This collection of papers, from very different vantage points, makes the argument that the Ottoman Empire bequeathed significant legacies to the notion and practices of modern political governance in the Middle East. The three essays address the impact Ottoman policies had on territories that had once been part of the empire, focusing most closely on the development of state institutions, nationalism, and the position of the caliphate. By exploring these key issues, the authors hope to call attention to the importance of the Ottoman experience in laying the groundwork for future political life in the region.

Often treated as a unified concept with a single definition, the presidential mandate actually encompasses multiple definitions, each connected to distinct ideas about democracy and presidential leadership. This article looks at how and when modern presidents have used mandate rhetoric and seeks to explain changes in presidential mandate-claiming patterns. Using an original dataset of 1,467 presidential communications from 1933 through 2009, I find that after 1969 presidents became more likely to use election results to justify their actions. However, they also became less likely to emphasize the magnitude of the election result, focusing their mandate rhetoric instead on campaign promises and distinctions between candidates and parties. Evidence suggests that this shift is the result of a combination of several factors: changes to the presidential nomination system, polarized party politics, and an overall decline in presidential approval ratings. Based on this research, I conclude that ideas about the presidential mandate are closely connected with the political conditions and challenges facing presidents. As the place of the presidency has shifted in American politics, the ways in which presidents interpret and communicate about elections have also changed.

All Dr. Katz's students admired how quickly he expressed a point, often through tidy lists. In honor of that style, I want to focus these remarks about Michael Katz and activism on four dimensions: (1) his understanding of the activist/academic tension; (2) how he advised his graduate students to wrestle with it; (3) how he engaged nonhistorians; and (4) how his work's prognosis of the prospects for social change transformed markedly in the last five years of his career.

Historical research can contribute to greater understanding of economic growth, but only if it proceeds without theoretical blinders and assumptions imposed by past definitions of capitalism. We will make this case, by taking one particular historical example—mortgage markets in nineteenth-century France—and analyzing the financial development that accompanied the rise of capitalism there. The French example demonstrates that there is an immense amount that historians and social scientists still do not know about economic growth or capitalism. One common assumption is that little financing takes place before big banks and other modern financial institutions arrive on the scene. No one, however, has ever tested this implicit assumption by estimating how much lending or other financial dealing occurred before the arrival of the banks and modern financial institutions in developed economies. Although scholars have studied financial dealings back into the Middle Ages or before, no one knows whether the sums involved were big or small. We do so and discover that the sums involved were enormous. That so much borrowing went on outside modern financial institutions raises serious doubts about the argument that connects financial development and economic growth. Our research also makes it clear that context was critical when entrepreneurs raised money in the early stages of economic growth or when young businesses or firms in new industries sought funds.

During the 1960s in Sweden, socioeconomic differentials decreased sharply and both the labor force participation of married women and aggregate divorce rates increased more rapidly than during any other period of the twentieth century. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the socioeconomic composition of the couple influenced the probability of divorce during this period of rapid restructuring. The study uses a large data set covering the entire married population of Sweden in 1960 and applies a binary model whereby the couples are analyzed as units rather than separate individuals to model divorce during the period from 1960 to1965. The main results show that the equalization process between genders and social classes during this period contributed to the decrease in marital stability. Dual-provider families exhibit substantially higher probabilities of divorce as compared to traditional single-provider families. We also find that the socioeconomic gradient of divorce had become negative by the early 1960s and that couples with low socioeconomic status contributed more to the increase in divorce than did couples in the higher strata. A difference between the results reached in this study and those from divorce research covering later decades is that children do not reduce the probability of divorce when the wife's labor force participation is controlled for. The results indicate that the determinants of divorce have varied across different phases of the divorce transition during the twentieth century and that a historical perspective is necessary if we are to understand the long-term process that has produced current marital behavior.

Anthropometric studies have given much attention to the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the biological standards of living of urban populations. Instead, we know less about the evolution of height and the disparities within the rural world and how they have changed during the modern economic growth process. This article analyzes the evolution and the determining factors that would explain the inequality of the biological welfare of a group of rural populations in Mediterranean Spain. Using a database of the heights of military conscripts (N = 146,041) of the study area, a comparison is made of the biological well-being of the cohorts born between 1840 and 1965 in different rural environments (irrigated vs. dry farming). The results show that the recruits residing in irrigated areas were taller than those in dry farming areas and that the nutritional differences were greater among the latter. The advantage of the heights in irrigated areas widened with the development of commercial agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century and, although it began to reduce from the early decades of the twentieth century, the anthropometric gap persisted throughout the period analyzed. The data also suggest that the distribution of income was also more unequal in the dry farming areas, where the diet was less varied and rich than in the irrigated areas. This situation could be largely explained by the existence of low productivity agriculture in these dry farming areas, among other possible factors.

