Michigan Historical Demography Workshop

About the Historical Demography Workshop

Historical demography has a long history of important interdisciplinary accomplishments. Classic studies, like Louis Henry's reconstruction of French fertility and the European Fertility Project, changed our understanding of both history and demography. Associates of the Historical Demography Workshop play important roles in major on-going research projects, such as the Great Plains Project and the Eurasian Project on the History of Population and Family Structure. Historical demography combines theories and methods from the social sciences with the appreciation of sources and attention to context that epitomize historians.

The Historical Demography Workshop is a joint initiative of the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, and Department of History.

We support:

Research on key demographic behaviors: fertility, mortality, family formation, and migration.
Collection, preservation, and dissemination of data describing historical populations.
Innovation and education in methods of analysis for historical data, such as family reconstitution and event history analysis.

This project is made possible by the combined efforts of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR),
the Population Studies Center (PSC) at the University of Michigan, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan.