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The Nation's Center Moves West: A Census Exhibit worksheet preview

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The Nation's Center Moves West: A Census Exhibit

Grade 8 census practice: museum labels on census artifacts, the moving center of population and Indiana data show growth, city growth and immigration in the 1800s.

Grade 8Social StudiesInteractive · Printable

Aligned toGEO.8.3

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What’s included

  • Single worksheet
  • Auto-graded online
  • 1 C3 Framework standard
  • Printable answer key
  • 11 questions
  • Classroom-ready

Details

Format
Interactive · Printable
Grade
Grade 8
Subject
Social Studies
Question types
Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Circle the answer, Sorting, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

  • Students use census tables to describe how the U.S. population grew and shifted west in the 1800s.
  • Students compare city and state growth to explain urbanization.
  • Students analyze where immigrants came from in 1890 and what the census could and could not count.

How to use

Let small groups each read one artifact label aloud as an exhibit walk, then have students use the tables to answer on their own.

Curriculum

C3 Framework standard covered

GEO.8.3

Use census data to analyze population growth, urbanization and immigration patterns in the United States in the 1800s.

Preview

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Name Date

The Nation's Center Moves West: A Census Exhibit

Use museum labels and census tables to analyze how Americans moved west, into cities and from abroad in the 1800s.

Walk through the exhibit

Read the exhibit labels. The Crossroads History Museum is invented; the artifacts are real kinds of objects, and the facts and numbers are real. Then answer the questions.

Counting a Moving Nation: Exhibit Labels

1Welcome. Since 1790, the United States has counted its people every ten years. From each count, the Census Office worked out the center of population: the point where a flat map of the country would balance if every person weighed the same. In 1790 that point lay east of Baltimore, Maryland. By 1890 it lay about 20 miles east of Columbus, Indiana, not far from this museum.

2Artifact 1: A page from the 1850 census. In 1850, for the first time, census takers wrote down every free person by name, with each person's age, job and place of birth. Enslaved people were counted on separate "slave schedules" that listed their age and sex but almost never their names. Families and historians still use these pages to trace where people were born and where they moved.

3Artifact 2: A German-language newspaper printed in Indianapolis in the 1870s. In the 1800s more immigrants came from the German states than from any other homeland. Many arrived after crop failures and the failed revolutions of 1848. Many settled on farms and in cities from Ohio to Wisconsin, where they printed newspapers, built churches and opened schools in German.

4Artifact 3: A conductor's lantern from Indianapolis Union Station. Opened in 1853, the station let several railroad lines share one depot, and it is often called the first union station in the country. Lines ran out from Indianapolis in every direction, and rail shops, meatpackers and factories hired young people from Indiana farms as well as newcomers from Europe.

5Artifact 4: A punched card from the 1890 census. Counting the 1880 census by hand had taken years. For 1890, clerks punched holes in a card for each person's facts, and electric machines invented by Herman Hollerith read the holes and kept the totals. The 1890 count, about 62.9 million people, was also the first that tried to count Native Americans living on reservations. Earlier counts had left many of them out.

6Closing panel. The land of this state was home to the Miami, Potawatomi, Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware) peoples before settlers came. Their nations, such as the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, govern themselves today, and many Miami and Potawatomi people still live in Indiana.

1.
Based on the welcome label, what does the center of population moving west show?
  • A. Eastern cities such as Baltimore lost most of their people.
  • B. The government moved the capital toward the middle of the country.
  • C. The number of people in the West grew faster than in the East.
  • D. Most of the people of the East packed up and moved to the West.
2.
Underline the sentence from Artifact 1 that best shows a limit of the 1850 census for people tracing ancestors who were enslaved.

In 1850, for the first time, census takers wrote down every free person by name, with each person's age, job and place of birth.Enslaved people were counted on separate "slave schedules" that listed their age and sex but almost never their names.Families and historians still use these pages to trace where people were born and where they moved.

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