Using a newly developed geographic information system transportation database, we study the impact of gaining access to rail transportation on changes in population density and the rate of urbanization between 1850 and 1860 in the American Midwest. Differences-in-differences and instrumental variable analysis of a balanced panel of 278 counties reveals only a small positive effect of rail access on population density but a large positive impact on urbanization as measured by the fraction of people living in incorporated areas of 2,500 or more. Our estimates imply that one-half or more of the growth in urbanization in the Midwest in the late antebellum period may be attributable to the spread of the rail network.

Recent studies of the gender gap in politics tend to focus on candidate choice rather than registration and turnout. This shift in focus away from gender inequality in political participation may be due to the finding in several studies of U.S. voting behavior since 1980 that differences in rates of registration and voting between men and women are modest and not statistically significant after controlling for traditional predictors of participation. However, we argue that researchers have overlooked the substantial gender gap in registration and voting in the South. While the gender gap in participation virtually disappeared outside the South by the 1950s, substantial gender differences in rates of voter registration and turnout remained in the South throughout the 1950s and 1960s. We test several explanations for the persistence of the gender gap in registration and voting in the South in the 1950s and 1960s and why it began to decline in the 1970s. These explanations include female labor force participation, resources, mobilization, and political engagement. Using American National Election Studies data for every presidential election year from 1956 to 1980, we employ heteroscedastic probit models within a cross-classified multilevel age-period-cohort framework to examine the declining gender gap in voter registration and turnout in the South. The results indicate that the decline of the gender gap is due to converging rates of political engagement and employment for women and men in the South during this time period. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications.

This article uses geographic information systems (GIS) to explore the growth of the rail network in England and Wales in the period before World War I. It uses two major GIS databases, one containing data on the growth of the rail network, including both lines and stations, and one containing parish-level populations. The parish-level data are particularly important for two reasons: they give an unparalleled level of spatial detail, and they are interpolated onto a single set of boundaries over time, which allows direct long-term comparisons. GIS's ability to integrate data allows the article to shed new light on how quickly the railways spread into the country's population. It then explores whether gaining a station made it more likely for a parish's population growth to increase and whether gaining one early was an advantage compared to gaining one relatively late. The article explores this impact at a variety of urban levels.

This article examines the first decades of the field of ethnohistory as it developed in the United States. It participated in the general rapprochement between history and anthropology of mid-twentieth-century social science. However, unlike parallel developments in Europe and in other research areas, ethnohistory specifically arose out of the study of American Indian communities in the era of the Indian Claims Commission. Thus ethnohistory developed from a pragmatic rather than a theoretical orientation, with practitioners testifying both in favor of and against claims. Methodology was flexible, with both documentary sources and ethnographic methods employed to the degree that each was feasible. One way that ethnohistory was innovative was the degree to which women played prominent roles in its development. By the end of the first decade, the field was becoming broader and more willing to engage both theoretical and ethical issues raised by the foundational work. In particular, the geographic scope began to reach well beyond North America, especially to Latin America, where archival resources and the opportunities for ethnographic research were plentiful, but also to areas such as Melanesia, where recent European contact allowed researchers to observe the early postcontact period directly and to address the associated theoretical questions with greater authority. Ethnohistory is thus an important example of a field of study that grew organically without an overarching figure or conscious plan but that nevertheless came to engage central issues in cultural and historical analysis.

During the late nineteenth century the transport revolution and growing agricultural output, especially in North America, engendered an agrarian crisis (1878–96) when intensifying international competition in foodstuffs led to dramatic price declines, particularly in wheat and other cereals. This comparative study of the process in Britain and France examines regional and local patterns of rural change in relation to the expansion of railways, the agrarian crisis, and the responses to the crisis by the governments and farmers of the two countries. Using spatial statistics and geographically weighted regression (GWR) to identify spatially varying relationships, it offers a new approach and results. Case studies of Dorset County in England and the Allier Department in France show that railways facilitated the shift from cereal production to livestock and dairy farming during the era of agrarian crisis. In Dorset the analysis using GWR provides an explanation for patterns of the agricultural depression that a pioneering article identified but could not explain and thus illustrates the promise of blending narrative and spatial history. Further, it argues that in France railway expansion and the construction of a secondary network reduced regional disparities in rail service and likely in agricultural productivity, too. More broadly, it concludes that the differing political economies of Britain and France led to different trade and railway policies during the crisis and to different agrarian outcomes in which agricultural productivity declined in Britain and improved in France.