In this article I consider the issues of temporality and periodization in the ancient Near East under three rubrics: how modern scholars have periodized ancient Near Eastern history, how societies of the ancient Near East periodized their own history, and, more broadly, how they conceptualized the temporal dimensions of their world and mapped themselves onto time. In each case I illustrate the issue with a selection of examples, which in no way represent comprehensive coverage. Under the last rubric, I focus on Sumer and Akkad.

Early in 1944 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified Local 22 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) as the bargaining agent for manufacturing workers at the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The local was built and largely sustained by the collective actions of African Americans, especially women, who quickly made it the primary institutional locus advancing the racial aspirations of Winston-Salem's black working class. Operating the largest tobacco manufacturing facility in the world and employing a workforce of 12,000, none unionized (Tilley 1948, 1985), RJR vigorously fought the local from its inception.

Ernest George Ravenstein’s influential “laws of migration” argued that short-distance and within-country moves were typically dominated by women. We use census microdata to take a fresh look at the relationship between gender and internal migration in late nineteenth-century Europe and North America. We argue that there was a significant flaw in Ravenstein’s key finding on gender and that this flaw has implications for more recent scholarship of the long-term “feminization of migration.” The apparent overrepresentation of women among internal migrants was due not to their higher propensity to move but to the much higher rate at which male migrants left the population, through either death or emigration. Men were just as likely to make internal moves as women were; the difference was that men did not remain in the population to be counted when the decennial census was conducted. Like Ravenstein’s “laws of migration,” this article relies primarily on data from the 1881 census of England and Wales. Whereas Ravenstein’s work was constrained by the contents of tables published by the UK Census Office in the 1880s, we are able to ask new questions by analyzing individual-level data files recently made available by the North Atlantic Population Project.

Historical social mobility research has played an important part in the coming-of-age of “the new social history” as an active arena for empirical social research. The contribution of this social mobility research tradition can be traced in part to its success in providing three critical elements that lie at the heart of most coherent social science research traditions. These critical elements include the following: 1) the identification of important substantive questions that are susceptible to empirical analysis; 2) the identification of data sources that can provide empirical information relevant to these questions, and 3) the provision of a set of methodological operations and research practices that link substantive questions to the results of empirical analysis. The importance of Thernstrom’s (1964, 1973) landmark works on historical mobility in providing these fundamental elements is reflected in the widespread adoption of his research design by subsequent empirical studies of occupational mobility in historical settings.

Scholarship demonstrated the major role of inheritance and kinship for elite’s power reproduction, particularly among noble families. In the absence of monarchic and court structures, ruling classes that enjoyed privileges and engaged in social closure could become the functional equivalent of a nobility. In this paper, we examine the evolution of the power of Swiss patrician families in the three major Swiss cities (Basel, Geneva, and Zurich) since the end of the nineteenth century and assess whether urban oligarchies endure in the twentieth century and what role kinship ties play in the reproduction of power structures. Building on a systematic database of 5,199 urban elites who hold power positions in the main economic, political, academic, and cultural institutions, we describe the evolution of Swiss patrician families between 1890 and 1957. Using social network, kinship, and sequence analysis, we provide a comprehensive investigation of the Swiss patrician elite’s evolution at both the individual and the family level. Our analyses show a general decline of patrician families’ presence in urban positions of power, however with significant variations according to both the cities and the spheres of activity. Furthermore, we identify distinct trajectories of families who have either lost their access to power positions, managed to access again or have remained in urban power positions according to different survival strategies. Beyond the Swiss case, we contribute to the literature on power and kinship through an interdisciplinary approach combining historical and sociological perspectives.

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.

