To better remember history, I try to find/create what I call "fun^[1] clusters", i.e. sets of events with a tenuous but legitimate connection to a central hub.^[2] This post presents six ways in which the 1890 Census is a fun cluster.

1. The end of the frontier. The Census Bureau announced that the US no longer had a "frontier of settlement”. Nothing changed overnight, but most Western movies are set before this year.

2. Wounded Knee. The last battle of the Indian Wars. Its connection to point 1 is real and non-coincidental — the frontier closure and the final suppression of Native resistance are the same story — but the fact that both happened in exactly 1890 is still a coincidence useful to remember both.

3. The proletarianization of America. Christopher Lasch identifies 1890 as a symbolic inflection point: Americans were forced to reckon with the proletarianization of labor, the widening wealth gap, and the tendency of both to become hereditary. Furthermore, he finds in Turner's 1893 influential book about the Frontier Thesis the earliest use of the term social mobility, and the first expression of the idea that the criterion of a good society is whether everyone has a fair chance to rise in the social hierarchy.^[3]

4. The 1924 Immigration Act. Congress set national-origin quotas based on the ethnic composition of the US as recorded in the 1890 census — deliberately chosen because it reflected an America that was English, Irish, German, or Scandinavian. Later waves of Southern and Eastern European immigration were to be treated as a deviation from the norm. Jews, despite not coming for a single country, were also affected, since all countries with large Jewish populations —Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Romania— received tiny quotas.

5. The birth of computers. The 1880 census had taken so long to process that officials feared the 1890 results would not be ready before the 1900 census began. Herman Hollerith was commissioned to solve the problem, and by 1890 had deployed the first punched-card tabulating machines. His company would eventually be absorbed into what became IBM.

6 (speculative). The first modern empire. Around 1890, the US reached population levels that had historically strained or broken pre-modern empires. Thanks to technology, it didn't stop growing.

1. ^{^}

   "Fun" in the same way that cancer can be fun for a passionate oncologist. History in general, and this fun cluster in particular, includes genocide, less violent forms of racism, etc.

2. ^{^}

   If the connections to the hub are strong, we get something different: an impactful event with broad consequences, like WW2.

3. ^{^}

   And not e.g. whether everyone achieves excellence in virtue or intelligence.