The case of the Bulgarian Esperanto movement under state socialism demonstrates a social movement can survive under authoritarianism by establishing a legitimate activist culture acceptable to the regime while pursuing its intrinsic goals. Bulgaria, a close Soviet ally, was a difficult case of movement survival. In the early years following World War II, the national Esperanto periodical Bulgara Esperantisto was a key organizing tool for the movement reporting on its activities, reaching out to potential recruits, and legitimizing the movement under the new communist-led regime. Examining the periodical’s discourse over a two-year period, I find that the movement managed to carve a space for itself in the new political context by advancing a form of what I term “nationalized cosmopolitanism.” Bulgarian Esperantists were able to maintain activist networks nationally and internationally, pursue intrinsic Esperanto goals, and sustain cosmopolitan identities under unhospitable conditions. The movement successfully legitimated itself by drawing from three cosmopolitan sources: Esperanto cosmopolitanism, communist internationalism, and Bulgarian peasant universalism. In the context of the nation-state system, invoking the nation was an effective legitimation strategy, even for a movement with cosmopolitan orientations, even under a regime justified in universal terms. Espousing pragmatism and partnerships while avoiding conflict, Bulgarian Esperantists were able to thrive under the new communist regime, recruit new members, and reconnect with the global Esperanto movement. I conclude that a legitimate activist culture can adapt to a regime’s ideology and institutional environment without necessarily being co-opted.

The literature on the development of secularism in Turkey, or laiklik, often cites the national state builders’ positivist worldviews as a principal explanatory factor. Accordingly, the legal-institutional form Turkish secularism took in the 1920s and 1930s is derived, to a large extent, from the Unionists’ and Republicans’ science-driven, antireligious ideologies. Going beyond solely ideational narratives, this article places the making of secularism in Turkey in the context of the sociopolitical contention for national-capitalist state building. In so doing, the article contributes to the latest “spatiotemporal” turn in the secularization literature, characterized by an increased attention to historical critical junctures, and sensitivity to multiple secularities occurring in Western as well as non-Western geographies. Based on a bridging of the secularization scholarship with that of state formation, and building extensively on Turkish archival material, I argue that the trajectory, fluctuations, and contradictions of secularization can be closely associated with two intertwined master processes: (1) the construction of internal and external sovereign state capacity, and (2) geographically specific trajectories of class formation/dynamics. The Turkish case demonstrates that secular settlements cannot be explained away simply by reference to the guiding ideas of actors. Contentious episodes such as civil-bureaucratic conflict, war and geopolitics, and class struggles/alliances make a significant imprint on the secularizing process.

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.

Due to the central position it assigns to the longue durée, the Annales school—impetus for and crossroads of historical debate—used quantitative methods from the beginning and granted them their patents of nobility. For some decades now, it has been inconceivable for good historical research in France not to devote an important part of its efforts to the measuring of phenomena. True, the Annales school has never spoken with a single voice; the changes that have occurred in its membership and in neighboring disciplines, as well as new historical sensibilities, have modified its original characteristics. The study directed by A Burguière of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales will soon report on the content and evolution of the themes, the network of contributors, and the intellectual climate that shaped the first generation of the Annales. Therefore this article limits itself to a rapid survey of publications, followed by an examination of the distinctive traits of the quantitative dimension of French historical work, the directions for and reasons behind new research. The picture must remain somewhat general because it focuses on only three major points: the preeminence of serial history over quantitative history; the underrepresentation of international comparative works, despite the example of F. Braudel; and the development of individual-level data banks, an important source for social and serial history.

The first phase of New Deal historiography saw a clash between attackers from the right, who held that the New Deal went too far and did too much, and liberal-centrist defenders, who maintained that the New Deal was a practical, democratic middle way between left and right totalitarianisms. The second phase, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, saw the triumph, among politicians as well as historians, of the liberal-centrists over the rightist critics. In the mid-1960s, radical or left historians launched an attack on the New Deal, claiming that it did not go far enough and did not do very much—that, in fact, it did very little to reduce enduring inequities in American life by effecting significant changes in the distribution of wealth, income, and power. The radical critics also went beyond the question of what the New Deal should have been—from their point of view essentially socialistic—to the question of what it could have been, insisting that it could have gone much further in reshaping American society. The liberal-centrists, who do not subscribe to the radicals’ socialistic prescription, have made substantial concessions to the radicals’ estimate of what the New Deal was by recognizing the New Deal’s limitations, but they reject the radicals’ judgment on the question of what the New Deal could have been. They continue to assert that the New Deal accomplished about as much reform as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

Three Declining Plateaus of population growth provide an empirical framework for American social history (Nugent, 1981). After a pre-history, self-sustaining demographic regimes appeared in the form of a frontier-rural mode of life common to most Americans by about 1720 and remained unchallenged until the mid-nineteenth century. From the 1860s to the 1920s, the frontier-rural mode continued to exhibit considerable strength but in rapidly contracting areas of the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Columbia Plateau. During that period of fifty years, however, the second plateau was increasingly supplanted by the metropolitan (or urban-industrial) mode of life. After 1920, by demographic measures, the frontier-rural mode of life had been replaced virtually everywhere by the metropolitan one familiar to Americans ever since.

