In 1790, federal marshals collected data for the first census, knocking by hand on each and every door. As directed by the U.S. Constitution, they counted the population based on specific criteria, including "males under 16 years, free White females, all other free persons (by sex and color), and slaves." There was no pre-printed form, however, so marshals submitted their returns, sometimes with additional information, in a variety of formats.

In 1810 and 1820, additional categories appeared, collecting information on "free White males and females under 10 years of age," as well as those "10 and under 16," "16 and under 26," "26 and under 45," and "45 years and upward." "Free colored persons" and slaves were now counted separately as were "all other persons, except Indians not taxed" and "foreigners not naturalized." Through the decades, the census continued to expand, including a growing number of questions on agriculture, manufacturing, living conditions, education, crime, mortality, and increasingly, race and ancestry.

The census has always had political implications, informing conscription, Congressional representation, and the collection and allocation of taxes. It has also always both reflected and shaped social divisions. Before 1960, census enumerators interviewed families in person and without consulting the individuals, selected which box to check for "race." Starting in 1960, largely for financial reasons, the Census Bureau mailed forms directly to households, thereby allowing individuals to select their own boxes. This led to a fundamental change in the way race was categorized and measured. In 2000, for the first time, individuals could select more than one box and about 6.8 million Americans did so, reflecting the complex nature of racial and ethnic categories today.

The 2010 census is designed to count all residents and will ask a small number of questions, such as name, sex, age, date of birth, race, ethnicity, relationship and housing tenure. The longer American Community Survey will collect socioeconomic data annually from a representative sample of the population.

For searchable (and map-able) databases of historical census data from 1790 to 1960, refer to the University of Virginia's United States Historical Census Data Browser. For more current information, try the official website of the U.S. Census Bureau..

To read Robert Beverley's full account of the life of Pocahontas, refer to pages 25-33 of his The History and Present State of Virginia online at Documenting the American South.

In contrast to Beverley's account, listen to historian Caroline Cox's attempt to reconstruct the life of Pocahontas in the lecture Biography: Pocahontas. In Colonial Williamsburg's podcast episode We are Starved, archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume provides a very different view from Beverley's of Pocahontas's time in England.

For more information on Crown Princess Ka'iulani, refer to The Ka'iulani Project, a website and research community that seeks to recover the history of Ka'iulani and make her life story more widely known. For class-appropriate readings on Ka'iulani, Scholastic's series of books for young people The Royal Diaries includes Ka'iulani: The People's Princess, a fictionalized first-person account of the princess' life from 1889 to 1893. Currently, much controversy surrounds an in-production film on the life of the princess and the annexation of Hawaii.

Weetamoo's early life, as well as the life of Awashonks, are fictionalized in another volume in Scholastic's The Royal Diaries series: Weetamoo: Heart of the Pocassets, by Patricia Clark Smith. Details on the lives of both Weetamoo and Awashonks are scarce, as the Wampanoag people had no written language; however, Mary Rowlandson, a colonist captured by the Wampanoag during King Philip's War, describes Weetamoo in her memoir, Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Project Gutenberg offers the full-text of the narrative.

For more on King Philip's War, Harvard professor Jill Lepore discusses the conflict in an episode of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's podcast, Historians on the Record.

In Kazunomiya: Prisoner of Heaven, another volume in Scholastic's Royal Diaries series, Kathryn Lasky imagines Kazunomiya's life from 1858 to 1862.

[Question 1] The first photograph of either a president or a first lady broadcasting from the White House is of Mrs. Hoover. She began national broadcasts in 1929, even setting up a practice room in the White House where she could "improve [her] talkie technique." Many of her broadcasts were made from President Hoover's country retreat, Camp Rapidan, where she often devoted her programs to speaking to young people, urging girls to contemplate independent careers and boys to help with the housework. Mrs. Hoover had a degree in geology from Stanford University, as did her husband. She had accompanied him to China for two years, where he hadsupervised the country's mining projects. She later used the Mandarin Chinese she learned then to communicate with her husband privately when they were in the presence of others.

