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.

Not so long ago the skilled worker was regarded by labor historians as the black sheep of the labor movement, and the artisan's attempt to preserve his position and to retain his shop-floor autonomy was condemned out of hand. No more. Spurred on by the studies of E. P. Thompson in England, Albert Soboul in France, and George Rudé in both countries, historians have discovered the skilled worker's importance in labor protest and rebellion; everywhere artisans have been found in the midst of what once were thought to be proletarian crowds. The continuing inspiration of Thompson, Soboul, and Rudé is apparent in all of the articles in this collection, although they are by no means simple reiterations of these historians’ insights. Viewing working-class life from the perspective of an entire century and two continents, the following essays suggest new generalizations and, inevitably, raise fresh questions.

Two political cartoons from the 1905 Chicago Tribune portrayed how some elements in society viewed the rise of a powerful Teamsters Union.On 29 April 1905, the front page cartoon depicted a husky teamster engaged in a sympathetic strike while the caption read, “The Dictator in His Old Act of Blocking Commerce” (Figure 1). A month later, on 3 June 1905, a cartoon played on the coincidence of the June 1905 uprising in Russia and a grand jury investigation of Teamster strike leaders in Chicago. The title caption read, “The Grand Dukes of Russia and the Grand Dukes of Chicago” (Figure 2). Both cartoons emphasized the theme of irresponsible power—either that of a dictatorship or of an unprincipled grand duke. Teamster leaders were tyrants, these images said.The sphere in which this irresponsible power was wielded extended beyond the realm of union affairs, and the relay the true menace conveyed by these images.They asserted that Teamster leaders held it in their power to stop the flow of business activity in Chicago.

The introduction of the Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR) in 1930 remains one of the most important events in the history of criminal statistics in the United States. Based on local police reports, it is the oldest extant national crime data system in the United States, with the possible exception of prison statistics. It continues to be a vitally important data system because of its extensive use by scholars, social critics, governmental organizations and the media, and as such it has made a major contribution to our understanding of crime in the United States in the last half century. The UCR has also had its share of controversy, involving not only scientific issues of validity and reliability, but the possibility of covert agendas on the part of the police and the FBI to foster an image of effective law enforcement. Despite its importance and controversial nature there is no single objective and definitive written history documenting the beginnings of the UCR. That which exists tends to be brief and superficial, and at times even ideologically biased (Leonard 1954; Maltz 1977; Sherman et al. 1982; Thompson 1968; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation 1940).

Although writers like Stephenson (1979) have questioned the assumption, many historians of immigration continue to argue that geographic mobility and levels of working-class consciousness (as expressed in trade unions, strikes, or workers’ political parties) are negatively related. In so arguing, recent studies follow the work of MacDonald and MacDonald, who claim that where migration from Italy was high, labor militance was low (MacDonald, 1963, 1958; MacDonald and MacDonald, 1964). For example, Barton (1975) and Yans-McLaughlin (1977) argue that familist southern and eastern European peasants living in fluid, complex societies were most likely to emigrate to the United States, in hopes of improving their positions in their home villages. Their familism—strong solidarity within the nuclear family and concomitant competitiveness in relations with those outside the nuclear group—discouraged voluntary associations, including participation in workers’ organization both in Italy and in the United States.

Understanding the replacement of soil nutrients removed by harvests makes it possible to understand the influence of humans on long-term soil fertility. This article calculates nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium balances for cropland in 1920 for three agroecoregions distinguished by particular historical settlement patterns, land use, geography, and climatic characteristics in Catalonia, Spain. The analysis assesses and compares the regional potential for farmers to have returned the nutrients extracted from croplands at a time of transition, when only a few synthetic fertilizers were yet available. From sustainability science, the article borrows a methodology to reconstruct soil nutrient balances in historical agroecosystems from available regional historical sources. The soil balances indicate that nutrient extractions were balanced with the additions in Catalonia’s wetter Pyrenees and eastern regions, but were in deficit in the arid western regions, where less livestock manure was available. In Barcelona province, farmers made considerable use of synthetic fertilizers already in 1920. Such fertilizers were mainly intended to supplement phosphorus in the eastern region, suggesting that they played an important role there too, where there was not enough manure.

While quantitative methods are routinely used to examine historical materials, critics take issue with the use of global regression models that attach a single parameter to each predictor, thereby ignoring the effects of time and space, which together define the context in which historical events unfold. This problem can be addressed by allowing for parameter heterogeneity, as highlighted by the proliferation of work on the use of time-varying parameter models. In this article, I show how this approach can be extended to the case of spatial data using spatially varying coefficient models, with an eye toward the study of electoral politics, where the use of spatial data is especially common in historical settings. Toward this end, I revisit a critical case in the field of quantitative history: the rise of electoral Populism in the American West in the period between 1890 and 1896. Upending popular narratives about the correlates of third-party support in the late nineteenth century, I show that the association between third-party vote share and traditional predictors such as economic hardship and ethnic composition varied considerably from one place to the next, giving rise to distinct varieties of electoral Populism—a finding that is missed by global models, which mistake the mathematically particular for the historically general. These findings have important theoretical and empirical implications for the study of political action in a world where parameter heterogeneity is increasingly recognized as a standard feature of modern social science.

