We contribute to an understanding of the determinants of voter support for US prohibition policies in the early 1900s, by separating substantive preferences for wet versus dry policies from preferences for centralized versus decentralized control. Prior studies of prohibition referenda have generated various conclusions about which groups supported and opposed prohibition, whether regarding the role of religion, urban/rural residence, immigrant status, gender, or class. But none of these studies has considered the impact of preferences regarding decentralization on voter support for prohibition measures. We exploit a combination of referenda unique to the 1933 Ohio ballot, where voters considered prohibition-repeal measures alongside a county home-rule amendment. By viewing support for home rule as a proxy for decentralization preferences we clarify and explain anomalies in prior studies regarding determinants of support for prohibition and its repeal, especially regarding urban counties and some evangelical denominations, which are shown to have been guided by a preference for local control of alcohol policy, and counties with larger proportions of women, which are associated with greater support for more centralized and uniform alcohol policy.

In a deservedly much-quoted phrase, Edward Thompson set out in The Making of the English Working Class “to rescue the poor stockinger, the ‘obsolete* hand-loom weaver, the ‘Utopian* artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” It is no criticism of that great, rugged, sprawling, big-hearted book to say that what the English working class most needs to be rescued from is the enormous condescension of middle-class intellectuals. Ever since Marx and Engels, if not indeed James Mill and Andrew Ure, English working people have not, at least until very recently, been allowed to have their own history but have had it imposed upon them from above by self-appointed champions and apologists from the “higher” classes.

Thompson himself is something of an exception, more an old fashioned independent country gentleman than a middle-class intellectual, living in a mansion in Worcestershire and exhibiting in his concern for the long dead poor the traditional paternalism which he decries in the eighteenth-century squire.

Of the myriad terrorist organizations that emerged in the late 1960s and the 1970s, those supporting the destruction of socialist Yugoslavia and the establishment of an independent Croatia were among the most active. This article explores the geopolitical context behind the radicalization of certain segments of the émigré Croatian population in the three decades following World War II and the processes that led them to adopt terrorism as an acceptable form of political expression. Specifically, it examines how changes in the realities of the Cold War political landscape during the 1960s and 1970s directly shaped the strategies of Croatian separatist groups outside Yugoslavia. These developments led Croatian radicals to cultivate a culture of abandonment, betrayal, and persecution, in which the Croats were portrayed as a nation of victims without allies. This helped precipitate a radicalization of the separatist movement, as many within the Croatian diaspora were increasingly convinced that only “self-initiated action”—that is, political violence and terrorism—could hasten the establishment of an independent Croatian state. Difficulties in dealing with the realities of Cold War international politics also led to the emergence of significant cleavages and conflicts within the émigré separatist movement, which further helped frame the processes of strategic thinking among radical activists. Drawing evidence from state archives and the political writings of radical émigré Croatian separatist organizations, the article traces the trajectory of radical Croatian separatists from staunch supporters of the West to desperate and disillusioned advocates of realpolitik thinking.

This article answers Larry Gerber's (1995) challenge for a renewed appreciation of the social science literature on corporatism and state theory by explaining variations in corporatist institutions through the concept of policy legacies. To understand the variation in corporatist forms of governance, three policy areas are key: the long-standing trade policies of the England and Canada, the forms of government intervention during World War I, and prior political battles within the dairy industries. In their own unique way, these policies shaped the character of the market failure, the political capacities of farm organizations, and the institutional response that incorporated private interest groups within the formulation and implementation of public policy. By viewing the emergence of corporatist institutions in England and Canada as examples of governmental responses to economic crisis, this research on corporatism contributes to the larger theory of the determinants, as well as the effects, of the state in capitalist democracies.

