One person, one vote. With this principle, the Court permanently changed representation in the United States. Equal population requirements changed the face of legislative redistricting in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court applied it to congressional districts in Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964), and to state legislatures in Reynolds v. Sims, 84 S. Ct. 1362 (1964). Equality in district population was valued not only as instrumental to other goals but also for itself, as Justice Black explained in Wesberry: “As nearly as practicable one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s. . . . To say that a vote is worth more in one district than another would . . . run counter to our fundamental ideas of democratic government.”

As Justice Brennan made clear, the Court based its decision in large part on a particular understanding of the historical meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and of article 1, section 2, of the Constitution. And as widely accepted as this principle has come to be, it has been subject to severe historical criticism, criticism that has never been resolved. For example, Berger (1977) claims that malapportionment was historically present and accepted before and during the creation of the Fourteenth Amendment and hence that the equal protection clause could not have implied the equal population principle (from chapter 5): “Certainly there was no disclosure that such intrusion [on apportionment] was contemplated; there is in fact striking evidence that malapportionment was an accepted practice.”

“There are billions of potential conflicts in any modern society, but only a few become significant,” E. E. Schattschneider (1960: 66) pointed out many years ago. Accordingly, the most important political struggles are not issue conflicts but issue-cleavage conflicts, “arguments about what the argument is about” (ibid.: 70–71). The definition of alternatives, from a Schattschneiderian perspective, is the primal act of politics. If the sine qua non of a political party is the selection of leaders, then the quintessential act of a political system is the selection and framing of issues, which is to say, “the domination and subordination of conflicts” (ibid.: 66).

In the summer of 1886, the conservative “Whig” wing of the Liberal party, led by Lord Hartington, together with a small group of Radical Unionists under Joseph Chamberlain, broke with the Liberal leader, Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone, and formed the Liberal Unionist party. This not-unexpected event occurred in two stages. The first was the defection of ninety-three Liberals to the Conservative opposition on the second reading of Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill in June, resulting in its defeat. The second stage was the decision of Hartington, Chamberlain, and their followers to contest, with Conservative support, parliamentary seats against Liberals in the ensuing July election which Gladstone called on the issue of Irish Home Rule.

The election of July, 1886 proved to be a critical juncture in British party alignment. The shift in the strength of the parties caused by the return of seventy-eight Liberal Unionists to the parliament of 1886-92 and their support of the Conservatives ended forty years of Liberal domination and began a generation of Conservative hegemony. The Liberal Unionists maintained a parliamentary strength of about seventy members and a separate identity until they merged with the Conservatives in 1912; few of the dissident Liberal Unionists returned to the Liberal party. The formation of the Unionist (Conservative and Liberal Unionist) coalition had long-term ramifications as well because it set the stage for the emergence of class politics shortly after the turn of the century.

The recent shift away from the idea of centrally planned public systems and toward market-based models of schooling opens new territory for scholarship in the history of education. What is the history of education markets? How has the structure of education markets changed over time? This article addresses these questions by surveying existing literature, with an emphasis on the early national and antebellum periods. In the process it brings new perspectives to standard narratives of the history of education in the nineteenth century, particularly regarding the development of state-based educational systems. It then proposes areas for future research and concludes by introducing two examples of new work in this field.

During my first year of graduate school (1982–83), Louis Galambos congratulated me for having the courage to go into a dying field. Naïveté, not courage, had propelled me to leave my position as deputy director of income maintenance programs for the New York City Department of Social Services and study political history at The Johns Hopkins University. Although contact with the job market four years later would confirm my adviser’s warnings, at the time he issued this “heads up” I did wonder what Dr. Galambos had been smoking. After all, it seemed to me that politics, and particularly its bureaucratic incarnation, touched the lives of Americans more of ten and more forcefully than ever before. How could interest in this topic be declining? What’s more, by my third year in graduate school, I had mastered a rich body of literature that confirmed the centrality of politics.The Progressive synthesis, dating back to James Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington, was under fire but still compelled elegant work that had begun to focus less on Progressive presidents and more on the fate of liberalism as it engaged racism, sought to reconcile local preferences with national agendas, and grappled with Americans’ increasing distrust of the centrally directed programs that the New Deal and the Great Society spawned (Brinkley 1982, 1995; Chafe 1980; Gerstle 1989, 2001; McGirr 2001; Sugrue 1996).