Funding for schools of all kinds was largely market-based until the Civil War. Parents in New York and other northern states continued to pay tuition, or rate bills, in addition to taxes to support common schools. Previous research relied on aggregate state-level data to estimate the amount of funding from public and nonpublic sources for common schools, while existing case studies of local school practices focus exclusively on Massachusetts or on urban locations and thus on exceptions to the rule. This study looks at local practices of school funding for multiple types of schools in one unexceptional rural town in western New York from 1815 to 1850. The results reveal considerable in-state variation in the proportion of public and private funding for common schools that is otherwise obscured by state-level data. The proportion of school funds that came from tuition was much higher for rural areas than for urban areas. The article also compares tuition funding for common schools with that for other types of market-based schooling, including two local venture schools and one local academy. The results show that, although tuition prices for academies and venture schools were predictably higher than for common schools, the overall structure of school funding for rural common schools and academies was more similar than different in New York in the antebellum era.

In recent articles Bourke and DeBats (1978, 1980) have made a number of interesting points, which are of immediate concern to the study of electoral mobilization and participation over time. They have pointed to the existence of a number of poll lists recording individual votes after 1820 in what they term viva voce states (1980:232ff). These lists certainly must attract the attention of anybody concerned with the empirical study of political development in the United States and elsewhere in the nineteenth century. Some of these lists have been known for quite a while, and some of them have also been used in various studies mentioned by Bourke and DeBats. Nevertheless, much tedious work remains to be done before all of these poll lists can be utilized and before they can be made available to the scientific community.

V. O. Key’s proposition that one-party politics in the American states has been destructive of both the dominant and minor parties in such systems fits California’s political experience very nicely. From 1893 to 1932 California Republicans captured almost all statewide offices and they maintained huge legislative majorities. Furthermore, both parties entered the 1930’s with little institutionalized capacity for performing the basic nominating and campaigning functions. It appears, therefore, that the notorious weakness of political parties in California could be accounted for in terms of Key’s theories of the debilitating impact of one-party politics. Understandably, however, this line of speculation raises questions in the minds of those students of California politics who are aware of the several studies that particularly credit crossfiling for the weakness of California parties at mid-century. Consequently, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate the relationship between intensity of interparty competition and crossfiling in California politics during the first half of this century. In establishing this relationship, this study first shows that crossfiling did not become a general practice until after the end of California’s one-party era (1893-1932). The analysis then goes on to demonstrate that, during the one-party 1920’s, crossfiling occurred more often in the relatively competitive areas of the state than in the most profoundly one-party areas. Finally, a deviant case analysis develops the correspondence between the incidence of successful crossfiling (winning both parties’ primaries) and the relative competitiveness of types of offices.

Once upon a time, historians and political scientists expended a great deal of effort in tracing the complex development of the United States Congress in the twentieth century—a time, especially from the 1930s onward, during which Congress faced a remarkable expansion in government activity as a surge of new concerns, foreign and domestic, and, as a result, an unprecedented load of business, all but overwhelmed the institution. During this same time, Congress’s role within the American political system has been Social Science transformed in the face of the rise of the imperial presidency, the Supreme Court’s insistence on changing rules of representation, and the consequent shift in the institution’s makeup and internal power structure. Finally, public perceptions of Congress, increasingly negative as they have become, have had some significant impact on the transformation of Congress within the American political system as well (Sundquist 1981; Harris 1993; Rieselbach 1994).

Seventy-three years ago pioneer American medievalist Dana Carlton Munro (1911: 504) delivered a paper in Philadelphia to the American Philosophical Society entitled “The Cost of Living in the Twelfth Century.” He threw down the gauntlet by concluding that

This article takes up this challenge with new material on the cost of living in Italy in the twelfth century.

The article discusses the conceptual and methodological challenges of comparative economic history, focusing on recent debates concerning alternative pathways of development in Europe and Asia, the agricultural systems of early modern England and the lower Yangzi region in China, and the historical demography of Eurasia. The article concludes that such debates support the perspective that there is substantial path dependency and contingency in economic history and that alternative development paths can be discerned across and within Europe and Asia.

