Analysis of the Republican Party popular vote in Georgia county congressional elections of 1876 suggests that Charles Tilly's (1978) model of interest-based collective action would be useful if embedded in the dynamic model of political processes and mechanisms that Tilly (2007) proposes. Specifically, class (petit bourgeois), status (black), and party (liberal Republican) interests explain 25 percent of the variance in the election returns. Adding a racial-change variable increases the explained variance to 32 percent but fails to distinguish the yeoman and freedman constituencies and the process through which the Democratic Redeemers divided and conquered the opposition in the process of “de-democratization” (ibid.). By embedding the structural analysis in the analysis of process (quantitatively and qualitatively), we can appreciate how yeoman and freedman constituencies experienced contract/convict labor differently and expressed opposition to Redeemers in qualitatively different ways, ultimately facilitating divide-and-conquer efforts.

We explore racial differences in multigenerational living arrangements in 1910, focusing on trigenerational kin structures. Coresidence across generations represents a public function of the family, and we observe this across different ages or life-course stages through which adults came to be at risk for providing simultaneous household support for multiple generations of kin dependents. Using data from the 1.4 percent 1910 Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample, our comparisons adjust for marital turnover, including widow(er)hood/divorce and remarriage, as rates are known to be historically higher among African Americans in this period. Across subgroups defined by age and sex, we find that African Americans are virtually always as likely as or more likely than European Americans (of both native and foreign parentage) to live as grandparents in trigenerational households. Widow(er)hood/divorce generally increased the likelihood of trigenerational coresidence, while remarriage sometimes increased, sometimes decreased, and sometimes had no association with this living arrangement. Also, we find that the life-course staging of household kin support in 1910 differed across race/generation partly due to different economic and demographic circumstances, suggesting more complexity in kin support than previously considered. We discuss these findings in relation to the histories of African American and European American families as well as their implications for future research.

The economies of modern cities are dependent on an advanced retail system; so too are the people who inhabit them. The origin and evolution of retailing in London, Canada, was studied using a historical geographic information system (GIS) to document the relationship between a city and its retail sector. Visualization and spatial-statistical techniques afforded by the historical GIS were implemented to study change over time. The locations of retailers and the types of the goods they sold were examined for four periods in the city’s early history: 1844, 1863, 1881, and 1916. The distances traveled to shop were also calculated for a variety of goods. The results indicate that the retail system was ingrained in the development of the city, showing marked locational patterns and a high degree of rationality in the shopkeepers' business strategies. Mapping the retail landscape in each era using historical GIS allowed for the examination of the relationship between retail and residential development in the growing city. While the downtown area remained the primary retail district for the city, considerable retail expansion also occurred at the urban periphery during this early stage of the city's development.

We quantify the increasing use of complex mathematics and show that the increase is unique to economics in the social sciences. Donald F. Gordon hypothesized that mathematics in economics would most likely be useful in manipulating long chains of relationships, precisely in the instances where the theory was least likely to be valid. Time bedevils long chains of economic reasoning, because the ceteris paribus assumption requires the stability of all links. We find that the rate of hypothesis testing in articles citing mathematically complex articles is less than 2 percent and summarize a variety of tests and other evidence that supports Gordon’s hypothesis. A major factor in the rise in mathematical complexity may be the decline in comments, replies, and rejoinders debating earlier publications; the decline has been rapid, as editors have become increasingly “hostile” toward perspectives other than the ones they have previously published. We conclude by emphasizing that (1) prominent journals in economics are devoting more space to mathematically complex articles despite their inconsequential operational harvest; (2) the “appropriate” balance between mathematical complexity and operationalism, as well as the relative merits of “stylized facts” versus observational reality, should be considered in editorial decision making; and, finally, (3) the academic debate that addresses empirical replication and verification, the appropriateness of model formulation, and the crucial matters of history and circumstance, which are the measures of all research in the social sciences, is vital.

