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Between 1880 and 2000, the percentage of married men 60 and older living only with their wives in empty nest households rose from 19 percent to 78 percent. Data drawn from the US census show that more than half of this transformation occurred in the 30-year period from 1940 to 1970, bookended by moderate increases between 1880 and 1940 and very modest increases after 1970. Two literatures have presented demographic, cultural, and economic explanations for the decline in elderly co-residence with their children, but none adequately accounts for a sharp change in the mid-twentieth century. Both aggregate comparisons and multivariate analysis of factors influencing the living arrangements of elderly men suggest that economic advances for all age groups in the critical 30-year period, along with trends in fertility and immigration, best explain the three-stage shift that made the empty nest the dominant household form for older men by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

American society is undergoing unprecedented cultural changes in the 21st century. This social transformation began with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As the United States becomes more diverse, both racially and ethnically, equal access to a variety of social institutions and organizations becomes more challenging. With respect to marriage, popular media continually report the blurring of boundaries between racial and ethnic groups. As a result, there has been a tremendous increase in interracial dating and marriage over the past several decades. There are considerable differences between the occurrence of interracial dating and interracial marriage. Data suggest that there is a much higher level of interracial dating in comparison to interracial marriage. This research effort focuses on trends in interracial marriages in the United States between 1980 and 2006. Information from the U.S. Census Bureau was used to analyze changes in the number and frequency of interracial marriages in American society over a 22-year time frame. Differential assimilation is employed for understanding interracial marriage trends and distinguishing important statistical differences between marriages with a Black spouse and those interracial marriages not involving a Black spouse. This exploration provides important empirical findings for assessing the progress of assimilation in America.

According to official census returns from Roman Egypt (first to third centuries CE) preserved on papyrus, 23.5% of all documented marriages in the Arsinoites district in the Fayum (n = 102) were between brothers and sisters. In the second century CE, the rates were 37% in the city of Arsinoe and 18.9% in the surrounding villages. Documented pedigrees suggest a minimum mean level of inbreeding equivalent to a coefficient of inbreeding of 0.0975 in second century CE Arsinoe. Undocumented sources of inbreeding and an estimate based on the frequency of close-kin unions (corrected downwards to 30% for Arsinoe) indicate a mean coefficient of inbreeding of F = 0.15-0.20 in Arsinoe and of F = 0.10-0.15 in the villages at the end of the second century CE. These values are several times as high as any other documented levels of inbreeding. A schematic estimate of inbreeding depression in the offspring of full sibling couples indicates that fertility in these families had to be 20-50% above average to attain reproduction at replacement level. In the absence of information on the amount of genetic load in this population, this estimate may be too high.