A Population History of the United States.

A Population History of the United States. By Herbert S. Klein. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi, 300. Paper, $22.00, ISBN 0-521-78810-2; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-521-78268-6.)

It has been twenty years since the last narrative surveys of American demographic history aimed at "the general reader" were published (p. 1). That few scholars attempt to synthesize the vast literature on population is testimony to the voluminous output of demographers, economists, anthropologists, and the occasional historian and speaks to the significant gaps in our knowledge of mortality, fertility, and immigration patterns before the mid-twentieth century.

Herbert S. Klein condenses much of this large and uneven literature while comparing American developments to those elsewhere in the world. American exceptionalism (and non-exceptionalism) take surprising new twists in this account, and the book is well worth reading for these insights alone. Klein necessarily limits his discussion to a few salient topics. First is a focus on national patterns, with briefer discussions of regional difference, concentrating on the traditional variables of sex, age, and race. Race refers primarily to African and European Americans, not Asian Americans or, until the late twentieth century, Hispanic populations. Native Americans appear in the pre-contact period but not again until the twentieth century.

Second, Klein explores the demographic models of the Mortality Revolution and the Demographic Transition as well as the demand for labor as a crucial force in shaping American population growth. He also examines the remarkable changes in childbearing patterns and marriage in the late twentieth century. Omitted are comprehensive discussions of ethnic and religious differences, residence, class, occupation, emigration (especially important on the eve of the Civil War and during the 1930s), and nineteenth-century marriage. Specialists will discover that, as in all surveys, important findings in their fields are overlooked or oversimplified. As a colonialist, I especially missed discussions of pre- and post-contact Native American urbanization and de-urbanization.

These limitations still leave much to explore. Klein finds that the Mortality Revolution--rising life expectancy--began in the eighteenth century. An abundance of food, the conquest of epidemic disease, the rise of public health measures, and an increase in wealth were factors. But the story is not one of Whiggish progress. Increased population density spread disease, and poor nutrition plagued both rich and poor. Life expectancy in the United States declined in the first half of the century, falling below levels in England and Norway. Downward trends reversed after the 1870s, but by the end of the nineteenth century, life expectancy remained at late-eighteenth-century levels. In the twenty-first century differential mortality, based on economic and social status, distinguishes the United States from other industrialized nations.

The Demographic Transition refers to the rapid population growth of the nineteenth century caused by an excess of births over deaths. In the United States, high fertility was the result of early and nearly universal marriage. The United States, like France, was unusual in its early adoption of marital fertility control, and by the 1890s American population growth rates were similar to those of Europe. Klein notes that elsewhere mortality levels fell before fertility rates dropped, whereas in the United States (and France) fertility levels fell first--something he assigns to land access, although other factors were certainly involved.

The demand for labor also helps explain much of United States history--the importation of indentured and enslaved labor in the colonial period, urbanization, massive waves of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and interregional shifts in the late twentieth century. This is a very useful approach that might have benefited from attention to the gendered dimensions of both immigration and labor.

Klein has provided a rich framework that raises many questions. Historians in particular will be challenged to connect the themes in population history to the broad outlines of social, cultural, political, and economic history. All readers will learn a great deal from this well-conceived and remarkably succinct overview.

A note on production values: some of the graphs are murky and difficult to read. Each fills only half of a page but frequently deserves a full page and a more artful presentation.

Temple University

SUSAN E. KLEPP