Since the emergence of distinctive social science disciplines in American universities in the late nineteenth century, there have been recurring tensions over whether history should be practiced within or pursued separately from particular social science disciplines. This study considers this issue for the case of economic history in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. Economic history was active as an inter-disciplinary field throughout the twentieth century, and it had a substantial presence throughout the twentieth century at Chicago, in one of the world’s leading economics departments. This study focuses on how economic historians and economists at Chicago have conceived of the relationship between economic history and economics over the past century. It argues that a key set of tensions has been, on the one hand, developing a conception of the economy that is subject to historical forces yet, on the other hand, allowing adequate scope for employing the tools of economics.

This paper examines the changing nature of the female labor force in Ireland and the United States. Data from the two countries are used to illustrate both similarities and variations in the Western experience of women during the period of rapid change in work and family life since the late nineteenth century.

A central facet of how Western families have been transformed during the past century has involved the increased participation of women in the paid labor force, and in the most recent decades, a dramatic rise in the labor force participation of married women. In his classic work, World Revolution and Family Patterns, Goode suggests that the increase in female participation in the non-agricultural labor force was clearly evident in Western countries but was not dramatic during the first half of this century (1963: 59-60). Since 1950, however, increases in the economic activity of women have occurred throughout the West. For example, using data from Scandinavian countries, Haavio-Mannila and Kari (1980) document the increased economic activity of women throughout this century, the transformation of the economies of Scandinavia from an agricultural to an industrial base, and the rapid increase in labor force participation of married women since 1950.

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).

This article examines the historical origins of the notion of “ideal” body weight by tracing the evolution of the gender-specific height and weight table in the United States from 1836 to 1943. Fewer than 200 years ago, weight was not regarded as an important health issue. At the turn of the twentieth century, low body weight, not overweight, was the leading concern of medical practitioners. With the rise of actuarial science, weight became a criterion insurance companies used to assess risk. Used originally as a tool to facilitate the standardization of the medical selection process throughout the life insurance industry, these tables later operationalized the notion of ideal weight and became recommended guidelines for body weights. The height and weight table was transformed from a “tool of the trade” into a means of practicing social regulation.

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.

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).

This article, which deals with the Saami’s experience with smallpox in the three northern Swedish parishes of Jokkmokk, Gällivare, and Enontekis during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, focuses on these epidemiologic questions: (1) Why were the Saami—a native people living in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia—not affected by smallpox until this period? (2) What happened once smallpox was introduced into the area? (3) Did the Saami’s experience with smallpox differ from that of the rest of the Swedish population? (4) If so, what were the most important differences? (5) And how are they to be explained? Finding the answers to these questions requires considering whether smallpox inevitably resulted from the number of susceptible people and whether the disease affected other aspects of demography besides mortality (Figure 1).

Theories connecting meritocracy and democratic stability are heavily understudied, and there are few attempts to empirically disentangle the potential mechanisms. This article proposes a novel explanation, emphasizing that bureaucratic impartiality and effectiveness provide separate shields that stabilize democracies. Impartiality protects the opposition from unlawful discrimination, which raises support for democracy among the (potential) losers of elections and reduces the incentives to rebel or stage coups d’état, whereas effectiveness serves incumbent policies, which raises support among the (potential) winners and reduces the likelihood of incumbent takeovers. I find support for these propositions in comparative-historical analyses of a few paradigmatic cases—interwar Finland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany—with similar levels of economic development, imperial-autocratic legacies, and meritocratic types of administration but different regime outcomes. The results show that both impartial and effective bureaucratic behavior rather than meritocratic recruitment norms as such are important stabilizers of democracy. Yet they emphasize the importance of bureaucratic effectiveness in raising the perception that votes count to change outcomes on the ground and thus that democracy makes a difference. I argue that this should have a wider significance for the study of contemporary processes of democratic recession.

