Publisher's Synopsis
The half-century preceding the Declaration of Independence was remarkable-an eruption of widely owned productive farms, ample high-quality food, growing demand for skilled labor, rising wages, and a scattered population all combined to create a notably higher level of well-being than could be found in populations born and raised in Europe and the British Isles. When the Declaration was signed, American-born children were the tallest, the healthiest, the longest-lived, and the least likely to suffer infant death in the Anglo-European world. This reality created a powerful expectation, and it gave rise to a physiological, economic, and cultural dynamic that merged with the very definition of "American."Over the next half-century, high rates of natural population increase, new waves of immigration, declining real wages, lagging food production, and higher disease rates essentially erased America's well-being advantage by 1855 to 1860. Doubts, regionalism, bitter politics, and the Civil War all coincided with the steep decline in public well-being-but that dynamic had become part of "us." It lives on, undulating, to this day.The Fragile Legacy of Well-Being documents this progression through the lived experience of three historical families-the Ulster-Scot Dunsmores/Densmores, the Amsterdam Dutch Vandergrifts, and the English Harts. Through careful research, detailed analysis, and vivid storytelling, each of these families comes alive for the reader to present the variety of lived experience in the early-American landscape. Stuart narrates the rise and fall of prosperity and well-being in America in a study that carries haunting undertones for our own present.
