bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Defining Characteristic to Vitiation of Principle
Authors: Emery J. C. Herbert
Published: February 2016

Some studies that address the decline of fraternal sickness insurance conclude that fraternal insurers were crowded out of the market by increasing government and commercial competition. This line of reasoning reinforces beliefs that government and commercial insurers were superior to fraternal providers and that voluntary insurance arrangements were deficient for addressing household income risks before the rise of the welfare state. This article shows that this interpretation is problematic. The largest sickness insurer in the United States, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, dismantled its sick benefit arrangements between the 1860s and the 1920s not because of an inability to compete with the government and commercial insurers that were not in the market until well after 1920 but rather because of declining demand for the insurance within the membership.
The Perils of Privatization
Authors: Kiser Edgar , Kane Danielle
Published: February 2016

Almost all premodern states and empires used privatized tax collection. Roman history is a good research site for the study of tax farming because it provides ample variation on its extent and effectiveness while controlling for many other factors. Tax farming began in the early Republic, was expanded but became more exploitative in the late Republic, and then was abolished for some types of taxes and was more centrally controlled for others in the Empire. We use a sociological version of agency theory to explain these changes. In addition to well-known causes of the use and effectiveness of tax farming, such as the size of the empire, the level of development of communications technologies, and the type of tax collected, we show that a major determinant in the Roman case was the characteristics of principals, a function of the form of the state. Differences between the Republic and the Empire can be traced to differences between the senate, which ruled in the former, and the emperors, who ruled in the latter. The perils of privatization in the late Republic were mainly caused by characteristics of the principals, especially the fact that the Roman senate was a multiple principal with a “revolving-door” relationship with the agents it was supposed to control, and were exacerbated by direct senatorial investment in tax farms.
“Pure Milk Is Better Than Purified Milk”
Authors: Czaplicki Alan
Published: February 2016

This article explains how pasteurization—with few outspoken political supporters during this period—first became a primary milk purification strategy in Chicago and why eight years passed between pasteurization’s initial introduction into law and the city’s adoption of full mandatory pasteurization. It expands the current focus on the political agreement to pasteurize to include the organizational processes involved in incorporating pasteurization into both policy and practice. It shows that the decision to pasteurize did not occur at a clearly defined point but instead evolved over time as a consequence of the interplay of political interest groups, state-municipal legal relations, and the merging of different organizational practices. Such an approach considerably complicates and expands existing accounts of how political interests and agreements shaped pasteurization and milk purification policies and practice.
The Transformation of the Canadian Domestic Servant, 1871–1931
Authors: Sager Eric W.
Published: February 2016

This article uses the national sample of the 1901 census of Canada to compare the earnings of live-in domestic servants with the earnings of women in other occupations and to examine the ethnoreligious backgrounds of domestic servants. The hypothesis that domestic service offered relative material advantages, when room and board are taken into account, is rejected. The hypothesis that female domestic servants came from a narrow range of specific ethnoreligious backgrounds is also rejected. The changing backgrounds and expectations of female domestic servants in the early twentieth century exacerbated class tensions in the service sector, helping ensure that domestic service remained an occupation of short duration and high turnover. The conclusion is that domestic service did not simply decline; rather, a work process was transformed. Demographic changes combined with changes in family and individual strategies to limit the supply of labor. When efforts to increase labor supply failed, bourgeois employers attempted to replace labor with new household technology; the wage-paid occupation of the domestic servant declined and was replaced by that of the unpaid housewife.
Music Teachers in the North Carolina Education Market, 1800-1840
Authors: Tolley Kim
Published: February 2016

Social historians have demonstrated that although men comprised the majority of teachers in North Carolina schools and academies during the early national period, women predominated by the end of the nineteenth century. This study concludes that among the music teachers who taught in academies and venture schools, women gained a majority decades earlier. In an effort to understand some of the underlying social processes that contributed to this shift, the following discussion analyzes the changing proportion of men and women in a sample of 65 music teachers, tracks the tuition they charged in a free market, and compares this to the tuition charged by teachers of Latin and Greek. The shift to women among music teachers in North Carolina presents an intriguing case, because it does not fit well with some earlier theoretical models of feminization among nineteenth-century teachers. The data suggest that women came to predominate among music teachers because a changing market for music instruction in venture schools and academies triggered a process of occupational abandonment and succession.
Market Forces and Market Failure in Antebellum American Education
Authors: Mitch David F.
Published: February 2016

