Origins: Taking Count

Every ten years there’s a rumbling in Washington. The machinery of government begins to churn, and soon people with notebooks are scurrying about everywhere, trying to take a reckoning of the American body politic. This familiar civic ritual, the census, has a distinguished lineage, one that goes back at least to ancient Rome. According to the Gospel of Luke, it was even a Roman census that was responsible for Jesus’ being born in Bethlehem: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was […]