The pre-world war I period decisively structured modern class relations in Europe and the United States. Farmers, the largest population group, greatly influenced the development of capitalism and states. Scholars have demonstrated farmers’ significance in particular areas (e.g., Blackbourn in Germany and Esping-Andersen in Scandinavia), but there has been little comparative analysis. Farmer politics, and thus modern class relations in general, have been inadequately theorized. Most existing work on agrarian classes has also been economistic, neglecting politics. We fill the gaps by analyzing agrarian politics in the United States, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.

In a recent article in Social Science History, Flanigan and Zingale reviewed the old problem of inferring individual relationships from aggregate data, cast doubt on Goodman’s ecological regression technique as a method of estimating such relationships, and contended that the specification analysis approach to the issue was misleading. Instead, they argued that an ad hoc procedure suggested by Shively in a 1974 article was superior to Goodman’s point estimates because it avoids dubious assumptions and forces investigators to make their premises clear. Comparing results from analyses of state-level data on major party voting in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections with figures from the Michigan surveys, they concluded, to their satisfaction at least, that the assumptions required for ecological regression were badly violated and that it was preferable in this and other cases to use the system that Shively, without making any grandiose claims for it, had originated (Flanigan and Zingale, 1985; Goodman, 1959; Hanushek et al., 1974; Shively, 1974; Langbein and Lichtman, 1978).

Anyone who has tried to teach undergraduates about the election of 1896 should instinctively appreciate Walter Dean Burnham’s enormous contribution in making sense of that election and its aftermath. Waged between two rather uninteresting men over issues that defy easy understanding, the presidential contest of 1896 hardly stacks up with those of 1860 and 1932 as “critical” in the casual sense of the term. Perhaps if William Jennings Bryan had defeated William McKinley, or, better still, if the glamorous Theodore Roosevelt had been the victorious Republican candidate, or, best of all, if Roosevelt had won and immediately started a major war, the election of 1896 would more readily appear to have been the transforming event that modern scholars contend it was. But, alas, McKinley won, waited over a year before reluctantly waging even a minor war, and proved unwilling to make any significant departures in domestic policy. Compared to the election of Abraham Lincoln or that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the contest of 1896 appears trivial. Who can blame undergraduates for yawning over the “Battle of the Standards”?

The early economic development of regions of recent European settlement such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and Argentina was similar in that each region began by exporting products with a high natural resource content. Yet in each case the pace and character of growth and development has differed depending on the timing of the initial settlement, the nature of institutions, and the type of resource export and its market demand. The economic development of resource abundant, sparsely populated regions has been explained by what has become known as the staples approach or models of export-led development.

In a Recent Critical review of sociological perspectives on historical problems, Skocpol observed, “Until the 1970s, ‘historical sociology’ was not a phrase one often, if ever, heard in conversations among sociologists in the United States” (Skocpol, 1984: 356). Of course there was a good deal of prior historical work by sociologists, some of which Skocpol herself goes on to cite. Yet, by her phrasing, she has inadvertently raised a question about the place of history in the discipline of sociology. Like almost all sociologists who use historical materials or perspectives, Skocpol sees reason to complain about the failure of sociology to give a larger place to history. But for me, a prior issue, in the spirit of a historically minded sociology, involves discovering what happened to the name “historical sociology.” The naming of an activity, in this case historical sociology, and its performance—historical research and interpretations by sociologists—are quite distinct. The first task is to clarify their relationship.

Every government policy has positive and negative externalities: offshoots and spin-offs that either are unplanned or exceed calculated expectations. New Deal agricultural policy was no exception. One controversial aspect of it is the alleged role of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) in southern tenant and sharecropper displacement. Whether or not the officials of the AAA underestimated or even cared about this phenomenon, many contemporaries and most historians have criticized the Roosevelt administration for it.

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.

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.

Despite decades of research, demographic historians are still uncertain about mortality trends and determinants in early New England. Although researchers agree that New England mortality was low relative to other regions of early America in the seventeenth century, they disagree about the direction of mortality trends over the course of the eighteenth century. Community-based reconstitution studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s at first seemed to provide strong evidence of a decline in adult life expectancy (Greven 1970; Norton 1971; Vinovskis 1972; D. S. Smith 1973). More recent studies, however, contradict the assessment of deteriorating health conditions in eighteenth-century New England. Family-based genealogical studies document a substantial long-term increase in adult male life expectancy over the course of the century, although the increase was followed by a slight decline in the early part of the nineteenth century (Fogel 1986; Kasakoff and Adams 1995).

Past research suggests that although political violence in mature democracies is rare, it does occasionally occur along ethnic, religious, and/or linguistic lines. Jamaica is an exceptional case in that it is a relatively mature democracy that experiences political violence between demographically similar groups. This article examines the origins of political violence in Jamaica—that is, the conditions that led to its development, intensification, and institutionalization during the late colonial period. Through original archival research, this article supports past findings identifying personality politics, the politicization of race/class divisions, and clientelism as contributing factors to the development of political violence. The research also, however, makes a major new contribution by providing evidence that colonial nonintervention during the early stages of political violence was a crucial factor leading to its escalation and then institutionalization. This finding gives the British colonial state a different and more central role than the extant literature suggests and has broader implications for all democracies.

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.

