For more than six decades recurrent efforts have been made to establish the trends of early American prices. Following the lead of Arthur Harrison Cole and other members of the International Scientific Committee on Price History, who foresaw the need for worldwide evidence on prices as an essential foundation of economic and historical analysis, scholars began to develop series for major market centers such as Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, Boston, New Orleans, and Cincinnati (Warren et al. 1932; Taylor 1932a, 1932b; Bezanson et al. 1935, 1936; Cole 1938; Berry 1943; Bezanson et al. 1951). Modern refinements of these largely wholesale and urban price indexes for the years before the Civil War have yielded reliable long-term insights against which to interpret basic issues of American economic growth (U.S. Congress 1959–60; David and Solar 1977). Meanwhile, researchers focusing on the evolution of particular parts of the country or on the economic milieus of specific organizations have felt the need to determine local price movements for the historical contexts that interest them. To do so, they have used evidence from the accounts of merchants and farmers (Rothenberg 1979; Adams 1986, 1992), from probate inventories (Anderson 1975; Main 1985), and from the records of public institutions as diverse as the Philadelphia almshouse and Harvard College (Smith 1990; Foster 1962). John J. McCusker (1991, forthcoming) has contributed an overview of the key elements of this literature and has constructed from selected series a deflator that can be used to compare American economic values over time between 1700 and now.

Historically, the departure of children from the parental home was an important economic and social phenomenon. Because it was equivalent to establishing a new residence, the decision to leave is relevant to our understanding of the history of migration. Leaving home was also a milestone in the life cycle that typically signaled a transition from semidependence to greater economic and social responsibility on the part of the individual, a change that affected labor force participation, family income, expenditures on housing, schooling or training, socialization, and interaction among siblings. In turn, couples considered these implications in formulating fertility goals and strategies.

Every government policy has positive and negative externalities: offshoots and spin-offs that either are unplanned or exceed calculated expectations. New Deal agricultural policy was no exception. One controversial aspect of it is the alleged role of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) in southern tenant and sharecropper displacement. Whether or not the officials of the AAA underestimated or even cared about this phenomenon, many contemporaries and most historians have criticized the Roosevelt administration for it.

The emergence of new infectious diseases and the resurgence of old ones fascinate scholars as well as the public. Before the Ebola virus made the best-seller lists or starred in a feature-length film, the International Commission on Historical Demography (ICHD) had planned a colloquium for its quinquennial meeting in Montreal, “The Big Killers: Epidemics, Famine, and War in Historical Perspective” (27 August–3 September 1995). Twenty-eight papers materialized. Interpretation and synthesis were the principal concerns. Technical obsessions of the guild—methodology, data, quantification, and the like—were banned. Instead, authors were encouraged to focus on the interrelations between mortality crises, on the one hand, and culture, society, economy, and politics, on the other.

The outbreak of AIDS around the world in the last 15 or 20 years is usually referred to as the “AIDS epidemic,” or occasionally “pandemic” (Grmek 1990). These terms have no great analytic value. The major medical dictionaries and epidemiological textbooks define an epidemic merely as an outbreak of a disease marked by a greater number of cases than usual (see Fox et al. 1970: 246–49; Mausner and Bahn 1974: 22, 272–77; Stedman’s Medical Dictionary 1977: 470; Kelsey et al. 1986: 212; Walton et al. 1986: 351; Harvard 1987: 247). This condition is contrasted with the endemic form of a disease at “its habitual level, or what previous experience would lead one to anticipate.” The term pandemic is used to describe an epidemic widespread in the world and usually characterized by a large number of cases, for example, the fourteenth-century plague epidemic (or Black Death) and the influenza epidemic during the latter part of World War I. Some authorities stress the fact that epidemics are also characterized by a declining phase. This is true by definition, of course, for otherwise the disease could be described as shifting to a new and higher endemic level. But it is also of interest that most of these unusual outbreaks of disease are eventually limited by such mechanisms as a decrease in susceptibles as persons become immune or die; as interventions, either medical or behavioral, eliminate the source or interrupt transmission; or as the pathogen mutates and becomes less virulent.

Writing for an American audience in the 1930s, Margaret Mitchell was able to dispatch the husband of Scarlett O’Hara with a certain irony. By then measles had become a childhood disease that was seldom fatal. During the nineteenth century, however, measles was not so lightly dismissed. Epidemics in populations with high proportions of susceptible individuals could be dangerous indeed. This article traces the history of measles in South Africa, showing how political and economic changes temporarily produced conditions that led to a devastating epidemic during the Boer War (1899–1902). It then compares the history of measles in South Africa with that in Great Britain and closes with a discussion of the relationship between human and biological causes in the history of the disease.