2021 marked the 30-year anniversary of the publication Fatal Years: Child Mortality in the late Nineteenth-Century United States, a pioneering work in historical demography by Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines. This special issue showcases the current state of historical mortality studies through a collection of articles originally presented at two commemorative sessions at the 2021 meeting of the Social Science History Association. It provides new and more nuanced evidence on several of the major themes of Fatal Years in terms of the mortality experience and includes studies of a wide range of contexts, from North America, to Ireland, England and Wales, and continental Europe. They all bring new evidence and leverage the dramatic development that has taken place in availability of large-scale micro-level data in the 30 years since Fatal Years was published. This introduction first provides some background to the collection and then summarizes the main findings from the different articles included. Preston and Haines provide a coda to this collection with a short reflection article on researching and writing Fatal Years.

2021 年是塞缪尔·H·普雷斯顿 (Samuel H. Preston) 和迈克尔·R. 海恩斯 (Michael R. Haines) 的历史人口学开创性著作《致命岁月：十九世纪末美国的儿童死亡率》出版30 周年。本期特刊通过最初在社会科学史协会 2021 年会议的两次纪念会议上发表的文章集展示了历史死亡率研究的现状。它为《致命岁月》的几个主要主题提供了新的、更细致的证据就死亡率经历而言，包括对从北美到爱尔兰、英格兰和威尔士以及欧洲大陆的广泛背景的研究。它们都带来了新的证据，并利用了《致命岁月》出版30 年来大规模微观数据可用性方面发生的巨大发展。本简介首先提供了该集合的一些背景，然后总结了所包含的不同文章的主要发现。普雷斯顿和海恩斯通过一篇关于研究和写作《致命岁月》的简短反思文章为本集提供了尾声。