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.

This introductory essay, firstly, offers a comparative, historical perspective on the transformation of petitioning into a vehicle for mass popular politics across North America and Western Europe during the “long” nineteenth century (1780–1914). While petitions were well established as an instrument of state in many early modern states, from the late eighteenth century a new type of mass, public, collective petitioning, based on established or invoked rights, emerged on an unprecedented scale in many countries. Mass petitioning underpinned the nascent repertoires of collective action pioneered by social movements. At the same time, the reception of petitions was institutionalized by political authorities, particularly legislatures elected under limited suffrage, as a potential source of legitimation. Secondly, the introduction suggests why people petitioned, and continued to petition, when their campaigns were often unsuccessful in achieving immediate results. The answer lies in the manifold advantages of petitioning in enabling political organization, mobilization, identity formation, citizenship, political change, and the forming of networks with elite political actors. By shaping an emerging field examining petitioning and petitions, raising awareness of petitions as sources and the methodologies to exploit them, and addressing broad questions of interest to historians and social scientists, this special issue hopes to stimulate further research and contribute to a rich dialogue in the years to come.

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.

This article uses Chile’s state milk program as a prism to map the trajectory of Chile’s social state through three combinations of political, economic, and welfare regimes. It traces the informal strategies deployed by citizens and local service providers and presents a historical typology of these encounters between 1954 and 2010, examining what commodification and decommodification mean to families in their everyday lives and discussing the implications of these findings to the literature on welfare regimes. The most important finding of this article is that regime type shapes but does not determine levels of provision. Welfare provision occurs in everyday interactions between state workers and citizens, and changes in regime type are filtered through and resisted through practices and strategies deployed in face-to-face encounters between local state representatives and citizens. There is often a large gap between central policy and these informal institutions that are created in everyday on-the-ground encounters between local state workers and citizens. Therefore, a second main conclusion of this article is that the informal institutions created at the local provision level coexist, compete, and clash with formal rules. A third conclusion of this article is that, to some extent, people who are regulated by the state also have some capacity to regulate their exchanges with the state, and, at the same time, state workers who organize and are organized by the state to distribute resources exercise discretionary power when implementing social programs.

The basis of most historical research including social science history is quite unsystematic. This characteristic results from the ways in which researchers find and choose historical sources for examination. Despite claims to be systematic, historians still tend to identify relevant evidence in impressionistic ways. Many social science histories involve the rigorous study of a source happily discovered by chance. Of course, access to the past has never been easy. Researchers have always lamented a presumed lack of “essential” records. Nonetheless, the actual ways we discover existing evidence have received little attention despite the fact that this process is fraught with difficulties and hidden dangers especially for researchers of a social scientific bent. Do not the presuppositions of social science history extend to the identification of sources? How do we know when we have all the “relevant data” for a particular project? Can systematic data analysis be justifiably built upon unsystematic identification of sources?

The creation of legal parameters to structure social relations is a basic feature of modern capitalist society. Law plays a major role in shaping the institutional setting within which conflicts arise, develop, and reach their resolution. Likewise, legislative solutions to pressing social conflicts create new possibilities and strategies for social change. The struggles between capitalists and the working class that have historically marked capitalist economic development constitute a central arena for the legislative restructuring of social relations. Yet, few have systematically studied the role of law in shaping the development of capital-labor relations (for some important exceptions, see Steinberg, 1982; Tomlins, 1985). In this paper, we explore the legal structuring of American working-class militancy in the twentieth century, a prominent dimension of capital-labor relations, but one for which the legislative underpinnings remain unclear.

During the twenty year period of 1945 through 1965 perhaps the most dramatic example of presumed presidential opinion leadership is President Truman’s speech proclaiming what came to be called the Truman Doctrine. Delivered to Congress and broadcast across the nation on radio, the speech has been widely acknowledged as establishing the temper of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Historians whether sympathetic or critical of the Truman administration agree that this speech more than any other single event marks the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, its implications for the future did not require hindsight available only to historians. Immediately, contemporaries in Washington and abroad grasped that President Truman was advocating a fundamental change in the U.S. responsibility and posture toward the world.

