"The Evolution of Divorce" by Brad Wilcox in National Affairs
is a really good, thoughtful history that brings together some very relevant but rarely-seen statistics, along with analysis of how cultures, attitudes and beliefs have changed over time.
It includes stats based on the numbers of marriages, which are considerably less common and more informative than purely per-capita stats. Some of them are:
From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled — from 9.2
divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married
women. This meant that while less than 20% of couples who married in
1950 ended up divorced, about 50% of couples who married in 1970 did.
And approximately half of the children born to married parents in the
1970s saw their parents part, compared to only about 11% of those born
in the 1950s.
...
The divorce rate fell from a historic high of 22.6 divorces per 1,000
married women in 1980 to 17.5 in 2007. In real terms, this means that
slightly more than 40% of contemporary first marriages are likely to
end in divorce, down from approximately 50% in 1980. Perhaps even more
important, recent declines in divorce suggest that a clear majority of
children who are now born to married couples will grow up with their
married mothers and fathers.
There is much more -- stats and sophisticated analysis on marriage quality, attitudes, low-conflict vs. high-conflict marriages and divorces, the effects on children, out-of-wedlock birth, cohabitation, social class, and the connections between all these phenomena.
