One of Louise Tilly's most widely cited articles was “Women's Work and European Fertility Patterns” (1976), coauthored with Joan Scott and Miriam Cohen. The subject of the article was a major increase in female illegitimacy at the time of the Industrial Revolution, which Tilly regarded as an instance of female vulnerability caused by isolation and urban migration. Surveys of recent writings by American and British historians about this subject suggest the impact of contemporary attitudes toward female sexual autonomy. This literature offers a far more positive portrait of the causes and consequences of female illegitimacy than Tilly provided.

Party leaders and committee chairs are rarely studied side by side. This study takes a step toward resolving that shortcoming by using an approach developed by David Mayhew to content analyze 3,163 original leadership “actions” from the Washington Post to demonstrate how leadership is exercised in the US House before and after the 1970 reforms. Existing studies demonstrate a shift in the locus of power from committee chairs to party leaders. This study details that transformation by illustrating how these leaders operate and reveals a shift in the number and type of leadership maneuvers that capture the essence of the reforms. Mainly, committee chairs were more likely to lead by legislating and party leaders are shown to lead by taking stands. The results also provide comparative evidence that party leaders had a greater connection to the president than chairs.

Peter C. Perdue's China Marches Westargues that the Qing dynasty's ability to break through historical territorial barriers on China's northwestern frontier reflected greater Manchu familiarity with steppe culture than their Chinese predecessors had exhibited, reinforced by superior commercial, technical, and symbolic resources and the benefits of a Russian alliance. Qing imperial expansion illustrated patterns of territorial consolidation apparent as well in Russia's forward movement in Inner Asia and, ironically, in the heroic, if ultimately futile, projects of the western Mongols who fell victim to the Qing. After summarizing Perdue's thesis, this essay extends his comparisons geographically and chronologically to argue that between 1600 and 1800 states ranging from western Europe through Japan to Southeast Asia exhibited similar patterns of political and cultural integration and that synchronized integrative cycles across Eurasia extended from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Yet in its growing vulnerability to Inner Asian domination, China proper—along with other sectors of the “exposed zone” of Eurasia—exemplified a species of state formation that was reasonably distinct from trajectories in sectors of Eurasia that were protected against Inner Asian conquest.

Political Conflict Over the past decade has brought about considerable scholarly attention to public attitudes regarding the rights of women. Some scholars have reexamined the suffrage movement during the progressive era to discover links with such recent developments as the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (McDonagh and Price, 1985).

Ruling Oneself Out is an extremely impressive scholarly achievement at multiple levels. It offers a model of how to identify and pose an important research question; that is, a question worth asking and answering not only because it is intrinsically interesting but also because it is theoretically puzzling and at the same time of great practical significance. Ruling Oneself Out is all this and more.

Ivan Ermakoff (2008) begins by asking about the conditions that lead dominant actors to surrender their power in ways that are likely to undermine their own interests. It is an intriguing question and all the more puzzling because he examines this process in the context of two cases in which the decision to surrender power was reached after a long and public process of deliberation and discussion. Moreover, both cases—the German Reichstag’s passage of the enabling act in March 1933 that gave Adolf Hitler the authority to circumvent the constitution and the transfer of state power to the proponents of an authoritarian and reactionary Vichy regime in the summer of 1940—followed open and democratic decision-making procedures to realize an outcome that would ultimately undermine the commitment to democracy that made those outcomes possible.

Social scientists studying revolutions have increasingly argued that explanations of revolutions that do not include subjective factors, such as culture, are inadequate. The failure to explain the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 is forceful testimony to this inadequacy. But the way in which cultural aspects are being added to existing approaches tends to undermine past advances in studying revolutions. Recent historiography of the French Revolution provides an example of a more thorough-going approach to political culture. A productive synthesis that both preserves past advances and better explains the revolutions of 1989 is achieved by analyzing the effects of cultural change on state elites.

It has become clear that the onset of widowhood, perhaps more than any other event of the aging process, involves a dramatic change in the family status of older persons. Because many elderly are neither emotionally nor economically prepared for widowhood, the death of a spouse often requires a realignment of social and familial relationships, economic conditions, and living arrangements. The ability to cope with hardships associated with loss of spouse certainly may be enhanced or limited by living arrangements. Not only does the type of household indicate the individual’s sociodemographic status, it also gives us insight into the individual’s family life in old age. Widowhood may initiate the final stage of the family cycle when the widowed person, as the only household survivor, must either change residence or live alone. In either case, a reordering of kinship links or provision for formal assistance may be necessary.