The seven decades framed by the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and institutionalization of organized labor in the wake of World War II constituted a unique period of US labor relations, one that labor historians have identified as the most violent and bloody of any Western industrialized nation. Despite long-standing scholarly interest in the issues of labor-management conflict, however, important questions regarding the causes of extreme labor-management violence within the United States have never been adequately addressed. In this paper, I utilize a recently compiled and unique data set of American strike fatalities to statistically model the causes of extreme strike violence in the United States. The time-series evidence suggests that picket-line violence increased in association with (1) the struggle for and against unionization and (2) economic desperation associated with tightening labor markets. The results also both depict the stultifying effect of massacres and suggest that state support for labor's right to organize tended to decrease the likelihood of violence and vice versa. This paper not only thus provides fresh insights into classic questions, but also offers a basis for both transhistorical and international comparison.

The second decade of the twentieth century is viewed as the pivotal period for ghetto formation in the United States. This decade witnessed the onset of the Great Migration and it was during this time that modern ghettos, massive agglomerations of tens of thousands of Blacks and virtually only Blacks, became visible. Despite the importance of this period for ghetto formation and the subsequent segregation experienced by Blacks, our understanding of the dynamics of segregation during this period is incomplete. We utilize recently released fine-grained census data to present a more precise and complete picture of segregation in American cities in the second decade of the twentieth century and in doing so make several contributions to the historical literature on residential segregation. First, we document how segregation varied across the full range of American cities, including Southern and smaller cities overlooked in most historical accounts. Second, we assess how the influx of Southern Black migrants into Northern cities was related to increasing segregation. Third, we ascertain the role of Blacks’ socioeconomic status in determining proximity to Whites. Fourth, we examine racial zoning’s impact on segregation. Finally, we consider how the presence of immigrants in a city was related to the residential segregation experienced by Blacks. This research thus adds to the literature on residential segregation by providing more reliable estimates of the degree of residential segregation experienced by Blacks at the beginning of the Great Migration as well as exploring other factors associated with varying levels of segregation at that time.

The period around the turn of the twentieth century has been called the “era of finance capital” in American history. It was during this period that the first of the great trusts were formed, combining in some cases hundreds of corporations into one. Investment bankers, in particular J. P. Morgan, were the major orchestrators of these schemes, but other leading financiers and industrialists were also active in controlling several corporations apiece. George F. Baker and James Stillman in banking; Edward H. Harriman, James J. Hill, and the Moore brothers in railroads; and John D. and William Rockefeller in oil and other industries were prominent among the leading capitalists of the age, and they dominated much of the business scene at that time.

One of the remarkable aspects of this period is the rare unanimity among scholars and journalists about its main characteristics. There is general agreement that financial corporations were the most powerful of the period, that a relatively small number of individuals dominated the corporate world, and that if it was ever possible to speak of a ruling class in American society, this was the period (e.g., Riesman, 1953; Bell, 1960; Parsons and Smelser, 1957).

The development of the Republican Party is a significant event in American political history. While scholars describe its formation as a realignment caused by the slavery issue, this article reinterprets this perspective. Focusing on gubernatorial elections in New England from 1840 to the mid-1850s, I present evidence that the rise of the Republican Party in the region was due to a lack of strategic voting coupled with third-party, antislavery voting that did not consistently affect the Whigs across states. A counterfactual argument suggests that Whig elites would have sought to change the nature of party politics and, had the distribution of third-party voting affected the Whigs similarly across states, then the Republicans may not have formed. Thus, the distribution of antislavery, third-party voting was more important than the presence of antislavery sentiment. This finding is important for understanding American party development and how strategic voting fits into the study of US elections.

