Title:	A Population History of the United States
Authors:	Herbert S. Klein Frank Smith
Keywords:	History
Issue Date:	2004
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Description:	My aim in this book is twofold: to report on the best of the current research and to summarize the mass of quantitative materials that private persons and public agencies have produced for understanding our society. Although few historians have ventured into this area, except for the colonial and early republican period, this is not an unworked field of research. Demographers, economists, and sociologists have devoted a great deal of time and research to understanding the evolution of the national population in the 19th and 20th centuries and have generated a great many new insights as well as new demographic materials. Even government demographers have written about historical demography as they begin to work through issues that are of contemporary concerns. There is thus a vast body of readily available research and materials that can be used to understand this history. The demographic history of any country shares many characteristics with other populations and their evolution. I have thus tried to show both the commonality of patterns and changes that the population of the United States shared with other nations, especially those of the North Atlantic world, and also to examine those features that were unique to its evolution. Although all modern industrial societies arrive at roughly the same basic structures in the 21st century, they often took slightly different routes to get there. In the case of the United States, the decline of fertility before the fall of mortality, the existence from the beginning of a multiracial society, and the ongoing impact of foreign immigration have been among the special factors that have helped define some of the unique features of the population history. In the following analysis I have tried to show how these unique features modified the broad demographic changes that all populations of the advanced industrializing countries were experiencing in the past three centuries.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55664
ISBN:	978-0-511-18685-1
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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