bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Rationalization, Standardization, or Market Diversity?
Authors: Lippmann Stephen
Published: February 2016

The “golden age” of radio broadcasting in the 1930s and 1940s was dominated by large, national broadcasting networks. The rise of these networks is thought to have been accompanied by a dramatic decline in the number of locally oriented stations in operation in the United States. However, this presumption contradicts the dynamics of concentration and organizational foundings in a variety of other industries. In this article I use comprehensive data on the vital rates of radio station founding, failure, and density to empirically test the popular claims of network dominance in the midcentury U.S. broadcasting industry. The results indicate that locally owned commercial stations were not eliminated by the rise of national broadcasting networks. In fact, concentration in the hands of the networks actually increased the viability of locally owned radio stations.
Is It about Time?
Authors: Gabaccia Donna R.
Published: February 2016

The theme for the 2008 Social Science History Association conference was “It’s about Time.” By surveying the program and panels on offer in Miami, the presidential address instead asked, “Is it about time?” Location and space figured more centrally than time in the titles of the conference’s many papers. Still, two conceptions of time were prominent features of the program. For some scholars, the past is like a foreign country; it can be compared to the present. For even more of the 2008 presenters, however, interest in time meant a concern with process. The analysis of time reflected on the program seemed to have developed along disciplinary lines. Historians and life-course sociologists analyzed time through narratives, time lines, or periodization. Sociologists dominated the theorization of time as sequential. Time geographers were most explicit in relating time and space, mainly in micro-level analyses. How to visualize and represent time in two dimensions remained an unsettled matter; some disciplines imagined timed processes as narrow or broad (represented along an x-axis), while others analyzed them as shallow or deep (represented along a y-axis). Scholars working with timed media, such as video, may have insights into how to overcome this representational roadblock.
Pioneers of the Modern Lifestyle?
Authors: Van Bavel Jan , Kok Jan
Published: February 2016

In many Western countries, including the Netherlands, couples marrying in the interwar period experienced unprecedentedly high levels of childlessness. Only recently do we witness a return to these levels, as part and parcel of the so-called second demographic transition. Looking back on the interwar period, many scholars have attributed the decline of fertility and the increase of childlessness to rampant economic and political instability. However, contemporary social scientists ascribed the phenomenon to individualization, secularization, and the priority newlywed couples gave to a career and a luxurious lifestyle. From this perspective, childless couples in the interwar period could be seen as “pioneers” of the second demographic transition. To disentangle “traditional” and “modern” backgrounds of childlessness, we have studied the fertility histories of nearly 3,000 Dutch couples married between 1919 and 1938. Our results, in particular the strong association of childlessness with religiously mixed marriage, confirm that an important part of childlessness in the interwar period can be associated with a modern, individualized lifestyle.
Social Science as If History Mattered
Authors: Kimeldorf Howard
Published: February 2016

Ruling Oneself Out is an extremely impressive scholarly achievement at multiple levels. It offers a model of how to identify and pose an important research question; that is, a question worth asking and answering not only because it is intrinsically interesting but also because it is theoretically puzzling and at the same time of great practical significance. Ruling Oneself Out is all this and more.

Ivan Ermakoff (2008) begins by asking about the conditions that lead dominant actors to surrender their power in ways that are likely to undermine their own interests. It is an intriguing question and all the more puzzling because he examines this process in the context of two cases in which the decision to surrender power was reached after a long and public process of deliberation and discussion. Moreover, both cases—the German Reichstag’s passage of the enabling act in March 1933 that gave Adolf Hitler the authority to circumvent the constitution and the transfer of state power to the proponents of an authoritarian and reactionary Vichy regime in the summer of 1940—followed open and democratic decision-making procedures to realize an outcome that would ultimately undermine the commitment to democracy that made those outcomes possible.
Interest, Collusion, and Alignment
Authors: Adut Ari
Published: February 2016

Ivan Ermakoff ’s Ruling Oneself Out focuses on two major instances of voluntary surrender of power in Western history: the March 1933 bill that empowered Adolf Hitler with the right to amend the Weimar Constitution and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional authority to Marshal Philippe Pétain in July 1940. The first event inaugurated the Third Reich, the other Vichy France. Much ink has been spilled over these events. But Ermakoff finds various problems with the existing accounts and advances his own theory of collective abdication in their stead. Moreover, his theory is geared to analyze all kinds of political crises and breakdowns where collective abdication plays a role—as it often does in such contexts. Ermakoff ’s theory is a formal one. It can hold for any situation in which a group confronts the possibility of collective persecution and has to decide whether to resist or abdicate. It is not confined to formally defined collectivities or to parliamentary settings: the dynamics that it reveals are independent of specific group configurations and institutional contexts.
Motives and Alignments
Authors: Ermakoff Ivan
Published: February 2016

Drawing on multiple perspectives and different analytic takes, Howard Kimeldorf ’s, Ari Adut’s, and John R. Hall’s comments raise three broad issues at the center of the agenda laid out in Ruling Oneself Out. The first issue concerns the motivational underpinnings of decisions reached in conditions of high uncertainty. The second draws the focus on the logic of the argument and its possible connections with models of organizational behaviors. The third points to the explanatory scope of the theory and the indeterminacy of the processes at play. In this article I address these critical remarks and, along the way, stake out claims and implications.

An argument about decisions cannot avoid delving into motivations and subjective perceptions. Several of Ari Adut’s and Howard Kimeldorf ’s comments focus on this issue. Adut draws attention to the possible effects of coercive pressures and pervasive expectations of retaliation in July 1940. In addition, his comments suggest that we should not downplay the significance of opportunism as a motive for endorsement.
The Discursive Turn in School Desegregation
Authors: Saatcioglu Argun , Carl Jim
Published: February 2016

This study addresses changes in the public conversation on school desegregation since the early 1970s. It applies the concept of discursive opportunity structure to the debates on desegregation in order to illustrate how a dynamic and balanced conversation, which involved both positive and negative views on the policy, has evolved into an anemic and overly negative one. The study relies on insights from social movement research on political opportunity structures for debates on contentious issues and on interpretive framing processes. Several inferences are offered on the nature of the discursive turn in desegregation at the national level, followed by a detailed analysis of desegregation and resegregation in Cleveland from 1973 to 1998. This involves the systematic examination of local newspaper coverage and also draws on court documents, administrative student records, and census information. The findings suggest that political and social structural factors that have restricted the chances for a balanced conversation have also complicated desegregation implementation and may have undermined the policy’s intended student benefits. By the 1990s even the most dedicated advocates had withdrawn from the debate, allowing the conversation to atrophy and become dominated by critical views. As a result, public education has risked failing to address the ill effects of resegregation and to produce reforms that foster quality schools for all.
Nature and Power
Authors: Radkau Joachim
Published: February 2016

Nature and Poweris to be understood not only ashuman power against naturebut also aspower by naturein the sense of Michel Foucault'sbiopouvoir(biopower) or Francis Bacon's “Naturae non imperator nisi parendo” (Only by obeying nature may we dominate nature). The fragile human attempts to get power over nature and by nature have a long history, reaching back over millennia until prehistoric times, and much of world history may be explained in part by the unstable relationship between humans and nature. The environmental approach offers a fresh look at global history. The great change that has happened in modern times seems to have been described best by Karl Polanyi (1944) in hisGreat Transformation, which also refers to a revolution in the human relation to nature. There are primeval symbioses of humans and nature that are the basis of environmental history until modern time. A global history of the environment may be written for a long time along the three great commons of history: woodlands, water, and pasture. The dark tune of Garrett Hardin's (1968) “Tragedy of the Commons,” to be sure, does not dominate the whole melody of environmental history. There is also a lot of historical evidence for Elinor Ostrom's rehabilitation of the commons. But it is better to be cautious with dogmatic theories and sweeping judgments. In modern times Hardin may be right, at least in this or that regard. Ostrom's concept applies only to local, not to global commons. The underlying philosophy ofNature and Poweris neither optimism nor pessimism but possibilism.
Nature and Powerthrough Multiple Lenses
Authors: Whited Tamara L.
Published: February 2016

This contribution focuses on analyses of specific themes in the encyclopedicNature and Power, by Joachim Radkau. The analysis is shaped by insights derived from pairing individual chapters from the book with related readings. Examples will include traumatic environmental experiences, early modern colonialism and colonial “ghost acreage,” industrialization and uses of the forest, and manipulations of the hydrologic cycle. The structure of the contribution is explicitly comparative.
Nature and Power
Authors: Perdue Peter C.
Published: February 2016

I discuss the references inNature and Powerto imperial China, especially its thorough discussion of key issues in China's environmental history, but I point out several limitations. Joachim Radkau says little about the role of local elites in agrarian policy, the impact of central Eurasian conquest on imperial regimes' attitudes toward the land, and the impact of global trade on the empire in the preindustrial age. The second part of the article discusses the important strategic and environmental role of trades in fur, tea, and fish from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries.
Radkau on the Americas
Authors: McNeill J. R.
Published: February 2016

In his bookNature and PowerJoachim Radkau seeks to provide a broad vision of environmental history that is not unduly influenced by American perspectives but does justice to the experience of the “Old World.” Given this motive behind his work, how does Radkau deal with the American hemisphere? Examination of the relevant sections of his book shows that Radkau is drawn toward areas of environmental history with scholarly debate, takes conventional positions for the most part on those debates, and follows the literature in emphasizing the United States over the rest of the Americas.
Images of Elderly in Popular Magazines: A Content Analysis ofLittell’s Living Age, 1845-1882
Authors: Range Jane , Vinovskis Maris A.
Published: February 2016