The international rise of mass education over the past few centuries is often seen by historians as due to the increasingly long arm of the state (see, e.g., Lindert 2004). On this view, the early rise and high level of mass education in the United States in contrast with its colonial ruler Great Britain reflects the ability of Americans to mobilize local and state government support for public education from the earliest days of the Republic. Indeed, institutions dating to the colonial era could have been at work. The articles in this special section are informed by the view that schools and the instructional services they offered during the antebellum period were subject to the choices of buyers and sellers of these services. The article by Kim Tolley provides a rich case study of this basic principle with her account of Mrs. Sambourne's foray into music teaching in early-nineteenth-century North Carolina.
Health during Industrialization
Authors: Carson Scott Alan
Published: February 2016

This article considers the relationship among race, stature, and proximity to Pennsylvania's nineteenth-century dairy-producing regions. Previous studies demonstrate a positive relationship between stature and access to dairy products. However, Pennsylvania's dairy-producing region was also close to urbanized Philadelphia. Here a new dataset is used from the Pennsylvania state prison system to track the heights of black and white males incarcerated from 1829 to 1909. It is documented that both blacks and whites living in southeastern Pennsylvania near both dairy-producing counties and urbanized Philadelphia were consistently shorter than individuals born and incarcerated elsewhere, indicating that the effects of urbanization dominated proximity to dairy production. Black inmates were consistently shorter than their white counterparts. The well-known midcentury height decline is confirmed among white men and is extended to blacks as well.
1-800-How-Am-I-Driving?
Authors: Adams Julia
Published: February 2016

As agents, we all act on behalf of others and of our own accord: these are socially and historically interrelated orientations to action in contemporary America. But as chains of accountability erode at work and in the economy, as layers of aides and representatives proliferate in social welfare, and as outsourcing comes to define prisonfare at home and mercenary warfare abroad, the challenges of agency relations come to the fore. These processes are counterposed to and entwined with more playful forms of action through self-representation, now in Facebook and its ilk increasingly mediated through technics, but rooted in far older forms of confessional speech and writing. How, then, do we begin to understand postmodern agency? This address, an invitation and a first step, locates the vicissitudes of everyday agency in America in comparative-historical context.
The Transportation Revolution and Antebellum Sectional Disagreement
Authors: Binder John J.
Published: February 2016

The transportation revolution had several important effects on the antebellum political equilibrium. First, it caused western and southern political views to differ by bringing more easterners and European immigrants into the West. Second, it reduced the costs of rerouting western exports to the non-South, which decreased the expected costs to the West of conflict with the South. Third, it greatly increased western population, which brought more free states into the Union and changed the balance in the Senate. Fourth, it increased northern numerical superiority over the South, giving the North a major advantage if an armed conflict did occur. These changes led the West to ally with the East and caused the South to secede.
Adolescence and Migration: Nîmes, France, 1906
Authors: Moch Leslie Page
Published: February 2016

At eighteen, Marius Pouzergue was a student at the regional secondary school in the Southern French city of Nîmes. He lived near the lycée with his family in a solid bourgeois neighborhood. The small but prosperous Pouzergue household included Marius’s father, his mother, his eighteen-year-old sister Lucie, and a cook. Marius’s father was a court lawyer. Nineteen-year-old Adèle Lafont, like Marius, lived with her family. The Lafonts resided on the fashionable Boulevard Victor Hugo, where Monsieur Lafont owned a jewelry establishment. A domestic servant lived with Adèle, her parents, her brother aged 16, and her sister aged 26.
North Carolina’s Public Schools: Growth and Local Taxation
Authors: Pritchett Jonathan B.
Published: February 2016

The Rapid increase in public spending for white schools that occurred in North Carolina after the turn of the century led to a large racial disparity in the amount spent per child by 1910. Previous scholars have attributed this racial difference in school spending to the disfranchisement of the black voter (Margo, 1982). It was argued that once blacks were prevented from voting, the white members of the school boards were able to divert the public funds which were initially allocated for the education of black children. The most widely accepted version of this theory is credited to Horace Mann Bond (1934) who studied education expenditures for black children in Alabama. Bond argued that the governmental level at which schools were financed was important in determining the racial division of public school funds since the white members of the county school boards were particularly inclined to divert the funds allocated by the state government. The state funds which were allocated to the local school boards in Alabama were not required to be shared equally between black and white students. After blacks had been disfranchised, the county school boards responded by allocating a disproportionate share of these state funds for the education of white children.
The Impact of Poverty and Progress on the Generation of Historians Trained in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s
Authors: Riess Steven A.
Published: February 2016

