The historical-comparative study of social democracy and cooperative organization are the foster children of historical sociology. This article offers a first account of systematic ideological differences in social-democratic ideology regarding private ownership and different cooperative traditions in the housing sphere of Northern European and continental German-speaking countries. The long-run trajectory of housing welfare regimes in these two country groups has been one of divergence: Nordic countries have moved to Anglo-Saxon levels of high homeownership, high levels of mortgage indebtedness, and house price increases, whereas private tenancy, lower indebtedness, and lower price increases still characterize their German counterparts. Based on historical case studies of Germany and Norway, we argue that the divergence in these two countries can be understood by the different social-democratic and cooperative solutions to the urban housing question from the 1920s onward. Supported by a pro-ownership social democracy, Norway started to develop housing cooperatives of the owner cooperative type, whereas German social democracy was in favor of associations of the tenant cooperative type. The differential growth of these two types of cooperatives and disparities in social democratic party ideology contributed to the urban housing divergence between the two country groups that has been observed ever since. We argue, more generally, that varieties of social democracy and welfare-anticipating cooperative organizations are important in helping us understand the welfare differences between countries.

In his 1936 essay on Nikolai Leskov—”The Storyteller”—Walter Benjamin (1969) lamented the destruction of collective memory that was taking place with the passage from community to society. In the transformed structure of modern life, claimed Benjamin, our ability to exchange experiences has diminished, and along with it, a collective sense of meaning. While tradition collapses under the irresistible force of the development of economic production, human perception also appears to be affected and penetrated by a logic of rationalization. This logic tends to annul more than past traditions and their meaning as vehicles for communal understanding; it also undermines the capacity for experience in general. In the modern world of machines and automatons, Benjamin feared, tradition was irreparably lost. With it there also vanished the remnants of collective dreams and aspirations that in the past had formed the humus of people’s redemptive path toward a meaningful and fulfilled life.

In this article we plead for a less state-centered definition of migration that allows us to understand better the relationship between cross-cultural migrations and social change and social development in the long run. Therefore, we developed a method that enables us to systematically compare CCMRs (cross-cultural migrations per capita) through time and space. This CCMR method puts issues of state policies and citizenship in a much broader social context. We conclude that the presentist approach to migration in the social sciences is highly myopic, as it privileges migrations crossing state borders over internal moves, and favors migrants who have the intention to settle for good. In itself this is a legitimate choice, especially if the core explanandum is the way migrants’ long-term settlement process in another (modern) state evolves. In the more empirical parts of this article however we have concentrated on the effects of Eurasian societies since 1500 that have received migrants. Sending societies and individual migrants and nonmigrants in sending and receiving societies have been largely left out. Finally, and paradoxically, integration and assimilation in the long run leads to diminishing opportunities of social development by cross-cultural experiences, because one could argue that due to globalizing migrations cultures converge further and thus cultural boundaries (as is already the case in migration to cities within culturally homogenous nation-states in the twentieth century) become less salient or disappear entirely. Logically speaking, this is also an implication of the model, presently to be developed further.

The history of the family lacks a history. Sociologists and historians rarely cite interpretative literature written before the last third of the twentieth century. Curiously, at least for the discipline of history, recent scholars have seemingly regarded older perceptions as relics of a prescientific past.

This foray into intellectual history will demonstrate that ignoring the history of this field also distorts it. My case study considers what is widely regarded as the largest revision in thinking about the history of the family—the complete overthrow of what William J. Goode, the sociologist most credited with its rejection, has derisively called (1970: 6) “the classical family of Western nostalgia.” Kertzer and Hogan (1988: 84) have aptly summarized the chief elements of the interpretation overturned by the revisionists: “Until recently, the popular image of Western family history pictured people as living in large extended family units that had multiple functions. With the advent of industrialization, it was thought, this system was transformed into one characterized by small, nuclear family units having more specialized functions.”

When African-American workers broke labor strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were acting in opposition to established social norms concerning race, class, community, and the state. Imagine platoons of African-American men who ordinarily lacked protection of their most basic civil rights escorted by police into a hostile European-American community to take the jobs of European-American workers who were expressing their working-class consciousness through a labor union that excluded their fellow African-American workers. Scholars have interpreted African-American strikebreaking as an example of the ethnic stratification characteristic of the American working class (Bonacich 1976; Gutman 1962, 1987; Foner and Lewis 1979, 1980; Spero and Harris 1931). What was its political-economic context? That is the central question of this essay.