The early nineteenth-century decrease in several West Indian slave populations has been a subject of intense interest among historians of the region, of slavery, and of population dynamics (Higman, 1973; Curtin, 1969). Further data on birth rates, death rates, causes of deaths, and quantity and quality of slave importation and migration will help explain the phenomenon of “natural decrease. “The slave registration records of the island of Grenada provide useful information on this piece of demographic history. The records enumerate slave births and deaths and list causes of death, signed by a physician. There are few published reports on death rates and causes of death in West Indian slave populations (Higman, 1973; Handler and Lange, 1978; Roberts, 1952). The purpose of this study is to describe the causes of death, estimate specific death rates, and construct a life-table for slaves in Grenada in 1818.

In state-of-the-field surveys of historical sociology and of historical social science at large, the study of the public sphere is missing. The rise of historical social science has not led to an established tradition of comparative historical research on the public sphere. This article gives an introduction to this topic and to this special issue, seeking to clarify the definition of the object of study and its stakes and providing an overview of analytic and historical dimensions relevant to the comparative historical study of the public sphere. The article argues that this search for an integrative framework is a necessary condition for well-defined comparative historical research, for incorporating the fragmented research from numerous disciplines, and thus for improving our understanding of the historical formation and the transformations of this central sphere of social life.

The goal of this article is to describe and explain the specific strike pattern of American bituminous coal miners in the last part of the nineteenth century (between 1881 and 1894).The central thesis is that the evolution of strike patterns in bituminous coal mining differed substantially from the development of strike patterns in other industries during this period. According to scholars like Gerald Friedman (1988) and Kim Voss (1993), the evolution of the American labor movement until 1886 was strongly determined by the Knights of Labor’s strategy of inclusive unionism, which sought to increase worker power through solidarity and broad-based strikes. As this strategy proved unsuccessful—especially in 1886—American labor unions later conducted a different type of walkout: planned, small strikes of strategically located, skilled workers, which were more successful.

Data quality is a central analytical issue in most studies of historical populations. There is often a need for data correction as well as for a careful consideration of the sources and types of error in data collection. Cross-identification of enumerated or registered events in independent sources often can be used as a check on data quality. This study investigates data quality of two sources by their enumeration comparability and in addition discusses some of the problems with such a comparison. The two sources compared are household listings of the United States manuscript federal censuses and independently prepared maps detailing property owners and the location of their property. The method employed estimates the correspondence of listings in each source based on the other and the combined enumeration correspondence of both sources. Further, this paper examines some of the village-level demographic and economic factors which may be associated with differences in the relative completeness of these sources.

As hand-harvest labor disappeared from the American cotton fields after World War II, labor market dynamics differed between two key production regions, the South and the West. In the South, predominantly resident African Americans and whites harvested cotton, whereas in the West the labor market was composed of white residents, domestic Latino migrant workers, and Mexican nationals temporarily immigrating under the sponsorship of the U.S. government (braceros). We use newly reconstructed data for the two regions and estimate for the first time the regional causes of the demise of the hand-harvest labor force from 1949 to 1964. Whereas cheaper harvest mechanization substantially affected both regions, the downward trend in cotton prices and government programs to control cotton acreage played important roles in the disappearance of hand–harvested cotton in the South, but not in the West.

In attempting to understand more fully the U.S. Supreme Court’s impact on national policymaking, scholars have examined Supreme Court policymaking as part of the “relatively cohesive alliances that endure for long periods of time” (Dahl, 1957: 280). These alliances or “party systems” represent relatively distinctive patterns in the general shape of national policy (Chambers and Burnham, 1975). It is common for historians to characterize the Jacksonian party system of 1828-1860 as a period in American history when national policy was aimed at aiding agrarian interests, or the First and Second Republican party systems in the later part of the nineteenth century as periods when national policy favored the rising industrial and financial interests. The change from one party system to another is the result of a process political scientists and historians have termed “partisan realignment” (Key, 1955). Periods of realignment in American politics are marked by a rapid change in the social and political agenda, which results in a significant and durable change in the party support in the electorate as well as in a significant change in institutional roles and national policy (Burnham, 1970; Jahnige, 1971; Sundquist, 1973; Trilling and Campbell, 1980). The new party balance may give rise to a shift from the dominance of one party to another, or an entirely new party system may develop. A relationship between mass electoral behavior and public policy appears to exist during periods of partisan realignment. The elections that produce this change in the party systems are termed “critical elections.”

