This article advocates for broadening social science history to include an even larger horizon, to reach a new level of understanding of human society in the past. It builds on and shares insights from 20 years of research that integrates environmental knowledge and environmental science into a history of social change, while trying to understand in detail how people changed the environment. The focus of the research is the demographic, social, agricultural, and environmental history of the US Great Plains, from the 1870s to the end of the twentieth century. Beyond supporting the argument for a broader interdisciplinary vision of history, the article shows how the Great Plains environment was changed by human action, and the ways that the environment shaped human behavior in turn. The history of the plains shows that the impact of human action on the land was dramatic and unmistakable. People radically changed land cover, but their actions were only one factor in causing events like the Dust Bowl, and only one part of the measurable increase in greenhouse gases. At the same time, the environment also constrained and shaped human behavior, even though it had less to do with family organization than broad trends in social change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The environment's most dramatic contribution was to spur out-migration in the 1930s when drought caused widespread agricultural failure, further confirmation of the importance of going beyond purely social factors to understand how people lived in the past.

Using data from the 2011 Multi-State Survey on Race and Politics (Parker 2011), I ask if African American1 opinion toward undocumented immigration mirrors African American opinion toward immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I find evidence that contemporary African American opinion does reflect the manner in which a previous generation of African Americans reacted to immigrant newcomers. More specifically, I find that factors associated with past reactions to new immigration, most notably political and economic competition, egalitarianism, the belief that new immigrants are distancing themselves from African Americans, and the belief that restrictive immigration policies were fueled by racism, continue to predict contemporary African American opinion on undocumented immigration. Taken together, I take my findings as evidence that the past may be prologue in accounting for black opinion toward the newest wave of immigration.

The 1960s-era, Nashville nonviolent civil rights movement—with its iconic lunch counter sit-ins—was not only an exemplary local movement that dismantled Jim Crow in downtown public accommodations. It was by design the chief vehicle for the intergenerational mentoring and training of activists that led to a dialogical diffusion of nonviolence praxis throughout the Southern civil rights movement of this period. In this article, we empirically derive from oral-history interviews with activists and archival sources a new “intergenerational model of movement mobilization” and assess its contextual and bridge-leading sustaining factors. After reviewing the literatures on dialogical diffusion and bridge building in social movements, we describe the model and its sustaining conditions—historical, demographic, and spatial conditions—and conclude by presenting a research agenda on the sustainability and generalizability of the Nashville model.

This research explains what happened to agricultural soil fertility during the “Campanha do Trigo” (Wheat Campaign) in Portugal, which began in 1929. It is commonly understood that the excessive expansion of wheat crops during the fascist “Estado Novo” (New State) regime led to the degradation of soils in the southern half of Portugal. This relationship, however, has never been questioned before. This article extends the narrative back into the last half of the nineteenth century in search of the origin of processes that gradually intensified throughout the country. In short, expansion of the cultivated area in association with the inadequate intensification of crop rotations over about 80 years, from the 1870s onward, including in non-wheat areas, strongly accentuated soil erosion and made organic fertilization progressively less effective. These transformations were only partially offset by chemical fertilization. Nitrogen and phosphorus were the key factors in this historical process. Focusing on the cultivation system and soil dynamics allows the successive integration of various kinds of historical evidence and sources. From an environmental question—why did agricultural soil degrade?—this article explores soil degradation over time and space, and assesses its social and biophysical impacts. At the same time, it addresses the history of agriculture in Portugal and its disciplinary foundations.

Over the ten years of its existence, the Social Science History Association has been a meeting place for groups in rebellion against the dominant orthodoxies of their disciplines. Thus it is fitting that an SSHA panel should assess the accomplishments and relationship of “social history” and “historical sociology,” two movements that have grown up as critiques of formerly dominant orientations in (respectively) the disciplines of history and sociology.

In assessing legacy-based explanations for the “trust deficit” observed in the post-communist region, I argue that one need first specify what kind of legacy is being considered: either between post-communist countries and another region, or among the post-communist states. I further contend that the most valid reference for legacies is Western Europe, not the globe. Using data from the European Social Survey (2002–10), I examine the association between sociodemographic factors and political trust in Eastern and Western Europe, and communist legacy effects among post-communist states. Results answer the question of legacies with a strong negative: no evidence is found that communist legacies account for the trust deficit, and I examine four empirical implications instead suggesting this deficit is the result of poor institutional performance.

Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record is one “laboratory” in which hypotheses developed by sociologists, economists, and even natural scientists can be explicitly tested, especially using dual forms of geographical and chronological comparison. As one example to demonstrate this, a case is made for the stimulating effect of “disaster studies.” Historians have failed to interact with ideas from disaster studies, not only because of the general drift away from the social sciences by the historical discipline, but also because of a twin conception that medieval disaster study bears no relation to the modern, and that medieval coping strategies were hindered by providence, superstition, fear, and panic. We use the medieval disasters context to demonstrate that medieval economic history can contribute to big narratives of our time, including climate change and inequality. This contribution can be in (1) investigating the root causes of vulnerability and resilience, and recovery of societies over the long term (moving disaster studies away from instant impact focus) and (2) providing the social context needed to interpret the massive amount of “big data” produced by historical climatologists, bioarchaeologists, economists, and so on.

Through a case study of the emergence of rights-infringing “illiberal” policies and practices in the field of Danish alcohol treatment from 1900 to 1943, this article shows how new scientific ideas on “degeneration” as the cause of alcoholism and the use of force in treatment were adapted and promoted by Protestant revivalist groups and Social Democrats alike. The article analyzes how new scientific ideas resonated with the cultural ideals of Danish Social Democracy and the evangelical temperance organization the Blue Cross. The article challenges the established view in the literature that eugenic and similar illiberal practices were the result of a “high modernist” state ethos and “communitarian-organic” thinking on the left. Building on secondary literature and archival sources, it is shown that illiberal policies and practices as well as theories of heredity in the case of Danish alcohol treatment were adopted as the result of common liberal-conservative ideals regarding the value of family shared by Social Democrats and Protestant activists across the civil society and state spheres.

In recent decades historians have become increasingly interested in utilizing the approaches of quantitative social sciences to aid their understanding of the past. One aspect of social life that lends itself well to quantitative study is demographic behavior and indeed historical demography has been flourishing. Although the questions posed by social historians inevitably transcend purely demographic issues, a firm knowledge of demographic conditions can be a valuable asset in the pursuit of a broader understanding of society in past times.

For the latter part of the nineteenth century, a critical period in the transformation of western European populations into modern urban-industrial societies, abundant demographic data are available in the relatively easily accessible published census and vital statistics reports. Because nineteenth-century statisticians and bureaucrats considered the urban-rural division as a fundamental and meaningful delineation of society, statistical bureaus throughout Europe tabulated a large number of statistics, including those derived from censuses and vital registration, according to some scheme of urban-rural classification and frequently provided separate tabulations for individual large cities. In addition, a number of contemporary scholars wrote articles and monographs utilizing these data. * Together these sources can be particularly useful for assessing the differences between urban and rural conditions of life at a time when cities and towns were beginning to claim an increasing share of a country’s population.

Until recently material factors had usually been regarded as the most important forces behind the great mortality decline in Western Europe during the last two centuries. Today, the discussion among historical demographers is much more diversified. Greater consideration is given to other factors than was previously. Predominant in several recent summaries is the argument that there was not one single cause of the mortality decline everywhere and in every age group (Brändstrom 1993; Health Transition Review 1991: 1-2; Mercer 1990; Schofield, et al., 1991; Sundin 1992a). One factor which has gained recognition especially in urban areas is the efforts by local and national agencies to improve hygienic conditions (Riley 1987). Cultural determinants of health have also received increased attention both in articles and monographs, especially in relation to mortality among infants and children (Johansson 1991; Preston and Haines 1991).

Over the past decade or so geographic information systems (GIS) methodology has become an accepted tool in historical research (Gregory and Ell 2007; Knowles 2008). Although often regarded as a mapping tool, GIS is perhaps better thought of as a type of database. What makes a GIS database unique is that a location is stored for each item of data, with this location taking any of a variety of forms: a point, a line, a polygon representing an area or zone, or, in the case of a raster system, a pixel. GIS can then present instantly on the screen a map showing the distribution of any variable or combination of variables in any of the chosen locational formats. This electronic display of information becomes an analytic tool, allowing the refinement of research questions, with answers displayed instantly: GIS creates a display of information once visible only in paper form, drawn slowly and expensively first by cartographers and then by vector plotters. GIS and its associated tools transform mapping into a dynamic exploratory process.

A growing empirical literature links political centralization with urban development. In this paper we present evidence showing how different patterns of political centralization in the United States and Canada affected urban agglomeration during the twentieth century, with a specific focus on the impact on the population of capital cities. Using data on Canadian and US cities and metropolitan areas, we find that the national capital effect on population grew over time in both countries but more so in the United States whereas the subnational (i.e., provincial or state) capital effect rose much more significantly in Canada than in the United States, controlling for other factors like geography and climate. We argue that these patterns in the national and subnational capital city effects reflect different trends in federalism in the two countries. In the United States, the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition of states’ rights and localism was transformed into a more nationally centralized form of federalism during the Progressive Era, but states and localities continued to retain significant autonomy. In Canada, federalism came to favor provincial rights but not localism. We believe that that these diverging trends were driven by institutional differences that gave the various levels of governments in Canada and the United States different access to revenue sources.