The article investigates the relations among internal, Continental, and transatlantic migration in late imperial Austria by combining information from passenger records of ships to the United States and internal district-level migration data from the Austrian census. Combined with other statistical sources, a snapshot of migration to the United States is provided in the context of long-standing patterns of internal and Continental migration and the changing socioeconomic structures of the empire. The relationships between internal and transatlantic movements and the determinants of migration to the United States are analyzed by means of regression analysis. In late imperial Austria internal mobility was negatively related to transatlantic migration. This suggests the existence of different migration systems with different patterns of internal, Continental, and transatlantic migration.

Despite the recently demonstrated importance of consumer credit for the economic health of nations and families, little is known about the history of consumer credit markets and their regulation. An important chapter in the history of consumer credit regulation came between 1909 and 1941, when policy experts at the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) engaged in a national campaign to transform small loan markets and policy in the United States. Concentrating its efforts on state-by-state passage of the Uniform Small Loan Law, the foundation's political success hinged upon an alliance with the American Association of Personal Finance Companies. While most scholarship portrays experts as being dominated or co-opted by industry, our case provides a countervailing example. Far from controlling RSF experts, lenders became dependent on the foundation for legitimating their political lobbying and their business activities. We explain how the foundation built its expert reputation through a process of reputational entrepreneurship, and we trace how RSF experts deployed this reputation as a power resource in their negotiations with small loan lenders.

While technological progress played a central role in the British Industrial Revolution, statistical evidence on how inventors and entrepreneurs engaged in the process of technological innovation has typically received minor attention. In this paper I use quantitative methods to show that counties with a relatively high number of informal networks −in the form of Freemasonry, friendly societies, libraries, and booksellers− experienced more innovation as measured by new patents and exhibits at the 1851 Crystal Palace World’s Fair. Qualitative evidence and propensity score matching suggest that the mechanisms highlighted here were an important part of British technological leadership. Economic factors cannot account for these patterns.

Turkish nationalism has long been an enigma for scholars interested in the formation of national identity. The nationalist movement that succeeded in crafting the Republic of Turkey relied upon rhetoric that defined the nation in explicitly secular, civic, and territorial terms. Though the earliest scholarship on Turkish nationalism supported this perspective, more recent research has pointed to Turkey's efforts to homogenize the new state as evidence of the importance of ethnicity, and particularly religion, in constructing Turkish national identity. Yet this marked mismatch between political rhetoric and politics on the ground is perplexing. If Turkey was meant to be a secular and civic state, why did Turkish nationalist policies place such a heavy emphasis on ethnic and religious purity? Moreover, why did religious identity become such a salient characteristic for determining membership in the national community and for defining national identity? This article draws upon historical research and social identity complexity theory to analyze this seeming dichotomy between religious and civic definitions of the Turkish nation. I argue that the subjective overlap between religious and civic ingroups during the late Ottoman Empire and efforts by nationalists to rally the populace through religious appeals explains the persistence of religious definitions of the nation despite the Turkish nationalist movement's civic rhetoric, and accounts for much of the Turkish state's religiously oriented policies and exclusionary practices toward religious minorities in its early decades.

We examine the socioeconomic consequences of discrimination against people of Southern origins during the US Great Migration of the first half of the twentieth century. We ask whether people living in the American North and Midwest in 1940 fared worse with respect to education, occupation, and income if they were perceived to be of Southern origins. We also assess variation in these effects across racial groups and across actual region of origin groups. Using linked data from the 1920 and 1940 US censuses, we compare the life outcomes of about half a million pairs of brothers who differed with respect to the regional origin implied by their first names. For both Whites and Blacks, we find statistically significant associations between outcomes and the regional origin implied by names; regardless of where they were born, men living in the North or Midwest in 1940 did worse if their names implied Southern origins. However, these associations are entirely confounded by family-specific cultural, socioeconomic, and other factors that shaped both family naming practices and life outcomes. This finding—that regional discrimination in the early-twentieth-century United States did not happen based on names—contrasts sharply with findings from research in more recent years that uses names as proxies for people’s risk of exposure to various forms of discrimination. Whereas names are a basis for discrimination in modern times, they were not a basis for regional discrimination in an era in which people had more immediate and direct evidence about regional origins.

