GIS Data

From the Newberry Library in Chicago, this is a new product available online to download. These downloadable zipped files contain additional files with the shape files.

The International Historical Geographic Information System (IHGIS) provides data tables from population and housing censuses as well as agricultural censuses from around the world, along with corresponding GIS boundary files. Data from diverse published documents are provided in a standardized, ready-to-use structure with thorough, consistently formatted metadata. ...

IHGIS provides shapefiles to describe the boundaries of administrative and statistical units represented in IHGIS data files. By linking the data tables to the boundary files, you can map the characteristics in the data tables. The GISJOIN field present in both the shapefiles and the data files serves as the link between the files. You can perform a join in a GIS package to attach columns from a data file to the attribute table of the boundary shapefile. ...

This site contains downloadable GIS data for 19th century railroads in the United States.

This site provides digital boundary definitions for every U.S. Congressional District in use between 1789 and 2012. These were produced as part of NSF grant SBE-SES-0241647 between 2009 and 2013.
The current release of these data is experimental.