Theories of strikes—or any kind of conflict—are theories of interaction. Marxists envisage class conflict as a dialectical struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Neoclassical economists imagine strikes as an unintended consequence of bargaining between rational actors.The tumult of class conflict is far removed from the quiet of rational bargaining, yet these theories are alike in this respect: strikes ensue from dyadic interaction. Adding political authorities to the dyad of workers and employers extends interaction to three sets of actors.

Seeking to reach the unbanked, the US Postal Savings System provided a federally insured savings alternative to traditional banks. Using novel data sets on postal deposits, demographic characteristics, and banks, we study how and by whom the system was used. We find the program was initially used by nonfarming immigrant populations for short-term saving, then as a safe haven during the Great Depression, and finally as long-term investments for the wealthy during the 1940s. Postal Savings was only a partial substitute for traditional banks, as locations with banks often still heavily used Postal Savings.

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 tendencies within democracy. The latter, he argues, are much more insidious.

In contrast to most long-settled agricultural landscapes, the US Great Plains presents a rare example of well-documented agricultural colonization of new land. The Census of Agriculture provides detailed information about evolving grassland farm systems from the beginning of agricultural expansion and then at some two dozen time points between 1880 and the present. From early sod-busting, through drought and depression, and into late-twentieth-century modernization, it is possible to track how farmers used their land in any county. Treating farmland as an agroecosystem, a hybrid human-natural landscape, this article asks how farmers captured, altered, and replenished soil fertility. Did they extract more soil nitrogen than they returned, or did they maintain a balance? The article assesses land use from a soil nutrients perspective in several plains environments to capture variation in climate (especially rainfall), native soil quality, and availability of irrigation water. It traces farm management strategies through time to understand agricultural crises, growth periods, and technological transitions in the context of soil fertility. Soil management on an agricultural frontier was markedly different from that in places that had been farmed for centuries. A shortage of people and livestock and an abundance of deep, rich soils in the plains informed farmers’ calculations as they juggled labor, capital, and market forces against family and financial strategies. Uniform methods of estimating and representing soil nutrient processes make possible a direct comparison of the relative sustainability of historical agroecosystems.

The significance of the slave trade and slavery-related commerce—what I will call the slave(ry) trade—in contributing to the development of colonial America and the United States has been a persistent theme in the work of Afro-American scholars. Two scholars in particular should be cited in this regard. W. E. B. DuBois (1896: 27) pointed out that slave labor was not widely utilized because the climate and geography of New England precluded the extensive development of agriculture: “The significance of New England in the African slave-trade does not therefore lie in the fact that she early discountenanced the system of slavery and stopped importation; but rather in the fact that her citizens, being the traders of the New World, early took part in the carrying slave trade and furnished slaves to the other colonies.” DuBois’s account of the role of Massachusetts and of Rhode Island, which later became “the clearing house for the slave trade of other colonies,” was similar to what was popularized as the “triangular trade” thesis.

Charles Tilly (1984) has advocated the study of “big structures, large processes and huge comparisons” as the surest path to knowledge in the present conjuncture. This essay follows his lead with a comparative study of the transformation of the sugar industry in Martinique and Cuba during the nineteenth century. Slavery in the Americas is commonly viewed as an archaic form of social and economic organization that is incompatible with modern forms of economy and polity emerging in the nineteenth century. Such a perspective presumes the singularity of slavery and represents its abolition throughout the hemisphere as a linear transition to capitalist modernity.

Policies excluding ethnoracial and religious minorities reinforce the power of political elites. This study addresses an extreme case of exclusion: urban expulsions of Jews in the medieval western Holy Roman Empire. Expulsions were official edicts proclaimed by Christian princes, lords, or town councils, whomever ruled a territory. Changing religious and political culture, in the form of new value on community righteousness and the beginning of territorialization, provided incentives for polities to expel their Jewish residents. Using a new database of Jewish settlement and city development in the Western Holy Roman Empire 1000–1520 CE, I show that the relational structure of political power between Christian elites could insulate or expose Jewish communities to political contests of the time. Jews were derided, lesser members of Christian society, but in spite of increasing focus on Christian piety and legislating community purity, most cities did not expel their Jewish residents. City rulers that did expel were attempting to solve challenges for sovereignty through their policies toward Jews.