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.

Land Transitions in the American Plains: Multilevel Modeling of Drivers of Grassland Conversion (1950 to 2000).

This paper examines drivers of land-cover change in the U.S. Great Plains in the last half of the twentieth century.

Land Use and Family Formation in the Settlement of the U.S. Great Plains.

In agricultural settings, environment shapes patterns of settlement and land use. Using the Great Plains of the United States during the period of its initial Euro-American settlement (1880-1940) as an analytical lens, this article explores whether the same environmental factors that determine settlement timing and land use-those that indicate suitability for crop-based agriculture-also shape initial family formation, resulting in fewer and smaller families in areas that are more conducive to livestock raising than to cropping. The connection between family size and agricultural land availability is now well known, but the role of the environment has not previously been explicitly tested.

Katrina in Historical Context: Environment and Migration in the U.S.

The massive publicity surrounding the exodus of residents from New Orleans spurred by Hurricane Katrina has encouraged interest in the ways that past migration in the U.S. has been shaped by environmental factors.

Ecological Frontiers on the Grasslands of Kansas: Changes in Farm Scale and Crop Diversity.

Farms stood at an ecological frontier in the 1930s. With new and better agricultural machinery, more farms than ever before made the leap to thousand acre enterprises. But did they abandon mixed husbandry in the process? This article explores the origins of the modern relationship between scale and diversity using a new sample of Kansas farms.

Providing Spatial Data for Secondary Analysis: Issues and Current Practices relating to Confidentiality.

Spatially explicit data pose a series of opportunities and challenges for all the actors involved in providing data for long-term preservation and secondary analysis -- the data producer, the data archive, and the data user. We report on opportunities and challenges for each of the three players, and then turn to a summary of current thinking about how best to prepare, archive, disseminate, and make use of social science data that have spatially explicit identification. The core issue that runs through the paper is the risk of the disclosure of the identity of respondents.

Widowhood, family size, and post-reproductive mortality: a comparative analysis of three populations in nineteenth-century Europe.

Researchers from a number of disciplines have offered competing theories about the effects oJ childbearing on parents 'postreproductive longevity. The "disposable soma theory" argues that investments in somatic maintenance increase longevity but reduce childbearing. "Maternal depletion" models suggest that the rigors of childrearing increase mortality in later years.