This article addresses three critiques that pull at the loose ends of Logics of History, revealing weaknesses and bringing new theoretical resources to problems raised by but not satisfactorily resolved in the book. Each critic suggests reformulations of my claims about how structures, events, and social transformations should be theorized: George Steinmetz from wide-ranging and theoretically eclectic perspectives, Dylan Riley from a broadly Marxist standpoint, and David Pedersen from a perspective that is predominantly Peircian. While agreeing with aspects of their critiques, I also reaffirm certain features of my own arguments.

Few today dwell on the significance of republican institutions. In the nineteenth century, however, republicanism was a revolutionary ideology proclaiming the right of all people as citizens to control their lives. While associated with universal suffrage, republicanism was not yet confined to a narrow political sphere, and many still sought to extend its values to economic affairs. They questioned whether citizens empowered to decide political questions should not also make economic decisions that affected their lives, and they warned that governments resting on free citizenship were threatened by concentrations of wealth giving some a disproportionate voice in society’s economic life. What sort of republic, one asked, could survive burdened with “this strange paradox of man split in two . . . subject in the workshop, king in the city”? (Diligent 1910: 5)

The question is absurd—of course there was an industrial revolution, as obviously as there was a French Revolution—but let me take it seriously. It is absurd because it is counterintuitive—intuition based on the obvious differences between developed and underdeveloped economies, between industrial and agricultural areas, between cities and villages, between factories and farms, between industrial workers and peasants, differences which point unambiguously to the revolutionary nature of industrialization—and because it can be asked only with a heroic disregard of the massive historical evidence for the existence of the industrial revolution. Other phrases used to describe it—“the great transformation” (Polanyi 1985), “the great divide” (Tawney 1982), and “the great discontinuity” (Hartwell 1971)—also underline its revolutionary character, in terms of the break with the past, the changing of the economy, and the making of a new society quite different from that which preceded it.

This study addresses changes in the public conversation on school desegregation since the early 1970s. It applies the concept of discursive opportunity structure to the debates on desegregation in order to illustrate how a dynamic and balanced conversation, which involved both positive and negative views on the policy, has evolved into an anemic and overly negative one. The study relies on insights from social movement research on political opportunity structures for debates on contentious issues and on interpretive framing processes. Several inferences are offered on the nature of the discursive turn in desegregation at the national level, followed by a detailed analysis of desegregation and resegregation in Cleveland from 1973 to 1998. This involves the systematic examination of local newspaper coverage and also draws on court documents, administrative student records, and census information. The findings suggest that political and social structural factors that have restricted the chances for a balanced conversation have also complicated desegregation implementation and may have undermined the policy’s intended student benefits. By the 1990s even the most dedicated advocates had withdrawn from the debate, allowing the conversation to atrophy and become dominated by critical views. As a result, public education has risked failing to address the ill effects of resegregation and to produce reforms that foster quality schools for all.

Labor (meaning both wage workers as well as their collective representation) in Russia was a major loser in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Aggregate data on prices, average wage and pension levels, wage arrears, and unemployment indicate a serious decline in workers’ standard of living that is unprecedented in the post-World War II era, while strike data show an upsurge in this form of worker militancy during the mid-1990s but a decline thereafter.

This article seeks to explain both why these developments occurred and what prevented workers from adequately defending their collective interests. Four explanations have been advanced by Western and Russian scholars. The first is that workers were victims of state policies pursued in line with the“Washington consensus” on how to effectuate the transition from an administrative-command to a market-based economy. The second points to workers’ attitudes and practices that were prevalent under Soviet conditions but proved inappropriate to post-Soviet life. The third, claiming that several key indices of workers’ standard of living are misleading, denies that labor has been a loser. The fourth and most compelling of the explanations is derived from ethnographically based research. It argues that despite changes in the forms of property and politics, power relations at the enterprise level remained intact, leaving workers and their unions dependent on the ability of management to bargain with suppliers of subsidies and credits. The article concludes with some observations about workers’ survival strategies and the extent to which collective dependence on economic and political strongmen has worked against structural change in favor of labor.

The first issue I wish to discuss is a distinction, familiar in the economics literature, between the study of equilibrium conditions and the analysis of the path by which this equilibrium is achieved. The study of equilibrium conditions tells us where under certain specified (and unspecified) assumptions the system will end up. It does not specify either the path taken to equilibrium, or how long a time must pass before the new equilibrium is achieved. This may remind some of Chicken Little, whose repeated assertions that the sky is falling still left that event’s timing somewhat uncertain. But often the length of this lag till the sky falls is of particular interest for political and other studies of the historical process, since it is crucial to know when the equilibrium is achieved and also how this length of time might itself influence the eventual equilibrium. It may be interesting for some questions of historical analysis or applied economic theory when we accept that something is “condemned to . . .” or that “it will eventually . . .”, but it is no clear that such statements should be regarded as historically or economically relevant or interesting in all cases.