The portrayal of individuals in the media usually affects the way the public perceives and treats them. The negative views of the elderly in this country are often blamed on the way in which the media have depicted the aged in our society. For example, in hearings on “Age Stereotyping and Television” before the House Select Committee on Aging, Representative William S. Cohen testified:

All too often, the image of the older person portrayed in the media is a cliche—the white-haired, venerable sage, whose life is uncluttered by the emotions, such as love, hate, and jealousy, that tax the rest of us, or perhaps the old fool in his dotage, a laughingstock for the Pepsi generation and those a few years removed from it. It requires little beyond modest powers of observation to determine that these cliches have little basis in fact. The elderly possess the same rich diversity that makes up every other segment of our population. What makes these myths more dangerous in the era in which we live, however, is the pervasive effect of television. With 97 percent of all households owning at least one set and nearly half that many possessing two, the ability of television to persuade and convince supercedes anything imaginable in past ages dominated by the written word [U.S. Congress, 1977: 8].
The “Egalitarian Myth,” Once Again
Authors: Gallman Robert E.
Published: February 2016

In the winter of 1978 Social Science History published a short note by me (Gallman, 1978) that questioned certain features of Professor Edward Pessen’s critique of the egalitarian hypothesis. In the winter of 1979 Professor Pessen (1979) responded to me, at great length. The editors have kindly offered me the opportunity to reply. The space limitations they have imposed upon the debate do not permit me to comment on each issue raised by Professor Pessen, nor do I think that that is necessary. I plan only to repeat the main points of my orginal note and to indicate how far I think Professor Pessen’s paper has affected them. As will appear, I believe my note has survived Professor Pessen’s critique well, and has gained strength from research done since it was written.
Poverty and Progress: A Critique
Authors: Pessen Edward
Published: February 2016

That Stephan Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress is widely regarded as a classic is clear from the very fact that a symposium of this type is being held. Nor is the book’s reputation unwarranted. Thernstrom (1964: 1) himself wrote that “one of the most glaring gaps in our knowledge of 19th century America is the absence of reliable information about the social mobility of its population, particularly at the lower and middle levels of society.” Thanks to his study of Newburyport and the many studies of other communities that his research has helped inspire, that gap in our knowledge has been narrowed and we are all the wiser. Before Thernstrom, American historians were prone to speak of large-scale upward mobility on the basis of a handful of success stories. He showed us a better way.

Some scholars, and they include admirers of Thernstrom’s work, have recently questioned both the importance of social mobility and the extent to which it influenced the minds of working people (Henretta, 1977; Katz, 1975; and Dawley, 1976). Their argument is interesting but highly conjectural. Most of us continue to believe, and rightly so, that research such as Thernstrom’s has significantly illuminated nineteenth-century American society.
Poverty and Progress: A Paradoxical Legacy
Authors: Frisch Michael
Published: February 2016

My Copy of Poverty and Progress provides shocking evidence that we have moved far enough along in time to have the necessary perspective: the price on the jacket of this Harvard University Press original edition—hardcover—reads $5.95. There is similarly little doubt about the judgment of time, for I think there would be general agreement with the assessment offered by Michael Katz (1982) several years ago that “in the last two decades there have been two landmark books in the history of social structure, one each for Britain and the United States. Both reflect not only the talents of the author but the national/intellectual contexts as well. For Britain the book is E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class [1964]; for America it is Stephan Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress [1964].”

It is thus appropriate that we honor Stephan Thernstrom on the twentieth anniversary of a slim volume on a small city, which made a disproportionately big bang. We know he understands that to the extent that our honorific twenty-one gun salute may occasionally seem to be aimed not over but at him, this is only to keep him from feeling uncomfortably like the guest at his own funeral eulogies. Whatever the mix of criticism and praise, however, I suspect that he will be amused: all of this solemn discussion devoted to what was initially only a doctoral thesis which Professor Thernstrom, if he was anything like most of us, may have had to struggle, from time to time, to take altogether seriously.
Social Change and Women’s Work and Family Experience in Ireland and the United States
Authors: Kain Edward L. , Bolger Niall
Published: February 2016

This paper examines the changing nature of the female labor force in Ireland and the United States. Data from the two countries are used to illustrate both similarities and variations in the Western experience of women during the period of rapid change in work and family life since the late nineteenth century.

