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IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT FOR THE SOVIET UNION TO TIE THE EASTERN BLOC COUNTRIES TO THE ANTI-BONN POLICY. IN THE LONG VIEW. AT LEAST ONE OF THOSE COUNTRIES WILL ATTEMPT TO REGAIN ITS "NATIONAL IDENTITY". ONLY IN THE CASE OF ULBRICHT CAN THERE BE NO QUESTION OF SEEKING NATIONAL IDENTITY, BECAUSE OF THE PECULIAR POSITION OF THE "GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC".

Despite the importance of marriage for the economic and demographic history of the nineteenth-century United States, there are few published estimates of the timing and incidence of marriage and no published studies of its correlates before 1890, when the Census Office first tabulated marital status by age, sex, and nativity. In this article I rely on the 1860 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series census sample to construct national and regional estimates of white nuptiality by nativity and sex and to test theories of marriage timing. I supplement this analysis with two new public use samples of Civil War soldiers. The Gould sample, collected by the U.S. Sanitary Commission between 1863 and 1865, allows me to test whether height and body mass influenced white men's propensity to marry. Additionally, a sample of Union Army recruits linked to the 1860 census, created as part of the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death project, allows me to combine suspected economic, demographic, and anthropometric correlates of marriage into a multivariate model of never-married white men's entrance into first marriage. The results indicate that nuptiality was moderately higher in 1860 than it was in 1890. In contrast to previous studies that emphasize the primary importance of land availability and farm prices, I find that single women's opportunity to participate in the paid labor force was the most important determinant of marriage timing. I also find modest support for the hypothesis that height affected men's propensity to marry, consistent with the theory that body size was a sign to potential marriage partners of future earnings capacity and health.

Abstract2021 marked the 30-year anniversary of the publication Fatal Years: Child Mortality in the late Nineteenth-Century United States, a pioneering work in historical demography by Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines. This special issue showcases the current state of historical mortality studies through a collection of articles originally presented at two commemorative sessions at the 2021 meeting of the Social Science History Association. It provides new and more nuanced evidence on several of the major themes of Fatal Years in terms of the mortality experience and includes studies of a wide range of contexts, from North America, to Ireland, England and Wales, and continental Europe. They all bring new evidence and leverage the dramatic development that has taken place in availability of large-scale micro-level data in the 30 years since Fatal Years was published. This introduction first provides some background to the collection and then summarizes the main findings from the different articles included. Preston and Haines provide a coda to this collection with a short reflection article on researching and writing Fatal Years.

De 1835 à 1935, la fécondité aux États-Unis a chuté de 7 enfants par femme à 2,1. Le dépouillement intégral du recensement américain réalisé par IPUMS pour les années 1850, 1880, 1910 et 1930 permet d'analyser très finement cette baisse. Pour cela, nous construisons des modèles inclusifs de la fécondité des couples qui prennent en compte une très large variété de facteurs économiques, sociaux, culturels et familiaux, y compris des mesures de la religiosité et de la disponibilité de membres de la famille résidant hors du ménage mais à proximité de celui-ci. Nos résultats mettent en évidence le rôle majeur dans la baisse de la fécondité joué par les pratiques et perceptions culturelles et religieuses, approchées par l'origine des parents – notamment le pays de naissance – et les choix de prénoms.