Over the past decade or so geographic information systems (GIS) methodology has become an accepted tool in historical research (Gregory and Ell 2007; Knowles 2008). Although often regarded as a mapping tool, GIS is perhaps better thought of as a type of database. What makes a GIS database unique is that a location is stored for each item of data, with this location taking any of a variety of forms: a point, a line, a polygon representing an area or zone, or, in the case of a raster system, a pixel. GIS can then present instantly on the screen a map showing the distribution of any variable or combination of variables in any of the chosen locational formats. This electronic display of information becomes an analytic tool, allowing the refinement of research questions, with answers displayed instantly: GIS creates a display of information once visible only in paper form, drawn slowly and expensively first by cartographers and then by vector plotters. GIS and its associated tools transform mapping into a dynamic exploratory process.

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.

A novel brand of laissez-faire that lay outside the political mainstream in the early postwar years was broadly hailed at the dawn of the twenty-first century as the common sense of a global age. Yet how to understand neoliberalism as a specifically political thing, especially in the unlikely terrains of Western European and leftist politics, is unclear. This article mobilizes field theory to conceptualize and investigate neoliberal politics in Western democracies, treating the left-right axis as a variable but fundamental organizing dichotomy over which mainstream political parties exert a unique definitional influence. To trace how this dichotomy has shifted over time, I develop a novel index of political neoliberalism using data on the electoral programs of mainstream parties across 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries between 1945 and 2004. I find that between the 1970s and 2004 a revised political center emerged, featuring a new concept of state responsibility and the means by which it should govern: a historical shift that took root across the left-right spectrum among mainstream parties and that was as much in evidence in Continental, Nordic, and southern countries as in Anglo-liberal countries. The overall trend can be fairly characterized as the rise of a specifically neoliberal politics. I suggest that a full explanation requires both a political sociology and a sociology of knowledge, attending to the organizational and cultural bases of Western party systems.

The existence of revolutionary waves is a well-known feature of history. This study contends that revolutionary waves are best understood as systemic phenomena occurring during periods of rapid world-cultural expansion. Rapid expansion and deeper penetration of cultural linkages is theorized to generate contradiction between idealized models and local political practices, empower oppositions, and fracture elites, resulting in waves of revolution. The theoretical logic is illustrated with the example of the Atlantic Revolutions. Multivariate analyses examine the correspondence among a new indicator of world culture, additional systemic processes, and revolutionary waves across five centuries of European history. Results suggest that the occurrence of revolutionary waves is positively associated with relatively rapid world-cultural growth and hegemonic decline, as indicated by periods of hegemonic warfare.

The rise of disciplines is connected with the formation of groups or networks of specialists. It is connected with the emergence of “scientific communities,” theorized about since Thomas Kuhn and Robert Merton. But how is such a community of specialists brought together; how are common orientations among members of a scientific community upheld? In this article it is argued that scholarly journals play a key role in the modern scientific disciplines. Journals both secure the shared values of a scientific community and endorse what that community takes to be certified knowledge. Publications in scholarly journals have become the basic units of scientific communication in a discipline. Against this theoretical background, I analyze in this article the evolution of the leading scholarly journal in the field of education in the Dutch-language community, Paedagogische Studiën (Studies in Education). The analyses illuminate a number of historical evolutions in this journal in the period 1920–75: the increase in coauthorship and the concomitant standardization of publication formats; the changing role of the editorial board, especially in its function of gatekeeper of scientific communication; and the increase and the shifting “global” nature of cited work in the journal. Because of the close relationship between journal and discipline, this analysis highlights basic characteristics of the patterns of communication and the constitution of disciplinary identity in Dutch-language educational science.

Neoliberal urban development, as a set of governance practices and regulations intended to valorize cities as sites for capital accumulation, has increased social polarization and produced enclaves or “cities within cities.” Local governments have relinquished administrative and legal control to private corporations over how certain areas in the city are developed and used (or “consumed”) and by whom. In this article I examine the emergence of governance strategies around urban fragmentation in Chester, an older, former industrial city in southeastern Pennsylvania. My analysis focuses primarily on modes of state (de)regulation and intervention in privatized urban redevelopment, emphasizing how common patterns in governance have surfaced despite changing definitions of “urban redevelopment” over different time periods. In doing so, this analysis fits within critical studies of actually existing neoliberalism, in which the forms and practices of neoliberalism are examined as historically contingent and geographically specific.