Historical and social scientific explanations often rely on major happenings and crises to define the topics of our inquiries or to delineate historical periods. But these models often prove limited and problematic. The challenge is to understand how action unfolds in a crisis and, in the process, reconfigures resources, opportunities, and horizons of possibility for new lines of strategic response. These questions are addressed through a comparison of Herbert Hoover and Harry Hopkins as they dealt with the onset of the Great Depression. Both men had the skills, network ties, and reputational resources that figure centrally in models of effective agency, but the contemporary assessments of their efforts differed dramatically. This pair of lives—Hoover and Hopkins—permits a cross-sectional comparison as both men wrestled with the onset of economic collapse and a sequential comparison as Hopkins inherited responsibility for relieving a crisis that had been shaped and reshaped by Hoover's actions.

In June of 1948, during the peak period of strike activity in the United States in the past fifty years, Philip Murray, President of the CIO, the most successful militant labor organization of the twentieth century, published an article giving his views on labor organization, democracy, and “our American system.” He argued that “if we pull together . . . we shall surmount the present crisis.” He felt confident about his prediction because, he said, “We have no classes in this country; that’s why the Marxist theory of class struggle has gained so few adherents. We’re all workers here. And in the final analysis the interests of farmers, factory hands, business and professional people, and white-collar toilers prove to be the same” (Murray, 1948; quoted in Lipsitz, 1981: 143).

From 1800 to the present the average person on the planet has been enriched in real terms by a factor of 10, or some 900 percent. In the ever-rising share of places from Belgium to Botswana, and now in China and India, that have agreed to the Bourgeois Deal—“Let me earn profits from creative destruction in the first act, and by the third act I will make all of you rich”—the factor is 30 in conventional terms and, if allowing for improved quality of goods and services, such as in improved glass and autos, or improved medicine and higher education, a factor of 100. That is, the reward from allowing ordinary people to have a go, the rise at first in northwestern Europe and then worldwide of economic liberty and social dignity, eroding ancient hierarchy and evading modern regulation, has been anything from 2,900 to 9,900 percent. What needs to be explained in a modern social science history is not the Industrial Revolution(s) but the Great Enrichment, one or two orders of magnitude larger than any previous change in human history. The article takes seriously the lesson of comparative history that Europe was not unique until 1700 and argues that ideas—specifically Bourgeois liberal ideas—not capital or institutions, made the modern world.

A veritable boom in immigration research has taken place in the last 15 years. The purpose of this article is to provide a conceptual map, a way of presenting the issues and approaches that pertain to the topic, to guide us through the vast territory immigration research now encompasses. As this boundless growth in immigration research has occurred across the social sciences, this review of the literature is not intended to be exhaustive but merely illustrative of what sociologists, historians, and anthropologists have contributed. Since America is the quintessentially immigrant society, the focus is on American immigration, but the theoretical issues this review highlights can be applied equally well to other societies with histories of immigration and racial or ethnic relations, such as Great Britain or Brazil. Increasingly, immigration research is one of the topics where sociologists and historians meet (research on revolutions is another), although they meet in much the same fashion that one sometimes arrives at a party and is much surprised to find out who else is there. Our common research interests increasingly bring us together, although not without a fair amount of surprise and trepidation.

From the point of view of the preindustrial world, the development of the English cotton textile industry in the eighteenth century was truly revolutionary. The industry was established early in the century as a peasant craft (section 2; note 2), and by 1850 it had been almost completely transformed in terms of the organization and technology of production. Of the total work force of 374,000 employed in the industry in 1850, only 43,000 (approximately 11.5 percent of the total) were employed outside the factory system of organization. In terms of technology, the industry was virtually mechanized by this time: there were 20,977,000 spindles and 250,000 power looms in the industry in 1850. What is more, steam had become the dominant form of power used in the industry—71,000 horsepower supplied by steam as opposed to 11,000 supplied by water (Mitchell, 1962: 185, 187). Value added in the industry by this time exceeded by about 50 percent that in the woolen textile industry, the dominant industry in England for over four centuries. This rate of development was something that had never been experienced in any industry in the preindustrial world. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution in England, in the strict sense of the phrase, is little more than a revolution in eighteenth-century cotton textile production.

