And bit by bit, a mosaic of American life took shape. Everyone spoke openly of their living arrangements, their jobs, their families, their faith and a whole lot more. They let the census-takers into their homes and they answered all kinds of questions. With privacy guaranteed, people opened up. The vast data dump, Kyvig says, will allow historians "to look closely at particular communities and how people within them were doing in terms of employment, income and material comforts." We already have general census information from 1940, but the "manuscript census" - the conglomeration of individual forms filled out by citizens at the time - has not been available until now. Three score and 12 years ago, America was in a very different place - economically and culturally.īut on April 2, 2012, when the National Archives releases detailed data from the 1940 census, we will get an even keener idea of how much - or how little - this nation has really changed in the past 72 years. And Hattie McDaniel was the first African-American actor ever to take home an Oscar.Īh, 1940. Bing Crosby crooned Only Forever on the console. Black fedoras were the "pure quill" - meaning the real deal. census is the first historical federal decennial survey to be made available on the Internet initially rather than on microfilm. Veiled in secrecy for 72 years because of privacy protections, the 1940 U.S. An enumerator interviews a woman for the 1940 census.
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