Statistical Atlas of the United States

In Booker T. Washington’s landmark autobiography Up From Slavery, he gives one of the earliest accounts of the "Black Belt." This term was first used geographically for the band of dark, rich soil that runs through the Deep South. But after the Civil War, the Black Belt became descriptive of its high population of freed African Americans who stayed in the vicinity of the plantations on which they were once enslaved. The Statistical Atlas of the United States (published in 1874) depicted this demography by pioneering the use of infographics, rarely seen before this date and never with such specificity. This enormous folio provided the first postwar scientific visualization of Washington’s truism. In gorgeous lithographs, the Statistical Atlas reveals not only the details of the Black Belt as it existed immediately after the Civil War, but also the seeds of the later Great Migration through dense pockets of African American population in the urban North.