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.

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.

Population has always been recognized as a fundamental resource of the state. In nineteenth-century Europe, however, the relationship between population—a body of people capable of working, fighting, growing, or moving collectively—and the state underwent a significant transformation as national governments found it increasingly more important to know their populations quantitatively. Satisfaction of this need required the creation of national institutions to carry out censuses and monitor the vital statistics and migratory movements of population.

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).

A prominent form of voluntary organization in the United States from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, fraternal associations are self-selecting brotherhoods and sisterhoods that provide mutual aid to members, enact group rituals, and engage in community service. Synthesizing primary and secondary evidence, this article documents that African Americans historically organized large numbers of translocal fraternal voluntary federations. Some black fraternal associations paralleled white groups, while others were distinctive to African Americans. In regions where blacks lived in significant numbers, African Americans often created more fraternal lodges per capita than whites; and women played a much more prominent role in African American fraternalism than they did in white fraternalism. Rivaling churches as community institutions, many black fraternal federations became active in struggles for equal civil rights.

Shammas (1994) documented the expansion of women's wealth holding across the nineteenth-century United States, explaining it as the result of the married women's property acts (MWPAs) passed in most of states starting circa 1840. We look at the timing of the expansion of women's wealth holding, drawing on archival and published evidence from probate records. Starting with Richmond, Virginia, and its agricultural hinterland, we consider a variety of places, urban and rural, in the South and North, to suggest a general view of the eastern United States. In rough outline, while colonial women were at most one-tenth of probated wealth holders, antebellum women were at least one-fifth. Levels of women's wealth holding increased even more. The substantial narrowing of the gender wealth gap cannot be attributed to the MWPAs that followed. Perhaps those acts will explain the further narrowing of the gender wealth gap in the later nineteenth century, but that narrowing might better be understood as a continuation of previous trends. Our results remind that some legal reforms can better be understood as reflections than causes of social change.

By analyzing the different factors affecting labor agricultural productivity in early-twentieth-century Spain, this article shows that common lands were not detrimental to agricultural development. Even though privatization fostered output per worker by bringing more land into cultivation, the role of the commons as provider of pasture and fertilizing materials counteracted that effect, especially in humid regions. The supposed advantages of dismantling the communal regime are thus not supported by the data.

This article addresses the legacies of Louise Tilly's work on women and the family in Europe for current studies of girls’ agency in history. Using my preliminary analysis of a body of German periodicals written for girls during the late Enlightenment, I propose some methodological possibilities for combining cultural histories of reading with social historical approaches to the roles played by girls and women in European social life. Tilly's focus on the life cycle as an organizing principle and the family economy as a key site of history established the importance of such groups to social historical understandings of the past. Though my study incorporates sources outside the usual bounds of social history, it also depends on the analysis and methods of pioneering feminist social historians such as Louise Tilly.

We offer new evidence on the dynamics of wealth holding in the United States over the Civil War decade based on a hand-linked random sample of wealth holders drawn from the 1860 census. Despite the wealth shock caused by emancipation, we find that patterns of wealth mobility were broadly similar for northern and southern residents in 1860. Looking at the determinants of individual wealth holding in 1870, we find that the elasticity with respect to 1860 wealth was quite low in both regions – consistent with high levels of wealth mobility.

With only a few exceptions, the historical study of individual-level correlates of child mortality in the United States has been limited to the period surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, when children ever born and children surviving data collected by the 1900 and 1910 censuses allow indirect estimation of child mortality. The recent release of linked census data, such as the IPUMS MLP datasets, allows a different type of indirect estimation over a longer period. By following couples across subsequent decennial censuses, it is possible to infer child mortality by measuring whether couples’ own children in the first census were still present in the second census. We focus our analysis on children aged 1–3 in the first of two linked censuses, who were less likely to be undercounted by the census than infants, and unlikely to be living apart from their parents in the second census. We estimate child mortality over the intervening decade and use OLS regression to correlate that mortality to the residence location and socioeconomic characteristics of their parents’ households. We limit our analysis to three panel datasets for married couples linked between the 1850–60, 1860–70, and 1870–80 censuses, when real estate and personal estate wealth data were collected. Our results indicate a significant negative relationship between wealth and child mortality across all regions of the United States and over the entire period examined.

Family systems shape social institutions, yet they are rarely considered in histories of economic development. In this article, we show that a suite of social conventions—such as age gaps at marriage, bride price, sequestration, and discrimination and violence against women—are overrepresented in polygamous societies as compared to monogamous societies. This dichotomy can be explained on the grounds that polygamy produces a chronic scarcity of marriageable females. We argue that this suite, which we call gamos and which we quantify by two different methods, has demonstrably significant consequences for social, institutional, and economic development.