This article challenges the conventional view of veterans’ politics in the United States as an “iron triangle” or a “subgovernment,” terms that connote a low-profile field dominated by a small number of elite actors operating consensually behind closed doors. It shows instead that veterans’ affairs were at the center of a heated national debate to which both grassroots activists and national leaders contributed as part of a larger social movement, as demonstrated by the controversy over the First Hoover Commission. Created by Congress in 1947 to find ways to make the executive branch more efficient, the commission’s proposals to reform veterans’ affairs were all defeated by the countercampaign of the largest and most influential veterans’ group of the era, the American Legion. Former soldiers were not alone (they benefited from the assistance of key state actors such as the heads of the Veterans Administration and of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs) but their mobilization proved decisive. This episode shows that even veterans of World War II, traditionally seen as the most deserving cohort of former soldiers in US history (the “Greatest Generation”), had to organize to defend their benefits against attacks. The privileged position of veterans in the US welfare state is therefore less the result of their exalted cultural status (as is often presumed) than of their ability to mobilize politically and to override the preferences of significant numbers of public and private actors—just like any other group making claims on the state.

This paper looks at the progress that the Mosaic database has enabled in the study of family structures in continental Europe in the past. Our main argument is that the combination of comprehensive archival research, digitization and computation, data mining, and open-access dissemination that is at the core of the Mosaic project is bringing about an important shift in the fundamental principles that have driven European family history research to date. These transformative features of Mosaic go beyond mere data infrastructural developments, as scaling up to much larger datasets leads to qualitative differences in measurements, methods, and questions. Integrating these perspectives can lead to an important incremental shift in both the scale and the scope of knowledge about historical European family systems.

Chicago is amythic city. Its representation in the popular imagination is varied and has included, at various times, the attributes of a blue-collar town, a city in a garden, and a gangster's paradise. Myths of Chicago “grow abundantly between fact and emotion,” and they selectively and simultaneously evoke and defer attributes of the city. For one perduring myth, social scientists may be held largely responsible: namely, that Chicago is “one of the most planned cities of themodern era,” with a street grid, layout of buildings and waterways, and organization of its residential and commercial architecture that reveal a “geometric certainty” (Suttles 1990). The lasting scholarly fascination with Chicago's geography derives in part from the central role that social scientists played in constructing the planned city. In the 1920s,University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess worked with his colleagues in other social science disciplines to divide the city into communities and neighborhoods. This was a long and deliberate process based on large-scale “social surveys” of several thousand city inhabitants.Their work as members of the Local Community Research Committee (LCRC) produced the celebrated Chicago “community area”—that is, 75 mutually exclusive geographic areas of human settlement, each of which is portrayed as being socially and culturally distinctive.

In the five centuries since Gutenberg introduced printing with movable type, Western society has been thoroughly infused by print culture.This culture, a complex mosaic of numerous factors, has recently become the focus of extensive historical research.The history of print culture, frequently referred to as the “history of the book,” concerns those aspects of a society that relate to the production, distribution, and reception of printed materials, whether canonical works of literature or ephemeral items such as newspapers and handbills. Authorship, publishing, regulation, bookselling, libraries, and reading are some of the aspects examined. Because print culture permeates all of society, the study of its history has captured the interest of a wide range of researchers: an array of historians of various types and periods (e.g., social, labor, cultural, and legal historians; historians of religion and ideas; and historians of science and technology), literary scholars (of various periods and genres), sociologists, information scientists and librarians, geographers, and bibliographers, among others. As might be expected, scholars of this diversity bring a wide breadth of perspectives to the subject.

