title: Rethinking the "early" decline of marital fertility in the United States.
abstract: In this article, I rely on new estimates of nineteenth-century mortality and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series to construct new estimates of white fertility in the nineteenth-century United States. Unlike previous estimates that showed a long-term decline in overall fertility beginning at or before the turn of the nineteenth century, the new estimates suggest that U.S. fertility did not begin its secular decline until circa 1840. Moreover, new estimates of white marital fertility, based on "own-children" methods, suggest that the decline in marital fertility did not begin in the nation as a whole until after the Civil War (1861-1865).
authors.affiliation: Department of History, Binghamton University, SUNY, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, NY 13902, USA. hacker@binghamton.edu
authors.forename: J David
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Hacker
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001315:Australia; D001723:Birth Rate / Q000208:ethnology* / Q000639:trends*; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005060:Europe; D005260:Female; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D017533:Marital Status / Q000208:ethnology*; D008423:Maternal Age; D008875:Middle Aged; D011155:Population Control / Q000266:history* / Q000639:trends; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology; D044465:White People / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*