This essay surveys the contributions of William H. Sewell Jr.'sLogics of History and concludes that the book sketches a compelling agenda for an integrated historical social science. The author first summarizes Sewell's ontological and epistemological claims concerning social structure and event, history and temporality, and sociohistorical causality. The author then discusses five main areas in which ambiguities in Sewell's approach might be clarified or his arguments pushed farther. These concern (1) the relationship between historical event and traumatic event; (2) the idea of the unprecedented event or “antistructure”; (3) the theory of semiosis underlying Sewell's notion of a multiplicity of structures; and (4) the compatibilities and differences between the concepts of structure and mechanism(here the author argues that social structures are the distinctive “mechanisms” of the human or social sciences). Finally, (5) Sewell's call for “a more robust sense of the social” in historical writing locates the “social” mainly at the level of the metafield of power, or what regulation theory calls the mode of regulation; the author suggests a possible integration of this society-level concept with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of semiautonomous fields.

A comparative spatial history using GIS, this article examines the similar and differing effects of railway expansion on the growth of postal communications in Great Britain and France from 1830 to the eve of the Great War. It argues that the modern Postal Age in Great Britain and France began in the 1830s. In Britain in 1839, the Parliament obligated private railway companies to convey the Royal Mail throughout the kingdom at reasonable rates. Thereafter, the expansion of postal services and railway networks went hand in hand. Over the years, thousands of new post offices were established and were closer to rail stations than before. As the years wore on the geography of postal communication expanded greatly and by 1914 the majority of rural districts became part of the system of regular, daily mail. In France, a country four or five times larger than England and Wales with a relatively vast rural population, the task of modernizing postal service was a greater challenge. The inauguration of a “rural service” in 1829 employed some 5,000 men as postal carriers to deliver and collect mail throughout the countryside. Thereafter, their numbers grew as new post offices were established to serve villages and small towns with mail deliveries every other day. In the 1880s, under the Third Republic, the state greatly expanded the postal service, deeming it a national mission. It was then that the growing rail network came to shape the national geography of postal service. Hence, at the turn of the century the patterns British and French postal expansions converged.

The emergence of postwar welfare states in Europe is usually understood as a social and political phenomenon, as a social policy to prevent against forms of mass poverty and to grant general social rights and entitlements to populations during a period of rising prosperity. Beyond these sociopolitical aspects, the foundation of systems of social security after 1945 also had important cultural and epistemic implications. The promise of the state to provide a generalized form of security represented an important cultural factor in securing the social and political stability of postwar societies in Europe. This article examines some exemplary aspects of the meaning of social security by tracing their historical roots and their effects on postwar welfare states in Western Europe. In order to chart the various, interconnected cultural meanings of social security, it juxtaposes two institutional contexts in which social security and prevention were discussed: an international organization of social security experts and a Swiss life insurance company with an innovative health promotion service. The article shows how security was seen ultimately as an utopian response to the multiplication of risks and damages through the processes of industrialization and modernization and thus reveals how security served as both a technical concept for managing integrated systems of insurance and an instrument of control and calculation to help administer the economic and social policies of modern societies. By focusing on the example of life insurance, it demonstrates how security acted as an umbrella term for a generalized model of prevention that targeted the specific risks of a modern, middle-class consumer society.

The devolution of tuition authority, or abdication of tuition-setting control from elected representatives to unelected university governing boards, is an instance of marketization in higher education. Except for New York and Florida, all states have moved closer to a market-priced ideal by “deregulating” tuition. In this article, I describe my analysis of these two negative cases and argue that preexisting higher education policies have lasting effects on the institutional logics to which policy makers and other stakeholders have access, leading to divergent outcomes. What policy makers deem appropriate policy in their local context is shaped by a history of education policy making that likely preceded their position in office. However, the structure of institutions and the founding ideas of those institutions—as preserved in planning documents and remembered by select institutional actors—perpetuate a commitment to a certain institutional logic. Specifically, Florida and New York policy makers were constrained in their decision making about tuition devolution at multiple points in time by a family of institutions logic that reinforced the importance of their state university systems’ lack of formal tiers and their commitment to price similarity. The state policies governing these state systems became politically consequential because policy makers invoked the system cohesiveness mandated by such policies as a principal reason for rejecting devolution proposals. This powerful narrative appears to have precluded the ideational change toward a market university despite a move in this direction in other states.

