Read on Twitter
So: a map I made a few years ago seems to have been going periodically viral for a year or so without my knowing it. This tweet by @simongerman600 is up above 750K views now. And a very high share of the engagement is livid about the erasure of native populations. https://twitter.com/simongerman600/status/1307983243719913473
When depicting population, not examining a dataset (this is @j_p_schroeder's), I try to be more careful about finding some way to represent native populations. E.g.: for an interactive exhibit @BPLBoston, I overlaid @ClaudioSaunt's shapefiles of cessions .
I'm spitting into the wind here, but there's all sorts of misinformation in that thread. The top reply is @simongerman600 incorrectly saying that it doesn't include slave populations. (It does--the 3/5 compromise counted them counted so the slaveocracy could get more seats.)
A much finer point is that not all Indians are excluded from this--one of my points in the site from which this is drawn is that far too many historians read these census maps as showing settler populations, even after the Dawes Act forcibly assimilated many natives.
There's also a frequent misconception in comments that including native populations would dramatically change this map. The US govt sometimes did count Indians off the census; it's surprisingly rare to find a native reservation that peeks up above 2 people per square mile.
(Or sovereign native territory in the antebellum era). But also, we gotta figure out how not simply that population must, necessarily, be progress. This map uses a visual vocabulary directly borrowed from the census's 1890 "Progress of the Nation"; but there are other tactics...
For instance, I keep toying with this scheme of the homestead act as a fire consuming the plains.
Anyhow, the original sin here seems to lie not with Kuestenmacher or Reddit, but with this site, which I guess did a screen capture a couple years ago, https://vividmaps.com/us-map-population-density/, and gestures at attribution without actually doing it.
