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

I myself had worked previously on some aspects of U.S. demographic history, most specifically on slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and Italian immigration, but most of my research and writing has been involved with the demographic history of Latin America. Given this rather unusual background, I thought that I might be able to provide a viewpoint that was somewhat different from the usual approach, and I felt that I had the skills to interpret the more technical work done by demographers, economists, and sociologists for a broader audience. My aim in this book is twofold: to report on the best of the current research and to summarize the mass of quantitative materials that private persons and public agencies have produced for understanding our society. Although few historians have ventured into this area, except for the colonial and early republican period, this is not an unworked field of research. Demographers, economists, and sociologists have devoted a great deal of time and research to understanding the evolution of the national population in the 19th and 20th centuries and have generated a great many new insights as well as new demographic materials.