2023/01/01 by Martin Dribe, J. David Hacker · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Medicine · Social Sciences · #Birth, Development, and Health #Climate Change and Health Impacts #Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/ssh.2023.8
openalex publication_date 2023/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Abstract 2021 marked the 30-year anniversary of the publication Fatal Years: Child Mortality in the late Nineteenth-Century United States , a pioneering work in historical demography by Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines. This special issue showcases the current state of historical mortality studies through a collection of articles originally presented at two commemorative sessions at the 2021 meeting of the Social Science History Association. It provides new and more nuanced evidence on several of the major themes of Fatal Years in terms of the mortality experience and includes studies of a wide range of contexts, from North America, to Ireland, England and Wales, and continental Europe. They all bring new evidence and leverage the dramatic development that has taken place in availability of large-scale micro-level data in the 30 years since Fatal Years was published. This introduction first provides some background to the collection and then summarizes the main findings from the different articles included. Preston and Haines provide a coda to this collection with a short reflection article on researching and writing Fatal Years .