The year was 1915, and Edwin R. A. Seligman had a problem.He was not preoccupied with the battle for woman suffrage, which women would win in his state of New York just two years later. Nor was he immediately concerned with the war in Europe, which would soon involve the United States. Nor yet was he worried about hordes of immigrants, the labor question, or the regulation of big business. Those larger issues in the political history of the Progressive Era concerned him, but his immediate problem was both far more mundane and far more fundamental: How could the State of New York keep paying its bills?

The goal of this article is to describe and explain the specific strike pattern of American bituminous coal miners in the last part of the nineteenth century (between 1881 and 1894).The central thesis is that the evolution of strike patterns in bituminous coal mining differed substantially from the development of strike patterns in other industries during this period. According to scholars like Gerald Friedman (1988) and Kim Voss (1993), the evolution of the American labor movement until 1886 was strongly determined by the Knights of Labor’s strategy of inclusive unionism, which sought to increase worker power through solidarity and broad-based strikes. As this strategy proved unsuccessful—especially in 1886—American labor unions later conducted a different type of walkout: planned, small strikes of strategically located, skilled workers, which were more successful.

Sir George Clark (1947: 98) once remarked that “during the whole course of the seventeenth century there were only seven complete calendar years in which there was no war between European states.” The impact of the longer land wars on civilian mortality during this period was often extreme. The reasons for this had little to do with the fighting itself. Wartime civilian mortality crises were precipitated by fatal epidemic diseases and starvation. Modern demographic historians attribute the starvation to military supply systems that stripped civilians of food and the means to acquire it, and the epidemics to decreased resistance to disease caused by undernutrition and to increased rates of disease transmission brought about by troop movements and civilian refugee flows (Flinn 1981: 52–53).

When social scientists enumerate the reasons behind the vast expansion of the U.S. welfare state during the New Deal, they commonly cite pressure from unemployed workers, the Keynesian ideology of Roosevelt's policy advisors, and the political compromise between southern congressionalDixiecrats and northern Democrats which enabled the programs that extended relief to the needy (Schlesinger 1958; Conkin 1967: chap. 3; Alston and Ferrie 1985; Goldfield 1989; Kimeldorf and Stepan-Norris 1992; Alston and Ferrie 1993; Quadagno 1994: 20–22; Fleck 1999a).While it is uncontroversial that the working class played some part in the formation of New Deal policy, it would seem that American farmers, particularly the mostly black southern tenantry, had little or no direct role in the distribution of federal relief.

The development of theNazi Party from 1925 to 1933 serves as fertile ground for studying what social movement researchers have identified as generic issues of micromobilization, the array of processes employed by movements in attracting, enlisting, and activatingmembers. Formally known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), the Nazi Party was, of course, a political party in contention with other parties of theWeimar Republic until wresting state power in 1933. The lion’s share of empirical research on the NSDAP has been by way of electoral studies done by political sociologists, political scientists, and historians. However, if one draws back the historical frame and looks at the period from 1920 through 1933, the Nazi Party in its incipient stages (Orlow 1969: 40–45) behaved quite overtly like some of the disruptive, militant socialmovements illuminated in contemporary social movement literature, culminating in the failed November Putsch of 1923 and Hitler’s subsequent imprisonment.

Quantification is often taken to be a hallmark of modern society and science. This is perhaps no where more obvious than in social science disciplines, marked by often heated debates about whether quantitative methods illuminate or obscure social reality. Quantification itself depends upon numeracy, that is, the ability to count, keep records of these counts, and make rational calculations. Thus, numeracy, like its more frequently studied counterpart, literacy, is central to modern life, both inside and outside of academia.

A great many factors other than philanthrophy influenced social policy in England during the Middle Ages. Although political thinkers steadfastly acknowledged the importance of received tradition, especially the religious command to help the poor, many lawmakers were profoundly ambivalent about begging. It is true that the opinion of the nineteenth century implied that medieval almsgiving was so “reckless” that English “beggars had an easy life,” but more recent research has challenged this perspective, bringing the parameters of medieval mendicancy into sharper focus. Seen individually, beggars were pathetic and vulnerable, but if viewed collectively they were thought to be dangerous and willfully idle. Parliament's decision to regulate begging in the years after the first appearance of the Black Death (1349–50) compelled the king's subjects to rethink the claims of the needy, even though almsgiving had long seemed a positive aspect of community life. Obviously by the close of the fourteenth century something had happened to broaden the story of casual relief, extending its boundaries beyond religious impulse to include the frustrations and passions that animated the political arena. Here contentious voices sounded, although parliamentary argument and debate were often tempered by the conviction that men of affairs could legislate a more orderly realm. Even so, efforts at social planning were by no means limited to statutory decree or confined to the late medieval world.

