National Historical Geographic Information System

The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) is a historical GIS project to create and freely disseminate a database incorporating all available aggregate census information for the United States between 1790 and 2010.

[1] In addition, NHGIS has created historical and contemporary cartographic boundary shapefiles compatible with every census, and over 50 million lines of metadata describing the collection.

Historical U.S. state and county boundaries are available 1790–present, with smaller geographies available as the U.S. Census Bureau created them.

[2] The cartographic boundary files and the tabular data are formatted so as to be easily linked for use in Geographic Information System software.

Much of the historical data are viewable as tables or interactive maps in Social Explorer, a small company which offers both free and professional licenses.