When an unprecedented and unanticipated downturn strikes a community, resources from disparate sources combine to aid those harmed by the distress. Today as in the past, public and private sources coordinate relief efforts, and the persistence of distress beyond that which had been anticipated and provided for by insurance brings in resources from outside the community. However, it is possible to crowd out a resource when the efforts of one source decrease the efforts of another. Modern research documents public welfare crowding out private charity (see, for example, Abrams and Schmitz 1978), and this also occurred in the past. Exploring this kind of concern, the present article highlights aspects of income assistance that played a role during the Lancashire cotton famine (1861-65).

Welfare ministries are key institutions of modern nation-states. However, we still lack knowledge about when and why national welfare ministries were established. In this paper, we argue that both the First and Second world wars were major driving forces behind the establishment of independent welfare ministries. To test our argument, we introduce a novel dataset on the establishment of welfare-related ministries in 30 countries. Our empirical findings suggest that the establishment of independent welfare ministries was a product of wartime turbulence and the political, economic and social shockwaves set off especially by World War I, which affected many countries at the same time. Considering alternative explanations such as the Spanish Flu, the Bolshevik Revolution or the emergence of new nation-states, we argue that war triggered multiple, interrelated and chronologically staggered transnational events and transformations that had major effects on the social welfare systems of the countries involved. In this light, we conclude that World War I was ultimately the root cause behind the establishment of welfare ministries.

The 1920s American prohibition of alcohol is notorious but not unique. Many countries experienced similar struggles. However, none went through such a protracted struggle as New Zealand, the only country to hold nationwide referendums on prohibition at every general election for almost eight decades from 1911 to 1987. Indeed, if the majority threshold of its first referendum in 1911 had been set at 50 percent instead of at 60 percent, New Zealand would have been the very first country in the world to become prohibitionist. In our empirical analysis, we focus on the first five of those referendums, held from 1911 to 1922, because the 1910s was the most critical period when the fight between Drys and Wets reached its highest intensity. We first investigate how the different referendum designs influenced voting patterns. This is possible because the district-level referendum results present rare features such as the participation rate by gender in 1911, the identification of the military votes in the two referendums of 1919, the option of prohibition with compensation in 1919, and from 1919, the addition of a state-control regime as a third option. Second, we estimate the effect of the main determinants of voting preferences identified in the historical and sociological literature on temperance and prohibition. Our results confirm the influence of two factors: (1) Evangelicals were more likely to be supporters of a total ban whereas Anglicans and Catholics were more moderate and (2) women were more likely to vote Dry.

This article examines a place utility model of how destination assets influenced inmigration for the 1950s African American urban system. Archival and historiographical data are combined with census data to conduct weighted least-squares regressions that compare economic, ethnogenic, and other place utilities. Despite declines in migrant selectivity and net southern out-migration, ethnogenic characteristics increased the size of in-migrant streams during the 1950s, net of the momentum from prior migration and, most important, net of economic and demographic place utilities. Even as several dramatic changes began or intensified during the period, ethnogenic attractions continued to shape destination selection during this “bridge” decade of civil rights–era migration.

To many historians, and to most of their students, the question of the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon the poor of Britain has become confused, an arcane debate of ever greater statistical complexity. This is a pity, for “the most sustained single controversy in British economic history” still has, and should have, the capacity to excite and rouse the imagination, as it did for those who began, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Condition of England debate (Mathias, 1975: vii; Taylor, 1975: xi). For Friedrich Engels, Edwin Chadwick, John Stuart Mill, or Lord Shaftesbury, and for many who as government inspectors or members of local statistical societies provided the evidence, the condition of the working classes was something tangible, to be seen in the streets of Manchester or London, demonstrated in the faces and bodies of the artisans and laborers who walked those streets and worked in the workshops and factories. The moral outrage felt by Engels, Chadwick, Shaftesbury, Barnardo, and many others in the nineteenth century came from the sight not only of squalid living conditions but of the malnourished bodies of the poor themselves.