A central facet of how Western families have been transformed during the past century has involved the increased participation of women in the paid labor force, and in the most recent decades, a dramatic rise in the labor force participation of married women. In his classic work, World Revolution and Family Patterns, Goode suggests that the increase in female participation in the non-agricultural labor force was clearly evident in Western countries but was not dramatic during the first half of this century (1963: 59-60). Since 1950, however, increases in the economic activity of women have occurred throughout the West. For example, using data from Scandinavian countries, Haavio-Mannila and Kari (1980) document the increased economic activity of women throughout this century, the transformation of the economies of Scandinavia from an agricultural to an industrial base, and the rapid increase in labor force participation of married women since 1950.
The Changing Shape of Burnham’s Political Universe
Authors: Jensen Richard
Published: February 2016

The discipline of political science deliberately abandoned history sixty years ago. In a quest for a true “science” of politics, it turned to physics and especially psychology for models of what a science ought to be like (Jensen, 1969). Rigor in defining and measuring variables and in the statement of theories and testing of hypotheses was sought, plus a method that could predict, and thus control, the future. History seemed unnecessary, for the terrible cataclysm of the Great War seemed to have erased or smothered the impact of the past. It would take political scientists a half century to rediscover history, and the goal of this paper is to examine the route of one of their most important explorers of the past, Walter Dean Burnham.
The New “Black Death”: Cholera in Brazil, 1855-1856
Authors: Cooper Donald B.
Published: February 2016

On repeated occasions in the nineteenth century, Asian cholera irrupted from its traditional center in the great river basins of India and spread in pandemic waves throughout parts of Europe, North Africa, and North America. In Spain alone 600,000 deaths resulted from cholera during four great invasions (Cárdenas, 1971: 224). The United States experienced terrifying outbreaks beginning in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Rosenberg, 1962) which also touched parts of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Initially South America escaped the onslaught. Some Brazilians speculated that the intense heat of the equator, or the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, somehow offered an effective buffer to the southward spread of cholera (Rego, 1872: 84). But this “sweet illusion” was shattered in 1855. Indeed the first city in Brazil struck by Asian cholera was Belém, capital of the vast northern province of Pará located astride the equator at the mouth of the Amazon river.
Archaeology and the Aztec Economy: The Social Scientific Use of Archaeological Data
Authors: Berman David R.
Published: February 2016

Political Conflict Over the past decade has brought about considerable scholarly attention to public attitudes regarding the rights of women. Some scholars have reexamined the suffrage movement during the progressive era to discover links with such recent developments as the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (McDonagh and Price, 1985).
Time in the Paddies: A Comparison of Rice Production in the Southeastern United States and Lower Burma in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Coclanis Peter , Komlos John
Published: February 2016

The Question Of the relative efficiency of agricultural production within the institutional framework of slavery flared in the 1970s. Fogel and Engerman (1971, 1977) found antebellum Southern agriculture to have been considerably more productive than previously thought. Although this aspect of their finding became generally accepted, the controversy focused on just how efficient slave production actually was compared to Northern agriculture (David and Temin, 1974; David et al., 1976; Schaefer and Schmitz, 1979; Wright, 1979).
Ex Parte County Aggregates Et Cetera
Authors: Alexander Thomas B.
Published: February 2016

The fourth president of our Association made a presentation totally different from those of his predecessors, stating that he wanted to interdict any presumption that such addresses ought to fit a particular mold. Subsequently, these addresses have been comfortingly varied—the eighth just not given at all in the cheery din of a great Chinese restaurant in Toronto. I feel free, therefore, to do exactly what I please today, and I appreciate the supportive precedents.
Bosses, Machines, and Democratic Leadership: Party Organization and Managers in Indiana, 1880–1910
Authors: VanderMeer Philip R.
Published: February 2016

American political parties achieved their peak importance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Numerous voting studies have demonstrated the level and significance of party identification, and evaluations of legislative behavior have shown that party loyalty had a primary influence on roll call voting (Bogue, 1980; Kleppner, 1981; Thompson and Silbey, 1984). Surprisingly, other aspects of parties have received very little attention. Only a few scholars have examined the extent of party structure and activities or their connections with political culture and the broader political system (Jensen, 1969, 1971, and 1983; McGerr, 1986; Keller, 1977; Mayhew, 1986: 203–256, 308–332). Even fewer have evaluated systematically the overall patterns of committee membership and the characteristics of party leaders to determine which social and political qualities were important (Stave, 1970; Watts, 1979).
Mortality on Convict Voyages to Australia, 1788–1868
Authors: McDonald John , Shlomowitz Ralph
Published: February 2016