In studying how to best understand social program introduction, political scientists have built up a laundry list of contributory factors. We suggest, however, that “objective” problem pressure has been incorrectly neglected by many scholars in recent decades—and the well-known case of Germany’s nineteenth-century introduction of social insurance legislation provides a clear illustration of this point. In explaining the origins and design of German social insurance, the interplay of three factors is key: first, exceptionally high problem pressure, connected to both labor market- and state-building processes; second, a fragile institutional context dominated by Prussia; and third, the party political constellation. In making this argument, we draw on “open functional reasoning” and extract implications from the case study to further refine the underlying theory. Specifically, we find that goal-oriented action may both be more common and more prone to compromise than the theory suggests. As such, we not only present an argument for considering the potential impact of problem pressure, but also lay out and refine an approach to doing so. In contrasting this approach to the problematic functionalism that initially inclined many scholars to neglect of problem pressure, we hope to help rehabilitate the concept—and in the process strengthen the explanatory power of research in sociology and political science.

This article compares the financing of urban infrastructure in nineteenth-century Chicago and twentieth-century Phoenix, highlighting distributional conflicts over the cost of public goods. Using the rich secondary literature on Chicago, particularly Robin Einhorn's book, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872, I explore whether adoption of development impact fees in Phoenix in 1987 represented a transition similar to that in Chicago between 1847 and 1851, when a system of special assessments paid by property owners benefiting from an improvement arose, in contrast to citywide financing of public works for citywide benefit. I examine the history of adoption and implementation of development impact fees, which were intended to “make growth pay for itself” by assessing new development to finance infrastructure it would require, and consider whether the fees resembled Chicago's special assessment system in constituting a privatization of government and in reflecting a view that government should not be used to redistribute. I conclude that models that address the provision of urban infrastructure, such as the Tiebout model, would benefit from greater attention to efforts to shift the cost of public goods over space, time, and social groups or classes in growing communities.

This essay analyzes the economic conditions associated with urban social disturbances in the United States in the 1960s. Using state-level data on the social disturbances in conjunction with census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, the analysis tests the relationship between measures of wage inequality and measures of social disorder. In conjunction with accounts of the unrest, the findings support the rising expectations hypothesis, an aspect of the relative deprivation view of racial violence. In particular, overall wage inequality is a significant factor in the disturbances. Also, although the residual or discrimination component of wage inequality and the human capital component are related to the disturbances in the same way, this relationship is stronger for the human capital component of inequality.

Between 1934 and the time of the 1940 Census, the US government built and leased 30,151 units of public housing, but we know little about the residents who benefited from this housing. We use a unique methodology that compares addresses of five public housing developments to complete-count data from the 1940 Census to identify residents of public housing in New York City at the time of the census. We compare these residents to the larger pool of residents living in New York City in 1940 who were eligible to apply for the housing to assess how closely housing authorities adhered to the intent of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the Housing Act of 1937. This comparison produces a picture of whom public housing administrators considered deserving of this public benefit at the dawn of the public housing program in the United States. Results indicate a shift toward serving households with lower incomes over time. All the developments had a consistent preference for households with a “nuclear family” structure, but policies favoring racial segregation and other discretion on the part of housing authorities for tenant selection created distinct populations across housing developments. Households headed by a naturalized citizen were favored over households headed by a native-born citizen in nearly all the public housing projects. This finding suggests a more nuanced understanding of who public housing administrators considered deserving of the first public housing than archival research accounts had previously indicated.

