For more than six decades recurrent efforts have been made to establish the trends of early American prices. Following the lead of Arthur Harrison Cole and other members of the International Scientific Committee on Price History, who foresaw the need for worldwide evidence on prices as an essential foundation of economic and historical analysis, scholars began to develop series for major market centers such as Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, Boston, New Orleans, and Cincinnati (Warren et al. 1932; Taylor 1932a, 1932b; Bezanson et al. 1935, 1936; Cole 1938; Berry 1943; Bezanson et al. 1951). Modern refinements of these largely wholesale and urban price indexes for the years before the Civil War have yielded reliable long-term insights against which to interpret basic issues of American economic growth (U.S. Congress 1959–60; David and Solar 1977). Meanwhile, researchers focusing on the evolution of particular parts of the country or on the economic milieus of specific organizations have felt the need to determine local price movements for the historical contexts that interest them. To do so, they have used evidence from the accounts of merchants and farmers (Rothenberg 1979; Adams 1986, 1992), from probate inventories (Anderson 1975; Main 1985), and from the records of public institutions as diverse as the Philadelphia almshouse and Harvard College (Smith 1990; Foster 1962). John J. McCusker (1991, forthcoming) has contributed an overview of the key elements of this literature and has constructed from selected series a deflator that can be used to compare American economic values over time between 1700 and now.

The historical record rarely presents researchers with precisely the evidence they desire. This is particularly true for social historians and like-minded scholars, whose subjects left precious few signs of their passing. Consequently, certain data have borne a disproportionate evidentiary load in social-historical research. The occupation a person pursued is one key piece of information on which scholars have come to depend. Our understanding of the historical social structure and where people fit into it is bound up with the interpretation of occupations. But this reliance on occupation as the primary social locator in historical research depends on some largely unexamined premises. Whether scholars group occupations or convert them into numerical status measures, they make assumptions about the nature of the occupational structure. When researchers incorporate change over time into their analyses, they suggest that the meaning of occupations remained stable for the purpose of measuring social mobility, class position, or group status-attainment. This assumption has been the subject of little discussion and even less research. For all the use to which historians have put occupation, there has been little effort to assess systematically its stability as a social or economic indicator.

In an overview of recent research on the history of the family, Tamara Hareven (1991) points out that this field of study took its inspiration from developments in historical demography and from the “new social history” of the 1960s. Family historians, like other social historians, had “a commitment to reconstructing the life patterns of ordinary people, to viewing them as actors as well as subjects in the process of change” (ibid.: 95). The flowering of research in this field has provided us with a more detailed understanding of the relationship between social change and family life than was previously available. We have learned, among other things, that rather than a single trajectory of change from extended family life before industrialization to the nuclear family afterward, changes in family organization have rarely been invariant, linear, or unidirectional.

Almost 30 years have passed since the “new” social history and its related fields fired the imagination of historians and other social scientists, particularly sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. Perhaps the time has come to ask: What difference does it make? What has been the impact of these new historical efforts on our understanding of more general patterns in history?

The new social history and its subdisciplines have become so established that they are not viewed as new anymore. Younger generations of scholars take them for granted. On the other hand, those of us who witnessed their emergence and helped develop them still remember the sense of promise and discovery and the frantic search for methodologies with which to answer new questions. The excitement led to collaborations and to an enduring sense of kinship among practitioners.

Historically, the departure of children from the parental home was an important economic and social phenomenon. Because it was equivalent to establishing a new residence, the decision to leave is relevant to our understanding of the history of migration. Leaving home was also a milestone in the life cycle that typically signaled a transition from semidependence to greater economic and social responsibility on the part of the individual, a change that affected labor force participation, family income, expenditures on housing, schooling or training, socialization, and interaction among siblings. In turn, couples considered these implications in formulating fertility goals and strategies.

This article examines a new set of historical microdata for insights on the wealth of the Irish in late-nineteenth-century Ontario. Regression analysis is used to determine whether or not the wealth of the Irish-born differed significantly from that of the Canadian-born and other birthplace groups.