During the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of research on the seaboard mortality associated with intercontinental migration during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The focus of historical interest in this linkage between mortality and migration has been the Atlantic slave trade. We now have mortality rates on voyages from various regions in Africa to various destinations in the Americas, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (see Curtin, 1968, 1969: 275-286; Klein and Engerman, 1976, 1979; Klein, 1978; Postma, 1979; Miller, 1981; Cohn and Jensen, 1982a, 1982b; Cohn, 1985; Eltis, 1984, 1987; Steckel and Jensen, 1986; Galenson, 1986). These slave studies have spawned renewed interest in the mortality associated with other seaborne populations, and mortality rates have been calculated on Dutch immigrant voyages to the East Indies during the eighteenth century, European convict and immigrant voyages to North America and European immigrant voyages to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Indian and Pacific Islander indentured labor voyages to Fiji and Queensland, Australia, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Riley, 1981; Eltis, 1983; Cohn, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988; Grubb, 1987; Ekirch, 1987; Morgan, 1985; Shlomowitz, 1986, 1987, 1989; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1988, forthcoming).
Is History a Process? Nonlinearity, Revitalization Theory, and the Central Metaphor of Social Science History
Authors: Roth Randolph
Published: February 2016

Process is a ubiquitous word in social science history. It appears dozens of times in such fundamental texts as Wallace 1969, Hershberg 1969, and Wolf 1982. Social science historians generally use it, as Berkhofer (1969: 169-87, 243-44) observes, to characterize the causes of change and persistence in human communities as organic or mechanical phenomena that are intelligible, general, systematic, repetitive, orderly, and similar in sequence. The concept of process is pivotal to our understanding of the daily flux of human interaction, the workings of institutions, the character of collective action, and the course of social evolution (Turner 1977; Wallace 1970: 165-206).
A Memory for Women’s History: Problems of Method and Interpretation
Authors: Passerini Luisa
Published: February 2016

This essay describes an oral history project that accompanied the establishment of an archive on the history of recent feminism in the region of Emilia-Romagna, Italy. The archive, which contains both written and oral historical sources, is now in existence at the library of the Bologna’s Women’s Center, the Centro di Documentazione delle Donne. Raffaella Lamberti (1989) has explained why it was politically important for the Women’s Center to establish such an archive. It should be noted that the Centro di Documentazione, since it was officially proposed in March 1982, has been a totally independent institution, although it draws financial and administrative support from the Regional Administration of Emilia-Romagna.
The “Onward March of Party Decomposition” in the American Electorate: An Empirical Examination, 1876–1984
Authors: Claggett William , Van Wingen John
Published: February 2016

Walter Dean Burnham (1965, 1970) demonstrated that non-voting and various measures of aggregate electoral instability increased between 1900 and the late 1920s, declined somewhat during the New Deal and its aftermath, and increased thereafter. To Burnham, the behavior of these measures implied a similar evolution in the partisan strength of the electorate since individuals without strong partisan ties are characterized by lower levels of turnout and more inconsistent turnout and partisan choices, both over time for the same office and across different offices in the same year. In short, he argued that the entire twentieth century, save for the New Deal, was marked by an “onward march of party decomposition.”
Women’s Informal Market Work in Massachusetts, 1875–1920
Authors: Folbre Nancy
Published: February 2016

Married women’s entrance into the market economy proceeded at a slow but steady pace between 1890 and 1910. That, at least, is the impression given by conventional census measures of the percentage with “gainful occupations,” which practically doubled in both the United States as a whole and in the heavily industrialized state of Massachusetts (see Table 1). This impression is misleading on at least two counts. Declines in self-reporting and enumerator bias may have overstated the increase in married women with gainful occupations. More important, dwindling opportunities for informal market activities, such as industrial homework, provision of services to boarders, and participation in a family farm or enterprise, may have countervailed increases in formal market participation. In Massachusetts, at least, married women’s specialization in non-market domestic labor probably increased.
Socialism’s Past, New Social Democracy, and Socialism’s Futures
Authors: Rose Brad , Ross George
Published: February 2016

The ideas of socialism grew in ordinary people’s lived experience of all-encompassing markets, totalizing doctrines of individualism, the power of capitalist property over human dignity and destiny, and equations between market success and human merit. Codified into doctrine, socialism was pro-ductivist, seeing the work experience as that which determined personal identity and the shape of social collaboration. It was also class analytical, mapping the social world in terms of classes in conflict and specifying the working class as the central social actor and agent for change. Third, it was egalitarian democratic, rejecting arbitrary distinctions determining different stations in life. Finally, socialism was Utopian, revolutionary at least in aspiration if not always in deed. The capitalist order could be, and ought to be, radically transcended. Socialism, which would follow, would reappropriate control over work and its fruits by “the workers” and would facilitate full democracy, equality, and the consecration of a creative and cooperative social order.
The Realms of Identities
Authors: Weitz Eric D.
Published: February 2016