This article appraises kin availability and migration timing on French-Canadian child mortality in an early twentieth-century North American industrial city. The analysis is based on the exploitation of an original dataset constructed by linking the 1910 census data (IPUMS-Full Count) for Manchester, New Hampshire to Quebec Catholic marriage records (BALSAC) and geocoding census data at the household level (Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps). Our results suggest that the presence of maternal and paternal grandmothers in the city living in different households were associated with reduced child mortality and that French-Canadian women who arrived in the United States as children or young adults experienced higher child mortality compared to second-generation French Canadians and those who migrated at a later age.

This collection of articles combines a set of works that study the contribution of transport infrastructure to the process of state building in different countries in Western and Central Europe. The focus and the themes treated vary, but have two common denominators: firstly, they are based on either completely original, or previously little-used, primary sources; and secondly, each work reveals new ways of interpreting how transport networks have shaped the territories into which they were introduced. Each article is an example of the wealth of potential approaches available and also helps us to interpret the processes involved in state building, which are a necessary precedent to European Integration (EI). To put the seven works that make up this special issue into context, I shall start this introduction by examining three aspects that complement them. I shall firstly clarify what we mean by EI. Secondly, I shall examine whether EI processes existed prior to the creation of the institutions that were set up after World War II to promote integration. Then, thirdly, and finally, based on the previous analyses, I shall look at the emergence of a railway network in Europe and the role that the European states played in this process. The fourth section will present the articles.

To assess claims about the role of the extended family in late imperial Chinese society, we examine the influence of kin network characteristics on marriage, reproduction, and attainment in Liaoning Province in Northeast China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We compare the influences on outcomes of the number and status of different types of kin as well as the seniority of the individual within each type of kin group. We find that the characteristics of kin outside the household did matter for individual outcomes but that patterns of effects were nuanced. While based on our results we concur that kin networks were important units of social and economic organization in late imperial China, we conclude that their role was complex.

The rise of disciplines is connected with the formation of groups or networks of specialists. It is connected with the emergence of “scientific communities,” theorized about since Thomas Kuhn and Robert Merton. But how is such a community of specialists brought together; how are common orientations among members of a scientific community upheld? In this article it is argued that scholarly journals play a key role in the modern scientific disciplines. Journals both secure the shared values of a scientific community and endorse what that community takes to be certified knowledge. Publications in scholarly journals have become the basic units of scientific communication in a discipline. Against this theoretical background, I analyze in this article the evolution of the leading scholarly journal in the field of education in the Dutch-language community, Paedagogische Studiën (Studies in Education). The analyses illuminate a number of historical evolutions in this journal in the period 1920–75: the increase in coauthorship and the concomitant standardization of publication formats; the changing role of the editorial board, especially in its function of gatekeeper of scientific communication; and the increase and the shifting “global” nature of cited work in the journal. Because of the close relationship between journal and discipline, this analysis highlights basic characteristics of the patterns of communication and the constitution of disciplinary identity in Dutch-language educational science.

The outbreak of AIDS around the world in the last 15 or 20 years is usually referred to as the “AIDS epidemic,” or occasionally “pandemic” (Grmek 1990). These terms have no great analytic value. The major medical dictionaries and epidemiological textbooks define an epidemic merely as an outbreak of a disease marked by a greater number of cases than usual (see Fox et al. 1970: 246–49; Mausner and Bahn 1974: 22, 272–77; Stedman’s Medical Dictionary 1977: 470; Kelsey et al. 1986: 212; Walton et al. 1986: 351; Harvard 1987: 247). This condition is contrasted with the endemic form of a disease at “its habitual level, or what previous experience would lead one to anticipate.” The term pandemic is used to describe an epidemic widespread in the world and usually characterized by a large number of cases, for example, the fourteenth-century plague epidemic (or Black Death) and the influenza epidemic during the latter part of World War I. Some authorities stress the fact that epidemics are also characterized by a declining phase. This is true by definition, of course, for otherwise the disease could be described as shifting to a new and higher endemic level. But it is also of interest that most of these unusual outbreaks of disease are eventually limited by such mechanisms as a decrease in susceptibles as persons become immune or die; as interventions, either medical or behavioral, eliminate the source or interrupt transmission; or as the pathogen mutates and becomes less virulent.