The traditional view has been that the Irish in nineteenth-century North America were impoverished and economically disadvantaged. In the American literature, certainly, Irish immigrants have been viewed as penniless, technologically backward, and inclined to reject rural for urban life because of their experience of famine (Akenson 1988: 48). Recent American empirical work has supported this view. For example, Stephen Herscovici (1993: 329) finds that in nineteenth-century Boston the native-born held significantly more wealth than immigrants and that the wealth of the Irish did not substantially increase over time. Ferrie (1994: 10) finds that the Irish-born were 69% less wealthy than the British-born in 1850 and that this gap rose to 72% in 1860, if age and duration in the United States are controlled for.

Much of what is known about how Appalachians cope with chronic poverty is the result of the landmark Beech Creek studies, a series of investigations of an impoverished, geographically isolated group of neighborhoods in eastern Kentucky (Brown 1952a, 1952b, 1988 [1950]; Schwarzweller et al. 1971; McCoy 1986). In 1942 James Brown purposefully selected a remote, nonmining area in rural Clay County, Kentucky, to document a way of life that was less deeply affected by the penetration of commodity, labor, and consumer markets than were Appalachian coalfield communities at the time. Brown’s detailed ethnographic observations of subsistence farming, social stratification, and family and community life, together with subsequent studies of residents and out-migrants from Beech Creek, provide the best empirical record of the strategies by which Appalachian persisters and migrants have coped with chronic, intergenerational poverty.

Studies of the Supreme Court confirmation process have traditionally concentrated on factors that lead to Senate defeat of nominees (e.g., Scigliano 1971; Songer 1979; Palmer 1983; Segal 1987; Cameron et al. 1990; Ruckman 1993; Van Winkle 1994). Thus, they look at such institutional and political variables as presidential strength, timing, the partisan composition of the Senate, and whether an appointment may alter partisan coalitions on the Court. More recently, a separate body of literature has begun to examine the effects of interest-group lobbying for and against Supreme Court nominees (e.g., Caldeira 1988-89; Caldeira and Wright 1990,1991; Austen-Smith and Wright 1994). For example, Austen-Smith and Wright characterize the allocation of lobbying resources across senators supporting, opposing, and indifferent to Robert Bork's 1987 nomination. Our study, which examines the lobbying against the 1881 nominations of Stanley Matthews, is part of this second wave of research on group lobbying and Supreme Court nominations. We argue that National Grange influence affected senators' votes on Matthews's nomination during a period not associated with interest-group activity.

Every government policy has positive and negative externalities: offshoots and spin-offs that either are unplanned or exceed calculated expectations. New Deal agricultural policy was no exception. One controversial aspect of it is the alleged role of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) in southern tenant and sharecropper displacement. Whether or not the officials of the AAA underestimated or even cared about this phenomenon, many contemporaries and most historians have criticized the Roosevelt administration for it.

Recent comparative studies in Western industrialization have discovered a variety of economic “governance structures” between competitive markets and corporate hierarchies. Such “associative” forms of enterprise pose both a descriptive and an evaluative problem to students of capitalist development. Can business cooperate, or does a single competitor who hopes to do better by cheating undermine all associative agreements? Suppose cooperation is possible: can it be accomplished to improve products and production processes, rather than merely to redistribute wealth from consumers to business?

It has long been known that manufacturing in the countryside for interregional and international markets was an important forerunner of industrialization during the formative period of capitalism. Every standard account of industrialization in Europe discusses the development of the domestic system of production, particularly its early predominance in textile manufacturing.

Although many Americans casually refer to the “institution” of marriage, most rarely consider the implications of that terminology. One enters into marriage by participating in fairly well-defined rites, and couples are warned of the solemnity of the undertaking. But seldom do the parties enter into marriage with a thorough understanding of what it means to subject oneself to governance by the law of marriage.

The law is widely recognized as an institution that may profoundly affect the choices and lives of individuals. It is designed to affect individual behavior, encouraging “appropriate” actions by penalizing those that are seen as problematic for society. Its rules allow for the balancing of competing rights, and the courts provide a remedy when the rules are broken. Marriage law provides ground rules to govern the specific relationship characterized by a lifetime sexual and economic partnership between a man and a woman and endorses that relationship by giving it legal force.

For an industrial worker in late-nineteenth-century America who lost a limb or an eye from a precariously assembled piece of machinery or who suffered some other work injury, compensation could be attained only through litigation. But under the common law, the courts assumed that workers who found themselves in dangerous work situations had the freedom to leave and find employment elsewhere. If they chose not to leave and were injured, the employer was not to blame legally. The doctrine of “assumed risk,” one of three “employers’ defenses,” made it difficult for a worker to win compensation. Only when an injured worker could prove that the employer had directly caused the accident and had done so alone was payment awarded (Downey 1912: 11–13).

