This paper uses census IPUMS data to analyze trends in racial differences in home ownership and housing values and to examine the connection between residential segregation and the housing status of blacks relative to whites. A widening in the ownership gap between 1940 and 1960 is explained largely by the increasing concentration of blacks in central city areas, whereas a narrowing in the ownership gap between 1960 and 1980 is explained only partly by changes in the relative characteristics of the black and white populations. Residential segregation did not widen the racial gap in home ownership rates in 1940 or 1980, but it did widen the gap in housing values after 1940.

The extent of economic gains by African Americans in the decades after slavery is in dispute. Using a newly constructed data set, compiled from the manuscript census schedules and other sources, we find that African Americans in the Mississippi Delta experienced substantial income gains between 1880 and 1910. These gains can be attributed partly to African Americans moving into higher paying occupations-in particular, moving from being farm laborers to being farm operators-and partly to an increase in the incomes received from given occupations, (C) 2001 Academic Press.

White and nonwhite infant mortality rates declined sharply between 1920 and 1970, but the ratio of nonwhite/white rates did not decline. This paper examines the racial gap using state level panel data with information on income, urbanization, women's education, and physicians per capita. We find that these variables can explain a large portion of the persistent racial gap in infant mortality rates between 1920 and 1945, but a smaller portion thereafter. We also find that even after controlling for these characteristics, southern states had relatively high infant mortality rates during this period, especially for nonwhites.

In this article we examine the relationship between immigrants' welfare use and their social capital, using the 1990 census. We measure community social capital using contact with co-ethnics and co-ethnics' economic inactivity, and examine the use of AFDC and SSI in two subpopulations: single-mother families and elderly units. Major findings are that the effects of social capital differ between immigrant single-mother families and elderly units; the effects of social capital differ between the young-at-arrival elderly and the old-at-arrival elderly; and the process of AFDC use is similar for immigrants and for natives, whereas the process of SSI use is more complicated for immigrants than for natives.

Historians often despair of their ability to write histories of child murder, because the crime was easy to commit and conceal. Even today, coroners can determine only in rare instances whether a deceased infant or newborn was suffocated or died of natural causes (Knight 1996: 441–44, 345–60). No reliable test can determine, once decomposition has begun, whether a deceased newborn ever took a breath; and suffocation, unlike strangulation, leaves no physical marks, unless excessive pressure is applied to the face or lips. A murderer needed but a few moments to smother a child and could claim that the child was stillborn, had been accidentally overlain, or had died from natural causes. Unwanted pregnancies could be kept from public notice with the help of family or friends, especially pregnancies that came to term in late winter or early spring, when expectant mothers could live quietly out of the public eye or stay wrapped in heavy clothing. In New England, a large proportion of suspected neonaticides—nearly a quarter—occurred in April or early May, “mud season” in the Yankee vernacular,when people emerged from their long winter “hibernation.”

The modern concept of wealth of nations emerged by the early twentieth century. Capital embodied in people human capital mattered. The United States led all nations in mass post elementary education during the human-capital century. The American system of education was shaped by New World endowments and Republican ideology and was characterized by virtues including publicly funded mass education that was open and forgiving, academic yet practical, secular, gender neutral, and funded and controlled by small districts. The American educational template was a remarkable success, but recent educational concerns and policy have redefined some of its 'virtues' as 'vices.'

The past is more relevant to the present than we often believe. There are historical roots to seemingly new concerns, frequently raised as social problems, which connect the beginning and the end of the twentieth century. For example, ethnic enclaves, which provided employment networks for women, existed in domestic work long before their recent rediscovery among ethnic men. Female-headed households and single mothers have also been around for a long time, but in 1900 they had to support themselves in the absence of large state or federal welfare programs. By creatively re-analyzing census data, the author explores women's place in the U.S. political economy at the beginning of the twentieth century, viewed from the national level, but also highlighting the variations in women's experiences according to racial ethnic background, class, and geography. Since this past is often used as a baseline for judging changes during the subsequent one hundred years, it is important to understand it on its own terms. Since this was also a period of economic transformation and high immigration, it is a key time to observe women's changing work options. Among them are the large volume of women's uncounted work in the informal economy; the individual, household, and geographic characteristics that predicted their formal employment; and the occupational segregation experienced by women of differing racial ethnic backgrounds.

In the 1990s, there have been frequent references to Miami as a 'city of the future' or 'the prototypical city of the 21st century.' However, there has been only limited documentation of the demography of Miami to back up these claims. This paper will ultimately trace the growth of the elder population in Miami-Dade County since the 1950s. There will be an examination within the elder population of their socio-economic and demographic characteristics over time using data from published census reports for 1960s, as well as public use micro data samples for 1950, 1970, 1980 and 1990 and available published 2000 census data tables. However, it must be noted that the growth of the elderly population in Miami-Dade County does not occur in a vacuum, thus there will also be an examination of the structural development of the overall community of Miami-Dade County that is linked to the literature on urban development in sociology. This paper will document the intertwining threads that have and will continue to have on the communities within Miami-Dade County as a whole and the competing demands that are and will be faced in the future with respect to resources and services, particularly health care. Thus, in this respect Metropolitan Miami is not unique. For the future, the elder population in Miami-Dade County will continue to grow and the competing demands will increase. The diversity of the elder population will also increase which in turn will place added pressure on finding culturally sensitive solutions to the increasing demand for health care in the community.

