This book provides the first comprehensive and consistent analysis of vital statistics and migration patterns for the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. It is anchored in the one available source for nationwide estimates, the decennial censuses. It attempts to provide, for black and white populations, a consistent set of estimates of birth and death rates, rates of natural increase, and net international and interregional flows. For the black population, it also estimates the changing pace of manumissions in the antebellum decades. The census estimates are also conditioned by a wide range of historical evidence, both quantitative and non-quantitative, ranging from evidence on slave smuggling to ship traffic during the War of 1812. The results are two-fold: a set of data and a set of questions suggested by the data that promise novel challenges for historians of the antebellum era.
This book examines in detail the fiscal and more general economic crisis of New York State and City. The authors show that the crisis was as much the fruit of political manoeuvering as it was the outcome of long-term economic trends and fiscal ineptitude. The book examines the roots of fiscal excesses and economic retardation and explores the interaction of fiscal and economic factors that ultimately imperiled the credit rating of the Empire State and the city that remains the financial capital of the United States. In uncovering the causes of these problems, McClelland and Magdovitz present both an analysis of the past and a warning for the future. The implications reach well beyond the borders of New York. The major causes of economic retardation first emerged in the period immediately following World War II, and show no signs of improving significantly in the immediate future.
Contrary to those who regard the economic transformation of the West as a gradual process spanning centuries, Peter D. McClelland claims the initial transformation of American agriculture was an unmis
This book is based upon two premises. The first is that the pervasiveness of the withering of the American Dream is a story with which few Americans are familiar. They are familiar with recent diffic
