THOMAS E. JORDAN is Emeritus Curators' Professor of Child Development at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His research addresses aspects of childhood in which stress is an element. As the author of 25 books and monographs, he has stressed empirical methods in studies of handicapped children, birth cohorts, and historical archives. His last four books addressed human development in 19th-century Britain. In 1998, he edited a two-volume edition of the Irish censuses, 1821-1911.