During the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of research on the seaboard mortality associated with intercontinental migration during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The focus of historical interest in this linkage between mortality and migration has been the Atlantic slave trade. We now have mortality rates on voyages from various regions in Africa to various destinations in the Americas, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (see Curtin, 1968, 1969: 275-286; Klein and Engerman, 1976, 1979; Klein, 1978; Postma, 1979; Miller, 1981; Cohn and Jensen, 1982a, 1982b; Cohn, 1985; Eltis, 1984, 1987; Steckel and Jensen, 1986; Galenson, 1986). These slave studies have spawned renewed interest in the mortality associated with other seaborne populations, and mortality rates have been calculated on Dutch immigrant voyages to the East Indies during the eighteenth century, European convict and immigrant voyages to North America and European immigrant voyages to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Indian and Pacific Islander indentured labor voyages to Fiji and Queensland, Australia, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Riley, 1981; Eltis, 1983; Cohn, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988; Grubb, 1987; Ekirch, 1987; Morgan, 1985; Shlomowitz, 1986, 1987, 1989; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1988, forthcoming).

Over six decades ago, A. M. Carr-Sanders first identified the dramatic shift from a population regime of high mortality and high fertility before 1750 to one of low mortality and low fertility after 1900 (Carr-Sanders, 1925). Carr-Sanders had a simple explanation for these changes. Improved sanitation and advances in medicine had lowered mortality while an increase in the standard of living had triggered a temporary increase in fertility. As technological innovations reduced the economic utility of children, however, individuals responded by limiting their fertility.

This article focuses on the importance of employment and educational roles for children in understanding major aspects of the American fertility transition of the late 1800s. It views the declining economic contribution of children to family income and the increased short-run costs of children from schooling as important factors in explaining variations in marital fertility among parts of the United States, and also for understanding the general downward trend of fertility in the late 1800s.

Data on children ever born from the 1910 census are used to analyze variations across states in childbearing among two cohorts of married white women. One cohort (those 70-74 years of age in 1910) did most of their childbearing in the period after the Civil War; while the younger cohort (40-44 in 1910) re-produced mainly in the period just before the turn of the century. Relationships between reproductive behavior of individual mothers and their own children’s roles will also be investigated through a sample of the 1900 manuscript census, based on a 1 in 750 household sample of the 1900 manuscript census (Graham, 1980). Special attention will be devoted to urban-rural variation in the effect of children’s activities on fertility.

A beta version of the machine-readable 1881 census of Canada is used to assess the efficacy of two proxy variables used to predict fertility: (1) the share of church seats held by various church denominations in an areal unit and (2) the proportion of children with biblical names. Weak evidence is found for both measures, although the article questions whether these relationships can be interpreted as evidence for the importance of religious liberalization as a factor in reducing fertility.

The politics of public space are often conceptualized in terms of social geography. Scholars have shown how the crowd’s invasion of municipal spaces, the transgression of local ethnic boundaries, or the rituals of particular street festivals have structured political protest. Public space can also be discussed in more general terms. Space has always served as a means of pressuring state or local authority, an arena in which subaltern groups—women, workers, sansculottes— expressed and enforced their moral economies. By the nineteenth century, these immemorial uses of public space had undergone significant change. In many cases, riots and charivari were complemented by soldierly public marches, quiet meetings, and well-disciplined strikes.This respectable use of public space was linked to subaltern groups’ increasing exploitation of a new form of political authority: that of public opinion and public debate, the realm of the “bourgeois public sphere.”

The Rapid increase in public spending for white schools that occurred in North Carolina after the turn of the century led to a large racial disparity in the amount spent per child by 1910. Previous scholars have attributed this racial difference in school spending to the disfranchisement of the black voter (Margo, 1982). It was argued that once blacks were prevented from voting, the white members of the school boards were able to divert the public funds which were initially allocated for the education of black children. The most widely accepted version of this theory is credited to Horace Mann Bond (1934) who studied education expenditures for black children in Alabama. Bond argued that the governmental level at which schools were financed was important in determining the racial division of public school funds since the white members of the county school boards were particularly inclined to divert the funds allocated by the state government. The state funds which were allocated to the local school boards in Alabama were not required to be shared equally between black and white students. After blacks had been disfranchised, the county school boards responded by allocating a disproportionate share of these state funds for the education of white children.

The historical study of imprisonment touches on various issues of a wider, theoretical significance. A major and ongoing discussion in social science concerns the nature of historical change. Authors writing from a structuralist or systems approach tend to emphasize rapid change followed by long periods of continuity. Opposed to this is a more developmental or longitudinal approach stressing long-term processes. Both approaches are represented in the historiography about imprisonment. They may be identified as modernization-oriented and process-oriented, respectively.