Study of the popular response to the political parties and candidates of nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States history has made significant progress since the 1950s. Samuel Lubell in The Future of American Politics was certainly one of the first to show historians that much understanding about the voting behavior of past generations could be gleaned from an imaginative examination of county and precinct election data. Lee Benson, in his now classic essay on “Research Methods in American Political Historiography,” persuasively demonstrated to many that systematic analysis of quantitative data could improve the accuracy and quality of generalizations about past voting practices. Benson’s subsequent study of early nineteenth-century New York politics, The Concept ofJacksonian Democracy, which quickly became a model of excellence in research design and methods, concluded, among other things, that “socioeconomic cleavages” were less important in explaining how New Yorkers voted after about 1820 than were “ethnic and religious” factors. At least in part inspired by Benson’s findings in New York, other historians pursued the study of the relationship between voting behavior and ethnocultural and religious factors by examining, for example, political behavior in Michigan during the Jacksonian era, the Midwest and Northeast during the 1890s, and Chicago in the early twentieth century. While the emphasis upon the importance of ethnocultural and religious factors in voting has engendered some criticism and dissent, it seems fair to conclude that this approach to the study of the voting process has produced significant work that has substantially influenced interpretations of American political history.

It is commonly asserted that Chinese diets before the market and production reforms of the 1980s contained little or no meat. Yet this nearly universal assumption remains untested: Unlike other forms of material consumption, the question of meat in Chinese diets has received almost no systematic attention from historians. Focusing on the early twentieth century, this article examines who in China ate meat, and how meat consumption was shaped by regional and household patterns. It combines insights from three sorts of data. First, Japanese price surveys from the 1920s show a high degree of variation in the preference for one type of meat over others, and the price availability of meat versus wages or other food products. Second, production data, including slaughterhouse tallies and industry estimates of animal by-products show the seasonality of animal slaughter and the vast scale and dispersed geography of China’s livestock production. Finally, nutrition and diet studies from the 1920 to the late 1940s examine actual household consumption, emphasizing how social forces and cyclical fortunes shaped individual choices. The composite picture from these three perspectives confirms that China’s meat consumption was hardly inconsequential. But more than simply triangulating a result, the exercise of comparing perspectives of price, production, and nutrition also highlights the collection of survey data as a series of historical moments.

To argue that the future was (re-)invented in the 1970s and the 1980s might seem especially puzzling in light of arguments that the optimism associated with utilitarian, modernization, and socialist theories withered at the time amidst widespread debate over a variety of “crises.” Nonetheless, it was in this peculiar constellation that ideas of the future became fundamentally renegotiated. “New risks” were juxtaposed with prevailing older ideas of social security that were predicated on individual and collective risk management. Focusing on West Germany, this article examines the various technical and political debates over “gaps” in terms of the finances, demographics, and trust in the system of social policy, which helped to put technical and political diagnoses of “new risks” squarely on the political agenda. This demographic argument is of particular interest, as it dramatized the unintended side effects of older social policy and created new, dystopian future scenarios of total systemic breakdown. At times, however, these discussions about managing the risks associated with Germany's demographic future verged on the utopian. New concepts of governmentality and biopolitics prevailed in this context. Moreover, pragmatic and sometimes technocratic concepts of new “governance” (and thus risk management) were proposed by social scientists and politicians as a means to address anxieties about the demographic future, and new models of risk-taking and risk-managing individuals also flourished at the time. With their descriptive but also prescriptive features, these theories contributed to ongoing academic efforts to explain the present and the future in terms of risk.

Historians and social scientists have relied on contemporaneous textual accounts to document African American mobility in the immediate aftermath of emancipation after the Civil War, but they have interpreted them in widely varying ways. Some emphasize large-scale migration across the South, while others suggest that most movements were local and limited. This research tracks the early or “first wave” of African American migrants between 1865 and 1867 within and out of the South in an attempt to map the motion taking place after the war and to document the scale, direction, and intensity of African American mobility in the period between 1865 and 1867. The Freedmen's Bureau records indicate certain kinds of movements within the South, while our census methodology shows that there was more movement out of the South than accounted for in the Freedmen's Bureau labor records or previously accounted for in the historiography. Further, we observe two types of movement: short-term migration based on one-year contracts, perhaps returning to the point of origin, and another movement not always mediated through the Freedmen's Bureau that was more long term, but also subject to the freedperson's return to the point of origin. We seek to chart the process of emancipation over time and across space, detecting spatial patterns on an otherwise highly variable individual experience. No study has used the Freedmen's Bureau labor contracts to trace African American labor movements, and no study has deployed the 1880 individual census data to examine African American migration based on birthplace cohorts.

There is a growing body of literature exploring the relationship between regulated professions and the state. Research has shown that the state is the key source of power for professions, and it has suggested that professions may support and assist state agencies and actors in many ways. Although studies have documented changing state-profession relations across region and era and recent research points to significant change in the regulation of some professions in the past decade or two, there remains much that we do not know about the changing nature of professional regulation over time. In this article I examine professional regulation in four Canadian provinces between 1867 and 1961. The findings reveal distinct eras of professional regulation and definite differences in who is regulated and how over time. There are many more regulated professions toward the end of the period, they are more closely regulated by the state, and their relationships to each other are more closely delineated. The implications for our understanding of state-profession relations over time are discussed.

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.

Historically, the departure of children from the parental home was an important economic and social phenomenon. Because it was equivalent to establishing a new residence, the decision to leave is relevant to our understanding of the history of migration. Leaving home was also a milestone in the life cycle that typically signaled a transition from semidependence to greater economic and social responsibility on the part of the individual, a change that affected labor force participation, family income, expenditures on housing, schooling or training, socialization, and interaction among siblings. In turn, couples considered these implications in formulating fertility goals and strategies.