Sir George Clark (1947: 98) once remarked that “during the whole course of the seventeenth century there were only seven complete calendar years in which there was no war between European states.” The impact of the longer land wars on civilian mortality during this period was often extreme. The reasons for this had little to do with the fighting itself. Wartime civilian mortality crises were precipitated by fatal epidemic diseases and starvation. Modern demographic historians attribute the starvation to military supply systems that stripped civilians of food and the means to acquire it, and the epidemics to decreased resistance to disease caused by undernutrition and to increased rates of disease transmission brought about by troop movements and civilian refugee flows (Flinn 1981: 52–53).

The development of theNazi Party from 1925 to 1933 serves as fertile ground for studying what social movement researchers have identified as generic issues of micromobilization, the array of processes employed by movements in attracting, enlisting, and activatingmembers. Formally known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), the Nazi Party was, of course, a political party in contention with other parties of theWeimar Republic until wresting state power in 1933. The lion’s share of empirical research on the NSDAP has been by way of electoral studies done by political sociologists, political scientists, and historians. However, if one draws back the historical frame and looks at the period from 1920 through 1933, the Nazi Party in its incipient stages (Orlow 1969: 40–45) behaved quite overtly like some of the disruptive, militant socialmovements illuminated in contemporary social movement literature, culminating in the failed November Putsch of 1923 and Hitler’s subsequent imprisonment.

In a recent New York Times article, Robert Sharoff reported on “a throwback to the early years of the 20th century when wealthy Chicago families tended to live in such close-in neighborhoods as Prairie Avenue and theGold Coast.” For the past five years, wealthy Chicagoans have been constructing “palatial residences of at least 6,000 square feet” in the Lincoln Park neighborhood a mile and one-half north of the Loop (Sharoff 2000: 36). This “return” of the well-to-do to the city contradicts traditional urban theories on elite residential patterns; the preponderance of these theories projects the upper class universally and continuously seeking the metropolitan fringe for new homes, more and open land, and/or lower density (Burgess 1925; Hoyt 1939; Alonso 1964; Adams 1987; Downs 1981; Luger 1996; Lowry 1960; Hartshorn and Muller 1989; and Knox 1994).These theories, as well as the notion of the recent return of the upper class to the city, mask a long history of continuing elite residence within some cities as well as considerable diversity in upper-class residence patterns and landscapes among cities.

There is a conventional wisdom about the origin of public range management in the American west that draws most of its evidence logically, but nevertheless circumstantially, from decades of subsequent policy. It is shared by advocates across the political spectrum, from conservative elected officials and ranchers to radical environmentalists. That conventional wisdom distracts the many individuals who have attempted to understand range policy, and it hampers recent attempts at range policy reform. Narrowly, the conventional wisdom concludes that the institutionalized management privilege of cattle ranchersover all other users—the capture of range management—was according to the design of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. In so concluding, the conventional wisdom contributes to the more general idea that forces are at work to make the colonization of a policy area by a particular interest the inevitable result of politics in a liberal democracy.

In January 1844, Joseph Hekekyan, a British-trained engineer in Muhammad Ali's service, recounted how the Commission of Ornato (a joint commission of Europeans and Ottoman subjects charged with overseeing city planning and public health efforts in Alexandria) had toured the Maristan Qalīwūn, a hospital founded as a pious endowment in the thirteenth century, with the purpose of assessing its conditions and determining how many poor people could be sheltered in this institution. As Hekekyan reflected on the men, women, and children who had already made this “asylum for the poor” in Cairo their home, he noted how they were lodged, fed, and clothed “by the munificence of the Pasha” and how their presence represented the uninhibited charity of the Egyptian government. He was most concerned with how the government supported all of the shelter's residents without distinguishing between inhabitants of Egypt's countryside and those of Cairo and the length of residents' stay (many had married and had children during their residence). Hekekyan put forth his own suggestions for how the government should deal with the poor, calling for the introduction of a tadhkira system (identifying the indigents' place of residence) and proposing that the parishes take care of their own poor (Hekekyan 1844, 2: folio 239).