The Rise And Fall Of 5 Great American Cities
What the Census reveals about systemic racism — a quick primer.
I’m too young in my writing career to write about writing yet. Nothing I’ve published has moved the needle much. I’ve certainly not done anything that has gone viral nor made more than a few bucks a month.
However, many times on Medium, it’s been said that a good place to start writing is that from which you already know about a certain subject. Honestly, I know a lot about a lot of different things. (Street smarts: not so much.) Geography was always the subject in which I was most interested. Everybody else? Not so much. There’s a good chance that Millenials and those in Gen Z did not even have to take a geography class to graduate.
I always get super excited when new Census numbers come out! My parents got us a World Book Encyclopedias set, and I gravitated to the US states' articles. We had the 1964 edition, so the populations of cities and towns were based on the 1960 census. That gave me the framework to know the relative sizes of cities today.
I’m a geek, I know.
Boy, things have changed! Most all of America’s largest cities in 1950 were east of the Mississippi. Today, eight of the ten largest cities lie to the west. The chart below identifies the five biggest losers in population since the 1950…