[Question 2] Her father and her maternal grandfather had both served in Congress. When she was 17, she had gone to Washington with her parents to visit their family friends, President Rutherford Hayes and his wife Lucy, and she had spent a week as a guest at the White House. She was politically ambitious, but saw little opportunity for women to advance their own political careers. She married William Taft, a lawyer, who would probably have been content to practice law, or to become a judge, but she strongly encouraged him to accept political appointments, and finally, to run for political office. On her husband's inauguration day, the outgoing President, Theodore Roosevelt, left Washington immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, and she skillfully maneuvered herself into the car, next to her husband, that drove them both back to the White House. William Taft coped with stress and unhappiness by eating. During his presidency, his weight ballooned to 340 pounds, making it necessary for theTafts to replace the White House bathtub with a super-sized one.

[Question 3] Bachelor President Grover Cleveland married 21-year-old Frances Folsom on June 2, 1886, in a White House ceremony at which John Philip Sousa played the wedding march. After the ceremony, the newlyweds escaped to a honeymoon cottage in nearby Deer Park, Maryland, where reporters camped out in the bushes. Frances Folsom was the daughter of Cleveland's former law partner. Cleveland had known her since she had been born, and had bought her first baby carriage. He was 27 years older than her.

President John Tyler's first wife, Letitia, was the first woman to die during her husband's presidency, in 1842. He remarried while he was President, to Julia Gardiner, at her church in New York City, on June 26, 1844. President Wilson's first wife, Ellen, died in the White House on August 6, 1914, and he remarried, to Edith Bolling Galt, while he was President, on December 8, 1915, in a ceremony at Edith's Washington, D.C. home.

[Question 4] Julia Grant, although it happened after her husband was no longer president. Mrs. Grant went down the Big Bonanza silver mine in Virginia City, Nevada with her husband after hearing that he had wagered that she would be afraid to go. The Grants, along with their son, Ulysses, Jr., visited the mine on October 28, 1879, more than two years after Grant had left office. The mine's fabulous production of silver during the Civil War had done much to undergird the Government's financial credit internationally. Lucy Hayes later descended into the same mine with her husband, President Rutherford Hayes. On May 21, 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt made the national news by visiting the Willow Grove coal mine in Bellaire, Ohio, to observe the working conditions of the miners.

[Question 5] After the Lincolns' son Willie died in February 1862, she grew despondent. A few of her acquaintances suggested that she and her husband could still receive consolation from him in the afterlife through the intermediary of a spirit medium. Mrs. Lincoln invited several—the exact number is disputed—to the White House for private consultations. Both Lincolns attended a few séances elsewhere in Washington, although it is a matter of conjecture whether the President regarded these as anything more than a kind of entertainment.

[Question 6] The famous writer was Washington Irving. James Madison was generally shy and reticent among crowds and at parties, but Dolley was a social gadfly and an accomplished hostess. She was also a couple of inches taller than her husband.

[Question 7] Lyndon Johnson, with his wife Lady Bird on one side and Jackie on the other, was sworn in aboard Air Force One less than two hours after JFK's assassination. The ceremony was delayed to wait for Jackie to arrive. The most famous photograph of the event has Jackie in the foreground, standing in a pink suit still stained with her husband's blood, with LBJ in the center with his hand upraised taking the oath, and with Lady Bird in the background.

For more on the first successfully-elected Irish American presidential candidate, try the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The organization offers primary and secondary sources and resources for both teachers and students.

To read a full history of John Barry's life and his service to the rebelling colonists and the young United States, try this article at ushistory.org, website of the Independence Hall Association.

Want to learn more about Molly Brown? If you live and teach near Denver, CO, you could visit her home, today the Molly Brown House Museum. If you don't live in Colorado, you can still read the website's overview of her life.

For more on Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, try Susan Campbell Bartoletti's book Kids on Strike! Eight chapters, illustrated with historical photographs, cover children in labor movements from the 19th century to the 20th, with one chapter devoted entirely to Jones's Children's Crusade. The Library Journal lists the book as appropriate to grades 5-8 and recommends it as a "fine resource for research as well as a very readable book."