Recent accounts of transnational activism have examined a variety of social movement organizations (SMOs) but have paid little attention to labor transnationalism. This article utilizes and adapts this new transnational social movements scholarship to understand contemporary labor activism in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries. Exploring the preexisting networks and intramovement cleavages that helped spawn labor opposition to NAFTA, it focuses on labor activists' complaints under the treaty's labor side accord. I explore how rising political opportunities associated with the treaty and its new institutions created new political arenas, targets for activists, and incentives for cross-border collaboration. The cross-border political exchanges that formed part of labor activists' strategies to utilize these new institutions helped activists create new movement frames, transnational identities, and coalitions. While these outcomes support the findings of literature on transnational SMOs, they point to the particular dilemmas labor activists faced in confronting these issues due to their vulnerability, the status of unions as formal organizations embedded in national institutional structures, and the difficulty of imagining policies and strategies that might be effective in this new transnational sphere.

Employing the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series of the University of Minnesota, we chronicle the changing timing and duration of transitions to adulthood in the twentieth century. Successive generations of young Americans reinvented the transition to adulthood to accommodate shifts in the economy and the American state. The patterned choices of young people delineate three eras of social history in the twentieth century: the era of reciprocity (1900–1950), the era of dependence (1950–70s), and the era of autonomy (1970s-2000). We also explain why African Americans differed from the general trend; they developed distinctive transitions to adulthood in response to persistent inequality.

Between the 1960s and 1990s a series of urban redevelopment projects in Manchester radically transformed ethnic settlement in the city. The ward of Moss Side, which had been a gateway for Caribbean and African immigrants, experienced repeated slum clearances in which whole communities were relocated and large tracts of housing stock were demolished and redesigned. The relationship between these physical and demographic changes has been overshadowed by the persisting stigmatization of Moss Side as a racialized “ghetto,” which has meant that outsiders have constructed the area as possessing a fixed and homogenous identity. This article uses geographic information systems in conjunction with local surveys and archival records to explore how the dynamics of immigrant mobility within Moss Side were shaped by housing stock, external racism, family strategies, and urban policy. Whereas scholarship on ethnic segregation in Britain has focused on the internal migration of ethnic groups between administrative areas, using areal interpolation to connect demographic data and the built environment reveals the intense range of movements that developed within the variegated urban landscape of Moss Side.

In the United States, significant variation regarding the quality of public goods exists across local governments. In this article, I seek to explain these patterns. I argue that economically and racially homogenous communities are collectively willing to invest more resources in public goods relative to diverse communities. I provide evidence in support of this claim by analyzing the relationship between race and income diversity and the share of community security and education that is provided by private entities. I find that as racial diversity and income inequality increase, the share of private security guards and white children enrolled in private school is higher.

Linked historical records typically are unrepresentative of the population from which they are drawn even if the method of linking is restricted to time-invariant matching criteria. An example drawn from Canadian census records illustrates the nature of bias that may afflict even a carefully linked sample. The use of potentially time-varying match criteria doubles the size of a linked sample at a modest cost in terms of additional bias. This trade-off is attractive for some research purposes if care is taken in the uses to which the data are put. Reweighting to mitigate the effects of bias in visible characteristics is desirable.

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 early decades of the nineteenth century are widely recognized as formative years for the English working class. During the first two decades a wide variety of trade groups struggled at both the regional and national levels to protect artisanal rights and unmuzzle the legally muted voice of labor (Prothero 1979; Randall 1991; Rule 1986; E. P. Thompson 1966). Success was at best uneven. Revocation of the Statute of Apprentices in 1813–14 was an alarming defeat for artisans who sought to protect their trade privileges from growing capitalist incursions. The successful repeal of the Combination Laws that had barred trade unions in 1824 encouraged a clamoring among many of London’s trades to resuscitate wage rates, precipitating strikes in many industries. Also emerging from the lean years was a new understanding of the relations between capital and labor. “The interests of the masters and men,” London’s Trades’ Newspaper pronounced, “are as much opposed to each other as light is to darkness” (Hollis 1973: 45).

Past empirical research into the history of racially motivated mob violence in the American South has relied almost exclusively on the record of completed lynchings. In this article, we propose that a better definition of “racialized terrorism” would also include the record of lynching threats. Using a newly available confirmed inventory of lynching threats for 11 Southern states from 1880 to 1929, we demonstrate that the total quantum of racialized terrorism nearly doubles when completed lynchings and lynching threats are combined, with some states and decades affected more than others. Parallel analyses suggest that previous conclusions regarding important environmental predictors of Southern mob violence, such as agricultural specialty, political party strength, and racial population composition, are robust to an expansion of racialized terrorism to include threatened lynchings. However, sufficient differences are found between the predictors of completed and threatened lynchings to suggest the need for future researchers to consider broadening the measurement of racialized terrorism.