This paper examines the discursive production of risk and its management in the German “enlightenment film” of the interwar period. From the sexual enlightenment films of the immediate postwar era to the Nazi-era sterilization films, public health campaigns mobilized new ideas about hygiene and the new resources of the mass media. Depicting a world composed of discrete risks (venereal disease, hereditary illness), on the one hand, and supplying information on how to manage such risks, on the other, public officials and experts invested considerable resources in this project of public education. Yet insofar as this project addressed controversial aspects of human behavior, and often proposed controversial solutions, this campaign of state-sponsored enlightenment remained an ambivalent one. Particularly in campaigns against venereal disease, leading advocates were frequently drawn into debates both about film's value as medium of mass instruction and the nature of the public they sought to address, a public perceived in fundamental ways as “at risk.” Their efforts routinely provoked charges that enlightenment films on sexual conduct could incite the very behaviors they strove to warn audiences against. By the end of the 1920s, the hopes placed in public enlightenment campaigns seemed to have waned. And yet the enlightenment film underwent a significant revival during the Nazi era. The paper concludes by examining the interconnections between the Nazis' reconceptualization of public enlightenment, risk, and strategies for managing it.

The Nazi ghetto system was one of the principal vehicles for the persecution of Jewish and other peoples in German-occupied Europe in World War II. Transport and confinement—twin pillars of the ghetto system—were intrinsically geographical matters that operated on scales from the international to the local and that shaped the demographic and epidemiological character of ghettos across Eastern Europe. This article uses geographical techniques of map-based visualization and spatial analysis to portray the demographic and epidemic history of the Nazi “model” camp-ghetto at Theresienstadt (Terezín) in the former German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1941–45. Our study reconstructs the space-time pattern and demographic structure of transports of Jewish prisoners to the ghetto and their association with substantial outbreaks of communicable diseases in the ghetto. The study highlights the importance of a geographical approach to an understanding of the demographic and public health impacts of both the Holocaust and other genocidal events.

In the years following the end of Reconstruction lynching became a favored method of White supremacist terror in the US South. Despite presidential efforts to quell racist violence in the 1870s, throughout the 1880s, presidents tended to ignore lynchings, and northern newspapers legitimized lynchings as a form of “rough justice.” Over time, however, presidents began to denounce lynchings, and northern newspapers began to argue that lynching shamed the United States before the “civilized world.” Scholars disagree, however, on both when and why the presidency and newspapers began to oppose lynching. We show that the lynching of Italian nationals catalyzed opposition to lynching from both the presidency and national newspapers starting in 1891. Using new data from across the United States, Great Britain, and Italy, we trace the political impact of the lynching of Italians. Lynchings of Italians brought immediate political pressure from the Italian embassy and generated broad international condemnation of the lynching of Italians in the United States. Ida B. Wells exploited this international outrage on her 1894 British tour to draw international attention to the lynching of Black Americans. International condemnation led presidents that were sensitive to their international reputation to denounce lynching, first of Italians, but later of Black victims. Our account dates the rise of antilynching politics earlier than accounts that focus on Ida B. Wells’s British tour of 1894, or the NAACP’s antilynching campaign post–World War I.

This paper takes, as its starting point, Preston and Haines’ observation in Fatal Years that social class was the most important influence on infant and child mortality in England and Wales in the early twentieth century. A subsequent study suggested that this could in part be due to the spatial distribution of the different classes across different types of place, and that some of the mortality differences by social class might actually reflect the contextual effects of healthy and unhealthy places. Although this line of argument has received a considerable amount of attention in health geography literature, it has rarely been examined for a specific historic period, and then only within particular urban areas. In this paper, we apply multi-level models to a complete count individual-level dataset of the 1911 census of England and Wales, comparing influences on infant and child mortality at the level of the individual couple and for two spatial levels. We find that although most variation in infant and child mortality operates at the individual level, there is also important variation at the two spatial levels and part of the mortality differences between social classes is better explained by the areas in which people lived rather than by their social class. A consideration of independent variables at all three levels suggests that different spatial scales capture different sorts of influences on early age mortality.