At the very end of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard the priests come and remove the relics preserved and protected by the Prince of Salina's aged daughters, virtually the last survivors of the family. Nothing is left of the fabled world of the Sicilian aristocrats. Even the material and symbolic artifacts of their eminence—the religious relics they guarded and the palace over which they presided—have turned into rubble or taken on the musty air of decay. The world of the Prince of Salina, a world of inherited wealth and power stretching back to the Norman conquests of the eleventh century, of aristocratic balls, of shimmering palaces in Palermo and vast estates in the interior—that world has come to an end.
Diverse Good Causes
Authors: Stephen Whitman
Published: February 2016

In many slave societies manumission coexisted with perpetual bondage, often featured by self-purchase by slave artisans, a practice that some societies monitored through recognition of the slave's legal personality as a contracting party. Manumission played a comparatively minor role in shaping North American slavery, with debatable exceptions in the mid-Atlantic region; historians of slavery there have portrayed manumitters as individuals of conscience and/or economic maximizers seeking profitable exits from a locally declining labor institution. This contrast was first noted by Frank Tannenbaum, who characterized slavery in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America as milder than in British America, and targeted differences in religion and in the European history of slavery of each society as key explanatory factors.
The Mortality Transition in Schenectady, New York, 1880–1930
Authors: Wells Robert V.
Published: February 2016

Over the past several decades, the demographic transition from high to low levels of both fertility and mortality has received much attention from scholars. Demographers have been interested in whether the change that has occurred in the developed parts of the world will be repeated elsewhere, while historians have used population changes as a means of exploring broader questions in social history. The interest, however, has not been evenly divided, with fertility declines receiving far more attention than improvements in mortality. This is especially true of American history.
The First Phase of the Empire State’s “Triple Transition”: Banks’ Influence on the Market, Democracy, and Federalism in New York, 1776–1838
Authors: Wright Robert E.
Published: February 2016

The story usually goes something like this: Colonial Americans lived in a world very different from that of the generation that fought the Civil War. Locals wielded the tools of government most of the time; rarely did distant officials attempt control, and when they did they were usually roundly rebuffed. Politicians “stood” for positions of honor rather than “running” for lucrative posts. A man’s surname was a crucial determinant of his socioeconomic well-being. Artisans and yeomen deferred to gentlemen. Barter predominated as little “cash” circulated. Custom and family, not market forces, dictated the allocation of credit. Change of all types occurred slowly. By Martin Van Buren’s presidency some threescore years later, America was a very different place. Though still evolving, the United States exuded modernity, at least in its general outlines. Politicians and bureaucrats in state capitals, and even Washington, increasingly affected Americans’ everyday lives. Party politics and patronage took on increased importance as plutocrats plied for patronage posts. A man’s bank account meant more than his lineage. Gentlemen feared the artisans and yeomen they once easily ruled. Cash was abundant, and the market determined most access to credit. Societal conditions changed apace. Generally speaking, over these decades America is described as becoming less “aristocratic” and “mercantile,” or even “feudal,” and more “democratic” and “capitalist.”
Introduction: Memory and the Nation—Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations
Authors: Olick Jeffrey K.
Published: February 2016

Since at least the nineteenth century, scholars and politicians alike have recognized the fundamental connection between memory and the nation. While political elites invented and propagated legitimating traditions, historians objectified the nation as a unitary entity with a linear descent. At the same time, critics like Ernest Renan pointed out that forgetting—that is, forgetting alternative possible stories and alternate possible identifications—is at the heart of national self-understanding, while Nietzsche bemoaned the proliferation of “monumental” history. World War I seemed to many good enough reason to abandon nationalist chauvinism, but for others a myth of the war experience “provided the nation with a new depth of religious feeling, putting at its disposal ever-present saints and martyrs, places of worship, and a heritage to emulate” (Mosse 1990: 7). And the anemic internationalism of the 1920s was just that—inter-nationalism rather than postnationalism, based on a nebulous and misunderstood notion of “self-determination”—where the burning memory of stabs in the back and imposed settlements fanned old antipathies to new heights. Memory has long been the handmaiden of nationalist zeal, history its high counsel. Even those like Nietzsche and Renan who worried about it understood its centrality.
When Do Collective Memories Last?: Founding Moments in the United States and Australia
Authors: Spillman Lyn
Published: February 2016

