The effects of wealth, occupation, and immigration on epidemic mortality from selected infectious diseases and epidemics in Holyoke township, Massachusetts, 1850-1912.

BACKGROUND: Previous research suggests individual-level socioeconomic circumstances and resources may be especially salient influences on mortality within the broader context of social, economic, and environmental factors affecting urban 19th century mortality. OBJECTIVE: We sought to test individual-level socioeconomic effects on mortality from infectious and often epidemic diseases in the context of an emerging New England industrial mill town. METHOD: We analyze mortality data from comprehensive death records and a sample of death records linked to census data, for an emergent industrial New England town, to analyze infectious mortality and model socioeconomic effects using Poisson rate regression. RESULTS: Despite our expectations that individual resources might be especially salient in the harsh mortality setting of a crowded, rapidly growing, emergent, industrial mill town with high levels of impoverishment, infectious mortality was not significantly lowered by individual socio-economic status or resources.

Household and farm transitions in environmental context.

Recent debate in the literature on population, environment, and land use questions the applicability of theory that patterns of farm extensification and intensification correspond to the life course of farmers and to the life cycle of farm families. This paper extends the debate to the agricultural development of the United States Great Plains region, using unique data from 1875 to 1930 that link families to farms over time in 25 environmentally diverse Kansas townships. Results of multilevel statistical modeling indicate that farmer's age, household size, and household structure are simultaneously related to both the extent of farm operations and the intensity of land use, taking into account local environmental conditions and time trends as Kansas was settled and developed. These findings validate farm- and life cycle theories and offer support for intergenerational motivations for farm development that include both daughters and sons. Environmental variation in aridity was a key driver of farm structure.

Immigration, Occupation and Inequality in Emergent Nineteenth-Century New England Cities.

This paper explores the social interactions of immigration, occupation and wealth in two urban industrial cities of nineteenth century New England that were largely built upon, and shaped by, immigration: the very rapidly growing factory town of Holyoke, Massachusetts and a more mixed market and steadily growing nearby community of Northampton, Massachusetts. Both communities were emergent, rapidly industrializing, inland cities, providing a quite distinct immigration context than large established cities of the East Coast. Both were destinations for the same general ethnic immigration waves over the late nineteenth century, but with very different, and differently impacted, social spaces into which immigrants arrived. Contrasting and considering both these emergent cities allows us to ascertain the extent to which the occupational distribution and accumulation of wealth by immigrant groups supports the broad pattern of nineteenth-century assimilation, and reveals ways in which other migration processes may have been at odds, or intertwined, with the long-term historical assimilation of immigrants in such communities. Our findings support a traditional assimilationist perspective in emergent urban-industrial centers. However, they also reveal the role of universal immiseration in an industrial city dual-labor market in facilitating or forcing assimilation, the temporal advantages for ethnic groups of arriving early in growing settlements, and the more individualistic nature of economic enclaves in gaining advantages over time that did not manifest across broad immigrant or occupational groups.

Migration in the 1930s: Beyond the Dust Bowl.

This paper analyzes in detail the role of environmental and economic shocks in the migration of the 1930s. The 1940 U.S. Census of Population asked every inhabitant where they lived five years earlier, a unique source for understanding migration flows and networks. Earlier research documented migrant origins and destinations, but we will show how short term and annual weather conditions at sending locations in the 1930s explain those flows, and how they operated through agricultural success. Beyond demographic data, we use data about temperature and precipitation, plus data about agricultural production from the agricultural census. The widely known migration literature for the 1930s describes an era of relatively low migration, with much of the migration that did occur outward from the Dust Bowl region and the cotton South. Our work about the complete U.S. will provide a fuller examination of migration in this socially and economically important era.

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. Our research addresses the complex set of relationships among growing urban communities, family wealth, immigration and mortality in New England by examining individual-level, socio-demographic mortality correlates during the nineteenth-century mortality plateau and its early twentieth-century decline. In contrast to earlier theories that proposed a more uniform mortality transition, we offer an alternative hypothesis that focuses on the impact of family wealth and immigration on individual-level mortality during the early stages of the mortality transition in Northampton and Holyoke, Massachusetts.

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. When industrial areas were sewered, clustering of mortality abated, and differences between industrial and commercial areas of the town were no longer significant. These findings illustrate Szreter's emphasis on considering both the benefits and costs of development. (1) Initial development contributed to high mortality in newly emergent urban-industrial centers like Northampton and was abated only when lagging public health infrastructures caught up with rapid growth and development near the turn of the century.