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Focuses on the fertility boom and bust cycles in Concord, Massachusetts from 1800 to 1990. Decline in fertility during the eighteenth century due to the decline of frontier conditions characterized by economic and demographic expansion; Characteristics of the state of boom and bust cycles in the nineteenth century.

An exceptionally early and rapid fertility decline was achieved in Concord, Massachusetts by 1815. This decline was succeeded by a new demographic regime characterized by remarkable cyclical responsiveness to macroeconomic and macropolitical events. The evidence for declining fertility during the eighteenth century is consistent with so-called Malthusian-Frontier explanations of colonial-era demography, whereas the nineteenth-century responsiveness to economic and political change reveals a much earlier onset of Easterlin fertility cycles than has previously been postulated. The transition from the first to the second regime followed the emergence of a market economy in rural Massachusetts in the decade after the American Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]