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The recent increase in American divorce rates has aroused a great deal of media publicity, popular discussion, and social science research. Several recent works have begun to reexamine the origins, trends, and implications of divorce in American history. This paper presents systematic data concerning the extent of divorce in three North Central states for the 1810-60 period. The findings establish the incidence of mass divorce for a considerable period prior to official divorce statistics. Major patterns are analyzed and compared to late 19th-century data from the first governmental studies of divorce for the 1870-1900 decades. While some urban-rural differences are found, changing laws and norms played the principal role in the increase in divorce rates during the 1800s. The final part of the paper discusses the implications of these findings for understanding marital disruption in social-historical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes core innovations in the strategy of research on demographic behaviour. One aim is a shift of attention away from events and towards a focus on dynamic processes and their interplay: away from a preoccupation with marriage and divorce, births, deaths, migrations, and household structure towards a broader perspective that takes account of partnership and intimacy, parenthood, potential and well-being, position in society and space, and personal ties. Another aim is a much closer engagement with genetics, neuroscience, psychology, and behavioural economics. A third aim is a strategy that pays more attention to pathways within the individual, to the processes entailed when the individual interacts with various contexts, and to progressions that involve the interplay of the pathways and processes through the life course. These shifts of emphasis, which have already begun to occur, require a systematic reassessment of priorities for research on demographic behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]