78
You are describing part of what is referred to as the Black Belt in the American South. It can be seen here in a map of majority-black US counties.
Your suspicions for the reason for this are quite correct. This corresponds to the interior of the old cotton belt. This area was historically the richest river-fed southern soil, with the largest plantations, ...
51
Based on this page from the French School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, it appears that the neighbouring Balsesmes merged into La Haye-Descartes in 1966, before the combined commune was renamed to Descartes the next year.
In 1962, the two communes had remarkably similar population levels of 1,679 and 1,689. With a combined population of 4,267 ...
44
T.E.D.'s answer (+1) is complete with regard to the human history of the Americas, but the rich soil in the "cotton belt" or "black belt" has a geological explanation as well. The article "How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline" by Craig McClain, "Executive Director of the Lousiana University Marine Consortium", describes ...
40
Not really.
Generally speaking, most European women since married in their early to mid twenties, to men in their mid to late twenties. The age gap for the commoners, i.e. the vast majority of the population, were typically not large. Unfortunately the question declined to define how much younger is "much younger" supposed to mean, but most Europeans ...
39
I think you are missing the true pattern of that map. Note that it shows a higher percentage of natives in Canada than it does in the US, and shows the same lower percentage of natives in the USA as in a geographically contiguous area of South America (1% or less).
If anything, the real pattern there is that areas in the subtropics (but not subartic) have ...
37
There were two major, interrelated events that caused this population boom in the 1970s.
The first was the discovery of oil on Alaska's North Slope at Prudhoe Bay and elsewhere in 1968 and 1969. The second was the raising of oil prices by OPEC in 1973 and 1979. Both sets of developments resulted in the rapid growth of oil production in Alaska, and its ...
36
For the vast majority of Germans, religious and non-religious alike, religion matters little in daily life. In some families, the babies are baptised, marriages have both civil and religious ceremonies, and one goes to the service on Christmas and perhaps on Easter. Yet in a survey or opinion poll, these people might report themselves as Christian. This kind ...
30
I've combined the data in:
List of largest cities throughout history
World population estimates
The winners are:
Modern Tokyo (metropolitan area), home to 0.55% of the world's population
700 AD Chang'an, home to 0.44% of the world's population
200 AD Rome, home to 0.42% of the world's population
1 AD Rome, 400 AD Rome, and 1900 AD London follow, all ...
28
University of Alaska, Anchorage published a study into People and Economy of Alaska, which can be viewed here.
From that source, I'd say there are following reasons for their population boom:
Discovery of Oil
As Tom has already mentioned, Oil was discovered in 1968 in Prudhoe Bay oilfields. Alaska collected $55 billion in oil revenues through 2001, with the ...
28
According to this article the ratio rose from 1.10 to about 1.54 (ratio of men/women fell from 0.91 to about 0.65) between 1941 and 1946 in the draft-age group (people born around 1887 to 1927), which was the most affected by the war losses.
Other age groups were less affected, so I'd say that the overall ratio would be around 1.3-1.25 (0.75-0.8 men/women)....
28
There's nothing really odd about this. The same thing historically has happened all over the globe any time an immunologically naïve population meets up with one that is tapped into all of the worldwide reservoirs of diseases. Eventually the native population can naturally select similar genetic protections to the ones the colonizers already had, but that ...
27
80% does not seem to be way off compared with other industrial countries like
Sweden (85%),
Denmark (80%),
Norway (72%),
Czech Republic (61%),
Finland (60%)...
21
German here. You see here a chart of the predominant confessions in Germany:
Wikimedia Commons, Martin Sander, CC BY-SA 3.0, 2013-06-23
As you see, approximately one third is Roman-Catholic (yellow), one third is Lutheran (violet, this is not the same church like in the USA despite having the same roots!) and the former German Democratic Republic ...
17
Apart from other reasons here exposed, I think it is worth mentioning
a) some groups of South American natives were adapted (culturally, and even in some cases, physically) to environments which were not comfortable for white settlers. For extreme examples, think of Amazonian tribes and inhabitants from the Andean Plateau. In these cases, there was little ...