Britain has been a model of political stability for so long that thinking of it as anything but that is difficult. The familiar image of Edwardian England is that of an Indian summer spent with a jovial uncle. This was a system, however, that was in crisis and was recognized by its contemporaries as being so. Regardless of whether the challenges of the Irish question, labor unrest, and suffragette militancy were connected or merely coincidential (see Pelling, 1968: 147-164), all three shared the common characteristic of extra-parliamentary activism and of violent—either actual or anticipated—methods. Furthermore, the system also was burdened with other contentious issues, as “politics after 1901 were increasingly dominated by controversies about matters which most Victorians had regarded as settled and closed to discussion” (Read, 1972: 16-17). If ever a governmental system suffered from an overload of simultaneous demands from a multiplicity of pressing and intractable problems, this was it. Contrary to what sometimes has been supposed, Britain’s political elite did not regard the approaching international hostilities as providing a means of alleviating these burdens by welding the country together with patriotic fervor. Instead they feared that war would be the final blow undermining the governments’s authority and, perhaps, producing civil war (French, 1982: 85-95).

Two major transitions in U.S. household structure involving the living arrangements of the elderly have taken place over the last two centuries. The first transition, around 1820, marked the demise of the colonial household economy and the rise of a privatized household economy (Degler 1980; Demos 1986; Lasch 1977; Ruggles 1987; Rutman 1977; Ryan 1981). The old tended to share households with the nonold after this time, and the prevalence of coresidence peaked at the turn of the twentieth century (Ruggles 1987). The second shift, around the late 1940s, marked a quiet “demographic revolution” in living arrangements (Smith 1986). It brought a rapid decline in intergenerational coresidence and a parallel rise in young adults and the elderly living as primary individuals.

Progressive Era campaigns to establish juvenile courts maintained that police and criminal courts failed to distinguish between children and adults. They suggested that law enforcement agencies either sentenced juveniles as if they were adults, imposing excessive punishments, or let kids go, failing to discipline them and encouraging them to commit further crimes. However, this case study of juvenile arrests in turn-of-the-century Detroit indicates that, before the creation of juvenile court, criminal justice institutions had more complex interactions with delinquent youth than has been recognized previously. Boys typically were arrested for very different offenses than were adults, and the police and courts often segregated children and adolescents from the harshest elements of the criminal justice system. The police sought every opportunity to decide the outcome of juvenile arrests themselves, without a court hearing, particularly if boys had committed only status offenses such as truancy or if crime victims decided not to prosecute. When juveniles did appear in criminal courts, judges found ways to soften their experiences, rarely jailing younger boys and instead sentencing some to reform school for ostensible rehabilitation. After 1900, efforts to protect young offenders from criminal justice institutions expanded as specially assigned police officers increasingly sought to discipline delinquents prior to arrest and the courts introduced an unofficial form of probation. Rather than constituting a break from the past, the creation of Detroit’s juvenile court in 1907 mainly made official juvenile offenders’ growing separation from the criminal justice system.

American ethnic groups vary in terms of movement on the economic ladder, position on the political spectrum, and educational attainment. Members of individual groups also congregate in particular occupations; Koreans in Los Angeles are overrepresented in the retail liquor industry (Light and Bonacich, 1988) and Greeks in New England are concentrated in pizza businesses (Lovell-Troy, 1980). While many of these differences may be obvious, an explanation for why they occur poses a serious challenge to social scientists. In response, scholars have proposed two theoretical frameworks, cultural and contextual, for understanding ethnic behavior. A cultural interpretation stresses that American ethnic groups’ behaviors are based on cultural traits brought from their countries of origin. In contrast, a contextual analysis explains ethnic conduct as immigrants’ responses to their new societies.

This article examines the event structure of the labor conflict known as the Everett Massacre, which occurred in Everett, Washington, on November 5, 1916. The much-celebrated confrontation between members of the Industrial Workers of the World and local law officials and citizen groups came to symbolize the sharp class divisions that shaped the lumber industry in the latter years of the nineteenth century in the Northwest. The article uses event structure analysis (ESA) to identify the causal structure of this conflict. Guided by this analysis, the focus turns to the structure of discourse in newspaper articles to reveal changes in the contrasting accounts of mill owners and union members, or Wobblies. The article draws on the concepts of relational distance and the monstrous double as a theoretical interpretation for the comparatively more violent labor struggles in the Far West.