During the violent early years of China’s Cultural Revolution, the province of Guangxi experienced by far the largest death toll of any comparable region. One explanation for the extreme violence emphasizes a process of collective killings focused on households in rural communities that were long categorized as class enemies by the regime. From this perspective, the high death tolls were generated by a form of collective behavior reminiscent of genocidal intergroup violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, and similar settings. Evidence from investigations conducted in China in the 1980s reveals the extent to which the killings were part of a province-wide suppression of rebel insurgents, carried out by village militia, who also targeted large numbers of noncombatants. Guangxi’s death tolls were the product of a counterinsurgency campaign that more closely resembled the massacres of communists and suspected sympathizers coordinated by Indonesia’s army in wake of the coup that deposed Sukarno in 1965.

While much of the federal Department of Justice’s policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from the 1880s and 1890s, the Indian Territories was the site of some of the most aggressive policing in the nation’s history. Specifically, a series of reforms in US-Indian relations permitted a high level of federal involvement in policing and the management of local order. Using original demographic data on US deputy marshals and criminal gangs active in the Indian Territories, as well as an analysis of media coverage of Oklahoma crime, this article shows that this explosion of state-building was due, in part, to the ways in which kinship rules in Oklahoma allowed racially ambiguous inhabitants to be castigated as “outlaws.” This, in turn, opened up space for the federal marshal apparatus—which was primarily white—to expand its role as the purveyors of local law and order in a manner that had never been possible in the South.

The Gilded Age was a tumultuous period for US labor and capital: the labor movement grew in size and intensity, strikes mushroomed, and women’s labor force and strike participation grew in tandem. Yet little is known about how women’s participation influenced strike efficacy. On the one hand, women may have added numerical force, militant energy for gendered solidarity and therefore contributed to strike success. On the other hand, women’s participation may have hindered the cause by delegitimizing it or by producing harmful internal factionalism. In this article, we ask: How did women’s participation in Gilded Age strikes influence strike success? We use a unique data source to test the impact of women’s participation relative to men on the success of every strike that took place in the Northeastern United States from 1881 to 1886. We find that striking gender composition ratios matter and are reflected in a nonlinear pattern: for male-dominated and female-dominated strikes, greater numbers of female strikers reduce the chances of success. However, when gender composition approaches approximate parity, the effect of female strikers enhances strike success. We suggest that in approximate proportional parity range, women were more likely to participate and also be taken more seriously by male co-workers. We supplement quantitative findings with qualitative accounts from specific strikes. Our findings have important implications for diversity in contentious collective action in general and strike success in particular.

Economic history, as a combination of two disciplines, has had a rather curious evolution. This is indicated both by looking at its checkered academic development in the United States, and by contrasting its evolution in the United States with that in England and elsewhere. Whereas in England and most European countries economic history is regarded as a separate discipline, with its own departments and professors, such an academic separation does not exist in the United States. Here, reflecting the dual nature of the subject, economic historians can be found in either history departments or in economics departments, and the nature of academic specialization often means they teach two distinct student bodies, with infrequent communication across disciplinary lines. Separatist tendencies have seemed more pronounced in the past two decades, when there was a marked change in the study of economic history in the United States, a change that has also affected other sub disciplines of history: quantification and model-building have spread into many areas of historical study. But in some measure this movement in economics reflects the recent tendency for economic historians to come from economics, rather than from history departments. Since the causes of the change seem, in part, peculiar to the United States, what I say about recent tendencies in the field may not fully reflect developments in other countries, although there seem to be similar trends emerging, albeit with some lags, in England and elsewhere in Europe.

Recent research in American urban history has given us a polarized view of the social order of nineteenth-century cities. At one extreme the studies of urban spatial and social mobility have revealed a restless shifting population of individuals moving through the city attached by little more than a brief term of employment. “American society…,” concluded one such mobility study, “was more like a procession than a stable social order. How did this social order cohere at all?” To a large extent the answer to this question has come from another body of studies which have reexamined a variety of institutions from police to public schools and found them to be part of a broad effort among Protestant middle-class leaders to bring control and order to this strange new urban world. The new research on mobility and social control has enlarged our understanding of American social history in many important ways, however, our emphasis on mobility and the mechanisms of coercive social control may obscure the social order that citizens of nineteenth-century communities defined for themselves.

