There is a growing body of literature exploring the relationship between regulated professions and the state. Research has shown that the state is the key source of power for professions, and it has suggested that professions may support and assist state agencies and actors in many ways. Although studies have documented changing state-profession relations across region and era and recent research points to significant change in the regulation of some professions in the past decade or two, there remains much that we do not know about the changing nature of professional regulation over time. In this article I examine professional regulation in four Canadian provinces between 1867 and 1961. The findings reveal distinct eras of professional regulation and definite differences in who is regulated and how over time. There are many more regulated professions toward the end of the period, they are more closely regulated by the state, and their relationships to each other are more closely delineated. The implications for our understanding of state-profession relations over time are discussed.

The question whether socioeconomic status gradients in adult mortality have changed over a broad historical period has become an important political and theoretical issue but is hard to test. In this article we study long-term trends in social inequality in adult mortality by using data for 2 (of the 11) provinces of the Netherlands for the period 1812–1922. We apply indirect estimation techniques, which have been developed for the analysis of mortality patterns in countries with deficient data. Our article shows that indeed there was a clear social class gradient in mortality, with the elite having higher survival chances between ages 35 and 55 than the middle class and farmers. Differences were even more apparent in comparison with workers. Over time there was a strong convergence among social classes in mortality levels. The implications of our results for the dominant views on the change in living standards in the past are discussed.

Prior to the Civil War, many hospitals in the southern United States treated both free and slave patients. In this article we develop a model for the selective medical treatment of slaves. We argue that the pecuniary benefits of hospital care increased with the price of the slave if healthy. Using a rich sample of admission records from New Orleans Touro Hospital, we find a positive correlation between the predicted price of the slave and the probability of hospital admission. We test the robustness of the model by controlling for the length of residence in the city, ownership by traders and doctors, and the type of illness.

This article examines the event structure of the labor conflict known as the Everett Massacre, which occurred in Everett, Washington, on November 5, 1916. The much-celebrated confrontation between members of the Industrial Workers of the World and local law officials and citizen groups came to symbolize the sharp class divisions that shaped the lumber industry in the latter years of the nineteenth century in the Northwest. The article uses event structure analysis (ESA) to identify the causal structure of this conflict. Guided by this analysis, the focus turns to the structure of discourse in newspaper articles to reveal changes in the contrasting accounts of mill owners and union members, or Wobblies. The article draws on the concepts of relational distance and the monstrous double as a theoretical interpretation for the comparatively more violent labor struggles in the Far West.