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A Population History of North America. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 736 pp.
A problem with demography is that it is often relentlessly descriptive. It is nevertheless intrinsically interesting to many scholars, and for a growing fraction of them demography is an important variable needed for the solution of related problems. Thus A Population History of North America is certain to have a wide audience.
The book is organized imaginatively, with historical demography carved up into 15 manageable chapters according to a sensible combination of geography, the availability of data, loci of scholarly interest, and historical circumstance. The four major geographic units are, not unexpectedly, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Stanley Engerman covers the entire population history of the Caribbean in a single chapter. Robert McCaa covers all of Mexican historical demography from first peopling to 1920 in another chapter, leaving the period 1920-90 to a chapter contributed by Zadia Feliciano. Canada was divided into three chapters, Hubert Charbonneau and three coauthors handling the 17th and 18th centuries and Marvin McInnis contributing two chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries respectively.
The editors decided to treat European-American and African-American demographic histories separately for the United States, dividing these populations further by periods: 1607-1790 and 1790-1920. Each wrote one of the two chapters for the latter period himself, and they recruited Henry Gemery and Lorena Walsh to provide chapters for the earlier period. Richard Easterlin provides an insightful integrated chapter on U.S. demography since 1900.
While McCaa was left to cover native Mesoamerica, American Indian historical demography was...