New York was the most populous state in the union in the year 1900. It had the largest white population, for both native born and foreign born persons, and together these groups made up over 7.1 million of New York's 7.2 million inhabitants at this time. The United States' industrial centers to the north and northeast were one of the most important economic draws during this period, and states in these regions had the largest foreign born white populations. Ethnic minorities Immigration into the agricultural southern states was much lower than the north, and these states had the largest Black populations due to the legacy of slavery - this balance would begin to shift in the following decades as a large share of the Black population migrated to urban centers to the north during the Great Migration. The Japanese and Chinese populations at this time were more concentrated in the West, as these states were the most common point of entry for Asians into the country. The states with the largest Native American populations were to the west and southwest, due to the legacy of forced displacement - this included the Indian Territory, an unorganized and independent territory assigned to the Native American population in the early 1800s, although this was incorporated into Oklahoma when it was admitted into the union in 1907. Additionally, non-taxpaying Native Americans were historically omitted from the U.S. Census, as they usually lived in separate communities and could not vote or hold office - more of an effort was made to count all Native Americans from 1890 onward, although there are likely inaccuracies in the figures given here. Changing distribution Internal migration in the 20th century greatly changed population distribution across the country, with California and Florida now ranking among the three most populous states in the U.S. today, while they were outside the top 20 in 1900. The growth of Western states' populations was largely due to the wave of internal migration during the Great Depression, where unemployment in the east saw many emigrate to "newer" states in search of opportunity, as well as significant immigration from Latin America (especially Mexico) and Asia since the mid-1900s.

This data collection constitutes a portion of the historical data collected by the project "Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death." With the goal of constructing datasets suitable for longitudinal analyses of factors affecting the aging process, the project is collecting military, medical, and socioeconomical data on a sample of white males mustered into the Union Army during the Civil War. The project seeks to examine the influence of environmental and host factors prior to recruitment on the health performance and survival of recruits during military service, to identify and show relationships between socioeconomic and biomedical conditions (including nutritional status) of veterans at early ages and mortality rates from diseases at middle and late ages, and to study the effects of health and pensions on labor force participation rates of veterans at ages 65 and over. This installment of the collection, Version C-3, supersedes all previous collections (Versions C-1 and C-2), and contains data from the censuses of 1850, 1860, 1900, and 1910 on veterans who were originally mustered into the Union Army in Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and West Virginia. This version of the collection also contains observations from Wisconsin, Indiana, California, and New Mexico. Census Data, Part 1, includes place of residence, relationship to head of household, date and place of birth, number of children, education, disability status, employment status, number of years in the United States, literacy, marital status, occupation, parents' birthplace, and property/home ownership. The variables in Part 2, Linkage Data, indicate which document sources were located for each recruit.

Chart and table of population level and growth rate for the state of New York from 1900 to 2024.