This data collection contains detailed county and state-level ecological and descriptive data for the United States for the years 1790 to 2002. Parts 1-43 are an update to HISTORICAL, DEMOGRAPHIC, ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL DATA: THE UNITED STATES, 1790-1970 (ICPSR 0003). Parts 1-41 contain data from the 1790-1970 censuses. They include extensive information about the social and political character of the United States, including a breakdown of population by state, race, nationality, number of families, size of the family, births, deaths, marriages, occupation, religion, and general economic condition. Parts 42 and 43 contain data from the 1840 and 1870 Censuses of Manufacturing, respectively. These files include information about the number of persons employed in various industries and the quantities of different types of manufactured products. Parts 44-50 provide county-level data from the United States Census of Agriculture for 1840 to 1900. They also include the state and national totals for the variables. The files provide data about the number, types, and prices of various agricultural products. Parts 51-57 contain data on religious bodies and church membership for 1906, 1916, 1926, 1936, and 1952, respectively. Parts 58-69 consist of data from the CITY DATA BOOKS for 1944, 1948, 1952, 1956, 1962, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1983, 1988, 1994, and 2000, respectively. These files contain information about population, climate, housing units, hotels, birth and death rates, school enrollment and education expenditures, employment in various industries, and city government finances. Parts 70-81 consist of data from the COUNTY DATA BOOKS for 1947, 1949, 1952, 1956, 1962, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1983, 1988, 1994, and 2000, respectively. These files include information about population, employment, housing, agriculture, manufacturing, retail, services, trade, banking, Social Security, local governments, school enrollment, hospitals, crime, and income. Parts 82-84 contain data from USA COUNTIES 1998. Due to the large number of variables from this source, the data were divided into into three separate data files. Data include information on population, vital statistics, school enrollment, educational attainment, Social Security, labor force, personal income, poverty, housing, trade, farms, ancestry, commercial banks, and transfer payments. Parts 85-106 provide data from the United States Census of Agriculture for 1910 to 2002. They provide data about the amount, types, and prices of various agricultural products. Also, these datasets contain extensive information on the amount, expenses, sales, values, and production of farms and machinery.

This collection includes county-level data from the United States Censuses of Agriculture for the years 1840 to 2012. The files provide data about the number, types, output, and prices of various agricultural products, as well as information on the amount, expenses, sales, values, and production of machinery. Most of the basic crop output data apply to the previous harvest year. Data collected also included the population and value of livestock, the number of animals slaughtered, and the size, type, and value of farms. Part 46 of this collection contains data from 1980 through 2010. Variables in part 46 include information such as the average value of farmland, number and value of buildings per acre, food services, resident population, composition of households, and unemployment rates.

This dataset contains estimates of proportional area of 18 major crops for each county in the United States at roughly decadal time steps between 1840 and 2017, and was used for analyses of historical changes in crop area, diversity, and distribution published in:Crossley, MS, KD Burke, SD Schoville, VC Radeloff. (2020). Recent collapse of crop belts and declining diversity of US agriculture since 1840. Global Change Biology (in press).The original data used to curate this dataset was derived by Haines et al. (ICPSR 35206) from USDA Agricultural Census archives (https://www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus/). This dataset builds upon previous work in that crop values are georeferenced and rectified to match 2012 county boundaries, and several inconsistencies in the tabular-formatted data have been smoothed-over. In particular, smoothing included conversion of values of production (e.g. bushels, lbs, typical of 1840-1880 censuses) into values of area (using USDA NASS yield data), imputation of missing values for certain crop x county x year combinations, and correcting values for counties whose crop totals exceeded the possible land area.Please contact the PI, Mike Crossley, with any questions or requests: mcrossley3@gmail.com