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Reviewed by:
  • A Population History of the United States
  • Dennis Hodgson
A Population History of the United States. By Herbert S. Klein. Cambridge University Press, 2004. 316 pp.

In just 238 pages of text, Herbert S. Klein, the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University, offers an overview of U.S. demographic [End Page 1299] history from prehistory until today. In the Introduction, Klein defines basic demographic measures for the nonspecialist reader and describes the various demographic transitions that have transformed populations over the last several hundred years. The two chapters that follow are a high point of the volume as Klein presents a masterful survey of what is known about the demography of the Western Hemisphere, from the arrival of the first humans through colonization by Europeans. Klein clarifies differences in how the Portuguese, Spanish, and the British settled their New World colonies by examining their differing situations with respect to the availability of indigenous labor and the cost of imported European labor. He also uses this labor supply framework to explain where and when colonizing powers resorted to the use of African slaves.

Klein's treatment of the actual population history of the United States, Chapters Three through Seven, is a more perfunctory examination of mortality, fertility, migration, population growth, and population distribution trends during five historic periods: 1776–1860, 1860–1914, 1914–1945, 1945–1980, and 1980–2003. In these chapters, Klein's focus is narrowly quantitative, although he occasionally reviews competing explanations of particular trends, for example, why fertility started to decline so early in the U.S. He also includes in each chapter a comparison of U.S. trends with those occurring in European societies. He makes no attempt to treat the contemporary debates and policy initiatives that are associated with the trends he describes. For instance, Klein documents the dramatic decline in immigration associated with the passage of the National Quota Laws in the 1920s, but he does not discuss the immigration restriction movement or the racist and eugenic fears that produced laws that overtly discriminated against Southern and Eastern Europeans. Similarly, when describing fertility decline from 1860 to 1914 he discusses the possible increased use of contraception and abortion but makes no mention of the contemporary legal initiates (Comstock laws and state abortion laws) that limited access to these birth control methods. Of course, many readers will have the requisite knowledge to "fill-in" the missing history, but even Klein's limited goal of charting U.S. population trends would seem to call for some treatment of contemporary reactions to population trends, especially those that produced policy initiatives aimed at altering them.

Admittedly there is a voluminous literature that narrowly focuses on accurately portraying U.S. population trends, and it has been over half a century since someone has attempted to summarize this body of work in a single volume. A one-volume overview of U.S. population trends would be an ideal main text for the courses in U.S. population history that are beginning to be offered and would be a very useful ancillary text for many courses in which a general knowledge of U.S. population trends is useful background information. Additionally, research on U.S. demographic trends is a highly specialized affair, and researchers tend to focus on a single demographic variable or a single time period. Reading a brief overview of U.S. trends would be an easy way for such specialists to become familiar with research on other demographic variables or other time periods, allowing them to better situate their work within a larger frame. That being said, I have to advise the reader that this particular one-volume overview of U.S. population trends contains more than a few errors of fact and interpretation. I hesitate to recommend it for [End Page 1300] the purposes mentioned above.

Consider Klein's description of nineteenth-century African American fertility trends. He begins by misreading one source's rates of natural increase as crude birth rates, arriving at a profoundly incorrect assessment: "The relatively steady level of crude death rates for this population—which remained at around 30 per thousand resident population for the century—was matched by...

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