As much as any other site in the nineteenth century, Francophone Lower Canada saw immense waves of popular petitioning, with petitions against British colonial administration attracting tens of thousands of signatures in the 1820s. The petition against Governor Dalhousie of 1827–28 attracted more than 87,000 names, making it one of the largest mass petitions of the Atlantic world on a per-capita scale for its time. We draw upon new archival evidence that shows the force of local organization in the petition mobilization, and combine this with statistical analyses of a new sample of 1,864 names from the anti-Dalhousie signatory list. We conclude that the Lower Canadian petitioning surge stemmed from emergent linguistic nationalism, expectations of parliamentary democracy, and the mobilization and alliance-building efforts of Patriote leaders in the French-Canadian republican movement. As elsewhere in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, the anti-Dalhousie effort shows social movements harnessing petitions to recruit, mobilize, and build cross-cultural alliances.

The interdisciplinary field of historical geographic information systems (HGIS) took root and flourished at the Social Science History Association (SSHA) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This essay first recounts the growth of HGIS at SSHA and beyond. It then considers challenges that GIS continues to pose for historians and other scholars, such as the unfamiliarity of its conceptual framework and the time and expense often involved in building HGIS databases. The bare-bones visual culture of Social Science History may inhibit submissions by HGIS scholars, whose work typically includes color maps. Yet the enduring methodological and interdisciplinary interests of SSHA members provide a strong basis for continuing involvement by historians who use GIS. The essay closes with new directions in HGIS scholarship, including study of empirical uncertainty, historical gazetteers, textual analysis linked to GIS mapping, and comparison of topology and topography.

For social historians and historical sociologists working in the interdisciplinary fields of ethnic studies and women's studies, the challenges posed by poststructuralism are neither purely intellectual matters nor disciplinary quibbles. Rather, a concern with “rescuing political economy” from being washed away by the tide of poststructuralism is impelled by larger political commitments that transcend the academy.

Unlike mainstream disciplines, these fields historically have been connected to social movements dedicated to empowering people marginalized by reason of race, class, and/or gender. Poststructuralism has become a thorny issue in these fields: Many social science- and political economy-oriented scholars have come to feel, whether justifiably or not, that these fields are being “taken over” by literary, film, and cultural studies scholars.

Recent scholarship on Mexican Americans in the United States, relying largely on qualitative evidence, sees racism and exploitation as the major explanatory factors in their history. Using representative samples of persons of Mexican origin, we argue that immigration is fundamental to their historical experience. A small, beleaguered community in 1850, the Mexican-origin population grew during the late nineteenth century due to greater security under US jurisdiction. However, immigration between 1900 and 1930 created a Southwest broadly identified with persons of Mexican origin. Economic development in Mexico, restriction of European immigration to the United States, and extreme cross-border wage differentials prompted extensive emigration. Despite low human capital, circular migration, and discrimination, immigrant Mexicans earned substantially higher wages than workers in Mexico or native-born Hispanics in the United States. They followed typical immigrant paths toward urban areas with high wages. Prior to 1930, their marked tendency to repatriate was not “constructed” or compelled by the state or employers, but fit a conventional immigrant strategy. During the Depression, many persons of Mexican origin migrated to Mexico; some were deported or coerced, but others followed this well-established repatriation strategy. The remaining Mexican-origin population, increasingly native born, enjoyed extraordinary socioeconomic gains in the 1940s; upward mobility, their family forms, and rising political activity resembled those of previous immigrant-origin communities. In the same decade, however, the Bracero Program prompted mass illegal immigration and mass deportation, a pattern replicated throughout the late twentieth century. These conditions repeatedly replenished ethnicity and reignited nativism, presenting a challenge not faced by any other immigrant group in US history.

Formalization of comparative case methodology has given the appearance of growing consensus and cross-disciplinary acceptance around a set of best practices. Yet how researchers use a method may differ widely from what methodologists believe, which is the crux of institutionalization of a method. This study examines whether comparative methodology has, in fact, institutionalized within the social sciences using evidence from the entire corpus of comparative studies of revolution published from 1970 to 2009. Content analysis of methods of case selection within the revolution subfield reveals a wide diversity of strategies with only modest methodological awareness by practitioners, a lack of consensus among which case selection strategies to use, and little convergence over time. Thus, the comparative method has not yet institutionalized in its practice. Methodological practice has implications for the coverage of cases of revolution and what is substantively known about the phenomenon.