Four synchronous epidemics of measles and scarlet fever are observed in the historical data collected by colonial authorities in Victoria, Australia from 1853 to 1876, suggesting some sort of synergistic relationship between the two diseases. While epidemics of measles, as recorded by the colonial record keepers, still occurred during the remainder of the study period (until 1916), no further epidemics of scarlet fever occurred after 1876. This is suggestive of a change in Victoria’s disease ecology in the late 1870s. After analysis of the historical data for potential artifactual cases, it does not appear to be the result of confusion in diagnosis and changes in case definitions do not appear to have affected reporting of the causes of death. We conclude that the most likely explanation for the observed pattern is an epidemic synergy that ended after the 1876 epidemic. We hypothesize that this synergistic relationship between measles and scarlet fever in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria ended due to a shift in the dominant group A streptococci (GAS) M-type or the loss of a GAS bacteriophage. Support for this hypothesis comes from observations that other diagnoses associated with group A strep infections also changed their mortality profiles during the 1870s, particularly “Bright’s disease,” a possible descriptor of post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis. We situate the emergence and end of this pattern within the demographic and socioeconomic conditions of the Victorian gold-mining boom in the 1850s to 1870s and postboom changes in fertility, mortality, and housing infrastructure, highlighting the importance of social conditions in disease evolution.

This paper analyzes rural conflict in one of the most volatile areas of interwar Europe, the latifundia regions of the South of Spain. The historical and economics literature argues that rural conflict is a bottom-up response of landless peasants to unemployment, bad harvests, landownership inequality, changes in property rights, and poor enforcement of proworker legislation. A second generation of historical studies has focused on democratization and concomitant changes in collective bargaining and labor market institutions. Was conflict caused by structural factors like poverty, inequality, or unemployment or was conflict an endogenous response to political change? This paper uses municipal-level time series and cross-sectional variation in rural conflict in three Andalusian provinces (Córdoba, Jaén, and Seville) in the early 1930s to argue that, although collective misery certainly shaped the main issues of contention, inequality or deteriorating living standards did not explain the explosive intensification of conflict during the Second Republic. Geographic variation in conflict would be consistent with unobserved locational advantages and higher agricultural incomes, thicker labor markets, facility of communication, and market access and information, irrespective of the intensity of inequality or the degree of local Socialist political power. Poor harvests can only explain a small part of the time-series evolution of conflict from April 1931 to June 1934, while good harvests probably intensified the competition of temporary migrants and local workers for well-paid harvest jobs. Large gains in rural laborers’ bargaining power, organizational buildup, and reactions to policy changes and state intervention are more promising explanatory factors of the temporal evolution of conflicts in the period.

Before 1890, German emigrants were one of the largest European groups to emigrate overseas in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most of them settled in North America, but a handful of Germans landed in countries south of the equator. This article examines those who chose uncommon paths and settled in the Southern Hemisphere, focusing on Hessians who went to either Australia or South America. Those who emigrated to the Southern Hemisphere were quite different from the Hessians who moved to the United States. More striking, however, are the contrasting backgrounds of the Australian-bound versus the South American–bound groups: These two groups were comparable in size, but in terms of any identifying socioeconomic characteristic they were poles apart from each other. Those bound for Australia were poorer, less skilled, and more likely to use a multiyear migration strategy to get their family members across the ocean, typical of the ways of those bound for the United States. In contrast, those who went to South America were wealthier, more skilled, and mostly emigrated as intact families without the use of such migration networks. This work shows that the choice of destination mattered for individuals and that certain destinations attracted particular types of individuals and groups, reemphasizing the role of self-selection in the migration experience.

