Research: Building the Population Bomb

American demography and global population in the twentieth century.

In the twentieth century, the world’s population grew more rapidly than it ever had before, and more rapidly than it probably ever will again. As it grew, it became the subject of scientific expertise and the object of numerous interventions aimed at slowing its growth. This set of projects examines how human population became a problem that governments, intergovernmental agencies, and nongovernmental organizations thought they could solve. In so doing, it centers demography, the social science of human population dynamics, exploring how demography contributed to anxiety about population growth and how anxiety about population growth contributed to the development of demography. Projects in this section include my award-winning 2021 book, Building the Population Bomb, as well as articles, chapters, and blog posts.

Projects in this section are based on a three-pronged approach to researching the history of demography and human population politics. At the core is research in the Rockefeller Archive Center, the United Nations Archives, the American Philosophical Library, the Wellcome Library, the National Academy of Sciences, the Hoover Institution, the London School of Economics, and the archives of Yale, Princeton, and Stanford University. Supplementing that is algorithmic analysis of the corpus of demography journal literature and population-related journal articles in other social scientific fields. Finally, I utilized two existing oral history collections — the PAA Oral History Project and the Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project — and completed additional oral history interviews of my own. This research was completed between 2012 and 2017 with funding from the University of Michigan, the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.