The title of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in 2007 was “History and the Social Sciences: Taking Stock and Moving Ahead.” David I. Kertzer (2007), the president of the association at that time, explained that the focus of the conference was to determine “how far we have come in social science history” and to isolate “the most promising avenues for research.” The following essays were presented at the presidential session, titled “The Past, Present, and Future of Economics for History.” The presenters put forward a number of provocative arguments before a fully engaged audience, whose numbers spilled into the hallway of Chicago's Palmer House. While the authors were all economists by training and by department affiliation, there was an intense interdisciplinary exchange between audience members and the panelists. The session, in short, was a huge success in generating a range of ideas about the future of economics for history.

Montreal in 1881 was highly segregated along four distinct social dimensions: language, religion, socioeconomic status, and sector of employment. By 1901 the population had doubled, and we examine changes in residential distributions over the two decades. Despite the increased integration of certain groups, segregation remains high, and multiple dimensions are still discernible. In addition to long-established communities of French Canadians, Irish Catholics, and Anglo-Protestants, we see new streams of immigrants occupying their own patches in the urban fabric. To make meaningful observations of sociospatial changes over two decades, we used a geographic information system (GIS) to situate individual census households with spatial precision on 1 of 12,000 lots in 1881 and 30,000 in 1901, so that we could reaggregate them into meaningful districts of different scales and districts with identical boundaries for both years of observation, thereby overcoming the major methodological problems hindering previous comparative analyses. Coupling well-established statistical indexes of segregation and diversity in a GIS framework lends new analytic power to grasp the scale of phenomena and inquire into behavioral choices of nineteenth-century households. The empirical evidence shows how both concentration and diversity were built into the urban fabric. This study also offers methodological cues for comparative studies in other places and periods.

The transportation revolution had several important effects on the antebellum political equilibrium. First, it caused western and southern political views to differ by bringing more easterners and European immigrants into the West. Second, it reduced the costs of rerouting western exports to the non-South, which decreased the expected costs to the West of conflict with the South. Third, it greatly increased western population, which brought more free states into the Union and changed the balance in the Senate. Fourth, it increased northern numerical superiority over the South, giving the North a major advantage if an armed conflict did occur. These changes led the West to ally with the East and caused the South to secede.

As agents, we all act on behalf of others and of our own accord: these are socially and historically interrelated orientations to action in contemporary America. But as chains of accountability erode at work and in the economy, as layers of aides and representatives proliferate in social welfare, and as outsourcing comes to define prisonfare at home and mercenary warfare abroad, the challenges of agency relations come to the fore. These processes are counterposed to and entwined with more playful forms of action through self-representation, now in Facebook and its ilk increasingly mediated through technics, but rooted in far older forms of confessional speech and writing. How, then, do we begin to understand postmodern agency? This address, an invitation and a first step, locates the vicissitudes of everyday agency in America in comparative-historical context.

Recent interpretations of the neoliberal transformation of welfare states emphasize the formative role of crises in which old institutions are rolled back to make way for the “rollout” of neoliberalism’s program of austerity, markets, and privatization. Policy scholars and social historians argue, however, that major social changes combine long-term institutional development, sudden pivots, and cyclical trends. This article draws on a case study of municipal employee labor relations in New York City to examine the temporality of neoliberal transition. It acknowledges that actual neoliberalism involves a mix of policies that depart from its market-liberal ideal type and that include elements of statist, communitarian, and/or corporatist policies. Thus the article engages a puzzle: if paths to neoliberalism are not always sudden and are populated by policies that are not necessarily driven by neoliberal assumptions, how should we understand what neoliberalism is and how it develops? The article traces the history of municipal labor relations from the 1950s through the present to show that the transition to neoliberalism was characterized by the transition from a contentious corporatism that took shape in the 1950s and went through a neocorporatism forged in the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and that kept corporatist institutions in place while undermining their social power and laying the groundwork for neoliberal policies from the 1990s forward. The article shows how longer-term trajectories and shorter-term crises intertwine to produce a neoliberalism better understood as a repertoire of governance than as an undifferentiated set of policy preferences for market mechanisms.