Immigration, Wealth and the 'Mortality Plateau' in Emergent Urban-Industrial Towns of Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts.

The mortality transition in Western Europe and the U.S. encompassed a much more complex set of conditions and experiences than earlier thought.

Sewers in the city: a case study of individual-level mortality and public health initiatives in Northampton, Massachusetts, at the turn of the century.

Emerging industrial communities of nineteenth-century New England experienced both rapid population growth and lagging development of public health infrastructures. In turn, high mortality in these newly urban cities contributed to a delay in the regional mortality transition of the late nineteenth century. Analyzing death records and a file of linked cause-specific death and manuscript census records for the industrializing community of Northampton, Massachusetts, we show that early in the city's development, mortality clustered near industrial activities and open sewers.