Some eight or nine years ago, David Nixon—a political scientist from Penn State University—was struck by the open dumping of industrial wastes into Pittsburgh’s rivers. Research on the topic indicated that under terms of the River and Harbor Refuse Act of 1899, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintained responsibility for issuing permits to private concerns for the discharge of wastes into the nation’s waterways. The Act had also been successfully employed by the Justice Department in prosecuting a handful of past offenders. When the Corps’ district office in Pittsburgh denied any knowledge about such permits, David and a biologist friend began taking water samples from the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. Subsequent chemical analyses of more than 400 samples verified the polluted condition of the stream caused by certain industrial sources. Upon taking his evidence to the district U.S. Attorney’s office, David Nixon persuaded Richard Thornburgh to file charges which were upheld by the federal district court in 1971—although final resolution would not come until years later. The suit eventually involved the Pennsylvania Chemical Corporation, U.S. Steel, Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, and Jones & Laughlin Steel, but David Nixon’s goal was to induce the government to enforce clear violations of existing law. In that regard, President Richard Nixon revived enforcement of the 1899 Refuse Act by Executive Order in December, 1971, and the “permit program” became the basis of enforcement for compliance with the Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. For more than 20 years prior to 1971, federal efforts to abate water pollution struggled to find some means to enforce compliance and in the process expended well over a billion dollars, without any apparent knowledge of the 1899 law.

Throughout his distinguished career, Herbert Gutman has displayed a rare genius for dredging up the most gloriously obscure historical evidence and deriving from it new perspectives on the largest themes. The Black Family is another triumph of this kind: my awe of Professor Gutman’s energy and insight is enhanced by this volume. At the same time, Gutman makes clear that the volume is not demographic in its intent. Since my commentary is to be from a demographic perspective, I will take particular pains to direct this perspective to the purposes Gutman sets forth in The Black Family. These are identified by the author as discerning “what sustained common slave beliefs and behavior,” rather than merely documenting “regularities in behavior,” the latter being Gutman’s characterization of the results of the application of quantitative methods (1976). My task, then, is to examine the links that Gutman establishes between demographic argument and explanation, in his sense, and to assess their adequacy. No demographer, I suspect, would have undertaken the kind of investigation Gutman assays; but demographic skills would have served Gutman’s intentions. I will here try to be severe with this imposing volume, recognizing the importance and aptness of its central thesis, and the audacity of its author’s empirical reach, but questioning the adequacy of his demography to his own ends.

On New Year’s Day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in much of the South. Lincoln’s act transformed the Civil War from a sectional rebellion to a war of liberation. Although the proclamation’s immediate legal effect was minimal, since it touched only those areas still resisting Union authority, its political effect was far reaching and dramatic. With a single stroke of his pen, Lincoln ensured that the Union victory would create a new class of citizens, the freedmen, numbering well over 3 million. Almost all of these new citizens were landless and destitute. Despite their new legal status, they were faced at the war’s end with a social structure that regarded them as inferior, treating them with contempt at best and with violent fury at worst. In emancipating the slaves and overturning the economic and social basis of southern society, the federal government shouldered the responsibility of finishing what it had begun, making the freedmen citizens.

Montreal in 1881 was highly segregated along four distinct social dimensions: language, religion, socioeconomic status, and sector of employment. By 1901 the population had doubled, and we examine changes in residential distributions over the two decades. Despite the increased integration of certain groups, segregation remains high, and multiple dimensions are still discernible. In addition to long-established communities of French Canadians, Irish Catholics, and Anglo-Protestants, we see new streams of immigrants occupying their own patches in the urban fabric. To make meaningful observations of sociospatial changes over two decades, we used a geographic information system (GIS) to situate individual census households with spatial precision on 1 of 12,000 lots in 1881 and 30,000 in 1901, so that we could reaggregate them into meaningful districts of different scales and districts with identical boundaries for both years of observation, thereby overcoming the major methodological problems hindering previous comparative analyses. Coupling well-established statistical indexes of segregation and diversity in a GIS framework lends new analytic power to grasp the scale of phenomena and inquire into behavioral choices of nineteenth-century households. The empirical evidence shows how both concentration and diversity were built into the urban fabric. This study also offers methodological cues for comparative studies in other places and periods.

Population aging in France in the nineteenth century concerned mainly women, as men's life spans increased only after World War I. The article assesses the impact of this gender-differentiated aging process on wealth distribution, using individual data on bequests collected for the period 1800-1939. Over time, more women died without assets. But those who owned assets were richer. As a result, women's aging contributed both to a more unequal wealth distribution and to narrowing the gender gap between asset owners.

