Population Change in the United States

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The United States is the third most populous country in the world after the two demographic billionaires, China and India. In 2015, the population of the United States numbered 321 million inhabitants, compared with 1.36 billion in China and 1.29 billion in India (PRB, 2015). When the first census was conducted in the United States in 1790, the population size of the country (as then defined geographically) was just under 4 million, which is about the size today of the metropolitan area of Phoenix, Arizona. In 220 years, the United States has increased tremendously in size, from 3.9 million inhabitants in 1790, to just under 309 million in 2010 (Figure 13.1), to more than 321 million in 2015. In this chapter, I trace the patterns of population growth of the United States from colonial times to the present and then examine some projections of the US population for the future. HISTORY OF POPULATION CHANGE IN THE UNITED STATES The Precolonial Period Estimates for the precolonization period of the size of the population in the land now known as the United States are not easy to obtain, and they vary considerably: “There is probably no single figure that can be accepted as the ‘best’ estimate of the late fifteenth century North American population” (Snipp, 1989: 9). According to Zinn, “The Indian population of [around] 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases introduced by the whites. A Dutch traveler in New England wrote in 1656 that ‘the Indians…affirm, that before the arrival of the Christians and before the smallpox broke out amongst them, they were ten times as numerous as they now are, and that their population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them have died’” (2003: 16). The number of Native Americans continued to decline over the next centuries and totaled between 125,000 and 150,000 by 1900 (Thornton, 1990: 42). This decline resulted in part from attrition during the continual warfare in which they participated in the defense of their tribal lands, as well as from unusual hardships and, as just noted, from diseases introduced by the European settlers.