Any communicable disease that strikes urban populations poses difficult problems for public health officials. First, treatment in the early stages of these diseases may be based primarily on guesswork; before the etiology of the disease is fully known, public health officials are often prompted by public fear to take action to curb and treat the disease (Terris, 1985). Second, even when effective treatments have been identified, these may be politically costly. When dealing with communicable diseases, responsible public health professionals have at times concluded that measures such as quarantine, mass screening, or mandatory reporting of the disease are necessary. Mandatory reporting of previous sexual partners by carriers of any sexually transmitted diseases may prove embarrassing or destructive to an individual’s business or social life. In the face of such threats, individuals who face such measures may mount political campaigns against them, making them risky for public health officials. Third, even when effective treatments are known, they may be very expensive to administer and may tax existing public facilities (hospitals, clinics) and funding for public health.

Between 1956 and 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) operated five counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) designed to repress a range of threats to the status quo. This article examines more than twelve thousand pages of memos related to FBI programs against white hate groups (mostly the Ku Klux Klan) and the New Left in an effort to gain insight into the Bureau's repression of left- and right- wing targets. The article's goals are both general and historically specific: First, to introduce a two-dimensional typology to organize and categorize repressive acts generally and then to use this typology to examine the patterning of repressive acts across the COINTELPROs. This approach allows for the uncovering of distinct overarching strategies applied to left- versus right-wing targets. These strategies are emergent in the sense that they are not apparent from a textual analysis of Bureau memos or through a comparison of the outcomes of each COINTELPRO. Recognition of these emergent strategies provides insight into the complex, ambiguous relationship that the FBI had with both the civil rights movement and the Klan.

The purpose of this article is to add critical expansion and empirical correction to the thinking about critical elections in American history in general and the New Deal realignment in particular. There will be first a discussion of critical realignment theory, in which some of its ambiguities with regard to the relationship of voting turnout to realignment will be explored. Next, some propositions derived from this literature will be tested in an effort to correct the theory and eliminate the ambiguities. Aggregate data from presidential and congressional elections, 1912-1940, in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the city of Pittsburgh, will be employed in this effort.

In general, it will be argued that, when fluctuations in turnout are taken into account, the electoral changes preceding 1940 are at least as correctly described by the term “mobilization” as by the term “realignment.” Finally, some observations will be offered on the future of critical election theory.

Lodging was once common. In 1900 about one-quarter of U.S. households contained a lodger or lodging family. Almost as many more took one in at some point in the life of the household. Since then, rising incomes have enabled more people to maintain their own household. Today, lodging is quite rare and is confined largely to the poor.

A good deal has been written about lodging, mostly by social historians concerned with its implications for daily life. We have been told that lodiging was part of the immigrant experience, that it helped even out household income over the life cycle, that it augmented the clout of women within the household, and that in larger cities it supported a subculture among single men and women (Modell and Hareven 1973).

Sex preference has long been an issue in both mortality and fertility studies. In mortality studies, higher mortality rates for girls than boys have been documented in many regions of the world, especially in South Asia (Waldron 1983). These studies suggest that the patriarchal family system puts more value on male offspring than female offspring and that this valuation determines such mortality patterns (Das Gupta 1987; Levine 1987). Recent studies examining this process of discrimination have found that family composition is a major intervening mechanism (Simmons et al. 1982; Muhuri and Preston 1991). The Japanese family system is especially useful for examining these patterns. It is characterized as a stem family system, similar to other Asian countries in its patriarchal lineage but different in its possibility of female inheritance. Under a stem family system, a son typically inherits the household, but a daughter can also inherit when there are no sons. Despite the uniqueness of the Japanese family system, little attention has been paid to the mortality pattern of children in Japan relative to those in other Asian countries. Evidence is mixed regarding sex-selective practice in early modern Japan (Smith 1977; Hayami 1992; Saito 1992b).