In an era of extreme specialization among American historians, it is rare for a monograph to have had the major impact of Poverty and Progress. While there have been previous studies of social mobility, American ethnic groups, and urban communities, Thernstrom’s study was pathbreaking in his use of research techniques and interpretation, and it established a major agenda for the “New Social History.” The questions he raised and his success in writing history “from the bottom up” captured the imagination of the new generation of historians who attended graduate school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His ability to explore the experience of the inarticulate working class drew the attention of radical or New Left historians who were seeking to write a different type of labor history that focused less on unions and more on working-class culture, as well as of the traditionally oriented consensus historians who wanted to expand the horizons of social and cultural history to encompass the experiences of the greatest numbers of Americans. Thernstrom’s impact on the latest cohort of historians was felt in their methodology and their studies of ethnic subcommunities, working-class culture, and geographic and social mobility.
Poverty and Progress Revisited: A Response to Riess, Frisch, and Pessen
Authors: Thernstrom Stephan
Published: February 2016

It is a rare author, I suspect, who is capable of assessing the impact and influence of his own work with any insight. I do not pretend to be one of them. I cannot venture an opinion as to how well these three interesting papers succeed in illuminating that question. While reading them I felt like Huck and Tom hiding away in the church gallery to hear the eulogy at their own funeral. The minister:

drew such pictures of the graces, the winning ways, and the rare promise of the lost lads that every soul there, thinking he recognized those pictures, felt a pang in remembering that he had persistently blinded himself to them always before, and had as persistently seen only faults and flaws in the poor boys. The minister related many a touching incident in the lives of the departed, too, which illustrated their sweet, generous natures, and the people could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those episodes were, and remembered with grief that at the time they occurred they seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide [Twain, 1875: 151 — 152].
Ecological Regression Estimates: Alchemist’s Gold?
Authors: Dykstra Robert R.
Published: February 2016

Those skeptical of ecological regression in voting behavior studies continue to suggest that problems in applying the technique severely limit its utility. But the cautionary offered in the Winter 1985 number of this journal by William H. Flanigan and Nancy H. Zingale (“Alchemist’s Gold: Inferring Individual Relationships from Aggregate Data,” Social Science History 9: 71-91) goes so far as to suggest that these problems are insurmountable—or virtually insurmountable. As a user, I was prepared to be devastated, but in fact find myself cheered (if a little puzzled).

Interested readers will recall that the centerpiece of the authors’ argument is a test involving this question: How did the voters of 1968 behave four years later in the presidential election of 1972? The test consists of comparing voters’ actual behavior, as determined by survey data, with ecological regression estimates of that same behavior. The tabulated results are alleged to be decisive in proving the authors’ point, but instead appear to prove just the opposite of what is intended, as a fresh look at the material reveals.
Research Note The Skewed Sex Ratio in a Medieval Population: A Reinterpretation
Authors: Siegfried Michael
Published: February 2016

Recent studies in social history suggest that the practice of female infanticide was widespread in early medieval society. While much of the work on female infanticide is sound, particularly the anthropological studies which observed the practice first hand, the interpretations of historical data are much less certain. In particular, data from the ninth-century French monastic tax rolls known as the Carolingian polyptychs are assumed to reflect female infanticide (Coleman, 1971; 1974; 1976; de Mause, 1974; Guttentag and Secord, 1983). The data recorded on the Polyptychs are biased in a manner reflecting the Church’s teachings and social functions, giving the impression of a skewed sex ratio favoring males in this population. Anthropological studies lead us to doubt that female infanticide was practiced to the extent suggested by the sex ratio on the polyptychs.
Periodization Schemes and “Party Systems”: The “System of 1896” as a Case in Point
Authors: Dean Burnham Walter
Published: February 2016

1. Was there any such thing as the “System of 1896”—or indeed any other “system” in American political history, for that matter? Professor McCormick’s paper suggests that he would clearly answer this question in the affirmative. For essentially he argues not that no such system existed, but that much too heavy an interpretative burden in my analyses has been placed on 1896 itself. I am sure that, so far as this is concerned, Professor McCormick is right. Yet there do seem undercurrents in this friendly critique of the broader doubt as to whether there is any substantiality at all to the model which I first attempted to sketch out quite a few years ago. On any one of a variety of specific details, I would have to plead, if not guilty, then at least nolo contendere. Yes, I undoubtedly placed too great a burden on 1896 itself, which inevitably should and does create scholarly doubts. Yes, the original sketch which attempted to link elite motivation with underlying power structure and those with electoral politics in and after the 1890s was painted in very vivid colors indeed. This may tell a dramatic story, but it may assume a greater conspiratorial intentionality and future-prediction on the part of elites than was actually there. But once we deal with issues such as these, is there anything left? Professor McCormick, a friendly critic, seems to think there is, but undercurrents of doubt remain.
“Fewer Children of Greater Spiritual Quality”: Religion and the Decline of Fertility in Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Parkerson Donald H. , Parkerson Jo Ann
Published: February 2016