Kinship ranks second only to economic factors in social-scientific attempts to explain who migrates, when they move, and where they go. A person’s household circumstances are commonly thought to influence his or her propensity to move, as is the presence of other kin in the same community. Furthermore, the existence and location of kin in other communities are commonly thought to affect both the propensity to move and the choice of destination. Much of the international migration literature, accordingly, focuses on kin chains of migration, while much of the contemporary internal migration literature focuses on rural-urban kinship ties and on the continuing importance of extended kinship ties in societies experiencing high rates of urban-bound migration.

This article uses a unique data set from 1957 to examine the racial gap in health insurance coverage and the extent to which that gap influenced racial differences in health care spending. Results indicate that black households in 1957 were statistically significantly less likely to purchase health insurance than white households, even after controlling for differences in income, years of schooling, age, family size, marital status, and other personal and job-related characteristics. Findings in the article also provide weak support for the hypothesis that a racial gap in health insurance coverage contributed to racial differences in health care spending between blacks and whites; even after controlling for differences in income, education, and other characteristics, racial differences in medical expenditures were smaller for insured than for uninsured families, although the result is not statistically significant.

Twentieth-century American men and women were often unable to live up to or down to their own fertility ideals. In a national random sample of 11,126 ever-married men and women over the age of 44, “discrepant fertility”—the difference between ideal fertility and completed fertility—was common. This article seeks to identify the causes of such discrepancies, and findings suggest that the most important exogenous factor is “birth cohort.” Those born prior to or after the Great Depression were prone to exhibit negative discrepant fertility, having had fewer children than they thought ideal, while those born during the Depression—the parents of the baby boom—were characterized by significant positive discrepant fertility, having had more children than they thought ideal. It is argued that these cohort effects are closely related to social and economic conditions that prevailed as twentieth-century Americans came of age and assessed their professional and familial prospects.

Edward Jarvis’s (1971 [1855]) study of insanity in 1854 Massachusetts still receives attention as an exemplary study of mental disorder. It is cited as the first American study of the “true” prevalence of mental illness in a general population (Dohrenwend 1975), the first American study to show that social standing (pauperism) was related to mental illness (ibid.), and the first American study to show that a substantial number of ill people were not receiving “professional” help (ibid.; Fox 1984). Likewise, Jarvis’s focus on social causation—social factors cause mental disorder, versus social selection, according to which mental disorder impairs social functioning and achievement—identified an important issue that still receives attention in the mental health literature (Dohrenwend 1975; Fox 1990; Turner and Wagenfeld 1967; Wheaton 1978).

This article examines collective petitioning in metropolitan Spain during the Age of Revolution, focusing on the practices and discourses that framed petitioning as a meaningful form of action. There was a deeply rooted tradition of petitioning in old regime Spain, which was part of the ordinary bureaucratic workings of the crown and also provided a legitimizing framework for rioting in specific contexts. The collective experimentation in popular participation after the 1808 Napoleonic invasion transformed petitioning. Petitioning was first reconceptualized in accordance with the emerging language of rights and popular sovereignty. Activists and commentators had some awareness of the use of public petitioning in Britain, and once the representative Cortes met in Cadiz in 1810, public petition drives on public issues became part of the political culture. At the same time, the need to legitimate unconventional forms of action in the context of a crisis in the state converted petitioning into an all-embracing right. The right to petition, not only encompassed signed protest texts but also legitimated the old tradition of petitioning by riot and further was used to justify provincial rebellions, juntas, and military pronunciamientos. In comparative terms, this article highlights the elasticity of the language of petitioning during the Age of Revolution and cautions against narrowly associating it with one particular form of collective action or historical trajectory.