While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this article questions whether and to which extent their symbolic territorial cohesion was also at stake. The hypothesis we aim to verify is that railway buildings acted as recurrent visual signifiers of territorial coherence and had, therefore, the potential of being instrumental as state-building tools. This research explores how an architectural reading of railway networks can inform our understanding of state-building projects and processes. We expect that geographically scoped railway architectural history is capable of cross-fertilizing political and planning history, through a better understanding of empire, state, and regional building discourses. The investigation focuses on the stylistic architectural choices of edifices on two trunk lines in Transylvania, North-West Romania, before World War I, while this territory belonged to the Habsburg then, as of 1867, Austro-Hungarian Empire. The large-scale analysis of railway architecture is discussed in relation to railway-line ownership, political (central, regional, and local) agency, economic development, and architectural Zeitgeist, highlighting state-building and territorial integration patterns. The mapping carried out reveals two successive architectural layers. These denote a shift in the role of railway architecture from an initial liberal phase, before the 1880s, to a bloom phase, prior to World War I. While during the former there was little state control over architectural aspects, during the latter architecture became a foremost representation instrument for the state railway administration. At the same time, the extant railway architecture appears as a palimpsest, a genuinely cross-border, European heritage, documenting the dynamics between imperial, state, regional, and local agencies.

My presidential address identifies the pathways to disadvantage that complicate our understanding of purposive action. The article explains that (1) first, deception can deepen inequality; (2) disadvantages can emerge in midcourse, as new and unanticipated distributions of resources, sanctions, and opportunities unfold during the course of action; (3) the rules targeting one area of social life can disadvantage groups of people in other areas; and (4) disadvantaging policies can emerge through isomorphism (isomorphic disadvantage), sometimes by virtue of what other policy commissions across the globe are doing about the same social problem. Finally, (5) when there is an unlucky turn of events that leads to a deepening of disadvantage, its consequences depend on more than mere chance to make those disadvantages durable. My article concludes with a brief discussion of the implications for reparations and repair. While these pathways may not be exhaustive, they systematize the sociological intuition that things are not as they appear. And although my discussion of repair is brief, it gestures toward the possibilities that the past offers for understanding the process and the rules of remedy.

This article examines the evolution of the novel in the United States using a remarkable new source, the Ngram database. This database, which spans several centuries, draws on the 15 million books that Google has scanned. It allows researchers to look at year-to-year fluctuations in the use of particular words. Using one of the available filters, the article is based on English-language books published in the United States between 1800 and 2008. But making sense of these data requires a framework. That framework is provided by the four periods that emerge from much recent writing on the novel. Four epochs—the sentimental era (1789–1860), the genteel era (1860–1915), the modern era (1915–60), and the postmodern era (1960–)—define the evolution of the novel and, more broadly, changes in American society and values. The article argues that a study of key words drawn from the Ngram database confirms the existence of these periods and deepens our understanding of them.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, leisure was reserved for the few. By the end of the twentieth century, however, most workers had a regulated normal working time of 40 or fewer hours per week, annual paid leave, and overtime compensation. In this paper, I investigate which political parties brought forth these changes – which party constellations supported or opposed working-time reforms and argue that sector and class differences drive party preferences. Lower-class and urban middle-class workers demanded regulation as demand for leisure increased with income. In contrast, employers and farmers opposed such reforms. Accordingly, the study argues that socialist and social-liberal parties were inclined to support leisure-securing working-time reforms, whereas conservative and farmer parties opposed them. Due to their linkages with workers and farmers, liberal parties may be divided into a rural constituency that tends to oppose working-time reforms and an urban constituency that supports them. I test these expectations using parliamentary data: 65 roll-call votes from Norway between 1880 and 1940, combined with analysis of major reforms and legislative appeals. Finally, I undertake a generalization test using country-level reform data from 33 democracies between 1880 and 2010. Results generally fall in line with expectations, and the pattern is stable over time.

This article develops a political articulation-based explanation of divergence in democratic inclusion between two champions of liberal democracy in Latin America: Chile and Uruguay. Political articulation scholars depart from the traditional reflection models of political parties as mere expression of preexisting social cleavages, highlighting the relative autonomy of parties’ practices and their strategic role in structuring state-society relations. My work extends this current trend in comparative-historical sociology to the Latin American Left turn after the demise of the market-fundamentalist Washington Consensus, empirically identifying a set of strategies that boost Left parties’ capacity to articulate on a specifically class basis. These strategies, I argue, are endowed with causal efficacy, driving democratic variation beyond the restrictions and opportunities of the institutional environment. Combining process tracing account of historical sequences with my own analyses of labor statistics, protest events, and party linkages and manifestos, I show that differences in Left parties’ ability to build linkages with labor and advance its institutional representation as a class actor are at the root of the divergence in political inclusion between these two countries. This finding has substantial implications for contemporary democratic theory: after neoliberalism, strongly organized mass parties of the Left may not be a necessary condition for a given democracy’s stability and consolidation, but they may be a sufficient condition for a particular democracy’s realization of the normative ideal of political equality.