Over six decades ago, A. M. Carr-Sanders first identified the dramatic shift from a population regime of high mortality and high fertility before 1750 to one of low mortality and low fertility after 1900 (Carr-Sanders, 1925). Carr-Sanders had a simple explanation for these changes. Improved sanitation and advances in medicine had lowered mortality while an increase in the standard of living had triggered a temporary increase in fertility. As technological innovations reduced the economic utility of children, however, individuals responded by limiting their fertility.
Parties and Electorates from Raj to Swaraj: An Historical Analysis of Electoral Behavior in Late Colonial and Early Independent India
Authors: Vanderbok William , Sisson Richard
Published: February 2016

Fascination with elite recruitment, ideology, and political strategy in the Indian nationalist movement has given rise to a wide range of scholarly studies about these phenomena. An extraordinarily rich literature has also developed dealing with provincial political movements during both the nationalist and postindependence periods. More recently a literature concerning local, “peoples’” history has started to develop and flourish, the most influential genre being the self-styled subaltern studies (see Guha, 1984–86; also Guha, 1983). Missing in the historiography of this vast and complex region are studies of those institutions that constituted the core of successive nationalist demands made for political reform—elections and representative institutions. Our study is a preliminary venture into the world of elections to provincial legislative institutions in late colonial and early independent India. The place of elections is not only important in understanding the decolonization process in India; it is of broad comparative interest in enhancing understanding of the democratization of regimes.
Social Science History: Citation Record, 1976–1985
Authors: Clausen Aage R. , Wu Jaushieh Joseph
Published: February 2016

In a recent article in Social Science History, Professor Alan Bogue, former president of the Association and one of its founding fathers, has reviewed the first ten years of SSHA. In it he presents from the constitution the major purpose of the Association as “improving ‘the quality of historical explanation in every manner possible, but particularly by encouraging the selective use and adaptation in historical research and teaching of relevant social science’” (Bogue, 1987: 336). In this paper, we review the first ten years of the Social Science History journal in the context of an association formed to promote social science applications to the analysis of historical data. One indicator of the success of this enterprise is the extent to which historians are applying social science methods. Another indicator is the involvement of non-historians in social science history.
Migration to Albany, New York, 1850–1855
Authors: Davenport David Paul
Published: February 2016

The nineteenth century was a period of dramatic population growth in the United States. In 1800 scarcely five million people resided in the fifteen states. By 1900 the populace had increased fifteenfold, and settlement stretched from the Atlantic coast westward to the shores of the Pacific Ocean (Century of Population Growth, 1909).
High-Risk Childbearing: Fertility and Infant Mortality on the American Frontier
Authors: Bean Lee L. , Mineau Geraldine P. , Anderton Douglas L.
Published: February 2016

Historical analyses of demographic phenomena from the past few decades have provided new insights requiring the reassessment of a number of traditional paradigms, such as the venerable demographic transition theory. Fertility studies have dominated this research, but there is a growing interest in the interrelationships of several demographic variables, such as family formation and infant mortality (Knodel and Hermalin 1984; Nault et al. 1990; Potter 1988a; Working Group on the Health Consequences of Contraceptive Use and Controlled Fertility 1989a, 1989b). This article falls into the latter category; in it we investigate the relationship between childbearing (fertility) and infant mortality in the Utah frontier population during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Federalism, State Action, and “Critical Episodes” in the Growth of American Government
Authors: Campbell Ballard C.
Published: February 2016

The publication of Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987) has interested students of the expansion of governmental activity. Despite a large literature on the growth of the public sector, Crisis is one of the few book-length historical accounts of the subject for the United States (Larkey et al. 1984). In this respect, Higgs’s study resembles Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State (1982), which also examined the historical transformation of government, albeit within a limited temporal perspective (1877–1920), and which like Crisis encased the story within a distinct theoretical framework. Skowronek argued that expansion of the public sector depended on the reconstruction of national administrative capability during the Progressive era. Higgs contended that major crises in American life functioned as the catalyst of “Big Government.” Although each author emphasized different dynamics propelling growth, both held that temporally specific disjunctures in governmental history date the emergence of the modern state. Higgs and Skowronek share one other similarity: neither of them adequately integrated federalism or the states into their analyses. Omission of these critical dimensions of the American polity raises questions about the utility of their research designs and the accuracy of their conclusions.
Micro and Macro Land Availability as a Determinant of Human Fertility in Rural Canada West, 1851
Authors: Marr William L.
Published: February 2016