Historical analyses of demographic phenomena from the past few decades have provided new insights requiring the reassessment of a number of traditional paradigms, such as the venerable demographic transition theory. Fertility studies have dominated this research, but there is a growing interest in the interrelationships of several demographic variables, such as family formation and infant mortality (Knodel and Hermalin 1984; Nault et al. 1990; Potter 1988a; Working Group on the Health Consequences of Contraceptive Use and Controlled Fertility 1989a, 1989b). This article falls into the latter category; in it we investigate the relationship between childbearing (fertility) and infant mortality in the Utah frontier population during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Prefamine Irish living standards have proved enigmatic. They are intriguing because they hold the key to understanding the trajectory of economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century. They have remained elusive because of the paucity of available information. Using Australian data, this paper examines regional trends in Irish-born female convict heights, identifying divergent tendencies between west and east that left Ulster women the tallest in the land.

There is no Doubt that Sweden, at least from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, belonged to the European countries where legal control of extramarital sex was most extensive. First of all, there was a difference between Protestant and Catholic countries, not in principle but in emphasis and form. The Spanish Inquisition was, for instance, mainly interested in whether people thought that a certain behavior was a sin or not. Religious confessions proved that the sinner realized that he had done something wrong, and he could therefore be treated with a certain mildness afterwards (Benassar et al. 1979; Henningsen et al. 1986). Protestantism, at least in Sweden, tended to be more interested in people's actual behavior, usually leaving the internal spiritual life of the sinner aside. This dichotomy between thought and behavior was of course not total in practice, but it tells us something important about the difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards religious control. Religious homogeneity also explains some of the success of Swedish orthodox Protestantism in creating a system of tight control. There was no escape for dissenters except emigration, since the creed was protected by the civil state.

History is full of reactions and revolutions from which even the scholarly world is not immune. The revision in French economic history during the last two decades affords an example of one of the most complete turnabouts in recent scholarship. In the 1940s and 1950s a number of scholars, mainly American, believed that the problem to be explained was French economic retardation in the nineteenth century. Much was written about the unenterprising character of French entrepreneurs, anticapitalist social attitudes, the persistence of the family firm and the small farm, and other sociocultural characteristics that were deemed inimical to economic growth. The Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard (1948-1958) provided inspiration for analysing French entrepreneurial failure in terms of Parsonian sociology, and the classic retardationist view of French industrial development remains enshrined in David S. Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), originally written during the 1950s for the Cambridge Economic History of Europe.

Despite the importance of marriage for the economic and demographic history of the nineteenth-century United States, there are few published estimates of the timing and incidence of marriage and no published studies of its correlates before 1890, when the Census Office first tabulated marital status by age, sex, and nativity. In this article I rely on the 1860 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series census sample to construct national and regional estimates of white nuptiality by nativity and sex and to test theories of marriage timing. I supplement this analysis with two new public use samples of Civil War soldiers. The Gould sample, collected by the U.S. Sanitary Commission between 1863 and 1865, allows me to test whether height and body mass influenced white men's propensity to marry. Additionally, a sample of Union Army recruits linked to the 1860 census, created as part of the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death project, allows me to combine suspected economic, demographic, and anthropometric correlates of marriage into a multivariate model of never-married white men's entrance into first marriage. The results indicate that nuptiality was moderately higher in 1860 than it was in 1890. In contrast to previous studies that emphasize the primary importance of land availability and farm prices, I find that single women's opportunity to participate in the paid labor force was the most important determinant of marriage timing. I also find modest support for the hypothesis that height affected men's propensity to marry, consistent with the theory that body size was a sign to potential marriage partners of future earnings capacity and health.

Central american events of recent decades show human behavior at both its most courageous and its most barbaric. The opposing phenomena of popular mobilization and state terrorism pose some of the most profound questions that can be asked by social science. How can we explain the willingness of political elites and their agents to slay thousands—tens of thousands—of their fellow human beings, even when their victims are unarmed? Conversely, how do we account for ordinary people undertaking collective action under circumstances so dangerous that even their lives are at risk?

Lead contact and lead poisoning have received scant attention in discussions of early West Indian societies but are potentially important issues in considering the health and medical problems of blacks. Although our discussion focuses on Barbados, the West Indian historical literature strongly suggests that our general findings are applicable to other Caribbean areas and have implications for understanding some of the disabilities of early white populations as well. In this paper we also seek to illustrate how bioanthropological and chemical analyses of slave skeletal remains and historical data can complement one another in defining and investigating various dimensions of slave life.

We have been studying the migrations of the descendants of nine men who came to Massachusetts before 1650 and have compiled a computerized database that includes all the people born before 1860 in the patrilines. Thus we have what the nine genealogists who studied these families thought was close to a complete list of family members alive in 1850. Here we focus on our attempts to find these individuals on the 1850 federal census.

To facilitate our task, we made up a search list that contained all males alive in 1850, but we omitted females known to have married by 1850. The search list included both the last known place in each individual’s record before 1850 and the next known place after 1850. The list was deliberately over-inclusive. In the 30% or so of the cases in which we did not have death dates for individuals, we carried them on the list until they were 100 years old. Again, the census is supposed to have been taken as of 1 June, but we included anyone who was born or died in 1850, whether it was before or after that date. All told, we searched for 7,627 individuals, about two-thirds men and one-third unmarried women.

Within the last 15 years historians, political scientists, and sociologists have played major roles as expert witnesses in southern voting-rights cases. In most of these lawsuits, black plaintiffs challenged the racially discriminatory effects of at-large elections, contests in which candidates must run citywide or countywide rather than from single-member districts. Unless a white majority casts its votes as a bloc against minority candidates, at-large elections do not have a discriminatory impact. For this reason, the court’s decision frequently turns on its assessment of the degree to which electoral patterns in the jurisdiction are polarized along racial lines. Although the expert witnesses on whom the court must rely have employed a variety of statistical methods, they increasingly have preferred a technique known as ecological regression analysis to measure the degree of racial bloc voting (Loewen 1982: 179–94; Grofman et al. 1985; Engstrom and McDonald 1985; Jacobs and O’Rourke 1986).

The growth of black fraternal associations is closely intertwined with the larger history of voluntary associations in American society. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, compared to its European counterparts, the United States soon gained a reputation as “a nation of joiners.” As early as the 1830s, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville described the proliferation of voluntary associations as a hallmark of American democracy. In his view, such associations distinguished America from the more hierarchically organized societies of Western Europe. “The citizen of the United States,” Tocqueville (1947 [1835]: 109) declared, “is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it.” Near the turn of the twentieth century, a writer for the North American Review described the final decades of the nineteenth century as the “Golden Age of Fraternity” (Harwood 1897).

How do state bureaucracies become high-quality organizations? Leading comparative politics studies assume that bureaucratic quality is forged by the introduction of meritocratic personnel systems because meritocracies, in contrast to politicized bureaucracies, select the most competent applicants for the jobs at hand. However, in line with principal-agent theory I propose that without a certain level of responsiveness of bureaucrats to the government in place and its policies, the positive consequences of meritocracy for bureaucratic quality are drastically reduced. Meritocracy is likewise essential to bureaucratic quality but, given that it demands some bureaucratic autonomy, meritocracy also creates a control problem. To study the consequences of meritocracy for bureaucratic quality, I revisit bureaucratic developments in the paradigmatically important historical cases of Prussia as well as Imperial and Weimar Germany. Based on extant scholarship of Prussian and German bureaucratic history, the analysis shows that bureaucratic quality varies over time with responsiveness even when meritocraticness is constant at high and low levels, and that governments knowing this hesitate to adopt meritocratic systems despite their advantages if they believe the bureaucracy will be unresponsive. Studying Prussia and Germany historically helps distinguish between the consequences for bureaucratic quality of meritocracy from those of responsiveness. On this basis, I identify where comparative politics studies may benefit from adding, in a comparative historical perspective, responsiveness to the explanation of bureaucratic quality.

In this article we use network theory to explain the adoption of the Protestant Reformation. We use new historical data on the connections between Hansa towns that allow us to conduct the first social network study of the Protestant Reformation. Based on an analysis of cities in central and Western Europe between 1517 and 1530, we find evidence for diffusion through both simple and complex contagion. Our operationalization of network data based on medieval Hansa Diets points to the complex association between tie weights (i.e., the strength of ties) and numbers of ties in network diffusion. Using optimal tuning parameters for simple adoption models, we show that a combination of strong ties and weak ties fostered Protestant adoption in northern cities.