Summer Team: Chris Liao (chrisliao@uchicago.edu), David Cho, Jiacheng Li, Maria Dubasov, Miguel Santos
This folder contains all work that was done by the 2022 Summer Team on exploring the history behind America's early national debt. Much of the work done by this summer's cohort focused on analyzing the post-1790 debt certificates, the ones that people redeemed for consols following the passage of Hamilton's plan to refund the national debt. Within this subset, we were most interested in the Continental Debt certificates, rather than the Assumed State Debt Certificates.
Chronologically, the S2022 timeline is as follows. If you just care about our results, see bullet point 8.
- First,
data_cleaning_cl.ipynb
cleans the post-1790 debt certificates, producingaggregated_CD.csv
, an aggregated version of all post-1790 debt certificates that has the county column addedcounty_cw.csv
, a preliminary geographical crosswalk- Geographical labels refers to town, county, state and country names
cleaning_town.ipynb
takes as inputaggregated_CD.csv
and standardizes our geographical labels, producingaggregated_CD_final.csv
- an improved version ofaggregated_CD.csv
with standardized town namesfinal_geographical_cw.csv
- final geographical crosswalk that links original and cleaned geographical labels
AvgDebtPerOccupation.ipynb
takes as inputaggregated_CD.csv
and helps standardize different occupation names, producingoccupation_mapping.csv
- mapping from original occupation names to their standardized names
NY_webscrape.ipynb
take as inputNY_1790_CD.xlsx
and produceNY_results.csv
, a raw version of scraped data for New York from the U.S. Federal Census by scraping ancestry.com
NY_process_webscrape.ipynb
takes as inputNY_results.csv
and producesNY_table.csv
, the final version of our combined New York dataset that includes both original debt certificate and ancestry.com dataNY_table2.csv
, a supplementary table
CD_webscrape.ipynb
takes as inputaggregated_CD_final.csv
and producesCD_results.csv
, a raw version of scraped data for the rest of our states (minus Virginia) from the U.S. Federal Census by scraping ancestry.com
CD_process_webscrape.ipynb
takes as inputCD_results.csv
,NY_table.csv
, andNY_table2.csv
, producingCD_table.csv
andCD_table2.csv
, our final tables that index individuals by search group, aggregate their debt holdings and are combined with scraped ancestry.com dataCD_table.csv
is the final table we use to produce our final results
final_analysis.ipynb
takes as inputCD_table.csv
and outputsmaps
- which consists of maps sumarizing total and average debt holdings across county and stategeography_table.csv
- which summarizes debt holdings by geographic locationOccupation_table.csv
- which summarizes debt holdings by occupationOccupation_states
contain the same information, but by state.
delete unused folders,
write bash script to execute everything for replicability.