In 2006 the population of the United States reached three hundred million, a milestone marked by a conference at the British Library which attracted participants from both sides of the Atlantic. The Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA) was established in 2004 by the merger of the Institute of Latin American Studies and the Institute of United States Studies. This book is one of the ISA's first publications focussed on the United States. It is a tribute both to the success of the conference and to the vigour of the new institute.

A brief review can make only a few selective comments in a work comprising sixteen chapters and ranging across several disciplines. There is scholarship of real substance here, though some authors, inevitably, are more readable than others. The general conclusions are the obvious ones spelled out by William Frey in an overview chapter that the American population is getting bigger, older, and more racially and ethnically diverse. Some areas that have often been overlooked are relatively generously treated, as in the two chapters on Native Americans by Joy Porter and Dean Kotlowski, and two focussed on Cubans by Annabel Cox and Jessica Gibbs. African Americans as such are not accorded their own chapters, though they surface in some, most substantially in a chapter on prison policy and population by Vivien Miller. It is intriguing to note the various population groups identified as particularly significant by different authors. Thus Rhodes Cook makes much of the “baby boomers,” those born between 1946 and 1964, “the largest generation of voters in American history” (17); Jay Kleinberg stresses the importance of the “matron,” the large and increasing numbers of middle-aged women in the population and in the labour force in the twentieth century; while others unsurprisingly probe the implications of the rising numbers of Latinos.

In one fascinating chapter Natasha Warikoo, in comparing schools in New York and London, finds that American teenagers identify more strongly with their racial or ethnic cultures than do their British counterparts, even as being “American” means more to them than being “British” does to the Londoners. Incidents of racial violence are regularly highlighted by the media, but Bill Ong Hing somewhat reassuringly spells out the rich array of state, local and voluntary programmes designed to integrate immigrants. The sentiments on the Statue of Liberty, it seems, still have some force. Chris Bailey draws on recent scholarship to argue that the recent “culture wars” are largely being waged by political activists and elites; the bulk of the population, surveys show, are not that preoccupied by such issues as abortion and gay marriage. Andrew Wroe, in discussing immigration policy, points up the change in atmosphere since the mid-1990s, when anti-immigrant sentiments were strong, as recently expressed by the relatively liberal stance of George W. Bush (if not of all Republicans). Dowell Myers is good on the profound quandary emerging in California, where non-Hispanic whites are now a minority of the population but still constitute two-thirds or more of actual voters, and will retain their majority status in the electorate for another generation. The implications of such a demographic transition may one day have to be addressed by the United States as a whole.