The persons in this story make up a stem family at a particular point in its life course; that is, they form a domestic group composed of parents (in this case, a single surviving parent) living with one married child who has taken over the family property and has begun rearing offspring of his own. There are a number of variations on this story in the folklore of early modern Central Europe. Each story treats the discords which can arise in such families. For example, in a shorter and somewhat coarser version than that given above, the father was hungry and a pig’s trough replaces the two yards of cloth. Despite differences in language and emotional content, however, the moral is generally the same: parents deserve to share in what they have helped create, and their presence in the family serves to teach intergenerational cooperation and respect to the young. In the version quoted here this point is made especially well by having the child remind the father of his obligations. We are confronted here by a thoroughly socialized child whose invocation of the Golden Rule reestablishes order and harmony in the family’s affairs.

Federal and state appellate court reporters for the 15 American slave states and the District of Columbia contain nearly 11,000 cases concerning slaves. In deciding these cases, southern judges formulated doctrines that would later become commonplace in other disputes. In fact, the common law of slavery, whether it concerned the sale, hiring, or accidental injury of a slave, looks far more like modern-day law than like antebellum law. Slave law, in many ways, helped blaze the path of American law generally.

Explanations of the gender pay gap and related labor market segregation remain fiercely debated. On the one side are those economic historians who take a primarily neoclassical view, in which competition among workers and employers eliminates wage differences that do not reflect productivity and occupational segregation that is not the outcome of choice. Persistent discrimination must reflect anticompetitive institutions, for instance, trade unions. A corollary of the neoclassical perspective is that markets are liberating, freeing agents, including women, from cultural stereotypes and ensuring that they get paid what they are worth, although of course this need not imply wage equality if there are gender differences in productivity. On the other side are those cultural historians who interpret wage differences as reflecting custom and, as far as women are concerned, the cultural deprecation of women's work, while occupational segregation represents gender stereotypes of fit work for women. In this view, socially and culturally constructed gender identities can influence market outcomes, producing discrimination in wages and work that persists even in the face of competitive forces.

This article extends Max Weber's theory of the transformation of charisma by exploring the relationships between cults of charismatic miracle workers and the Catholic Church in early modern Europe. We show that, at least in this case, cults of miracle workers were able to preserve their charismatic character even after the death of their leader by securing recognition from the church of their leader as a saint. While the Church in general was concerned over the proliferation of magic, its attitude toward miracle workers in this period was not hostile. Instead, we show that the Church established a canonization procedure that was biased in favor of those miracle workers whose acolytes formed densely connected networks capable of harnessing local support. Rather than being inimical to each other, charismatic authorities and existing institutional structures formed symbiotic relationships. In addition to routinization and depersonalization, we suggest that charismatic authorities can also undergo a process of preservation, which depends on their ability to secure from existing institutions the resources needed to stabilize the relationships between themselves and their staffs.

Over the last twenty years political scientists and sociologists concerned primarily with western European developments since 1945 have attempted to define corporatism as an ideal model for use in analyzing this region's political economies. Several influential American historians in recent years have also employed the concept of corporatism in examining the development of the modern American political economy. Although these historians have not ignored the contemporary European-oriented social science literature, the relationship between the work of historians describing the evolution of America's political economy and the theoretical literature based primarily on more recent European experiences and European concerns remains problematic.

The lynching literature often considers how the Populist Party affected lynching, yet the Southern Farmers’ Alliance—a short-lived but influential voluntary association that mobilized large numbers of white farmers—is overlooked. We argue that this is a critical oversight, as the Alliance was the origin of populism in the South. Specifically, we hypothesize that where the Alliance had more local organizations, the greater the likelihood of lynching from 1888 to 1895, the peak period of populism. To test this, we focus on two states with different experiences with the Alliance: North Carolina, in which the state’s Alliance was a strong supporter of the Populist Party, and South Carolina, where the Democrats sought to court Alliancemen and deter the creation of, and voting for, the Populist Party. Our empirical findings reveal that lynchings were more common in counties where the Farmers’ Alliance had more organizations in South Carolina, but no similar connection exists in North Carolina. These findings suggest that the Southern Farmers’ Alliance is, at times, pivotal to understanding populism’s connection to lynching in the late-nineteenth century American South.