In 1876, there was a huge commemoration of the centennial of American independence. The year was marked in many ways, by many groups, in many parts of the country. The central event, though, was a grand International Exhibition in Philadelphia, four years in the making. Planners first met in 1872 in Independence Hall and spoke at length about the sacredness of the venue: “It is altogether fit and wise that we should take our first step and utter our first words in this hall. There sat John Hancock, presiding over that immortal body. There came Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston presenting the sacred declaration. There lies the broken and silent bell, which at the word proclaimed liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof” (USCC 1873: 24-25). The theme was taken up by many others in many different ways. Images of the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Washington, and Franklin were scattered throughout centennial ceremonies, buildings, poems, histories, and other documents. The revolution was used as a touchstone in talk about the exhibition and as a rich source of national symbolism.
What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?: Official Memory in German Politics since 1989
Authors: Olick Jeffrey K.
Published: February 2016

In 1959, Theodor Adorno delivered a lecture whose title and theme played on Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”{Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?).Kant’s essay had begun with the statement that enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from self-imposed nonage. Called “What Does It Mean to Come to Terms with the Past?” (Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?), Adorno’s lecture takes issue with tendencies in the Federal Republic of Germany to wish away difficult legacies of the Nazi period. Evoking a parallel between Kant’s “enlightenment” (Aufklärung) and the contemporary expressions “coming to terms” or “working through” (Aufarbeitung), Adorno poses a high critical standard for German political culture. According to his diagnosis, the Federal Republic was more concerned with getting beyond the past, with avoiding difficult memory through what Adorno calls “an unconscious and not-so-unconscious defense against guilt,” than with the genuine working through that would be required to “break its spell.” The latter would demand an act of clear consciousness, a difficult process much like the work of psychoanalysis. According to Adorno, the defensive unwillingness in the Federal Republic to confront the past—at both the personal and official levels—indicated not the persistence of fascist tendencies against democracy (e.g., neo-Nazi groups) but of fascist tendencieswithindemocracy. The latter, he argues, are much more insidious.
Mill Town Mortality: Consequences of Industrial Growth in Two Nineteenth-Century New England Towns
Authors: Hautaniemi Susan I. , Swedlund Alan C. , Anderton Douglas L.
Published: February 2016

Recent research has considerably increased our understanding of the factors associated with the American epidemiological transition in the late nineteenth century. However, uncertainty remains regarding the impact on mortality of specific changes ancillary to urbanization and industrialization in American cities and towns. The broad objective of the Connecticut Valley Historical Demography Project is to examine changing relationships between socioeconomic status, the rise of new urban-industrial communities, and cause-specific mortality trends during the rapid development of New England manufacturing. To address these issues, the present analysis examines two emergent urban centers in Massachusetts, adopting a micro-demographic approach to explore late-nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century determinants of mortality.
Between God and Market: Influences of Economy and Spirit on Shaker Communal Dairying, 1830-1875
Authors: Murray John E. , Coşgel Metin M.
Published: February 2016

By our late-twentieth-century experience, survival of an economy seems critically dependent on well-established rights to private property and a return to labor that rewards greater effort. But that need not be so. History provides examples of microsocialist economies that, internally at least, did not use prices to allocate resources, allowed for little private property for participants, and provided a constant return to labor independent of effort. Some of these economies may even be termed “successful,” if success is taken to mean survival over several generations (Roehl 1972). If these communities survived despite their lacking the conditions generally thought necessary for success, a question worth asking is how this occurred, for we can then shed some light on what really is necessary for economic survival. The role of time is critical here, for even if the microsocialist economies examined in this article eventually became the merest shadow of their former selves, the fact that they did flourish for so long makes them a valuable counterexample and, hence, a phenomenon in need of explanation.
Selective Assignment of Military Positions in the Union Army: Implications for the Impact of the Civil War
Authors: Lee Chulhee
Published: February 2016

The Civil War was the bloodiest event in American history. For every 10,000 persons, 182 died during the war. Wartime mortality was especially severe for young men; about 8% of all white males between the ages 13 and 43 died (Vinovskis 1990). Among those who survived the war, many were disabled due to wartime injuries. According to the estimate of Claudia Goldin and Frank Lewis (1975), human losses account for 37% and 28% of the direct costs of the Civil War for the North and the South, respectively.

A question of perennial interest to social historians is the degree to which mortality during the war varied across economic classes (Murdock 1964; Hess 1981; Lavine 1981; Riggs 1982; Rorabaugh 1986; Kemp 1990; Geary 1991). Starkly put, the question reduces to this: Was the Civil War a poor man’s fight? In a recent study, Maris Vinovskis (1990) suggested that the answer to the question is yes. Vinovskis found that recruits from disadvantaged backgrounds were more likely to die or to be wounded than servicemen who had higher-ranking jobs or greater wealth, presumably because they were more susceptible to disease or were sent on more dangerous missions. However, he didn’t provide evidence of how the socioeconomic backgrounds of recruits affected their susceptibility to disease and military missions. Moreover, since his study was based on a relatively small sample composed of recruits who resided in a single town, it is unclear whether the results could be generalized for Union army recruits at large.
The Transplanted:Immigrants and Ethnics
Authors: Bukowczyk John J.
Published: February 2016

