For this assignment, I imported 1930 census data from NHGIS. As for my visualizations, it displays the number of homes, by percentage of county population, that are either rented or owned. I decided to narrow down results even further to see if there was a drastic difference between homes owned within the former Confederacy and post-1860/pre-1870 Union decades after the war and the readmission of the rebelling states. Up until the Great Depression, many of the former Confederate states employed the practice of tenant farming as a means to keep their former cash crops profitable after the fall of slavery as an institution. When the Great Depression hit, tenant farming also took a hit. So, the goal of this data is an attempt to see a general view of the population of tenant farmers through rentals in correlation with those owned their properties around this time in relation to the regional practice.
Overall, the general consensus, based on the data, is that the states of the Union had higher rates of ownership, compared to rented, than the former Confederacy (Note: population differs drastically between the higher density counties up north than south). However, to achieve a sturdier argument on this basis, I would have to import tenant farming data alongside pulling information on formerly enslave community concentrations per county. This way, with the additional data, a much stronger argument could be made.
The most difficult part of this process was attempting to separate the maps based on state concentrations (i.e. the former Confederacy and pre-1880 Union). In fact, I was unable to figure out how to take the original data set and further confine it to just the states of the Union pre-1880.
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| Owned Homes 1930 |
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| Owned Homes, Former Conf 1930 |
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| Rented Homes 1930 |
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| Rented Homes, Former Conf 1930 |
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