Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 December 5

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December 5[edit]

Immigration data for the 1897 Imperial Russian census[edit]

Does anyone here know where exactly I can find immigration data (as in, the number and percentage of foreign-born people for each uyezd in the Russian Empire) for the 1897 Imperial Russian census? Futurist110 (talk) 03:35, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think the main issue with this is that there was no nationality question on the census. This article might be useful for some more detail.[1] Dlez (talk) 06:42, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
To be fair, though, country of birth is a bit separate from nationality. Futurist110 (talk) 07:27, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
What with the political upheavals of the 19th century in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the concept of "country of birth" may not have been very stable. The country could have ceased to exist, or the place of birth could now be in a different country. Would ethnic Russians born in Congress Poland have considered themselves foreign-born?  --Lambiam 09:33, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The Price of Expansion: The Nationality Problem in Russia of the Eighteenth-Early Twentieth Centuries has some statistics, presumably using language to define nationality.
Census as a Techology of Empire discusses the problems of identifying the disparate nationalities, languages and religions, while attempting to present the empire as a unified entity. This was especially so in provinces where Russian claims to sovereignty rested on the the premise of an ethnic Russian majority and notes an example when '...the chair of one Polish census district had instructed the registrars in his jurisdiction to mark Russian as a person's native language if they answered the question "Do you speak Russian?" in the affirmative' (p. 39). However, all of the nationalities discussed in this paper had been incorporated into the empire by border expansion rather than through migration.
Alansplodge (talk) 10:52, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Raw data for "Nationalities (as determined by language)" is at Visualizing the 1897 Census. In the "social group" category lower down, 0.6 million (0.5%) are described as "foreigners" which must have been immigrants. Alansplodge (talk) 11:06, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Some much more detailed figures at EMIGRATION FROM AND IMMIGRATION INTO RUSSIA (1931), specifically the section headed "Immigration into the Russian Empire" from p. 565 onwards (46/61 of the pdf file). The author was "Recently President, Central Statistical Board of U. S. S. R." and uses data from sources other than the 1897 census. Alansplodge (talk) 11:31, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Beautiful, excellent, and extremely detailed article! Thank you! I have just read it and I found it to be extremely fascinating! Do you know of any other similar articles about this topic? Futurist110 (talk) 03:51, 6 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, that's the best I could do I'm afraid. There's probably more out there in Russian, but that's beyond my capabilities. Alansplodge (talk) 16:24, 6 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well, thank you very much anyway! Futurist110 (talk) 06:44, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What permanently inhabited island under 45° from the equator was discovered last?[edit]

What about last to become known to Europe? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:47, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discovered by whom? Obviously anyone living there would know about it. For Euopeans, possibly Hawaii in 1778. Hawaii#European_arrival RudolfRed (talk) 21:52, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Currently inhabited but either discovered late or "discovered" late by Europeans. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:14, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Chatham Islands says 1791. They're at 44 degrees south. AnonMoos (talk) 22:54, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Nukuoro says 1806... AnonMoos (talk) 22:56, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Pitt_Island in 1807. Occupied by 38 people in 2011, not sure about today. RudolfRed (talk) 23:36, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Pitt Island had 39 people in the 2018 census, so reasonable to assume it's still populated.-gadfium 00:55, 6 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Idjwi is a large island of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Lake Kivu. Lake Kivu is said to have first been visited by a European explorer in 1894 [1]. There are sure to be other inhabited islands in rivers and lakes in various parts of the world that were not mapped or catalogued until later. --Amble (talk) 22:20, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]