The emergence of new infectious diseases and the resurgence of old ones fascinate scholars as well as the public. Before the Ebola virus made the best-seller lists or starred in a feature-length film, the International Commission on Historical Demography (ICHD) had planned a colloquium for its quinquennial meeting in Montreal, “The Big Killers: Epidemics, Famine, and War in Historical Perspective” (27 August–3 September 1995). Twenty-eight papers materialized. Interpretation and synthesis were the principal concerns. Technical obsessions of the guild—methodology, data, quantification, and the like—were banned. Instead, authors were encouraged to focus on the interrelations between mortality crises, on the one hand, and culture, society, economy, and politics, on the other.

By the close of the first decade following ratification of constitutional female suffrage in the United States, it had become commonplace to read of female political leaders bemoaning the inefficacy of women's lobbying organizations, which despite their lobbying efforts did not engage in any electoral activity such as the mobilization of female voters (see, for example, NYT 10 March 1928: 3; NYT 31 March 1931: 22). That this should have been the case raises an interesting question: Why not? That is, given the likelihood that women's votes would have increased the efficacy of these lobbying efforts, why weren't the leaders of women's lobbying organizations, in particular those of the former suffrage machine, the National League of Women Voters (NLWV), pursuing those votes?

One of the most fascinating aspects of criminal adjudication is the method of identifying the criminal. Who committed the crime? While crime-detecting agents of the twentieth century use an array of sophisticated methods, such as fingerprinting, psychology, and, most recently, DNA sampling, no such methods were available to their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century counterparts. In fact, during the early modern period there were hardly any police forces to speak of. How, then, did contemporaries detect and report their culprits? Here I address these intriguing questions using an urban case study of Frankfurt am Main from 1562 to 1696.

Two major transitions in U.S. household structure involving the living arrangements of the elderly have taken place over the last two centuries. The first transition, around 1820, marked the demise of the colonial household economy and the rise of a privatized household economy (Degler 1980; Demos 1986; Lasch 1977; Ruggles 1987; Rutman 1977; Ryan 1981). The old tended to share households with the nonold after this time, and the prevalence of coresidence peaked at the turn of the twentieth century (Ruggles 1987). The second shift, around the late 1940s, marked a quiet “demographic revolution” in living arrangements (Smith 1986). It brought a rapid decline in intergenerational coresidence and a parallel rise in young adults and the elderly living as primary individuals.

Federal and state appellate court reporters for the 15 American slave states and the District of Columbia contain nearly 11,000 cases concerning slaves. In deciding these cases, southern judges formulated doctrines that would later become commonplace in other disputes. In fact, the common law of slavery, whether it concerned the sale, hiring, or accidental injury of a slave, looks far more like modern-day law than like antebellum law. Slave law, in many ways, helped blaze the path of American law generally.

The outbreak of AIDS around the world in the last 15 or 20 years is usually referred to as the “AIDS epidemic,” or occasionally “pandemic” (Grmek 1990). These terms have no great analytic value. The major medical dictionaries and epidemiological textbooks define an epidemic merely as an outbreak of a disease marked by a greater number of cases than usual (see Fox et al. 1970: 246–49; Mausner and Bahn 1974: 22, 272–77; Stedman’s Medical Dictionary 1977: 470; Kelsey et al. 1986: 212; Walton et al. 1986: 351; Harvard 1987: 247). This condition is contrasted with the endemic form of a disease at “its habitual level, or what previous experience would lead one to anticipate.” The term pandemic is used to describe an epidemic widespread in the world and usually characterized by a large number of cases, for example, the fourteenth-century plague epidemic (or Black Death) and the influenza epidemic during the latter part of World War I. Some authorities stress the fact that epidemics are also characterized by a declining phase. This is true by definition, of course, for otherwise the disease could be described as shifting to a new and higher endemic level. But it is also of interest that most of these unusual outbreaks of disease are eventually limited by such mechanisms as a decrease in susceptibles as persons become immune or die; as interventions, either medical or behavioral, eliminate the source or interrupt transmission; or as the pathogen mutates and becomes less virulent.