ECON 3013: Economic History of the United States

This features .pdf files of published census reports.

This features source tables, time series tables, and GIS boundary files for spatial analysis applications. Using NHGIS: An Introductory Guide is a very good place to start!

FRED compiles macro data from a variety of government and other sources. FRED is a database of over 383,000 economic time series from 82 sources. You can download data in Microsoft Excel and text formats and view charts of data series.

FRASER is a collection of scanned historical documents from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (St. Louis Fed). Some historical statistics that are not available in FRED may be found in FRASER.

GeoFRED alows you to create, customize, and share geographical maps of data found in FRED.

ALFRED (Archival Fred) allows you to retrieve vintage versions of economic data that were available on specific dates in history. In general, economic data for past observation periods are revised as more accurate estimates become available. As a result, previous vintages of data can be superseded and may no longer be available from various data sources. Vintage or real time economic data allows academics to reproduce others' research, build more accurate forecasting models, and analyze economic policy decisions using the data available at the time.

The publication is a useful statistical history of banking developments in the United States and provides a reliable basis for relating banking and monetary forces to changing levels of economic activity. Included are annual balance sheet items, particularly on a standard basis (segregation of loans into real estate, collateral, and other loans), as well as data on hundreds of unincorporated (private) banks. Data is provided for both States and for major bank categories.

A chart of the past trend of price inflation, federal debt, business, national income, stocks and bond yields for the United States from 1775 to 1943.

This is a digital edition of Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. The site reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps, many of them animated to show changes over time or made clickable to view the underlying data.

This site lists a number of possible data sets which may be relevant to this course.

Access machine-readable format detailed data on American labor markets selected from over 150 separate investigations undertaken between 1874 and 1920 by the Bureaus of Labor Statistics established by the governments of 29 states. To date the project has collected, coded, documented, and distributed 36 data sets. Thirty-five of the data sets are cross-sectional surveys of workers with information on working conditions, living standards, family demography, and household economy. One data set contains two cross-sectional surveys of firms.

This is a portal for historical statistics, macro and micro, of a number of countries including the U.S.

Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas visualizes Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s transformations during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Drawing on 1850, 1880, and 1910 census data, it shows how migration, residential, and occupational patterns shaped the city. The Digital Atlas breaks new ground by locating each person counted in the Census at their home address, sometimes before the street grid was even established. This is a living project that will expand to include all five boroughs up to the 1940 census.

This guide, managed by Marie Concannon of the University of Missouri Library's Government Information Department, points to consumer prices and wages reported in primary sources for each decade back to the 1700s. Whenever possible, they refer to retail price and wage averages as reported in government publications. When those are not available, they use figures listed in other contemporary sources such as commercial catalogs, travel guides and newspapers. This site is based on freely available historic resources, mostly from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRASER® digital library and the HathiTrust Digital Library. To understand the value of a historic price or wage in current dollars, they recommend the website MeasuringWorth.com.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) assembled an extensive data set that covers all aspects of the pre-WWI and interwar economies, including production, construction, employment, money, prices, asset market transactions, foreign trade, and government activity. Many series are highly disaggregated, and many exist at the monthly or quarterly frequency. The data set has some coverage of the United Kingdom, France and Germany, although it predominantly covers the United States.

The Statistical Abstracts contain lots of demographic, economic, financial (private and public), and related data. These large volumes can be downloaded as zip files, which contain a number of pdf files. To see which pdf file contains the information that you're looking for, first consult the table of contents posted as a separate pdf file. [NOTE: The U.S. Census Bureau no longer publishes the Statistical Abstract. For a current version, see ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States.]

On Weber's page, you can download an Excel spreadsheet containing balance sheets of national banks (by state and reserve city) on the call dates each year for the period 1880 to 1910. With these data for example you could analyze the position of New York City or New York country banks before, during, and after a panic period.