To date, there has been no attempt in Ontario economic history to examine human fertility in the nineteenth century by area of the province where area is differentiated by the extent of agricultural development and the data used are at the household level. In the United States, Richard Easterlin and his colleagues (1978) used a sample of rural households from the 1860 manuscript census to look at fertility, family, and agricultural differences and similarities for old and new areas in the northern states. The present study takes the census districts of Canada West (now Ontario) in 1851, divides them into three groups by the percentage of ever-improved agricultural land, and uses a sample of farm households from the manuscript census of 1851–52 as the data set. Since the extent of agricultural development can be taken as a proxy for county wide land availability, the contribution of this study is to relate land availability at both the county and household levels to fertility in the mid-nineteenth century.
Apprenticeship and Exploitation: An Analysis of the Work Pattern of Nurses in Training, 1897–1937
Authors: Olson Tom
Published: February 2016

One of the hallmarks of the written history of nursing is the idea that the apprenticeship system of nurses’ training, lasting from the 1870s through the 1930s, was characterized by exploitation. “Emergencies and understaffing” dictated the training of nurses, according to Susan Reverby, because “the demands of the hospital for a work force meant that pupils’ education was continually sacrificed to the exigencies of hospital work” (1987: 64–65; also see Kalisch and Kalisch 1986).
The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Politics of Institutional Structure
Authors: Lieberman Robert C.
Published: February 2016

On New Year’s Day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in much of the South. Lincoln’s act transformed the Civil War from a sectional rebellion to a war of liberation. Although the proclamation’s immediate legal effect was minimal, since it touched only those areas still resisting Union authority, its political effect was far reaching and dramatic. With a single stroke of his pen, Lincoln ensured that the Union victory would create a new class of citizens, the freedmen, numbering well over 3 million. Almost all of these new citizens were landless and destitute. Despite their new legal status, they were faced at the war’s end with a social structure that regarded them as inferior, treating them with contempt at best and with violent fury at worst. In emancipating the slaves and overturning the economic and social basis of southern society, the federal government shouldered the responsibility of finishing what it had begun, making the freedmen citizens.
Ethnic Differences in School Attendance in Antebellum Massachusetts: Evidence from Newburyport, 1850–1860
Authors: Herscovici Steven
Published: February 2016

Historians who have studied school attendance in the nineteenth century have noted the differences in enrollment rates between children of immigrants and children of parents born in the United States. These differences in attendance rates apparently persist even after controlling for the social and economic backgrounds of the children. Despite the fact that this result is familiar in the literature, historians have not agreed upon a single cause for these differences (Kaestle and Vinovskis 1980; Soltow and Stevens 1981; Perlmann 1988). Scholars have debated many possible reasons: perhaps different cultural or religious circumstances led immigrants and native-born Americans to act differently toward their children’s education; perhaps immigrants took their children out of school earlier because they could not afford the luxury of educating their children; or perhaps immigrants made a conscious choice between the education of their children and better housing, or other consumption for themselves and their families.
Nutrition and Economic Development in Post-Reconstruction South Carolina
Authors: Coclanis Peter A. , Komlos John
Published: February 2016

The determination of anthropometric historians to unearth the broad patterns of human biological well-being is now too well known to need reiteration. From Richard Steckel's exploratory essays, which could be taken as the launching manifesto of the discipline, to the most recent publications, many hundreds of thousands of records from nearly all continents of the globe have been examined (Mascie-Taylor 1991; Steckel 1979). All of this effort notwithstanding, we are still in the initial phases of this research program, with many important features of the agenda remaining unsettled (Floud, Wachter, and Gregory 1990; Fogel 1993; Komlos 1989; Mokyr and O'Grada 1988). One such question is related to the most startling discovery to date, namely, that as part of its adaptability to its socioeconomic environment, human physical stature has undergone cyclical fluctuations during the course of the last quarter of a millennium (Fogel 1986; Komlos 1987,1994a, 1994b; Nicholas and Oxley 1993).
New York City Homicides
Authors: Monkkonen Eric H.
Published: February 2016

The primary reasons for understanding homicide in the past are the same as for the present, and in fact most present studies use some comparisons over time. Because homicide varies across time and over political territories, we know that it is not an invariant human phenomenon. For social historians, homicide is also important because in both coroners and newspaper accounts we catch fascinating snatches of everyday life. Through its incidence and the records generated around the events we are able to explore otherwise hard-to-see aspects of our past.
Class as Race and Gender|Making and Breaking a Labor Union in the Jim Crow South
Authors: Griffin Larry J. , Korstad Robert R.
Published: February 2016