Inequality across the twentieth century United States is a tale in two parts. The last half-century is the better known of the two and has been a period of widening inequality. But the first half-century, as we will demonstrate, was a period of narrowing inequality. It is the less well understood of the two tales largely because of data deficiencies. The federal population census, which provides much of the evidence on the distribution of material well being, first asked questions on income (and education) in 1940. We assemble data from a wide variety of sources showing conclusively that there was, during the first half of the century, a substantial decrease in various measures of inequality. The wage structure in manufacturing narrowed, the premium to various white-collar occupations decreased as did that for many craft trades, and the return to years of post-elementary education fell. These declines, moreover, came in two large spurts, both during wartime periods that were subsequently sustained. Not only was there a wage and income compression in the 1940s, about which much has been written, but there was also a narrowing in the late 1910s. Both periods of reductions in the premium to skill and decreases in the pecuniary return to education coincided, as well, with expansions in education, first for secondary schooling and later at the college level.

Ansley Coale's indices of fertility are well-established measures in historical demography. Developed in the 1960s, they formed the basic analytical device for the European Fertility Project (EFP), which chartered the decline of fertility inEurope (Coale and Watkins 1986), and which has since spawned efforts to measure fertility control in more refined and rigorous ways (David et al. 1988; David and Mroz 1989a, 1989b; David and Sanderson 1988, 1990; Haines 1989; Okun 1994a, 1994b; Bean et al. 1991; Anderson and Silver 1992).

Not long after the 1976 publication of The Atlas of Early American History, its cartographic editor made a candid admission.1 Barbara Bartz Petchenik, a eading cartographer and historian of map-making, felt certain that the era of scholarly historical atlases had come to an end. Important new computer technologies—most notably GIS (Geographic Information Systems)—would entirely change the ways in which maps were produced and used. Many questions formerly addressed by the traditional atlas could now be answered by querying a database directly, thus eliminating the need for the intermediate image—the map. She frankly wondered “whether it is wise to expend resources, skilled labor and money, in producing such documents that are relatively inflexible and user-limited.” Worst of all, she continued, “TheAtlas of Early American History may represent the ultimate stage . . .

This paper examines the impact of Civil War pensions on the labor force participation of the veterans and non-veterans. The main question is how much the pensions reduce the labor force participation of pensioners. The analysis shows a substantial difference in the participation rate among the pensioners, which closely correspond to the variation in pension income. The pensions account for as much as 15 percent reduction in the participation rate. The analysis also finds a significant impact of health and occupation, and supports previous findings about the declining elasticity of retirement with respect to pensions. Furthermore, a comparison of the participation rate between veterans and nonveterans reveals a strong regional difference in retirement behavior. A lower participation rate of Union veterans who received the pensions was not only caused by the pensions, but also the lower participation rates in the Northern states.

Better-educated people are healthier, but the magnitude of the relationship between health and education varies substantially across groups and over time. We undertake a theoretical and empirical study of how health disparities by education vary over time and across the population, according to underlying health characteristics and market forces. One surprising implication of the theory we develop is that health disparities actually increase as the price of health inputs falls. Therefore, government subsidies for health care research or even universal health insurance may worsen health inequality. Moreover, technological progress in health care will tend to raise inequality over time. The theory also implies that health disparities will be larger for sicker, older and more vulnerable groups. The first prediction is consistent with significant expansions in health disparities over the last thirty years in the US. The second is consistent with observed patterns in the National Health Interview Survey, the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, and the Framingham Heart Study. The returns to schooling are twice as high for the chronically ill and for those out of the labor force, and they tend to rise with age.

A fair amount of research suggests that health has been improving among the elderly over the past 10 to 15 years, Comparatively little research effort, however, has been focused on analyzing disability among the young. In this paper, we argue that health among the young has been deteriorating at the same time that the elderly have been becoming healthier. Moreover, this growth in disability may end up translating into higher disability rates for tomorrow's elderly. using data from the National Health Interview Survey, we find that, from 1984 to 1996, the rate of disability among those in their 40s rose by one full percentage point, or almost forty percent. Over the same period, the rate of disability declined for the elderly. The recent growth in disability has coincided with substantial growth in asthma and diabetes among the young. Indeed, the growth in asthma alone seems more than enough to explain the change in disability. therefore, we argue that the growth in disability stems from real changed in underlying health status.

By utilizing the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and a measure of occupational prestige (OCCSCORE) as a labor market outcome, the authors examine variations in the degree of labor market discrimination faced by several ethnic and racial groups in the United States between 1880 and 1990. Results demonstrate that the sharpest decline in labor market discrimination against blacks occurred between 1960 and 1980. For black males the extent of labor market discrimination was greater in all census years in IPUMS after 1880 until 1970, evidence contradicting the conventional expectation that market-based discrimination will decline progressively over time by dint of competitive pressure. Finally, after replicating George Bojas' "ethnic capital" exercise, the authors pool the 1880, 1900, and 1910 data to determine the relative magnitude of a group's gains and losses in occupational prestige due to group advantage or disadvantage in human capital endowments and due to favorable or unfavorable treatment (nepotism or discrimination) of those endowments in the labor market. The authors then examine statistically whether the group human capital advantage or disadvantage and group exposure to nepotism or discrimination at the turn of the century affects labor market outcomes for their descendants today. Results indicate strong effects of the past on present labor market outcomes. Hence, the essence of the study is the statistical demonstration that there are significant and detectable effects on current generations of the labor market experiences of their racial/ethnic ancestors.

In this paper we examine changes in the time American children spent with their parents between 1981 and 1997, and the contribution to these changes made by shifting patterns of female labor force participation, family structure, and parental education. We decompose changes into the parts attributable to changes in demographic characteristics and the parts probably due to changes in behavior. In general, children time with parents did not decrease over the period; in two- parent families it increased substantially. Population-level changes in demographic characteristics exerted only small direct effects on the time children spent with parents.