Even under the increasingly more open conditions of glasnost and after, the October Revolution has proven difficult for Western, Soviet, and post-Soviet historians to reconceptualize. In this essay I shall examine the reasons behind this difficulty and suggest where a reconceptualization of October might fruitfully be sought. Rethinking October from the perspective of recent research into the construction of historical or collective memory, I will argue, affords unique insights into exactly why October has proven so enduring. Focusing on the October Revolution as the crucial element in the primarily Bolshevik efforts to establish and enshrine the legitimacy of the new Soviet state during the first decade after October 1917 problematizes the event in a way that traditional approaches, deeply implicated in this issue of (il)legitimacy, are unable to do.

Let me begin with a simple theme, repentance, and a simple message: repent from complacency in the practice and defense of social science history (SSH). I say this because I do not see social science historians meeting three major challenges that must be overcome if the larger, collective enterprise is to survive with the same vitality it had a decade ago. Those challenges are, first, to bring social theory forcefully back into historical research; second, to take formal methods to a new, higher level; and, third, to seek to train the next generation of social science historians in the theory and methods they will need in the next century.

This article tests Federalist and Anti-Federalist explanations for state contributions to the confederation government using data on troop requisitions from 1775 to 1783. The Federalists claimed that state politicians acted unilaterally and contributed when the Continental army protected their state's interests. The Anti-Federalists claimed that state politicians understood their duty to the Union and contributed to advance its needs. The results suggest that, with one important caveat, states contributed more consistent with the Federalist argument. This helps explain why the Articles of Confederation needed reform.

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, affects nearly twice as many black Americans as white Americans, and with disproportionately more devastating effects. Black hypertension victims suffer kidney disease at up to eighteen times the rate of white victims, and have three to four times the fatal stroke rates (USPHS, 1980). Although no clear cause has surfaced for the overwhelming majority of hypertensive cases (Lancet, 1980; Gillum, 1979), there is mounting evidence that hypertension among blacks is related to sodium (salt) metabolism.

It has long been believed that “excess” salt consumption elevates blood pressure (Kark and Oyama, 1980: 1007-1020; Ruskin, 1956:xiii). Today it is known that a high intake of salt can result in excess sodium retention, which can influence blood plasma volume, cardiac output, vascular resistance, and blood pressure (Williams and Hopkins, 1979). Blacks, however, apparently do not consume any more salt than whites (Luft et al., 1977). But, significantly, it would seem that blacks do have a tendency to retain much more sodium “on the same salt load” than whites (Luft et al., 1977). Moreover, the volume of blood plasma in blacks may be higher than in whites (Schacter and Kuller, 1984).

This special section of Social Science History launches a series of five articles illustrative of what we believe is an eclectic center in the development of historical studies of institutions and policies, often termed the “new institutionalism.” The new institutionalism emerged in the early 1980s in reaction to “a long season in which social forces and processes were the predominant topics of study” (Orren and Skowronek 1986). While the precise role of institutions varies according to the practitioner, hallmarks of the new institutionalism include a portrayal of institutions as semiautonomous actors; a contextualization of institutions within sociohistorical processes (and vice versa); a recognition of inefficiency, contingency, and accident in history; and a recognition of the relative autonomy of ideas and symbolic action in historical development (March and Olsen 1984, 1989; Krasner 1984; Smith 1988; Katznelson 1992). As is expected of new paradigms, the entry of the new institutionalism into the intellectual community has been marked by an array of polemics against its predecessors, “old” schools defined by “old institutionalism,” behaviorism, and structural functionalism. It has also generated a wave of spirited counterattacks (Mitchell 1991; Bendix et al. 1992; Ethington and McDonagh forthcoming).

As other contributors to this roundtable suggest, the practices of social and labor history as we have known them have been in methodological and epistemological turmoil for some time. The dominant paradigms that guided much of the work of social historians in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have been thrown into question by poststructuralism and by the emergence of new analytical perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicities. Attention to culture and to the meanings that historical subjects imposed on the habits of everyday life, as well as to the constitutive power of language and cultural practices, have now become a central aspect of much historical work that has sought to analyze the operations of gender, race, and ethnicities as the subjects of social history and the history of working people in particular.