The Historic Ecological Variables Dataset draws from hundreds of publications series, municipal documents across the eight large northern cities in our sample (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis, with plans to add New Orleans as resources allow, for the period 1830-1930), as well as census records. Original sources are often discovered through bibliographic references in other period and modern publications and through the historical reconstructions of evolving city institutions. This research process yields, in turn, rich information about the sources themselves, including their present locations and accessibility, content format, such as tables of relevant data, maps, and narrative descriptions, as well as options for data collection (e.g., microfilm, photocopy, non-flash photography, and direct on-site transcription.)

This type of information is critical to the research process but cannot readily be managed by conventional bibliographic citation. The CPE has designed, and is currently testing, a sophisticated new database to organize these widely varying and critically rich sources of ecological information. Source information will be searchable on many different levels, including ranges of dates, subjects (e.g. public health across institutions), authors, publishing entities, repositories, material types, variables in tables, map contents, etc. An example of sources that will be made available in the upcoming database is presented below.

Boston Sources

View a list of non-census data sources from Boston here. Year ranges highlighted in BLUE indicate data that are continuous throughout the period under investigation. Those appearing in GREEN cover the majority of the period, and uncolored dates pertain only to the given year(s).