A Population History of North America

The history and interpretation of North American population dynamics since the Columbian encounter is a critical element of the overall history of the “New World.” Much traditional political, economic, and social history implicitly assumes a basic understanding of underlying population dynamics without necessarily seeing those dynamics as a factor in North American history that itself needs explanation and explication. Yet even a cursory look at some of the “big” questions of this history tends to bring one to central questions of population. What was the size of the indigenous American populations at the time of Christopher Columbus? What impact did the demographic dynamism of the North American slave population have on the “peculiar institution” in the United States? When and how did the overall region and its subpopulations go through the demographic transition, and what impact did that change have on other political, economic, and social dynamics? And how did a world region with roughly “a few million, largely rural inhabitants” in 1492 grow to “approximately 420 million, substantially urban residents at the end of the twentieth century” who “now include most ethnic groups from around the globe”?