In a recent New York Times article, Robert Sharoff reported on “a throwback to the early years of the 20th century when wealthy Chicago families tended to live in such close-in neighborhoods as Prairie Avenue and theGold Coast.” For the past five years, wealthy Chicagoans have been constructing “palatial residences of at least 6,000 square feet” in the Lincoln Park neighborhood a mile and one-half north of the Loop (Sharoff 2000: 36). This “return” of the well-to-do to the city contradicts traditional urban theories on elite residential patterns; the preponderance of these theories projects the upper class universally and continuously seeking the metropolitan fringe for new homes, more and open land, and/or lower density (Burgess 1925; Hoyt 1939; Alonso 1964; Adams 1987; Downs 1981; Luger 1996; Lowry 1960; Hartshorn and Muller 1989; and Knox 1994).These theories, as well as the notion of the recent return of the upper class to the city, mask a long history of continuing elite residence within some cities as well as considerable diversity in upper-class residence patterns and landscapes among cities.

At the fall 2001 Social Science History Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network sponsored a forum on the history of gun ownership, gun use, and gun violence in the United States. Our purpose was to consider how social science historians might contribute nowand in the future to the public debate over gun control and gun rights. To date, we have had little impact on that debate. It has been dominated by mainstream social scientists and historians, especially scholars such as Gary Kleck, John Lott, and Michael Bellesiles, whose work, despite profound flaws, is politically congenial to either opponents or proponents of gun control. Kleck and Mark Gertz (1995), for instance, argue on the basis of their widely cited survey that gun owners prevent numerous crimes each year in theUnited States by using firearms to defend themselves and their property. If their survey respondents are to be believed, American gun owners shot 100,000 criminals in 1994 in selfdefense–a preposterous number (Cook and Ludwig 1996: 57–58; Cook and Moore 1999: 280–81). Lott (2000) claims on the basis of his statistical analysis of recent crime rates that laws allowing private individuals to carry concealed firearms deter murders, rapes, and robberies, because criminals are afraid to attack potentially armed victims. However, he biases his results by confining his analysis to the years between 1977 and 1992, when violent crime rates had peaked and varied little from year to year (ibid.: 44–45). He reports only regression models that support his thesis and neglects to mention that each of those models finds a positive relationship between violent crime and real income, and an inverse relationship between violent crime and unemployment (ibid.: 52–53)–implausible relationships that suggest the presence of multicollinearity, measurement error, or misspecification. Lott then misrepresents his results by claiming falsely that statistical methods can distinguish in a quasi-experimental way the impact of gun laws from the impact of other social, economic, and cultural forces (ibid.: 26, 34–35; Guterl 1996). Had Lott extended his study to the 1930s, the correlation between gun laws and declining homicide rates that dominates his statistical analysis would have disappeared. An unbiased study would include some consideration of alternative explanations and an acknowledgment of the explanatory limits of statistical methods.

In 1978, some 40 years after the practice of opinion polling first arrived in France, the country’s newspapers and magazines informed their readers that 76% of the French approved of Charles de Gaulle’s role in World War II, that 77% did not consider the pope’s moral instructions binding, that 83% never participated in winter sports, and that 36% thought Michel Rocard would be a good finance minister. Anyone who could not remember those findings for long might be forgiven, for they were but drops in an ocean of polling data, a tidal wave of information that swept over France each year. For many, this onslaught of polling data is deeply disturbing, given their belief that opinion polls have undermined elected representatives’ ability to use their judgment in making political decisions and have silenced other, more authentic expressions of popular opinion (for example, see Champagne 1990). Even those who welcomed les sondages d’opinion as a new means of bringing the people’s voice into arenas of power might still have felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of them published in France by that time–well over 500 in a typical year, according to one 1984 estimate–and many began to characterize the country’s apparently insatiable appetite for polls as sondomanie, or “poll mania” ( Jaffré 1985). Perhaps it was only to be expected that France, one of the pioneers in the creation of modern democracy, would be among the countriesmost interested in using polls to proclaim the will of the people to the humble and the powerful alike.

