Demographic history of the United States
[3] From 1890 to 2021, the median age at first marriage was as follows:[4] Nearly all non-Native American commercial activity was run in small privately owned businesses with good credit both at home and in England being essential since they were often cash poor.
Most settlements were nearly independent of trade with Britain as most grew or made nearly everything they needed—the average cost of imports for most households was only about 5-15 English pounds per year.
New England's healthy climate (the cold winters killed mosquitoes and other disease-bearing insects), and abundant food supply resulted in the lowest death rate and highest birth rate of any place in the world (marriage was expected and birth control was not, and a much higher than average number of children and mothers survived).
Emigration to the New England colonies after 1640 and the start of the English Civil War decreased to less than 1% (about equal to the death rate) in nearly all years before 1845.
The Dutch-started colony of New York had an eclectic collection of residents from many different nations and prospered as a major trading and commercial center after about 1700.
The main commercial center of Philadelphia was run mostly by prosperous Quakers, supplemented by many small farming and trading communities with strong German contingents located in the Delaware River valley.
Many more settlers arrived in the middle colonies starting in about 1680, when Pennsylvania was founded, and many Protestant sects were encouraged to settle there for freedom of religion and good, cheap land.
New Jersey and Delaware had a majority of British with 20% German-descended colonists, about a 6% black population, and a small contingent of Swedish descendants of New Sweden.
The main feature of the economy in Virginia, Maryland and South Carolina was large plantations growing staples for export, especially tobacco and rice.
The ancestry of the 3.9 million population in 1790 has been estimated from various sources by sampling last names in the 1790 census and assigning them a country of origin.
Another estimate with very similar results to the ICPS study (except for the French and Swedish totals) gives the number of Americans of English ancestry as 1.9 million in 1790 or 47.9% of the total of 3.930 million (3.5% Welsh, 8.5% Scotch Irish, 4.3% Scots, Irish (South) 4.7%, German 7.3%, Dutch 2.7%, French 1.7%, Swedish 0.2% and Black, 19.3%.
The 1790 population reflected the approximate 50,000 "Loyalists" who had emigrated to Canada during and at the end of the American Revolution, 7–10,000 of whom went to the United Kingdom and 6,000 to the Caribbean.
From 1831 to 1840 immigration increased greatly, to 599,000 total, as 207,000 Irish, even before the famine of 1845–1849, started to emigrate in large numbers as Britain eased travel restrictions.
Thousands of poor Irish took advantage of this offer and headed to Canada on what came to be called the "coffin ships" because of their high death rates.
Once in Canada, many Irish walked across the border or caught an intercoastal freighter to the nearest major city in the United States – usually Boston or New York.
Bad potato crops and failed revolutions struck the heart of Europe in 1848, contributing to the decade's total of 435,000 Germans, 267,000 British and 77,000 French immigrants to America.
Bad times in Europe drove people out; land, relatives, freedom, opportunity, and jobs in America lured them in.
However, much like Texas, the Mexican government had encouraged immigration and settlement of these regions from groups in the United States and Europe.
The Great Migration was the movement of millions of African Americans out of the rural Southern United States from 1914 to 1960.
They migrated because of a variety of push and pull factors:[20][21][22] The proportion of Americans who move across state lines fell by 50% from 1990 to 2018.
Regional disparities in local economies have also grown during this time, meaning that more people remain in economically depressed areas.
[25] In the years after WWII, the United States, as well as a number of other industrialized countries, experienced an unexpected sudden birth rate jump.
The millions of men coming back to the US after WWII, and the couples eager to start families, led to a sharp rise in the US birth rate, and a surge in new housing construction in the suburbs and outlying areas of the cities.
Since the men who came back got jobs in the workplace again, married women stayed home to take care of the house and children and let their husbands be the breadwinner of the household.
[29] The total fertility rate of the United States jumped from 2.49 in 1945 to 2.94 in 1946, a rise of 0.45 children therefore beginning the baby boom.
The "relative income" theory explains the Baby Boom by suggesting that the late 1940s and 1950s brought low desires to have material objects, as a result of the Great Depression and WWII, as well as huge job opportunities, because of it being a post-war period.
Following this period, the next generation had a greater desire for material objects; however, an economic slowdown in the United States made jobs harder to acquire.
After 1890 the US rural population began to plummet, as farmers were displaced by mechanization and forced to migrate to urban factory jobs.
After World War II, the US experienced a shift away from the cities and into suburbs mostly due to the cost of land, the availability of low-cost government home loans, fair housing policies, and the construction of highways.
