Happy Semiquincentennial! As a tribute to America’s 250th birthday I decided to take a look back at the population counts since 1776. While a census of the nation was not completed until 1790, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were about 2.5 million people living in the United States’ original 13 colonies in 1776. Since then the nation has grown to more than 340 million people in 50 states. The visualization below shows the population counts for every census and some key highlights about each of the time periods.
Data Notes
The data for this visualization comes from information published by the US Census Bureau. You can find the source documents below.
The visualization was then created in Tableau.