The economic history of African American workers since 1940 has been marked by alternating episodes of progress and stagnation. Sharp gains in relative incomes during the 1940s were followed by little change in this measure in the 1950s. Renewed progress from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was followed by a new period of stagnation and even decline in relative pay in the 1980s and early 1990s. The important episodes of progress were to a great degree driven by changes on the demand side of the labor market: rapid growth in labor demand—especially for blue-collar workers—during WorldWar II and the effect of new antidiscrimination policies on the demand for black labor after 1965 (Donohue and Heckman 1991; Jaynes andWilliams 1989: 294–96).

The fact that white-collar workers share relatively similar experiences of economic hardship and proletarianization across nations but develop clearly different types of trade unionism renders the theoretical relevance of formalist and economist approaches to the class location and class character of whitecollar workers questionable. According to this perspective, notwithstanding ideological and logical variants, social class reflects an occupational conglomerate, and class constituents' consciousness, disposition, and action are determined by their position in the social structure. Analysis of social class becomes a simple task of filling empty strata with workers and debate centers on the demarcation lines within the occupational structure, generating theories of class structure without attention to class agents (Bourdieu 1984). By contrast, historico-cultural, ethnographic approaches to social class, pioneered by E. P. Thompson's monumental work in 1963, turn formalist, economist theories on their head by bringing class agents back in. The process by which workers become class members is considered complex, contingent, and relational: lifestyles, dispositions, modes of collective action, and political orientations blend at a historical juncture in such a way that a class character substantially distinct and sustained enough forms and becomes an important dimension of social structure.

There is a conventional wisdom about the origin of public range management in the American west that draws most of its evidence logically, but nevertheless circumstantially, from decades of subsequent policy. It is shared by advocates across the political spectrum, from conservative elected officials and ranchers to radical environmentalists. That conventional wisdom distracts the many individuals who have attempted to understand range policy, and it hampers recent attempts at range policy reform. Narrowly, the conventional wisdom concludes that the institutionalized management privilege of cattle ranchersover all other users—the capture of range management—was according to the design of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. In so concluding, the conventional wisdom contributes to the more general idea that forces are at work to make the colonization of a policy area by a particular interest the inevitable result of politics in a liberal democracy.

Critics of identity politics often wax polemically as they charge contemporary social movements with narrowly and naively engaging in essentialist politics based on perceived differences from the majority. Such essentialism, critics charge, inhibits coalition building (e.g., Phelan 1993; Kimmel 1993), cannot produce meaningful social change, and reinforces hegemonic and restrictive social categories (Seidman 1997). It is even responsible for the decline of the Left (Gitlin 1994, 1995). Social movement scholars similarly view “identity movements” as cultural rather than political movements whose goals, strategies, and forms of mobilization can be explained better by a reliance on static notions of identity than by other factors.

Social policy that emerged from the New Deal era continues to shape race relations and politics today. Since the 1930s, scholars have debated the net effect of the New Deal on racial inequality. On the one hand, the social policies of the 1930s are viewed as a great step toward a racially inclusive society (Myrdal 1944; Wolters 1975; Sitkoff 1978, 1985; Ezell 1975; Patterson 1986; Weiss 1983). In contrast to previous eras and political regimes,Roosevelt's New Deal reflected a qualitatively different sense of government's responsibility toward its citizens, including African Americans. Alternatively, New Deal era social policy is considered a crucial component in the structure of American racial stratification (Lewis 1982; Rose 1993; Quadagno 1994; Valocchi 1994; Brown 1999).The legislative record of the New Deal was consistently racialized and discriminatory.Welfare policy, in particular, actively excluded and subjugated blacks. These contrasting portrayals reflect the ambiguity of the New Deal legacy of race relations.

In January 1844, Joseph Hekekyan, a British-trained engineer in Muhammad Ali's service, recounted how the Commission of Ornato (a joint commission of Europeans and Ottoman subjects charged with overseeing city planning and public health efforts in Alexandria) had toured the Maristan Qalīwūn, a hospital founded as a pious endowment in the thirteenth century, with the purpose of assessing its conditions and determining how many poor people could be sheltered in this institution. As Hekekyan reflected on the men, women, and children who had already made this “asylum for the poor” in Cairo their home, he noted how they were lodged, fed, and clothed “by the munificence of the Pasha” and how their presence represented the uninhibited charity of the Egyptian government. He was most concerned with how the government supported all of the shelter's residents without distinguishing between inhabitants of Egypt's countryside and those of Cairo and the length of residents' stay (many had married and had children during their residence). Hekekyan put forth his own suggestions for how the government should deal with the poor, calling for the introduction of a tadhkira system (identifying the indigents' place of residence) and proposing that the parishes take care of their own poor (Hekekyan 1844, 2: folio 239).