Early in 1944 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified Local 22 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) as the bargaining agent for manufacturing workers at the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The local was built and largely sustained by the collective actions of African Americans, especially women, who quickly made it the primary institutional locus advancing the racial aspirations of Winston-Salem's black working class. Operating the largest tobacco manufacturing facility in the world and employing a workforce of 12,000, none unionized (Tilley 1948, 1985), RJR vigorously fought the local from its inception.
The Eclectic Center of the New Institutionalism
Authors: Ethington Philip , McDonagh Eileen
Published: February 2016

This special section of Social Science History launches a series of five articles illustrative of what we believe is an eclectic center in the development of historical studies of institutions and policies, often termed the “new institutionalism.” The new institutionalism emerged in the early 1980s in reaction to “a long season in which social forces and processes were the predominant topics of study” (Orren and Skowronek 1986). While the precise role of institutions varies according to the practitioner, hallmarks of the new institutionalism include a portrayal of institutions as semiautonomous actors; a contextualization of institutions within sociohistorical processes (and vice versa); a recognition of inefficiency, contingency, and accident in history; and a recognition of the relative autonomy of ideas and symbolic action in historical development (March and Olsen 1984, 1989; Krasner 1984; Smith 1988; Katznelson 1992). As is expected of new paradigms, the entry of the new institutionalism into the intellectual community has been marked by an array of polemics against its predecessors, “old” schools defined by “old institutionalism,” behaviorism, and structural functionalism. It has also generated a wave of spirited counterattacks (Mitchell 1991; Bendix et al. 1992; Ethington and McDonagh forthcoming).
Inflation and Deflation in Early America, 1634–1860: Patterns of Change in the British American Economy
Authors: Harris P. M. G.
Published: February 2016

For more than six decades recurrent efforts have been made to establish the trends of early American prices. Following the lead of Arthur Harrison Cole and other members of the International Scientific Committee on Price History, who foresaw the need for worldwide evidence on prices as an essential foundation of economic and historical analysis, scholars began to develop series for major market centers such as Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, Boston, New Orleans, and Cincinnati (Warren et al. 1932; Taylor 1932a, 1932b; Bezanson et al. 1935, 1936; Cole 1938; Berry 1943; Bezanson et al. 1951). Modern refinements of these largely wholesale and urban price indexes for the years before the Civil War have yielded reliable long-term insights against which to interpret basic issues of American economic growth (U.S. Congress 1959–60; David and Solar 1977). Meanwhile, researchers focusing on the evolution of particular parts of the country or on the economic milieus of specific organizations have felt the need to determine local price movements for the historical contexts that interest them. To do so, they have used evidence from the accounts of merchants and farmers (Rothenberg 1979; Adams 1986, 1992), from probate inventories (Anderson 1975; Main 1985), and from the records of public institutions as diverse as the Philadelphia almshouse and Harvard College (Smith 1990; Foster 1962). John J. McCusker (1991, forthcoming) has contributed an overview of the key elements of this literature and has constructed from selected series a deflator that can be used to compare American economic values over time between 1700 and now.
Escape from Catastrophe: The Saami’s Experience with Smallpox in Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Sweden
Authors: Sköld Peter
Published: February 2016

This article, which deals with the Saami’s experience with smallpox in the three northern Swedish parishes of Jokkmokk, Gällivare, and Enontekis during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, focuses on these epidemiologic questions: (1) Why were the Saami—a native people living in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia—not affected by smallpox until this period? (2) What happened once smallpox was introduced into the area? (3) Did the Saami’s experience with smallpox differ from that of the rest of the Swedish population? (4) If so, what were the most important differences? (5) And how are they to be explained? Finding the answers to these questions requires considering whether smallpox inevitably resulted from the number of susceptible people and whether the disease affected other aspects of demography besides mortality (Figure 1).
Money, Votes, and Political Leverage: Explaining the Electoral Performance of Liberals in Interwar France and Germany
Authors: Kreuzer Marcus
Published: February 2016

The capacity of political parties to adapt to rapid political change has received little attention. The literature on parties usually studies political organizations from either a sociological perspective, as if they are automatically transformed by socioeconomic changes, or a rational choice perspective, as if they optimally adapt themselves to environmental changes. Neither approach pays sufficient attention to parties’ internal decision making and its effect on their capacity to innovate. This article compares the Parti radical (French Radical Party, Radicals) with the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party, DDP) and the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party, DVP) during the interwar period to demonstrate how electoral mechanisms can systematically account for their different innovative capacities.
Southern Tenancy, Machines, and Production Scale on the Eve of the Cotton Picker’s Arrival
Authors: Heinicke Craig
Published: February 2016

A fundamental characteristic of the southern United States before World War II was the separate, and lagging, economic path taken by that region relative to the rest of the nation. The South was particularly slow to advance in agricultural science and technology. Both contemporary investigators and recent scholarship have indicted southern institutions for delaying development in southern agriculture (Street 1957; Whatley 1985, 1987). Were sharecropping and tenancy, institutional arrangements that characterized the southern plantation system, responsible for retarding southern economic development? Despite the large amount of scholarly attention that has been focused on these issues, this question remains unanswered.
The Transplanted: Workers, Class, and Labor
Authors: Barrett James R.
Published: February 2016

General history always requires an overall model, good or bad, against which events can be interpreted. ‘No theory, no history’ [Braudel, 1974: xi].