The pawnshop was a critical component of urban credit networks in early modern Europe, serving as a source of ready cash in an era before there was widespread access to deposit banking and formal consumer loans. This article examines the use of the pawnshop, among other financial strategies, such as shop credit and loans between kin and neighbors, by a sample of poor to middling citizen households in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. It also evaluates the multiple links between consumer behavior and the acquisition of either savings or debt. Petty credit from the pawnshop came at a high price, and its use presumed prior access to consumer goods suitable for pawning. Thus we find that the poorest households did not rely on the pawnshop as often or as extensively as their better-situated peers for whom collateral was more easily obtained. Better-situated households also enjoyed easier access to shop credit, the terms of which were more favorable for the consumer. None of these households, however, were in positions to save to the extent necessary for participation in the larger capital markets of Amsterdam and the world.

Internal migration remains one of the most important issues in European social history. Our entire concept of community and of social life rests on certain assumptions about residential stability, yet these assumptions have only been inadequately tested for most historical periods and in most places. We now know that previously accepted characterizations of the stable peasant community are erroneous, for numerous studies have documented the great population flux in much of western Europe in preindustrial times (Schofield, 1970; Tilly, 1978). Yet, for the most part, our ideas about life in communities of the past tend to rest on an assumption of a bedrock of residential stability to which the limited population movement is anchored.

Louise Tilly is noteworthy as an historian, a mentor, and a distiller of feminist thought. Her work covers a variety of fields. In the field of labor history she produced an important study of political contention in Italy, Politics and Class in Milan, 1881–1901, and, along with Charles and Richard Tilly, a widely influential study of collective action, The Rebellious Century (Tilly 1994; Tilly et al. 1975). Her most influential work is in the arena of women's and family history, most notably Women, Work, and Family, a product of her collaboration with Joan Scott (Tilly and Scott 1978). She was also a member of the Panel on Women's Work and Technology of the National Research Council, which produced a signal study of the evolution of women's white collar work and its prospects, Computer Chips and Paper Clips: Technology and Women's Employment, and she possessed a keen interest in the intersection between demographic and family history as shown in her coedited collection on European fertility decline (Gillis et al. 1992; National Research Council 1986). Before illness forced her to cease work, she was moving into global history where her most important contribution was her presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA) that outlined a distinctive and original approach to world history (Tilly 1994).

During the 40 years since its founding, the Social Science History Association (SSHA) and its journal have attracted many scholars to the field of social science history, stimulating many new lines of research, but it has only had limited success in developing some of the more prominent new trends in the history field. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's early presence in the journal Social Science History did not stimulate much further work on the longue durée. In environmental history, transnational history, and studies of the non-Western world, the SSHA has not led the way. The article calls on members of the SSHA to think about creative responses to these new directions of inquiry.

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 relationship between economic performance and wealth inequality at a regional level is examined using county-level wealth for Ontario in 1892 and 1902. The results find that after controlling for confounding factors, declining wealth inequality was generally accompanied by slower economic performance as measured by changes in wealth levels and manufacturing output over time. This suggests that a more egalitarian wealth distribution came perhaps at the price of less robust economic performance.

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.

Historians have often portrayed American Indian populations as relatively homogeneous. Notorious in this regard is the genre of formulaic tribal histories, in which individuals or subgroups are scarcely seen and amorphous tribes merely react to U.S. policy directives and agents’ actions (Clifton 1979; Iverson 1984). When internal differences are noted, they tend to be lumped into dichotomized categories, with little attention given to their composition or to the historical processes from which they arose. Hence the literature is replete with references to traditionalists and progressives, Christians and pagans, and mixed bloods and full bloods, to name only a few. But history does not unfold in fixed oppositional stages, and dichotomizing these terms, even if they were employed by historical participants themselves, reveals little about social processes. They indicate, instead, a recognition that intratribal heterogeneity was increasing, perhaps in patterned ways (Clifton 1989).