17
The Soviet population in 1941 was 196,716,000. In 1946, it was 170,548,000.[1] That's a difference of 26,168,000 people. According to a study published by the Russian Academy of Science[2], there were 12,300,000 births and 11,900,000 natural deaths during war, so the populational decrease must be entirely attributed to war deaths. Considering 400,000 births ...
16
Because people are quibbling in comments over the meaning of "overpopulation", it might suggest that this question is broad or unclear. So let's look at it from a different angle.
In the 1960's, Dr. John Calhoun, working at NIH, conducted his famous (some would say infamous) "mouse utopia experiment".
Mice were placed in an enclosure (named "Universe 25") ...
14
Actuarial science was just getting started in the 17th century, so we can answer this question with some specificity--for London and Breslow, anyway.
John Graunt made the following life table for London in 1662 (source):
Around 1% of Londoners were older than 77.
Edmond Halley (of comet fame) made the following table for Breslau in 1693. Note that births (...
14
UPDATE: Aaron Fogleman estimates that 585,000 people "immigrated" (many involuntarily) to the 13 colonies between 1700-1775. If they all survived until the time of the Revolution, then 24% of the population at the time of the Revolution would be foreign born (585,000/2,400,000 = .244). Of course this is an absurd assumption, so treat this estimate as an ...
13
Maybe not
Joseph Tainter argues, in Archeology of Overshoot and Collapse, that so far there is no evidence of a Malthusian catastrophe. Whether you follow Tainter in this assertion will in part depend on how wide or narrow your definition of overpopulation is.
Problem with definition
According to Malthus, population grows exponentially while food production ...
12
While Peter Turchin has overstated the case, it is most likely that this was usually true. Infant mortality rates were very high until they started to decline in the early decades of the 20th century (especially in Europe and the US). To this can be added the generally high death rate from lack of effective medical care and frequent epidemics. These factors ...
12
As noted in the discussion on the question, there are two kinds of overpopulation which I'll call "chronic" and "acute". Chronic overpopulation, where the full production capacity of agriculture in normal times is insufficient to feed the population, is sometimes the only case people consider. But acute overpopulation, where the population "only" starves in ...
12
Using the delta areas as proxies for the entire river valley systems:
The area of the Ganges delta (about 59,000 km2) is nearly 4 times as large as Mesopotamia (about 15,000 km2), and 3 times as large as the Nile river delta (about 19,000 km2). Additionally:
Once wet-rice cultivation with paddies is developed, rice provides nearly twice the calories per ...
11
Pre-columbian population of North America was only a couple of million people, most of them are pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers. This kind of lifestyle does not allow more than 2-4 million people people to live on the continent. Central and South America, on the other hand, was home of several large civilizations with developed agriculture, and ...
11
The answer is simple - the US population is not primarily British in descent. The states have had large numbers of immigrants from all over Europe. Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have a much higher proportion of the population directly descended from British settlers, there was very little Eastern European movement to British colonies as they were just ...
11
As far as we can tell, Medieval French families were significantly bigger than modern western families - averaging perhaps around five to six. In contrast, modern France has an average household size of 2.38. However, they remained relatively small scale, and somewhat nuclear families of mostly two generations. Note the standard disclaimers apply: pre-modern ...
9
There are no really reliable estimates for the population of Mycenaean Greece, although scholars have supplied some (more or less educated) guesses. On the more conservative end of the scale, Stanford's Mitsotakis professor Josiah Ober has written that:
The population of Hellas in the Mycenaen period (including Thessaly and Crete) was somewhere in the ...
9
That passage is based on the works of Henry F. Dobyns. In his 1983 book, Dobyns advocated for a 18 million strong pre-contact population in North America. Specifically, he gave an estimate of 5,250,000 people living in the Mississippi River valleys. This, according to Dobyns, amounted to a population density of 2.53 per km2.
Horcicultural peoples ...
9
Population estimates
A number of estimates have been made for the population of ancient Egypt but, as the article The people of ancient Egypt says,
Egyptologists tend to dodge the issue of population numbers, as there
are no statistics available and all such numbers are based on more or
less educated guesswork.
The British Museum Dictionary of ...
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