History and Genealogy in Conversation, in Pittsburgh tomorrow!
Dear Readers,
Do you know someone in Pittsburgh who’s looking to have a good time? And, by “a good time” I mean they want to think deeply about census records…
(You’re getting this because at some point you said you wanted to read about boring things. If that is no longer true, you can unsubscribe here.)
SO: if you are in Pittsburgh, come out to Carnegie Mellon’s Kresge Theater (in the College of Fine Arts Building) at 5pm tomorrow, Thursday, Feb. 23. If you are not in Pittsburgh, please forward this immediately to everyone you know in Pittsburgh.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
You’ll want to be in that theater, because it is going to be a good time. I’ll be talking about DEMOCRACY’S DATA (of course), but the real attraction is the person I conned into convinced to do this event with me: Tammy Hepps.
Just check out the way Tammy begins this essay (which is one of my favorites, ever, about the census):
On January 2, 1920, a frigid day even by Pittsburgh’s standards, nineteen year-old Henry Silverstein began his first day of work as a census enumerator. He got off the street car in Homestead near Fifteenth and West, his official census portfolio tucked under one arm, and turned left instead of right. Things went downhill from there, and within days he became so overwhelmed that he came up with an illegal scheme to be done with the whole mess. He got away with it for almost a century, too, until a single-minded sleuth (that’s me) decided it would be fun to read through all 140 enumeration districts of the Homestead District, 1880-1940.
I opened that essay with my 12-year-old next to me just now and he (despite telling me often how boring the census is) could not help reading over my shoulder. Check out the rest of Tammy’s essay here.
I hope to see you there, if you can make it. White Whale Bookstore will be selling books and I will sign (and stamp!) them. Our host is my fellow historian of quantification, Christopher Phillips-–if you liked DEMOCRACY’S DATA, or if you’ve read MONEYBALL and thought something might not be quite right, you’ll love Chris’s SCOUTING AND SCORING. (My 12-year-old reports that this sounds much cooler than what I write about. Which is true.)
See you tomorrow, perhaps. And in the meantime, here’s the oft-mentioned-12-year-old letting one fly in Pittsburgh! 
yours,
Dan