What is NAPP?
NAPP (North Atlantic Population Project) is a machine-readable database of historical complete-count and sample census data for countries of that region. These data have only recently become available for social science research, and they collectively comprise our richest source of quantitative information on the population of the North Atlantic world in the late nineteenth century.
To allow the comparative analysis of human behavior across these countries, the NAPP collaborators have harmonized the record layouts, coding schemes, and documentation for the different censuses. NAPP assigns uniform codes across all the censuses and brings relevant documentation into a coherent form to facilitate analysis of social and economic change. NAPP data are compatible with the existing IPUMS series of U.S. census samples and are the foundation for a long-term collaborative enterprise to reconstruct the population of this region from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Scholars interested only in the United States are better served using IPUMS-USA, which is optimized for U.S. research.