nhboy
Ubi bene ibi patria
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"I’ve always been curious about the history of marriage and divorce in the United States. We often hear about how divorce rates are in flux, or how marriage rates are declining, but we’re rarely given a real sense of the long-term trends in marriage and divorce. Since I couldn’t find a chart showing the long-term marriage and divorce trends in the U.S., I decided to crawl through the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) database and collect the data myself.
If you’re not familiar with the NCHS, they publish monthly reports on vital statistics about Americans such as birth rates, death rates, causes of death, and — you guessed it — marriage and divorce rates. Most of the historical data is hidden away in PDFs of these monthly reports, so I had the pleasure of scraping data from scans of dozens of CDC reports that were published 30 years before I was even born. I’ll save you the laborious effort of repeating my scraping efforts by sharing the data set here.
To provide a more visual view of the data set, I charted the per capita marriage and divorce rates below, with a few annotations to denote major historical events."
"I’ve always been curious about the history of marriage and divorce in the United States. We often hear about how divorce rates are in flux, or how marriage rates are declining, but we’re rarely given a real sense of the long-term trends in marriage and divorce. Since I couldn’t find a chart showing the long-term marriage and divorce trends in the U.S., I decided to crawl through the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) database and collect the data myself.
If you’re not familiar with the NCHS, they publish monthly reports on vital statistics about Americans such as birth rates, death rates, causes of death, and — you guessed it — marriage and divorce rates. Most of the historical data is hidden away in PDFs of these monthly reports, so I had the pleasure of scraping data from scans of dozens of CDC reports that were published 30 years before I was even born. I’ll save you the laborious effort of repeating my scraping efforts by sharing the data set here.
To provide a more visual view of the data set, I charted the per capita marriage and divorce rates below, with a few annotations to denote major historical events."