Bodenhorn et al. (2017) have sparked considerable controversy by arguing that the fall in adult stature observed in military samples in the United States and Britain during industrialization was a figment of selection on unobservables in the samples. While subsequent papers have questioned the extent of the bias (Komlos and A’Hearn 2019; Zimran 2019), there is renewed concern about selection bias in historical anthropometric datasets. Therefore, this article extends Bodenhorn et al.’s discussion of selection bias on unobservables to sources of children’s growth, specifically focusing on biases that could distort the age pattern of growth. Understanding how the growth pattern of children has changed is important because these changes underpinned the secular increase in adult stature and are related to child stunting observed in developing countries today. However, there are significant sources of unobserved selection in historical datasets containing children’s and adolescents’ height and weight. This article highlights, among others, three common sources of bias: (1) positive selection of children into secondary school in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (2) distorted height by age profiles created by age thresholds for enlistment in the military; and (3) changing institutional ecology that determines to which institutions children are sent. Accounting for these biases adjusts the literature in two ways: evidence of a strong pubertal growth spurt in the nineteenth century is weaker than formerly acknowledged and some long-run analyses of changes in children’s growth are too biased to be informative, especially for Japan.

This article focuses on traditional private credit markets in eighteenth-century France through the examination of notarized loan deeds and to a lesser extent civil court records. It examines in particular how credit markets functioned and how they developed in the eighteenth century. It argues that traditional credit markets featured norms of solidarity, cooperation, and fairness, and allowed considerable flexibility and input from both creditors and debtors. But in the middle of the eighteenth century, this market experienced several major changes. Not only did the volume of exchange and the number of notarized credit contracts dramatically increase, engendering a standardization of contracts and a greater resort to external institutions, but a new group of investors modified the traditional norms and practices of exchange. This article concludes that the private credit market shifted from an institution in which input, negotiation, and flexibility prevailed to a more rigid institution in which rules and rigor applied.

In 1876, there was a huge commemoration of the centennial of American independence. The year was marked in many ways, by many groups, in many parts of the country. The central event, though, was a grand International Exhibition in Philadelphia, four years in the making. Planners first met in 1872 in Independence Hall and spoke at length about the sacredness of the venue: “It is altogether fit and wise that we should take our first step and utter our first words in this hall. There sat John Hancock, presiding over that immortal body. There came Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston presenting the sacred declaration. There lies the broken and silent bell, which at the word proclaimed liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof” (USCC 1873: 24-25). The theme was taken up by many others in many different ways. Images of the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Washington, and Franklin were scattered throughout centennial ceremonies, buildings, poems, histories, and other documents. The revolution was used as a touchstone in talk about the exhibition and as a rich source of national symbolism.

Numerous network studies demonstrate that interlocking directors unite corporations in the United States into a tight-knit corporate community (e.g., Sonquist and Koenig, 1975; Mariolis, 1975; Mizruchi, 1982). In addition, nonnetwork studies of foundations, universities, and other nonprofit organizations suggest that corporate officers and directors play a large role in the governance of such institutions (e.g., Hartnett, 1969; Dye, 1976; Useem et al., 1976; Salzman and Domhoff, 1980; Useem, 1981). However, there are no studies that cast light on the structural position of nonprofit institutions in relation to the well-established corporate network.

Charles Tilly has introduced to historical and sociological discourse the concept of the repertoire of collective action. The concept is rooted in the observation that “any given population tends to have a fairly limited and well-established set of means for action on shared interests. . . .” (Tilly 1977: 39) The repertoire of collective action, like its theatrical counterpart, implies a group of actors who choose among a restricted number of performances with which they are familiar. Their options are circumscribed both by prior experience and by the material, organizational, and conceptual resources they find readily at hand (Tilly and Tilly 1981: 19). Tilly also likens the repertoire of collective action to a game that involves a set of basic rules around which a considerable degree of extemporization is not only permitted but required. The result is a “paradoxical combination of ritual and flexibility” (Tilly 1977: 22; Tilly 1986b: 33, 37) in which neither element must be allowed to displace the other, lest the performance lose either its creative edge or its ready communicability.