What is with all the manjaw women in the media?

[giblets]

Why did Americans supposedly reproduce far more than their French, British, Spanish, and Portuguese counterparts? Is there any reason to explain such a difference? Was such a dramatic and apparent difference (which would amount to several more children per family and would surely be noticeable) ever noted by contemporaries?

I'm not sure where you're getting the "several more children per family" figure from. Let's assume a generation is 25 years and 2.1 children per family is required for replacement. A 150% increase in population over 100 years implies a growth rate of ~0.9% per year (or a ~25% increase per generation) and a 50% increase in population over 100 years implies a growth rate of ~0.4% a year (or a ~10% increase per generation). A 25% increase requires ~2.6 children per family, a 10% increase per generation requires ~2.3 children per family. A difference of ~0.3 children per family is not that big.

[Whoha]

**** let's even compare it to the prolific Catholics... Ireland saw virtually no population growth in the past century

Immigration was shut down after about 1925 so America can't be responsible for no Irish pop growth during the past century.

[C0ckney]

al, two things

1) as i've already pointed out, there is a decent chance that many irish people who came to america had some english ancestry. also this may well be true for 'scots-irish', as it was not only scottish people settled in the plantations of ireland but english as well.

2) britian has seen a steady stream of emigrants leaving for the new world, i.e. the USA, canada, australia, new zealand, south africa and smaller numbers to other parts of the empire. large numbers started to leave in the first half of the 19th century and this continued up until the 1950s when numbers declined. at the same time, during the 1950s britain started to receive large amounts of immigrants, especially from the west indies and the indian sub continent.

[Cort Haus]

And Brits and Scots?

Scots are British.

[Cort Haus]

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/...mes/index.html
Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Davis? Sounds English.

Jones, Davis and possibly Williams are actually Welsh names in origin. Saying British would have covered it.

[MikeH]

Why is anyone even discussing this?

Europe in 1900 was already very crowded, the USA was (and still is) mostly empty.

It's a pretty good general rule that all populations of creatures reproduce faster when there is more space/resources for them to expand into unless there is are external limiting factors, which there rarely is in humans. And as someone pointed out above, it doesn't need to be that many extra children per family to make a dramatic difference.

As for Ireland... google Irish Diaspora.

[Dinner]

I was reading a 4x4 magazine a few months ago where the authors tried to find the most isolated place in the lower 48 states still accessible using an offroaders and they supposedly found some place in Utah which was around 100 miles from any paved road. The coastal areas are pretty densely populated but inland there is still a ton of empty space. Even here in Southern California if I had east for an hour or two you end up in the desert with hardly any signs of other people at all other then the occasional plane in the sky.

[Al B. Sure!]

So people like myself or Ozzy whose ancestors came to America in the 20th century could not be expected to have any English ancestry. Correct?

[Dinner]

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on where they came from. Loads of people around the world have British or English ancestry so even if they came from a third country their ancestors could have originally come from the UK. Then their is the fact that were ever relatively rich soldiers are stationed they tend to have foreign wives or at least have sex with local women and the UK, commonwealth countries, and the US have had military personnel all over the world for centuries.

[giblets]

So people like myself or Ozzy whose ancestors came to America in the 20th century could not be expected to have any English ancestry. Correct?

They're a minority of Americans, so who cares? No one ever said all Americans have some english ancestry.

[Whoha]

I was reading a 4x4 magazine a few months ago where the authors tried to find the most isolated place in the lower 48 states still accessible using an offroaders and they supposedly found some place in Utah which was around 100 miles from any paved road. The coastal areas are pretty densely populated but inland there is still a ton of empty space. Even here in Southern California if I had east for an hour or two you end up in the desert with hardly any signs of other people at all other then the occasional plane in the sky.

Theres a reason everyone rode past it and a bunch of other marginal land to get to the coast. It would have been prohibitively expensive to live there then, and would be quite costly today as well.

[Barnabas]

Spaniards and the Portuguese are known for emmigration, only in the past decade and a half Spain became a country of immigrants. Argentina received over a million spaniards, without counting those who came here to work and returned to Spain with the money they had saved. The Same thing happened in Cuba before it was ruined with communism, and many other latin american countries received Spanish immigrants.

After ww2, Spaniards emmigrated to Germany, France, Switzerland. And even as late as the 70s many emmigrated to Venezuela when they had a brief oil boom and were loaded with money.

The Same happened to the Portuguese. In Andorra there are more Portuguese than Andorrans.


I also remember reading that English-American families had very high birth rates, they breeded much more than in Europe, had better food, were healthier, and had more space.

If I recall correctly, they reproduced at a faster rate than Mexicans in the XIX century, when the USA became independent, The Viceroyalty of New Spain had a higher population than the USA, even if we don't count Central America, in the Mexican-American war, the USA had a much higher population.


Ireland is a very special case, not a good example.

Alby, do you think the midwest is full of pure ethnic Germans?, most white americans are 1/4 something, 1/8 another ethnicity and the rest something else for example. Of a multi ethnic origin, and I think most have some English ancestor from the XVIII century.

[Al B. Sure!]

Yet why so few Anglo-Americans? Why are they only the predominant ethnicity in Maine and Utah? Granted, they could very well be the #2 ethnicity in every state and that would add up to a lot of people but where are they? They sure as hell are not in Philadelphia.

Where are the white folk named "Johnson" and "Williams" and "Smith"?

[giblets]

In the 1980 census, over 60 millions americans (~25%) claimed British ancestry. People are simply becoming less conscious of where their ancestors came from as time goes by. I mean why would anyone know where their ancestors were 300 years ago?

[giblets]

Where are the white folk named "Johnson" and "Williams" and "Smith"?

You've never encountered any such white people?