Winsborough Auth. This document was uploaded by our user. The uploader already confirmed that they had the permission to publish it. Report DMCA. Preston, Nathan Keyfitz, and Robert Schoen. Otis Dudley Duncan, David L. Featherman, and Beverly Duncan. Socioeconomic Background and Achievement. James A. Women in the Labor Force. Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox. Even the deluge of urban studies that has descended during the last quarter century has, with a few outstanding exceptions, done little to illuminate the forces that have given the city its specific form and character.
One of the most serious defects of historical urban studies is the lack of specific statistical information about the area, the density, and the population of cities. This lack points to the belated development of statistics itself: a discipline that hardly dates back in the West before the seventeenth century. Small wonder, then, that Adna Ferrin Weber's pioneer work, "The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century" has, for all its inevitable limitations, remained a classic for more than seventy years.
There are, of course, good reasons for this lack of population studies of even a single city, and still more for a comparative estimate of many cities: namely, the scarcity of accurate data, and in many cases the absence of anything worthy to be called a quantitative datum, whether accurate or not.
Even to make a first survey of this no-man's land required a special kind of hardihood: for it not merely demanded a lifetime's dedication, but gave no assurance in advance that the effort would bring a sufficient reward. Anyone looking for a prosperous academic career would hesitate before giving himself to such a dubious exploration; yet until someone ventured into this area no one could be sure if there were any pay-dirt—though even a negative result, if arrived at after due effort, would at least relieve other sociologists of a guilty sense of possibly having overlooked a mine of important information.
Happily in Tertius Chandler the indispensable qualifications for this tedious, difficult, and doubtfully rewarding job were united in a single person. A passion for figures, a dogged persistence in exploring sources, an almost fanatic faith that something would come of his effort enabled him to devote himself to this task for more than thirty years. As far back as —or was it earlier? Since until I wrote "The City in History" I had no special need for this kind of information, I duly filed these reports; moreover, I confess, I was a little chary of using Chandler's figures, for at no point until now did he explain his methods, list his sources, or critically review his results.
