When my editor, Frank Smith, first suggested the need for this volume, I wasrather surprised. Were there not a dozen books on the demographic history of theUnited States, I asked? No, he replied, not a one, and after a systematicchecking I found, to my astonishment, that he was quite right. Most countries inEurope have several such volumes dedicated to their population histories, andeven many developing countries have such histories. There were, of course,several important but partial general studies that had been produced in the 20thcentury from Rossiter's simple statistical compilation (1909), to the full-scalesurveys of Thompson and Whelpton (1933) and Taeuber and Taeuber (1971). Therewere also numerous long-term historical studies on aspects of demographicchange, especially related to fertility, but there was no one-volume synthesisthat covered the entire history of the United States. Despite the extraordinaryamount of research produced by individual scholars and even a recent collectionof essays on the subject edited by Haines and Steckel (2000), no one hadprovided the general reader with a survey.

I myself had worked previously on some aspects of U.S. demographic history, mostspecifically on slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and Italian immigration, butmost of my research and writing has been involved with the demographic historyof Latin America. Given this rather unusual background, I thought that I mightbe able to provide a viewpoint that was somewhat different from the usualapproach, and I felt that I had the skills to interpret the more technical workdone by demographers, economists, and sociologists for a broader audience. Myaim in this book is twofold: to report on the best of the current research andto summarize the mass of quantitative materials that private persons and publicagencies have produced for understanding our society. Although few historianshave ventured into this area, except for the colonial and early republicanperiod, this is not an unworked field of research. Demographers, economists, andsociologists have devoted a great deal of time and research to understanding theevolution of the national population in the 19th and 20th centuries and havegenerated a great many new insights as well as new demographic materials.