A companion to the ALA-award-winning Retrospective Bibliography of American Demographic History (1989), this volume includes literature on American demographic history published from 1984 to 1994. It covers such topics as marriage and fertility; health, sickness, and mortality; immigration, settlement, and cultural patterns; and family and its structures, roles and values (including both gender and sexuality issues). It also cites works showing the broad intersections between population matters and such economic, political, and social phenomena as war, oppression, government policy, elections, labor stereotype, discrimination, and cross-cultural contact or relations.

The bibliography organizes and describes citations to the rich historical literature on the ordinary life experiences of Americans, such as marriage, childbearing, health, migration, and ethnicity, and how these fundamental phenomena have been interconnected with the events of headline history. The book provides multiple points of access, through the detailed contents and through indexes of place, ethnicity, and topic.