Spain are most prevalent at first, and then other countries come into the picture.

From Jamelle Bouie:

In the 1700s, however, Spanish transport diminishes and is replaced (and exceeded) by British, French, Dutch, and—by the end of the century—American activity. This hundred years—from approximately 1725 to 1825—is also the high-water mark of the slave trade, as Europeans send more than 7.2 million people to forced labor, disease, and death in the New World. For a time during this period, British transport even exceeds Portugal's.

Be sure to pause the animation and click the dots, which represent a ships and the number of people enslaved on board. You get more details on where the ship is from, where it's headed, and how many trips it took.

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