In 1908 Señora Teodora Muñoz Viuda de Trejo, with the assistance of a public scribe, wrote to the city government regarding her business selling cakes on the streets of Mexico City. An inspector for the Department of Slaughterhouses and Markets had recently told her that as a vendor of prepared food she could no longer conduct business on the streets. This directive, if carried out, would have dire consequences for Señora Muñoz Viuda de Trejo.In her fourth letter to municipal authorities she wrote, I have mailed three letters and all without a favorable outcome. Today that circumstances compel me, I have made myself vulnerable once again to scorn, but a secret voice tells me to have faith. … Señor Governor, I have been a vendor of cakes since Señor Benito Juárez governed, then Señor Lerdo de Tejada came to power; and I continued making a living without interruption after our current president rose to power. I didn’t meet with any set-backs until three years ago when they took from me three licenses with which I supported myself. … I suffer an ailment of my arms; eight months ago I lost my only daughter who supported me, and she left me with three orphaned children—you see, she was widowed. And so, finding myself in this situation I am obliged to plead to the father of us the poor, that he concede what would be for me a fortune, that I be allowed to sell my cakes, and God will compensate you for this act of nobility. Your humble servant, Teodora Muñoz Viuda de Trejo.(AHCM 1910. 1735: 777)

Between 1935 and 1940, President Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico mobilized a populist coalition in support of land reform, workers’ rights, and a more inclusive political system. For years, scholars either ignored the crucial role of the Mexican Communist Party (Partido Comunista Mexicano [PCM]) in Cardenismo, or considered it a tool used and then discarded by the emerging national state (Shulgovski 1968; Anguiano 1975; Ianni 1977). Recently, Barry Carr’s monumental study (1992) of the ambiguous relationship between the PCM and the Mexican state argued convincingly that Cárdenas relied on the party to mobilize popular forces, while never incorporating either the PCM or Communist ideology into his project. Much less is known of Mexican Communism below the national level. Its social base, and its importance on the regional and local levels, remains largely unexplored outside of a few areas (Friedrich 1986: 128; Craig 1990; Carr 1987). Although the southeastern state of Yucatán boasted one of the PCM’s largest and most active regional organizations in the 1930s, and although Yucatán served as a crucial testing ground for Cárdenas’s reforms, the Yucatecan Left and its popular base has yet to be thoroughly examined.

Housing figures prominently during economic crises, a notable example being the Great Depression. Because housing is immobile, its market is very localized. In each city, the main agents are closely interconnected. Lenders depend on mortgaged homeowners and landlords to maintain payments; landlords rely on tenants; municipalities need all property owners to pay taxes. The Depression experiences of tenants, homeowners, and federal housing programs are well-appreciated; those of landlords and private lenders much less so. Considering the role of all agents, this case study of Hamilton, Ontario, focuses on owners and private lenders and asks who lost property, to whom, and how. Drawing on land registry and property tax records, city directories, and newspaper accounts, it documents the pattern and trajectory of defaults experienced by homeowners, landlords, and private lenders. Contemporaries and historians have used foreclosures as a measure of distress, but many borrowers defaulted voluntarily. The experience of Hamilton’s homeowners was similar to those in U.S. cities. Local landlords experienced higher rates of defaults than homeowners; private lenders foreclosed less often than lending institutions. Along with municipalities, both learned to be flexible in demanding payments. The high incidence of private mortgages, the stability of lending institutions, and the marginal role of the federal government were distinctively Canadian, but in general Hamilton’s experience is more broadly indicative.

Using case pattern analysis, this study examines Catholic male workforce trends in the majority Catholic countries of Chile, Ireland, and Poland. Employing denominational data for three categories of church male professionals in the 1950–2010 time period, I document four important trends. First, ordinations to the diocesan priesthood in Ireland went into decline especially after Vatican II, have been relatively stable in Chile with only a moderate increase in the 1990s, and spiked in Poland in the 1980s, 20 years after Vatican II. Second, in all three countries the average defection rate among diocesan seminarians increased in the 2000s compared with the earlier two decades. Third, the religious priest workforce has declined in Chile, has been relatively stable in Ireland until the 2000s, and is growing in Poland. Fourth, from the late 1960s there has been a decline in the workforce of religious brothers in each country, especially in Ireland. The theoretical contribution to the Catholic workforce literature is discussed in terms of a critical events argument emphasizing the impact of Vatican II, prophetic stances, sexual scandals, and papal visits on labor market trends. I conclude with implications for the study of religion and society in general.