In recent years there has been some penetrating historical writing on the pre- and early conditions of rapid industrialization in Britain and western Europe. While not establishing any exact theoretical framework, these studies affirm a number of general propositions, such as: the importance of social, including political, preconditions; the necessity of an adequate business structure; and the value of studying change more minutely to see the effect of regional as well as national differences. An overall conclusion that emerges is that rapid change to substantially higher productivity is a very complex social process in which the same conditions may operate in various areas with differing force and effects. Furthermore, it appears that no single social science provides an adequate array of questions. Studies in anthropology, economics, geography, political science, social psychology, and sociology can contribute to theory, or isolate important variables, but these must in some fashion be tested against reality over time by materials supplied chiefly by historians.

The United States with its continental differences and semi-autonomous state administrations offers excellent opportunities for both regional and comparative study. One topic that is particularly attractive, because it has been relatively neglected, is the rapid industrialization of the Delaware and Susquehanna areas—southern New Jersey, eastern Maryland, northern Delaware, and eastern Pennsylvania. This article is a brief preview of the types of research that some of us will pursue in forthcoming years. The examples cited come more from Pennsylvania than from the other states because of a larger secondary literature.

This work does not attempt to review the historiography produced by Latin American historians who, with different degrees of success, have applied quantitative methods to the study of the past. It is rather a reflection on, as well as an assessment of, the different schools of thought and the competing theories and methods of quantification as they are usually debated by Latin American historians.

At this stage in the development of the Social Science History Association it is appropriate for us to consider some of the general problems concerning the development and use of machine-readable data and the Association’s role in such matters.

Whence and whither family history? In his bibliographic and programmatic essay, Hobsbawm (1971) did not mention family history as a subfield of what was then the relatively “new” social history. The closest he came was “demography and kinship.” In 1980, by which time social history was definitely mature, and according to some critics, even in decline, the proceedings of a conference on history in the 1980s included a 37-page essay by Stone (1981b; see also Stone, 1981a, 1978) on family history. Several bellwethers of the change may be noted in passing. One year after the 1968 conference for which Hobsbawm's comments were originally prepared, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population held a meeting whose subject—the comparative history of household and family—went beyond strictly demographic history. In 1972, a family history newsletter was launched by Professor Tamara Hareven, in cooperation with the Newberry Library in Chicago; a special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History on “The History of the Family” appeared in 1971; a special issue of Annales: Economies, Societes et Civilisations devoted to “Famille et Societé” was published in 1972. By the time the Journal of Family History, edited by Hareven, began publication in 1976, two more special issues on family history of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History were required reading for those calling themselves social historians.

After the economy stabilized following World War I, the U.S. experienced a record level of residential construction. When considering housing in this period, scholars have usually focused on the sheer number of units built and perhaps on the fact that the rate of construction turned down several years before the whole economy soured. Relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which U.S. building patterns differed in the 1920s from earlier periods and what these changes can tell us about broader social trends. This article examines residential building in this period in more detail, by looking at the city of Chicago, and suggests that new patterns of housing construction may have been linked to changes in the economy as a whole.

I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb’s 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986).

The fall in the labor force participation rate of older men in the United States has been dramatic. In 1860 approximately 76% of men 65 and older were in the labor force. Today less than 20% work. Much of the decline has been explained in terms of a shift from agricultural occupations to manufacturing or industrial occupations, where participation historically has been lower at older ages. Participation rates, however, appear to have been constant in both farm and urban households through 1930, thus challenging the thesis that industrialization and urbanization were causes of the fall in the participation rate of older men.

The long-debated issue whether social scientists should be concerned with improving the human condition, and if so how they should attempt this task, has been raised afresh in the exchange of views between Lee Benson (1978) and Warren Miller (1978) on “Changing Social Science to Change the World.” Before plunging into this debate, however, I should like to suggest that all of us who participate in it are viewing the world from a particular occupational perspective. Some years ago, when George Lundberg’s Can Science Save Us? (1947) was current, a friend suggested to me that a prior question was, “Should science save us?” He may have meant, as Miller suggests, that saving or changing the world is not the principal task of social scientists; or in another meaning, he may have been anticipating more recent critics in noting that a world “saved” by social science might not be one in which everyone would prefer to live. I hope that our efforts will not be counter-productive.