The battle between narrative history and social scientific history, which has broken out again in the pages of the American Historical Review, is a new battle of ancients and moderns. Like many battles of the books, it is deeply foolish and tends to bring the reading of books into disrepute.

It is the old battle of the sciences against art, poetry, and the humanities, refought in history as analysis against narrative, model against story, number against word. The official battle was joined in the seventeenth century. Plato banished poets from the Republic, of course, but his notion that science and poetry are adversaries was not taken up in the ancient world. Plato himself wrote poetic prose, Lucretius a few centuries later presented an atomistic physics in poetry, and down to Galileo and beyond the dialogue served science as much as it served comedy and tragedy.

According to the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, modern societies have become increasingly preoccupied with the future and safety and have mobilized themselves in order to manage systematically what they have perceived as “risks” (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). This special section investigates how conceptions of risk evolved in Europe over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the creation and evolution of social policy. The language of risk has, in the past twenty years, become a matter of course in conversations about social policy (Kemshall 2002). We seek to trace how “risk” has served as a heuristic tool for understanding and treating “social problems.” A key aim of this collection is to explore the character of social policy (in the broadest sense) as an instrument (or technology) that both constructs its own objects as the consequences of “risks” and generates new “risks” in the process (Lupton 2004: 33). In this way, social policy typifies the paradox of security: by attempting literally to making one “carefree,” or sē (without) curitās (care), acts of (social) security spur new insecurities about what remains unprotected (Hamilton 2013: 3–5, 25–26). Against this semantic and philological context, we suggest that social policy poses an inherent dilemma: in aiming to stabilize or improve the existing social order, it also acts as an agent of change. This characteristic of social policy is what makes particularly valuable studies that allow for comparisons across time, place, and types of political regime. By examining a range of cases from across Europe over the course of the twentieth century, this collection seeks to pose new questions about the role of the state; ideas about risk and security; and conceptions of the “social” in its various forms.

Finance is often considered a constraining or compelling force in war. This article examines an alternative role of finance in war, asserting that investors can inform states about adversarial intentions and resolve under certain conditions. This signaling mechanism can reduce information asymmetry between states and decrease the probability of conflict. In the context of these theoretical expectations, I examine the case of Austria and the Rothschild Bank in the nineteenth century. I find that instead of being a constraining force on Austrian foreign policy, the Rothschilds helped inform Austria and other European powers during interstate crises. The information provided by the Rothschilds helped Europe avert war in several cases during the nineteenth century.

This article offers the first multivariate regression study of international migration in early modern Europe. Using unique eighteenth-century data about maritime workers, we created a data set of migration flows among European countries to examine the role of factors related to geography, population, language, the market, and chain migration in explaining the migration of these workers across countries. We show that among all factors considered in our multivariate analysis, the geographical characteristics of the destination countries, size of port towns, and past migrations are among the most robust and quantitatively the most important factors influencing cross-country migration flows.

What explains mass party formation? Prevailing approaches explain party formation as a process of reflection of preexisting social constituencies, or as the consequence of the rise of the bureaucratic state and in particular the advent of universal suffrage. These approaches fail to explain why Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) emerged as a mass party in some regions but not others despite attempts to do so and similarity in conditions that have been posited as central to party formation. I put forth a novel approach that posits that parties emerge as mass organization through a process of constitution of the very social base they claim to represent, but their constitutive powers are conditioned by fundamental economic structures. Relying on agrarian censuses and archival data, I show that the PRI emerged as a mass party in areas where land privatization had been more intensive. In these areas the party during its process of formation was able to build new, and absorb existing, peasant unions and organizations and carry out strong electoral mobilization. These findings suggest that mass party formation is dependent on the destruction of “pre”-capitalist agrarian structures.

In agricultural settings, environment shapes patterns of settlement and land use. Using the Great Plains of the United States during the period of its initial Euro-American settlement (1880–1940) as an analytic lens, this article explores whether the same environmental factors that determine settlement timing and land use—those that indicate suitability for crop-based agriculture—also shape initial family formation, resulting in fewer and smaller families in areas that are more conducive to livestock raising than to cropping. The connection between family size and agricultural land availability is now well known, but the role of the environment has not previously been explicitly tested. Descriptive analysis offers initial support for a distinctive pattern of family formation in the western Great Plains, where precipitation is too low to support intensive cropping. However, multivariate analysis using county-level data at 10-year intervals offers only partial support to the hypothesis that environmental characteristics produce these differences. Rather, this analysis has found that the region was also subject to the same long-term social and demographic changes sweeping the rest of the country during this period.