John Bodnar’s Scholarship has touched—and even helped shape—current debates in several related historical sub-disciplines, including labor history, Afro-American history, and family history. He is, of course, also a leading public historian. During a period in the historians’ craft decried for its myopic compartmentalization and narrow specialization, the connectedness of Bodnar’s work to a range of social science concerns, themes, and issues makes it especially compelling for us. Yet Professor Bodnar has forged a record of research—praiseworthy for its quality no less than for its quantity—that clearly has impressed his colleagues, inspired new graduate students, and generally enlivened the field of immigration and ethnic history. It is on that central focus of his work that I wish to dwell here.
The Transplanted:Women and Family in Immigrant America
Authors: Gabaccia Donna
Published: February 2016

As any casual reader of John Bodnar’s major new synthesis,The Transplanted(1985), knows, the family is the central analytical concept in this work. Bodnar (1985: xvii) asks us to see immigrants’ adjustment to life in the United States in a new way—taking place at all “the points where immigrant families met the challenges of capitalism and modernity: the homeland, the neighborhood, the school, the workplace, the church, the family and the fraternal hall.” This represents a significant change—I would argue, an advance—over earlier studies which focused on the confrontation of ethnic groups with American society, on the interaction of modern and traditional cultures, or on the peculiarities of American class struggle (Handlin, 1951; Archdeacon, 1983; Cumbler, 1986).

By focusing on small family units and a large economic system, Bodnar is able to escape from the confines of the case history, which has dominated immigration history since the late 1960s. Furthermore, he is able to focus quite properly on the considerable fragmentation that characterized most immigrant communities in the United States. Because small groups of immigrants responded to capitalism, they inevitably made differing decisions, both socially and ideologically; they also supported leaders with fundamentally conflicting views of the best interests and futures for immigrant communities. Bodnar’s immigrants, in other words, are human beings who make history, although never under conditions which they themselves determined. Furthermore, they are not isolated economist decision makers.
The Skilled Worker and Working-Class Protest
Authors: Hanagan Michael , Stephenson Charles
Published: February 2016

Not so long ago the skilled worker was regarded by labor historians as the black sheep of the labor movement, and the artisan's attempt to preserve his position and to retain his shop-floor autonomy was condemned out of hand. No more. Spurred on by the studies of E. P. Thompson in England, Albert Soboul in France, and George Rudé in both countries, historians have discovered the skilled worker's importance in labor protest and rebellion; everywhere artisans have been found in the midst of what once were thought to be proletarian crowds. The continuing inspiration of Thompson, Soboul, and Rudé is apparent in all of the articles in this collection, although they are by no means simple reiterations of these historians’ insights. Viewing working-class life from the perspective of an entire century and two continents, the following essays suggest new generalizations and, inevitably, raise fresh questions.
Labor Insurgency and Class Formation
Authors: Cronin James E.
Published: February 2016

The modern working class is not especially noted for its optimism or idealism. Indeed, the industrial proletariat may well have pioneered in the adoption of those secular and cynical life-styles and values that have come increasingly to pervade twentieth-century society and culture (Hobsbawm, 1978a). This makes it all the more surprising, then, to rediscover the deep feelings and high expectations with which Europe's workers launched the greatest wave of strikes in their history just after World War I. For a brief moment, the apocalyptic hopes of the left-wing socialists and the fantastic fears of the forces of order seemed about to come true: Soldiers deserted en masse and turned against their officers and their governments; workers in almost every industry struck for unprecedented demands; workers’ councils were established from Limerick to Budapest (Kemmy, 1975-1976). And if Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Gramsci were wrong in their optimism, they were no more misguided than their panic-stricken opponents, such as Churchill, Lloyd George, the diplomats at Versailles, and the various generals and police commanders charged with controlling and suppressing the volatile crowds of urban workers and discontented ex-soldiers (Mayer, 1959, 1967).
Mortality Among White Males
Authors: Gallman James M.
Published: February 2016

The last few decades have witnessed a new interest in the study of the family in colonial America. By concentrating on single communities, historians have been able to assemble increasingly complex demographic information that has shed new light on colonial society. Until recently this research has been primarily concerned with New England communities where the necessary information is most complete, but in the last few years several studies have appeared which deal with the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia (Demos, 1965, 1968, 1976; Greven, 1966, 1967, 1970; Lockridge, 1966, 1970; Vinovskis, 1972; Walsh and Menard, 1974; Rutman and Rutman, 1976; Smith, 1978). The early results of the most recent research offer an interesting contrast to the demographic patterns established in New England, and even passing comparisons of the two regions suggest a wealth of differences which must have played important roles in creating distinct colonial societies.