History is more complicated than theory [Vilar, 1982: 50, quoted in Zunz, 1985: 74].

Psychologists tell us that everyone is a bit neurotic. Academics may be a bit more neurotic than most people. When our work is going well, we get suspicious or at the very least we get anxious, always looking for new heights to scale. Part of the recent intellectual turbulence in the field of social history and in my own field of labor history, I would argue, is self-induced. We did not have enough problems, stuffing the lives of thousands of discrete individuals into our codebooks, reading everything that has ever been written about the work habits of iron moulders, plotting on maps the locations of saloons and cafes in relation to immigrant workers’ homes and then trying to make some sense out of all that. What we needed was a crisis. Like all good scholarly crises, what the crisis in social history is depends upon whom you ask, but if nothing else, the phenomenon gives us all just what we needed—something new to worry about.
The Transplanted: International Dimensions
Authors: Hoerder Dirk
Published: February 2016

John Bodnar’s Study—which I consider “the standard survey on the history of migration to the United States, which for many years will remain unsurpassed” (Hoerder, 1987)—also merits a controversial and lively discussion. A synthesis of the immigrant experience has long been called for. Beginning in the 1960s, Rudolph J. Vecoli’s penetrating critique (1964) and Victor Greene’s detailed study of east European miners (1968) dismantled Oscar Handlin’s paradigm (1951). The two decades since the end of the old paradigm witnessed the introduction of new methods, new approaches, and a new sensitivity to the roots of the migrants in their old cultures. I will first place Bodnar’s study in the context of two other recent syntheses and then raise some conceptual questions; in a third section I will take up issues related to the culture of origin and to the role of female migrants in community formation.
“New Social Movements” of the Early Nineteenth Century
Authors: Calhoun Craig
Published: February 2016

Sometime After 1968, analysts and participants began to speak of “new social movements” that worked outside formal institutional channels and emphasized lifestyle, ethical, or “identity” concerns rather than narrowly economic goals. A variety of examples informed the conceptualization. Alberto Melucci (1988: 247), for instance, cited feminism, the ecology movement or “greens,” the peace movement, and the youth movement. Others added the gay movement, the animal rights movement, and the antiabortion and prochoice movements. These movements were allegedly new in issues, tactics, and constituencies. Above all, they were new by contrast to the labor movement, which was the paradigmatic “old” social movement, and to Marxism and socialism, which asserted that class was the central issue in politics and that a single political economic transformation would solve the whole range of social ills. They were new even by comparison with conventional liberalism with its assumption of fixed individual identities and interests. The new social movements thus challenged the conventional division of politics into left and right and broadened the definition of politics to include issues that had been considered outside the domain of political action (Scott 1990).
Communities of Competitors: Open Price Associations and the American State, 1911–1929
Authors: Berk Gerald
Published: February 2016

Recent comparative studies in Western industrialization have discovered a variety of economic “governance structures” between competitive markets and corporate hierarchies. Such “associative” forms of enterprise pose both a descriptive and an evaluative problem to students of capitalist development. Can business cooperate, or does a single competitor who hopes to do better by cheating undermine all associative agreements? Suppose cooperation is possible: can it be accomplished to improve products and production processes, rather than merely to redistribute wealth from consumers to business?
From Mortuary to Cemetery
Authors: Tamason Charles A.
Published: February 2016

On 11 August 1779 the magistrates of Lille published a minutely detailed ordinance designed to reform funeral and burial practices in that northern French city. Since the Middle Ages it had been the practice in Lille, as in other French cities, to bury the deceased within the parish grounds. Depending upon the status of the deceased, burial would take place under the choir of the church (solennels); under a lateral wing (demi-solennels); or in one of the two exterior cemeteries adjoining the church—the first of which was for ordinary parishioners (bourgeois), the second for unbaptized children. Briefly, the Ordinance of 1779 established a common cemetery outside of the city walls and forbade further burials in the five parish cemeteries of Lille. The four traditional distinctions by rank were maintained in the new cemetery and a system of funeral hearses drawn by horses was introduced by the magistrates to transport the deceased to the new cemetery. The ordinance was the product of several years of negotiation among the magistrates of Lille, the Bishop of Tournai, and royal authorities at Versailles. This reform was partially the result of a new campaign for urban hygiene or l’air pur and an attempt by the magistrates to appropriate valuable urban property since the ordinance stipulated that parishes would sell their cemetery land to the magistrates.
Toward a Theory of State Intervention
Authors: Cohen Ira J.
Published: February 2016

