Profile:
In addition to introductory course on quantitative methods, social historian Daniel Scott Smith primarily teaches courses on Colonial North America and the American Revolution. Following the dictum to “study problems, not periods,” he has written articles that deal with topics in every century between the seventeenth century and the twentieth. His main research interests are in the fields of historical demography and the history of the family. He has published on the demographic transition in fertility, premarital pregnancy, old age and the family, and child naming trends among other subjects. Trained in demography as well as history, Dan Smith was editor of Historical Methods for a decade and is active in the Social Science History Association, serving as president in 1987-88.The main area of his current research is the social demography of military service in both the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War.