Mapping Mobility: Spatial and Class Change in the Gilded Age Wall Street Workforce

Methodology and Production

The basis of this project is four volumes in the Brown Brothers Harriman Records at the New-York Historical Society, volumes 13, 14, 15, and 17, which together allow a reader to trace the firm's salary history from the 1890s through the post-World War I years. With the help of research assistants I transcribed these records. Next, using a variety of search strategies, I identified Brown Brothers employees in the digitized 1900 and 1910 Census schedules. Again with the indispensable help of research assistants, I coded the demographic data found in the Census records into an Excel spreadsheet. I then used geocoding services such as Google Maps and Geocod.io to automatically encode the latitude and longitude of the bulk of the addresses given in Census data, and I used insurance maps, street-name change directories, and other sources to ferret out locations that were no longer the same as in the early 1900s.

This project is presented on the open-source publication platform Scalar, with demographic data mapped in Prospect, an open-source data visualization plugin for Wordpress. Inline media links in this Scalar site are used to display visualizations created in Prospect.

This page has paths: