This article discusses how American geography and sociology began their university institutionalization in the 1890s with some very similar disciplinary points of origin and understanding of their subject matter but subsequently carved out their own fields by creating new or abandoning old disciplinary areas. Some of the disciplinary “catchment areas” were fought over until they came under the heading of human ecology around 1907/8, which, at least in the case of sociology, later became an influential but nevertheless transient perspective. It is argued that the unfolding of human ecology can best be understood against the background of the interaction between sociological and geographical streams of thought beginning in the 1890s.

Social historians formed an important part of the Social Science History Association from its early days, and they widened its intellectual space beyond initial emphases on political history and quantitative methods. Lee Benson and other faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Charles and Louise Tilly, were particularly influential in attracting a broad mix of scholars to the group. The openness of the association and its interdisciplinarity appealed to younger scholars, and those interested in the “new urban history” were early recruits. A growing number of women, many of whom were social historians, participated in the first conventions and newly organized networks.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the gender divide in American higher education narrowed rapidly as women shifted their aims from homemaking to careers. The dynamic-social-norms hypothesis explains why we observe unexpected and rapid rather than gradual change in women’s education and employment. The explanation draws on a theory of social change developed by Timur Kuran that predicts revolutionary rather than incremental shifts in social norms. Critical to the argument is the claim that in some settings the choices of individuals depend in part on the choices of others. In the presence of interdependencies, the potential exists for unexpected and rapid transformations, such as that occurring in higher education between 1965 and 1975.

Louise Tilly’s thoughtful and provocative essay “Gender, Women’s History, and Social History” makes a genuine contribution to our thinking about the research that has been done in women’s history by proposing new categories for analysis and by addressing the current debate over the usefulness of deconstruction as a methodological tool for historians. She demonstrates that we have been engaged in “the study of women in time,” with some success. We have studied women’s occupations, sexuality, personal relationships, marriage choices, family roles, and education. We have examined changes in women’s legal and political rights, their engagement in social and political causes, their successes and failures in the political arena. We have analyzed the ways in which states have tried to regulate women’s behavior, the social and economic constraints under which women have functioned, and the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. And we know infinitely more than we did two decades ago about these subjects.

The combined influence of the Great Migration of African Americans and the civil rights movement propelled the drive for fair housing legislation, which attempted to curb overt discrimination in housing markets. This drive culminated in the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. By that time, 57 percent of the U.S. population and 41 percent of the African American population already resided in states with a fair housing law. This article uses hazard models to analyze the diffusion of state fair housing legislation and to shed new light on the combination of economic and political forces that facilitated the laws' adoption. Outside the South, states with larger union memberships, more Jewish residents, and more NAACP members passed fair housing laws sooner than others. Including controls for a variety of competing factors does not undermine the estimates, and historical accounts of the legislative campaigns support the article's interpretation.

Before the 1940s Puerto Rico was an obscure possession for most American social scientists, as indeed it was for most United States citizens. Conquered in the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico was overshadowed in the American consciousness by its more tumultuous neighbor Cuba. To be sure, by the 1930s, there were sparks of interest among foundation staffs, New Dealers, and radicals in the plight of the Puerto Rican poor. Yet on the whole the island continued to merit only cursory attention.