State intervention into the ownership, financing, and regulation of various industries and sectors of the capitalist economy is a phenomenon as old as capitalism itself. In the last 15 years this topic has become a focal point of vigorous interest among social scientists. Given the manifest problems to be found within current political-economic relationships, it is not surprising that a great deal of this attention has been focused on the contemporary scene. Nevertheless, a small number of works have undertaken the explanation of the historical development of state intervention. Unfortunately, the historian in search of explanatory guidance is confronted here with a series of less than comprehensive analyses which move at descriptive and explanatory cross-purposes. The first tasks of the social scientist or historian who wishes to address the development of state intervention therefore must be to classify and clarify the accounts which have been proposed.
Individuals and Aggregates
Authors: Bourke Paul F. , DeBats Donald A.
Published: February 2016

After more than a decade's impressive achievement in the “new” social history and the “new” political history, two distinct though related problems require us to reconsider the data appropriate to these inquiries. First, recent commentators (Foner, 1974; Formi-sano, 1976) have pointed to the relative failure of research in these areas to converge, a failure made more obvious in the light of the programmatic optimism of the 1960s which held out the prospect of an integrated approach to the social basis of politics and to the political implications of social structure. Second, there has been in recent years some acknowledgment by historians (see below) of the vexing question of inferences across levels of data, a matter central to other social sciences and particularly pressing for historians of electoral behavior.
The Political Economy of Women's Work
Authors: Sharpless John , Rury John
Published: February 2016

Recent work in women's history suggests that the dramatic rise in female labor force participation in the first decades of the twentieth century cannot be understood solely in terms of labor market forces. Although thedemandfor female labor increased substantially between 1900 and 1920 (Oppenheimer, 1970), such variables as religion, education, ethnicity, and social class interacted to determine thesupplyof women available for hire at any one time. It should not be surprising, therefore, that “cultural” variables such as these also served to limit the ability of women to improve their position in the labor market generally. This article will examine the ways in which the family and work environments interacted to determine the responsiveness of working women to different sorts of organizations which (theoretically) could have assisted them in altering the basic conditions of their work and family experiences.
A Second Look
Authors: Beach William W.
Published: February 2016

Three years ago in this journal, J. Morgan Kousser( 1977) offered a stunning challenge to historians—a program for significantly improving the quantitative competence of historians and for expanding the number and range of quantitative studies. Faithful readers of Social Science History, however, will have noted that no response has been made to Professor Kousser's “Agenda for ‘Social Science History'“; indeed, not so much as passing notice of Kousser's argument has appeared in this medium. Were it not for the often spectacular, informal debates that have surrounded Kousser's agenda and similar proposals, the absence of response in these pages might well be taken for consensus on what once was the tenderest of issues among historians, quantitative analysis. Nevertheless, the debate is very much alive, and the issue, though less tender now than even a few years ago, continues to possess great importance to historians actively engaged in many areas of historical research.
Justifying the War of 1812
Authors: Hatzenbuehler Ronald L. , Ivie Robert L.
Published: February 2016

A decade ago, Richard Hofstadter wrote that historians were approaching consensus on the political origins of the War of 1812. Blending elements of the work during the early 1960s of Norman K. Risjord, Bradford Perkins, and Roger H. Brown, Hofstadter (1969: 181) concluded that Republicans were convinced “the Republic itself and the fate of republican government had come to rest on the ability of the Republican party to take a forceful stand against foreign incursions on American rights.” Republicans, in other words, melded national with partisan goals and pursued war to save national honor and the Republican party.

Today, however, one would have to conclude that Hofstadter’s prediction was premature, based upon the spate of articles published since 1972 addressing the partisan nature of the vote for war in the House of Representatives, the role of the War Hawks in the debates and legislation of the war session, and the leadership (or lack thereof) supplied by James Madison (Hatzenbuehler, 1972b, 1976; Egan, 1974; Stagg, 1976; Hickey, 1976; Fritz, 1977; Bell, 1979).
Women and Social Security
Authors: King Gail Buchwalter
Published: February 2016

Recent statistics indicate that 72% of the elderly poor are widowed, divorced, or never-married women. The fact that many of these women are left destitute in their old age can be looked at from several perspectives. My particular interest is in how Social Security policy contributes to the potential poverty of women. The area of investigation is that of dependency—the designated category through which most women collect Social Security benefits.