The argument of this article starts with three key theoretical postulates: First, regional-scale explanation differs in important respects from either aggregate macroeconomic studies of development at the national level or microeconomic and business historical studies of individual firms. Second, neoclassical economic theory is unsuitable as a basis for the analysis of regional economic dynamics, and a different framework, called adjustment theory, should be used in its place. Third, utilization of adjustment theory in the historical geographical domain leads directly to the deployment of both the concepts and methods of geographical information science as the foundation for empirical inquiry.

Critical analysis is the basis of the liberal arts education, and computer analysis is so much a part of contemporary society that liberal arts majors need to learn to assess the veracity of computer-derived information just as they do the sources for a historical monograph. It is increasingly clear that humanists should acquire basic understandings of the use of the computer. Jobs for traditionally trained liberal arts majors are scarce, and computer skills will make history graduates more competitive in the job market. We are not necessarily suggesting that all historians understand “computerese,” or the way some computer users talk to one another. What is important for the historian, or for any humanistic scholar for that matter, is the ability to understand the algorithm, or in the language of the humanist, the logic of how a computer program operates to produce output. This is also essential if scholars in the humanities are to be able to understand and evaluate the new social science research.

Organized markets for European immigrant servants in North America began in Jamestown around 1620 and ended in the ports of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans around 1820. For two centuries these markets survived, even flourished, in spite of numerous wartime interruptions, political revolutions, depressions in the transatlantic shipping market, cyclical recessions in the American economy, and competition from both slave and native-born free labor. During the eighteenth century roughly half of the European emigrants to British North America entered servitude to pay for their transatlantic passage (Galenson 1981; Grubb 1992b).

In his classic, Southern Politics, Key used the term “one-party factionalism” to describe the electoral politics of the South during the 1930s and 1940s: “one-party” because the Republicans offered, at best, only minimal opposition to the Democrats, and “factional” because several groups tended to vie for control of the top state offices via electoral victories in the Democratic primaries. According to Key, severe consequences accompanied one-party factionalism. In most of the southern states, primary voters could not even vote the “ins” out of office, for the competing factions were so fluid that it was never clear who, if anyone, represented the ins. The haves in southern society normally controlled government; although those in power had their differences, particularly in style, most of them agreed that the status quo needed protection. The less privileged lacked organized avenues for expressing their needs.

This article considers the relationship among race, stature, and proximity to Pennsylvania's nineteenth-century dairy-producing regions. Previous studies demonstrate a positive relationship between stature and access to dairy products. However, Pennsylvania's dairy-producing region was also close to urbanized Philadelphia. Here a new dataset is used from the Pennsylvania state prison system to track the heights of black and white males incarcerated from 1829 to 1909. It is documented that both blacks and whites living in southeastern Pennsylvania near both dairy-producing counties and urbanized Philadelphia were consistently shorter than individuals born and incarcerated elsewhere, indicating that the effects of urbanization dominated proximity to dairy production. Black inmates were consistently shorter than their white counterparts. The well-known midcentury height decline is confirmed among white men and is extended to blacks as well.

A fundamental characteristic of the southern United States before World War II was the separate, and lagging, economic path taken by that region relative to the rest of the nation. The South was particularly slow to advance in agricultural science and technology. Both contemporary investigators and recent scholarship have indicted southern institutions for delaying development in southern agriculture (Street 1957; Whatley 1985, 1987). Were sharecropping and tenancy, institutional arrangements that characterized the southern plantation system, responsible for retarding southern economic development? Despite the large amount of scholarly attention that has been focused on these issues, this question remains unanswered.

Migration has long been recognized as an important mechanism for allowing populations to adjust to changing economic conditions (Goldstein and Goldstein, 1981; Findley, 1977, 1982). Massive population movements from rural to urban locations were an integral part of the European modernization process, as were movements to hitherto undeveloped frontier regions including ones overseas. Rapid urban growth, due in part to migration, has more recently characterized many of the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

This group of essays came out of an attempt to address the “usually unasked,” “bound to embarrass” question that Eric Monkkonen raised in his 1994 presidential address to the Social Science History Association. As both the social sciences and history have been reshaped in recent years by intellectual tendencies variously labeled “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,” or the “linguistic turn,” the never especially clear relationship between the social sciences and history has grown even more muddy. The essays that follow are drawn from two sessions of the 1998 annual program of the Social Science History Association. The sessions brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines and cohorts who held divergent ideas about the links between social science and history and different substantive agendas for explaining historical change. A mix of essays that highlight new methodologies for analyzing the past and pieces that offer explanations or remedies, the articles printed here point to some of the central issues in the debate about what social science history might mean today.