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The United States is organized under a federal system of government, presently consisting of a national government plus fifty states and the District of Columbia. Each state has its own constitution and governance structure.
Authority for admitting new states is vested in Congress by the Constitution's Article IV, Section 3. Once an area has achieved territorial status – a typical preliminary step on the route to statehood – the procedure for becoming a state usually involves three steps: first a territory petitions Congress through its territorial assembly; then Congress passes an enabling act authorizing the territory to write a constitution; finally, Congress passes an act admitting the state to the union. Both the enabling and admission acts require presidential approval.
Table Ap-E provides information concerning the timing of two important stages in that process: the date of legislation conferring territorial status (where applicable) and the effective date of admission to the United States.
There have been many deviations from the procedure just described; in fact, it is just one of the common routes taken to statehood. Three others can be noted.
Many tables in Historical Statistics of the United States refer to census regions and divisions or rely on the two-letter state codes standardized by the U.S. Postal Service. Refer to Map Ap-F for the current state boundaries and the current census regional classification. Refer to Table Ap-E for a listing of the state codes. The census regional classifications have a history. Through 1840, the decennial censuses tended not to organize statistical presentations along regional lines. Instead, state-level data were typically shown in tables that simply listed the states in north-to-south fashion. The Census Office introduced many changes to the tabular presentation of data in the 1850 Census, including the use of various regional groupings in summary tables that were published as part of a one-volume compendium. This change was one part of a wide-ranging census reform conducted against the backdrop of a deepening sectional crisis that gave regional summaries new salience. 1
The use of regional tabulations and summaries was continued in subsequent censuses, with a fair bit of variation and experimentation in the groupings as new states were admitted to the nation. A five-region scheme used in the 1880 Census is generally consistent with modern categories, although various regroupings and minor adjustments to nomenclature have occurred since 1880 (see Table Ap-G). Beginning with the 1900 Census, the regional categories were standardized.
Anderson, Margo J. 1988. The American Census: A Social History. Yale University Press.
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For a discussion of the wider reforms and the political context, see Anderson (1988). For details on the regional classifications used in the nineteenth century, refer to the source for Table Ap-G. |
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