In 1886 Emile Zola published La Terre (The Earth), a novel about peasant life in nineteenth-century France. In that novel, the peasant-proprietor Fduan, aware that he has reached an age at which he can no longer farm his own property, decides to divide it among his three children. Monsieur Baillehache, the notary before whom they all appear to legalize the transaction, feels that it is his duty to “make the usual comments.”

Famine mortality has a special interest for those interested in population history. After Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, famine was viewed as an event that “checks” population growth, perhaps the inevitable consequence of overpopulation. Although demographers have recently tried to show that a single famine or demographic crisis cannot retard population growth in the long run (Watkins and Menken 1985; Bongaarts and Cain 1982), yet famine, to the extent that it exists today, still constitutes a most dramatic demographic event.

The growth of English Nonconformity during the era of the demographic revolution (circa 1750–1850) has long been regarded as an impediment to the reconstruction of reproductive behavior. Historical demographers have relied heavily on Church of England registers of baptisms, burials, and marriages, while treating Protestant dissenters from the Church of England secondarily, as a factor of underestimation in the Anglican record. Such treatment suggests that religious culture played no independent role in determining population growth. This assumption seems problematic, however, considering the central role that social historians have assigned evangelical dissent to the emergence of modern English society and the somewhat greater place that religion has occupied in demographic studies of populations in continental Europe, the United States, and the third world.

That the Meiji Restoration marked Japan's proruption as a modern industrial nation-state has become a commonplace among those who study Japanese political history. The event may lack the romantic drama and mythology of the French revolutionary upheaval of almost a century before, yet the Restoration has remained a source of fascination for scholars seeking patterns in the events that transcend national boundaries to form the seamless web of human history.

The massive and ongoing exodus to cities from the countryside, a fact of life throughout Latin America today, includes Brazil. Although as late as 1960 that nation was a primarily agricultural country, over two-thirds of the population presently live in urban centers.

An anonymous comment on the suicidal inclinations of great men appeared among the regular articles in an 1850 issue of the highly regarded journal of mental hygiene, the Annales médico-psychologiques. “Some curious rapprochements might be drawn,” the author suggested, “given the frequency with which this thought occurs among celebrated men; but it is clear that if insanity were the sole possible explanation, only the lot of the common people would be desirable.” On one level, this statement represents an editorial contribution to an intense debate taking place in the journal's pages concerning the relationship between suicide and insanity. Although most nineteenthcentury observers associated self-destructive behavior with mental instability, viewing the individual who sought to put an end to his existence as weak, if not perverse, a certain mystique also surrounded suicide at this time. Images of Christian martyrs who willingly courted death in preference to leading lives of pagan dishonor, of the self-sacrificing heroes of antiquity, existed alongside more contemporary renderings of unrequited lovers and world-weary young men familiar to readers of Romantic novels and the faits divers. A longing for death was a sign of sensitivity and artistic promise. “Suicide,” wrote the influential critic, Saint-Marc Girardin, “is not the malady of one who is simple of heart or in mind; it is the malady of the refined and of philosophers.” Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Benjamin Constant, and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand all confessed to having been tempted to kill themselves in their youth. No less an idol than Napoleon Bonaparte was known to have entertained morbid ideas on occasion.