Traditionally it is assumed that “modern” civil society originated in the associations, clubs, and public sphere of the eighteenth century as a result of the “liberation” of the individual from the “shackles” of absolutism, religious intolerance, and the patriarchal family. However, recent research goes further back in time. Scholars such as Robert Putnam (sociologist), Antony Black (political scientist), and Katherine Lynch (historian) associate the origins of civil society with the heyday of confraternities and guilds in the late Middle Ages. This has serious consequences for our understanding of the characteristics and functions of civil society. Given that confraternities were permeated by religious devotion and crafts were inextricably bound to the (often undemocratic) political establishment, fundamental questions arise about the importance of religion in civil society and the role of associations in the political participation of individuals. This article suggests that several long-term trends can be observed when broaching civil society from the perspective of guilds (or brotherhoods). In early modern guilds, the fraternal ideals related to mutual aid and equality appear to have gradually disappeared. Craft guilds stopped being “brotherhoods” and “substitute families” and transformed into formal and bureaucratic juridical institutions, while retreating into a sphere separate from household and family.

This article proposes a methodology to address the urban evolutionary process, demonstrating how it is reflected in literature. It focuses on “literary space,” presented as a territory defined by the period setting or as evoked by the characters, which can be georeferenced and drawn on a map. It identifies the different locations of literary space in relation to urban development and the economic, political, and social context of the city. We suggest a new approach for mapping a relatively comprehensive body of literature by combining literary criticism, urban history, and geographic information systems (GIS). The home-range concept, used in animal ecology, has been adapted to reveal the size and location of literary space. This interdisciplinary methodology is applied in a case study to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels involving the city of Lisbon. The developing concepts of cumulative literary space and common literary space introduce size calculations in addition to location and structure, previously developed by other researchers. Sequential and overlapping analyses of literary space throughout time have the advantage of presenting comparable and repeatable results for other researchers using a different body of literary works or studying another city. Results show how city changes shaped perceptions of the urban space as it was lived and experienced. A small core area, correspondent to a part of the city center, persists as literary space in all the novels analyzed. Furthermore, the literary space does not match the urban evolution. There is a time lag for embedding new urbanized areas in the imagined literary scenario.

Historical inequality is difficult to measure, especially at the subcountry level and beyond the top income shares. This article presents new evidence on the level of inequality in Manhattan from 1880 to 1910 using housing rents. Rental prices and characteristics, including geocodable locations, were collected from newspapers and provide extensive geographic coverage of the island, relevant for the overwhelming majority of its population where renting predominated. This provides a measure of consumption inequality at the household level, which helps to develop the picture of urban inequality for this period, when income and wealth measures are scarce. For large American cities, but particularly for New York, housing made up a large share of consumption expenditure and its consumption cannot be substituted, so this is a reliable and feasible way to identify the true trends in urban inequality across space and time.

This article explores labor transnationalism in the Brazilian auto sector. It argues that industrial structure, state institutions and practices, and labor ideologies affect the form and frequency of labor transnationalism. In Brazil in the 1980s, labor transnationalism was mostly limited to information exchange and occasional economic support, and political pressure in the form of letters of solidarity from foreign unionists. By the 1990s, when Brazil opened itself to world trade in the auto sector by dramatically lowering tariffs and domestic content requirements, labor began to pursue new strategies. Yet while facing similar challenges in the same industry and at times within the same corporation, unions of opposing political tendencies pursued different strategies. Conservative unions responded to economic globalization by deepening their ties with the government and the business sector, while left-oriented unions increasingly made use of new forms of transnational actions. By the early 2000s, in Ford and Volkswagen, solutions to labor conflicts were achieved after Brazilian auto unionists traveled to the headquarters of the auto firms in Detroit and Wolfsburg and negotiated directly with corporate headquarters.

Joyce Burnette's (2008) book investigates why women earned lower wages and had different occupations than men during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Of more relevance in the present is why women often have lower earnings than and work in different occupations from men today. The answers from the past and present have some similarity, but the differences are considerably greater. The world of “brawn” jobs was transformed by technological change and sectoral shifts into a world of “brain” jobs. I will first address the question posed in the book and will end with that concerning today.