| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

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

Having provided an excellent synthesis of research on the Atlantic slave trade in 1999, Herbert S. Klein undertook the challenging task of distilling the prolific and diverse literature on American demographic history for a general audience, which I would judge to be advanced undergraduates in the social sciences. The broad methodology is reasonably straightforward, and the chief organizing device is knowledge that population changed through births, deaths, or migration. Thus the book is flooded with numbers, charts, tables, and maps, which the author blends with well-constructed prose to deliver a quantitative picture underlying the evolution of population from the earliest aboriginal settlements to the present. The book's most difficult endeavor and major contribution is to connect the numerical picture with a broad range of the causes and consequences that have flowed from the minds of economists, demographers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.

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