Racial disparities in diabetes a century ago: Evidence from the pension files of US Civil War veterans

Using a comprehensive database constructed from the pension files of US Civil War veterans, we explore characteristics and occurrence of type 2 diabetes among older black and white males, living circa 1900. We find that rates of diagnosed diabetes were much lower among males in this period than a century later. In contrast to the late 20th Century, the rates of diagnosed diabetes were lower among black than among white males, suggesting that the reverse pattern is of relatively recent origin. Two-thirds of both white and black veterans had body-mass indexes (BMIs) in the currently recommended weight range, a far higher proportion than documented by recent surveys. Longevity among persons with diabetes was not reduced among Civil War veterans, and those with diabetes suffered comparatively few sequelae of the condition. Over 90% of black veterans engaged in low paying, high-physical effort jobs, as compared to about half of white veterans. High rates of work-related physical activity may provide a partial explanation of low rates of diagnosed diabetes among blacks. We found no evidence of discrimination in testing by race, as indicated by rates of examinations in which a urinalysis was performed. This dataset is valuable for providing a national benchmark against which to compare modern diabetes prevalence patterns.USA Type 2 diabetes mellitus Health inequalities History of medicine Veterans disability claims Obesity

Black Elites and Latino Immigrant Relations in a Southern City: Do Black Elites and the Black Masses Agree?

The United States is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse as a function of immigration, both legal and illegal, from Asia, Mexico, and Latin America. Latinos are the fastest growing population, and in 2000, Latinos replaced African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. Although much of the media and scholarly attention has focused on demographic changes in traditional Latino immigrant destinations such as California, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona, the rapid growth in Latino populations is occurring across the nation. The South has undergone a particularly dramatic alteration in terms of racial composition, with six of seven states tripling the size of their Latino populations between 1990 and 2000. This settlement of Latinos in the South is no more than ten to fifteen years old, and new immigrants from Mexico and Latin America are settling in states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee (Durand, Massey, and Carvet 2000). They bring ethnic and cultural diversity to areas previously defined exclusively as black and white. Not only have new Latino populations migrated to urban and suburban locations in the South, they also have settled in small towns and rural areas, reinforcing projections of the “Latinization” of the American South. Examples of these “New Latino Destinations” (Suro and Singer 2000) include cities such as Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, Greensboro-Winston Salem, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; and Greenville, South Carolina

African-American Committee Chairs in U.S. State Legislatures

In this article, we explore whether African-American state legislators have been able to translate election to office into positions of power, particularly as committee chairs. Copyright (c) 2007 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

Black Substantive Representation in State Legislatures from 1971-1994

To determine if increased black descriptive representation in state legislatures has resulted in greater influence over policy outputs. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

Disentangling Constituency and Legislator Effects in Legislative Representation: Black Legislators or Black Districts?

Does the race of a legislator or does the black population of a district best predict legislative roll-call voting in the interests of African Americans? Due to methodological limitations, no prior study has found that "both" the race of the legislator "and" the black district population are significant predictors of congressional roll-call voting. Drawing on post "Shaw v. Reno"/"Miller v. Johnson" congressional districts (with greater data variance), I examine the effect of these two racial representation variables on roll-call voting in the 104th-106th Congresses. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.