Historical Chart: Map of the U.S. by Founding Date & Line Graph of Slaves Owned in Charles, MD

For this week’s assignment, I decided to create a chart that depicted the century in which each state was founded:

One of the downfalls of this map (or perhaps a downfall of me not being extremely familiar with Google Charts) is the lack of a legend to explain the coloring choices for this map. Given that information, I decided to include a short legend here –

  • Dark Green: States founded in the 20th Century
  • Medium Green: States founded in the 19th Century
  • Light Beige: States founded in the 18th Century
To create this chart, I went to Google Charts and choose the USA map from the list of given charts. This choice was a rather simple one, given that I wanted to depict information about the United States in a way that was visually appealing (probably influenced by the way I had seen it used in the Feltron reports). Once I picked the chart, I had to decide how I wanted to convey my given data. Because I wasn’t looking at very many data points (only three, really) I decided that a visual shading representation of the information would be a good approach. To represent this in the graph, I grouped the data points of each state according to which century they were founded in (i.e: data point ‘100’ was given to countries founded in the 20th century). By doing this, i created the difference in color shade that helped to visually group together the data points. While probably not the most scientific of approaches, it colored the map in a way that corresponded to the data that I wanted to convey.
If anyone knows of a way to create a legend on the map that I was using, please feel free to comment and let me know, I clearly wasn’t able to find it with my lack of technical prowess.

Also, here is the line graph depicting the number of slaves owned in Charles, MD from 1741-1809, using data pulled from Probing the Past:

Slaves Owned in Charles, MD from 1741-1809

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