On the basis of qualitative and quantitative data, I show that nonviolent protests against politically motivated repression in Mexico were more significant, both in terms of their histories and their political impact over time, than the literature suggests. I document that Mexico had human rights movements prior to the late 1980s that have been overlooked because activists since 1968 framed their struggles in terms of amnesty for political prisoners as well as the reappearance of, and accounting for, the disappeared. I further show that their 25-plus years of struggle were effective in the passage of two amnesties for political prisoners (1971 and 1978) as well as the emergence of an ombudsman called the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH circa 1989/1990), along with the negotiated settlement of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. This evidence suggests that even against strong odds, and even in the context of ongoing repression, nonviolent social movements of relatively powerless people can independently influence nondemocratic governments not only to pass favorable policy, but also to restructure the polity.

The notion that government funding undermines the independence of nonprofit organizations is a prevalent theme in scholarship on state–nonprofit relations, social welfare policy, and the condition of American civil society. This article scrutinizes historical assumptions about community organizations that inform debates over the influence of government funding in the nonprofit sector. Drawing on long-standing organizational theory and a historical analysis of the Community Chest movement, this article highlights the tension between collaboration and independence inherent in the nonprofit organizational form as well as the implications of this tension in light of historical changes in the resource environment of voluntary human service agencies. This conceptual and temporal focus leads not only to an analytical reorientation but also to a historical revision: The influx of government funding in the American nonprofit sector in the 1960s promoted nonprofit independence by undermining the authority of local community institutions. In addition to complicating popular beliefs about charity in American civic culture, this article facilitates a more sophisticated understanding of community dynamics.

“Civil society,” in the definition proposed in the introduction to this special issue, was not solely a product of the Enlightenment or of elite sociability. This article focuses on eighteenth-century confraternities in Paris and Milan to argue that these religious associations fostered the kinds of values and behaviors that most writers associate with the formation of civil society: cooperation, charity, a sense of responsibility, and peaceful interaction both among the members and between them and others in society. Many of them encouraged a culture of independence and a sense of rights among their members. They also offered experience of organization to a very large number of men and a smaller number of women. They thus contributed to the formation of eighteenth-century “civil society.”

Imagine a fourfold table in which one dimension is “present versus past” and the other “exotic versus home.” Traditionally, social and cultural anthropology’s domain has been the exotic’s present and history’s domain the home’s past. A third box, the home’s present, has been occupied by sociology, while the fourth, the exotic’s past, has usually been the province of anthropologists too because other disciplines—with the exception, perhaps, of ethnohistorians—are usually even less interested in exotic peoples’ past than in their present. These domains are now in flux. I argue, in what follows, that only when the oversimplified ideas about time and space that have created them are seriously questioned will anthropology find a secure “place” in social science history.

The “panoptic” powers characteristic of nineteenth-century criminal justice systems created prison sources that are increasingly used to study past populations. Each step of the criminal process has its own selection logic, leading to a predominance of unskilled and low-skilled men and women in prison samples. There are also crucial differences between the profiles of single and repeat offenders. This article employs a sample of more than 27,000 individual admissions to Belgian prisons in the nineteenth century to explore these trends in greater depth. Recidivists form a specific subset of the prison population. Detailed comparisons of recidivists and nonrecidivists are therefore useful as they help to understand the selection mechanisms inherent in prison data. Male recidivists were predominately low-waged workers incarcerated for minor acts of violence or misconduct classified as disturbances of the peace. Female recidivists were disproportionately low-skilled workers arrested for beggary and sex work. Recidivists also differed in their stature. Male recidivists in Belgian prisons were shorter than the average prisoner. By contrast, female recidivists were taller than one-time offenders. These height differences have important implications for our understanding of well-being in the past.

Despite growing reliance on census data for historical research in the United States, there has been little systematic evaluation of census quality. This article relies on back-projection methods, new estimates of nineteenth-century mortality, and the 1850–1940 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) samples to estimate age- and sex-specific net census underenumeration of the native-born white population in the United States in the 1850–1930 censuses. National and section of birth estimates are constructed. In general, the results suggest slightly higher net undercounts for native-born white males relative to native-born white females, slightly higher net undercounts in the South, and a modest trend toward greater census coverage over time. A few censuses stand out as anomalous. The 1870 census suffered a higher net rate of omission than any other census. The net undercount was especially high in the South, probably reflecting the unsettled conditions in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The net undercount was not nearly as great as nineteenth-century observers speculated and subsequent historians have long believed, however. The 1880 census appears to have achieved the most complete coverage of the native-born white population before 1940.