For nine weeks during the 1866 cholera epidemic, the registrar general for England and Wales published details of more than 13,000 deaths in London. Although the names of the deceased and the informant were withheld, all other information available from the death certificate was reproduced in the capital city's Weekly Returns, including registration district and subdistrict, precise address (house number and street, or institution), sex, age (sometimes down to hours for infants), occupation, cause(s) of death, and duration of final illness. Since historians’ access to original death certificates in England and Wales is restricted, this source presents an opportunity to analyze systematically the practice of cause of death certification in the middle of the nineteenth century, albeit during a period of mortality crisis. Variability of diagnostic “depth”—that is, the listing of multiple causes and duration of final illness—is considered for three major causes: cholera, diarrhea, and respiratory tuberculosis. Deaths in workhouses and general hospitals were chronically underdocumented compared to home deaths. This finding supports the notion that the institutionalization of sickness in the nineteenth century was accompanied by a loss of the “patient narrative” and also points to the entrenchment of institutional cultures of record keeping and administration.

Most of the major historical interpretations of imperial and Soviet Russia share, at bottom, a common belief that the dominant characteristics of the political system are teleological and dualist, indeed even Manichaean. The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative model of politics based on a plurality of groups emerging from the peculiar evolution of the bureaucracy in Imperial Russia. Before taking up the substantive part of the argument, however, I wish to review briefly what I mean by the teleological-dualist interpretation which remains up to the present the reigning orthodoxy in the field.

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.

Like american historians of the colonial period, historians of New France did not neglect, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, the problem of differentiation between the inhabitants of the New World and the metropolitans from whom they descended. It is thought that with the decline in French immigration after 1675 and the rapid Canadianization of the population, the relative isolation of the colony favored the creation of a particular type of French people, whose originality was reflected in such domains as physique, character, language, military strategy, and so forth. Was demographic behavior one of these particularities, or even oppositions, as the French officer de Bougainville noted in 1756: “It seems that we are a different nation, even an enemy” (Filteau 1978 [1937]: 252)? More specifically, how did reproductive behavior adapt to the living conditions prevalent in the St. Lawrence valley during the first century of European settlement?

Contemporary Denver is a metropolis shaped in the automobile age. When the Denver Planning Commission first warned about the “sinister disease” of decentralization in 1941 and reported “startling evidences of the flight of Denver residents across the corporate boundaries,” 72.4 percent of the population of the five-county Denver area lived within the city itself (Table 1). Thirty-five years later, metropolitan area population had more than tripled, but suburban growth had cut Denver’s share of the total to 35.8 percent. The suburban counties of Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder and Jefferson accounted for one third of all Coloradans, and local residents ranked surburban sprawl as one of three major problems of the metropolitan area.

While families have historically provided the basis of business organization in the United States, in the late nineteenth century the development of corporations and managerial capitalism weakened their role in business, especially in management (Bell 1962; Chandler 1977; Farber 1972; Hall 1977,1988; Kanter 1978; Mills 1956; Shammas et al. 1987). Chandler (1977) has postulated a historical decline in family management, control, and decision making in firms with the growth of industrial capitalism; others have asserted a continued presence of the family in business ownership (Davis and Stern 1980; Lansberg et al. 1988).

Projecting economic variables is a difficult art but one which statesmen practice with relish. In parliamentary democracies it is a rare candidate who does not forecast that under his tenure the pots of the electors will be graced with chickens. A more sober, careful kind of forecasting is required in conducing foreign affairs. Sound judgments about tariffs, subsidies, military and naval force levels, and even alliances depend upon prior analysis of the effects of each such policy over some specified length of run. Although one suspects that some kind of forecasting was always a part of statecraft, industrialization in Western Europe necessitated a change in the time frame of the predictions of statesmen. As the pace of economic change quickened, the rate at which the economic and military potential of states might change also accelerated. For many Englishmen observing the growth of the German economy during the 1890s, learning this lesson produced more than a little anxiety. So great was the attention which the British gave to German economic growth that predictions of Germany’s overtaking of Britain came to be a staple item of British politics in the two decades before World War One. Should these predictions have been taken seriously by contemporaries? The best answer is that given by the outcome of the pre-1914 Anglo-German rivalry: Germany did not overtake Britain in that era. Because war intervened, we cannot know the outcome of continued peaceful economic rivalry, but by using a relatively new statistical method we can chart the course this rivalry may well have followed had the peace been kept in 1914. Our projections suggest a sequence of events that never occurred but may nonetheless be used as a guide in evaluating the views and expectations of contemporaries.