Whatever Happened to Early American Population History?

Abstract

H HISTORICAL demography is in high fashion these days, Richard S. Dunn noted in I972.1 Questions of population-how many people, how long they lived, when they married, how many children they had, whether they moved or stayed-stood near the center of the great flowering of early American social history that marked the decade surrounding I970. The period witnessed major advances in empirical knowledge of the demographic facts of everyday life as well as a growing technical expertise and some impressive gains in theoretical sophistication. Early American history, it seemed, was in for a major restructuring in which the questions and methods of demography would play a central role. That early promise has not been realized, and the movement has fizzled out and moved to the margins of the field. True, there were some impressive publications in the mid-ig80s, but most represented the completion of projects begun much earlier, in demographic history's heyday. And there have been important new developments, especially in the study of labor markets, migration, and human stature, but most of it is the work of economists with an agenda separate from the social history mainstream. It does not denigrate such achievements to admit that demography does not now enjoy the pride of place among early Americanists that it could claim twenty years ago, that it is no longer high fashion. What happened? Part of the problem is the character of demography. It is a sharply focused, technical discipline that buries its concern with death and sex under lots of equations and complicated methods. As the most