Reviewed by Richard Alba | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.4

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Reviewed by Richard Alba | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years. By Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. x + 411 pp. Graphs, tables, notes, appendices, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth).

Claude Fischer and Michael Hout have produced a volume that will prove an indispensable reference for historians, sociologists, and other social scientists who are interested in the twentieth-century trajectories of such major social indicators as educational attainment, ethnic and religious diversity, and household living arrangements. Their data analyses are as comprehensive as possible, given that social surveys were in their infancy during the first half of the century, and they are always intelligently and insightfully constructed. The authors complement them with incisive syntheses of frequently large literatures, contributing to the indispensability of the volume as a resource. This is not to say that the book merely echoes conventional wisdom on the important subjects it addresses. In fact it dispels some commonly encountered generalizations on some topics such as the decline of the nuclear family household in the later part of the century. The authors use their survey of patterns across a large number of domains to draw some new conclusions about how Americans simultaneously diverged and converged during the last century.

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