Several recent studies of the emergence of prisons in Europe and America dealt with the first half of the nineteenth century (see especially Rothman, 1971; Foucault, 1975; Ignatieff, 1978). These studies suggested that confinement was a relatively new phenomenon in that period.

Writing more than twenty five years ago, W. S. Robinson assailed the assumption implicit in much empirical work that statistical measures computed for aggregate units—states, provinces, counties, cities, wards, school districts—could be used in place of corresponding measures for the individuals comprising these units. Robinson was not the first scholar to expose the pitfalls of naive inferences from group level data to individual level behavior. But he first brought this problem forcefully to the attention of practicing social scientists. Focusing on the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient (r), Robinson proved that an aggregate level coefficient need not be equal in value to the corresponding individual level coefficient. Blending empirical examples with mathematical demonstration, Robinson showed that when the individual level correlation between being a native American and being able to read was computed for state level percentages of natives and literates, its value changed from .118 to -.526. Thus an investigator relying on correlations computed for the American states would not even correctly assess the direction of the relationship between nativity and literacy. Coining new jargon, Robinson used the term “ecological fallacy” to describe a naive inference from the group to the individual level of analysis.

The reverberations of Robinson’s work are still being felt by those interested in the past behavior of individuals. Historians without access to survey research and experimental techniques must rely on data that have already been collected. Because such data so often pertain to aggregate units, historians frequently must use cross-level inference to estimate the behavior of individuals. Having paid virtually no attention to the methodology of cross-level inference for almost twenty years after the publication of Robinson’s work, historians have suddenly discovered the “ecological fallacy.” Authors dread to see the term “ecological fallacy” scribbled in the margins of their work; to fall victim to this fallacy is to forfeit one’s claim to methodological legitimacy.

In the years before professional image-building, few political groups managed to acquire a more enviable image than did the Republican insurgents of the Taft period. The Congressional insurgents, who first caught the country’s attention with the fight against the Payne-Aidrich tariff in the Senate and against the dictatorial rule of Speaker Joseph Cannon in the House, compensated for their failure to win control of their party by winning extravagant praise from contemporary journalists. They have had scarcely less appeal for historians. Thomas Dreier entitled his 1910 study of the rebellious Republicans, Heroes of Insurgency, and later writers have followed his spirit, and very nearly his terminology. In 1940, Kenneth W. Hechler provided a highly favorable portrait in Insurgency, and Russel Nye’s Midwestern Progressive Politics (1951) offered a sympathetic portrayal in the 1950s. Only in the most recent study, James L. Holt’s Congressional Insurgents and the Party System (1967), is there any critical discussion of the limitations of the insurgents’ ideas and political strategies.

Despite the emergence of social science history, the profession remains organized around the study of periods in the history of societies. Departments of history still structure their curricula mainly along national and temporal lines, and the same principle of socialization thereby defines most academic positions (Darnton, 1980). To judge by the sessions of the annual meetings of the Social Science History Association (SSHA), those sympathetic with that orientation focus on topics, approaches, and methodologies. Only one association network, that for the study of Asia, mentions a locale in its title, and none specifies a particular time period. This article will examine the findings and implications of social science history for one well-established national/period field, that of early American history.

This article examines the choice of draft animal in Southern agriculture in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and shows that the preference for the mule over the horse reflected the South’s geography. The mule was well suited to the crops that dominated the region. The long, hot summers favored the heat-tolerant mule. The region’s geography made it difficult to produce good pastures and encouraged mule breeding to locate at considerable distances from Southern farms. The consequent variation in the price of mules relative to the price of horses across the South shaped the choice of work stock. Also important were the forms of labor organization on Southern farms. This research shows that the choice of the mule over the horse represented an important and progressive step for Southern agriculture.

Studies of the institutional development of the presidency and popular leadership by presidents over time lead us to contrary expectations as to how a nineteenth-century president would react to a major political scandal. Scholarship on newspapers of the late 1800s is also unclear on how a quasipartisan media, with some outlets moving toward independence, would cover a White House scandal. I find that a close analysis of the case of President Ulysses S. Grant and the Whiskey Ring scandal forces us to reconsider what we assume to be firmly modern developments in both presidential studies and media history. Though a supposedly “premodern” president, Grant still mounted a concerted effort to mitigate the damage of the scandal. Further, although the president could get his version of events across in prominent newspapers, Republican newspaper coverage was hardly reliable. Newspapers also connected politicians’ character and psychology to mistakes made in office and made presidential strategies to shape public perception clear to their audiences—emphases on political gamesmanship considered hallmarks of the modern media environment.