Historical Census Browser and City and County Data Books--UVA Libraries

Following up on last month's post regarding the Newberry Library's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, I wanted to blog about two exceptional resources provided by the UVA Libraries: Historical Census Browser and County and City Data Books.

Sponsored by the Scholars' Lab at the UVA Library, the Historical Census Browser is one tool in a suite of offerings provided by Spatial and Statistical Data and Services. Drawn from historical volumes of the U.S. Census of Population and Housing, the census browser enables users to "examine state and county topics for individual census years, examine state and county topics over time," and "generate maps of selected data."

Focusing on the mid-late 20th century (1944-2000), the County and City Data Books database provides a wealth of data on local governments, economies, and populations. As the site notes, "The data presented here for the 1944-1983 editions was obtained through ICPSR, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The 1944-77 data for cities came from study #7735 and the 1947-77 data for counties and states came from study #7736. Data for all levels of the 1983 edition came from study #8256."

New African-American historical newspapers

Adding to Stanford's holdings of African-American newspapers in the ProQuest Historical Newspaper series, the library has recently acquired two new titles: The Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005) and the Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002, excludes 1913-1921). Both newspapers are full-text searchable, as well as cross-searchable with other titles in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers line. Both are available on the library's databases and articles page.