Given the centrality of legislatures in our representative system of government, it is a remarkable fact that there is today no general, systematic history of state legislative development in America. There are numerous studies of particular laws or individual legislators, but the process by which this important institution evolved historically and its role in the political system remain largely unexplored. The internal development of state legislatures in the century or so after the Revolution, as Ronald Formisano (1974: 480) has observed, is “generally almost terra incognita to historians” (see also Zemsky, 1973; Bogue, 1974; Campbell, 1976). The men who served as legislators in this period are equally obscure. Historians have also assumed, without investigating the proposition, that policy making was the primary function of legislatures and that citizens were linked to that policy-making process through representatives. Studies of past legislative behavior have focused principally on the role of political parties and interest groups in the conversion of constituent demands into public policy.

The study of critical elections in American politics has been marked by a steady growth of knowledge and a remarkable consensus among practitioners in the field. Although minor quibbles have appeared from time to time, the work within each generation has set the agenda for the work of the next. The pioneering efforts of Key (1955, 1959), Schattschneider (1960), and MacRae and Meldrum (1960) produced clear descriptions of the phenomenon of critical elections, as well as operational definitions of the concepts. This group of studies paved the way for the systematic analysis and classification of elections in the work of Campbell et al. (1960), Sellers (1965), Pomper (1967), and Burnham (1968). The election patterns discovered in these studies, however, required explanation. The next wave of interest in critical elections, ushered in by the theoretical works of Burnham (1970) and Sundquist (1973), identified the essential variables governing electoral dynamics, but still did not explain precisely how these variables worked. That explanation is the next obvious step in the theory of critical elections, and it is the subject of this discussion.

State intervention into the ownership, financing, and regulation of various industries and sectors of the capitalist economy is a phenomenon as old as capitalism itself. In the last 15 years this topic has become a focal point of vigorous interest among social scientists. Given the manifest problems to be found within current political-economic relationships, it is not surprising that a great deal of this attention has been focused on the contemporary scene. Nevertheless, a small number of works have undertaken the explanation of the historical development of state intervention. Unfortunately, the historian in search of explanatory guidance is confronted here with a series of less than comprehensive analyses which move at descriptive and explanatory cross-purposes. The first tasks of the social scientist or historian who wishes to address the development of state intervention therefore must be to classify and clarify the accounts which have been proposed.

In a strictly theoretical and methodological perspective, the Columbia studies of personal influence—conducted in the 1940s and early 1950s—are today of largely historical interest as particularly self-conscious and sophisticated examples of social-scientific discovery. Yet, there are indications that these studies are once more coming to scholarly attention and their long eclipse, so symptomatic of discontinuity in social-scientific research, may be coming to an end (Scheingold, 1973). There is a growing interest in describing and explaining electoral and related patterns of behavior in terms of the “social networks” to which people belong. The contribution of the Columbia studies to research on the effect of social networks in voting behavior and public affairs seems therefore worthy of retrospection.

The last few decades have witnessed a new interest in the study of the family in colonial America. By concentrating on single communities, historians have been able to assemble increasingly complex demographic information that has shed new light on colonial society. Until recently this research has been primarily concerned with New England communities where the necessary information is most complete, but in the last few years several studies have appeared which deal with the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia (Demos, 1965, 1968, 1976; Greven, 1966, 1967, 1970; Lockridge, 1966, 1970; Vinovskis, 1972; Walsh and Menard, 1974; Rutman and Rutman, 1976; Smith, 1978). The early results of the most recent research offer an interesting contrast to the demographic patterns established in New England, and even passing comparisons of the two regions suggest a wealth of differences which must have played important roles in creating distinct colonial societies.

During the 1820s and early 1830s, two largely different populations of working people lived alongside each other in the region surrounding Manchester. Today, they represent, in an important and clear contrast, the social foundations which have supported distinctive directions of popular protest and collective action. The theory of working-class radicalism, as developed by Marx and others, has tended to confound the two. The necessary radicalism and fundamental opposition to the growth of capitalist industry of more traditional communities of craft workers was wedded to the concentrated numbers of new industrial workers and the clarity of their exploitation by capitalists. This marriage took place in theory, but not in concrete social movements. The working class emerged as a foundation for basically reformist collective actions, while the radical and reactionary populist craftsmen lost the war of the industrial revolution.

Not so long ago the skilled worker was regarded by labor historians as the black sheep of the labor movement, and the artisan's attempt to preserve his position and to retain his shop-floor autonomy was condemned out of hand. No more. Spurred on by the studies of E. P. Thompson in England, Albert Soboul in France, and George Rudé in both countries, historians have discovered the skilled worker's importance in labor protest and rebellion; everywhere artisans have been found in the midst of what once were thought to be proletarian crowds. The continuing inspiration of Thompson, Soboul, and Rudé is apparent in all of the articles in this collection, although they are by no means simple reiterations of these historians’ insights. Viewing working-class life from the perspective of an entire century and two continents, the following essays suggest new generalizations and, inevitably, raise fresh questions.

On 11 August 1779 the magistrates of Lille published a minutely detailed ordinance designed to reform funeral and burial practices in that northern French city. Since the Middle Ages it had been the practice in Lille, as in other French cities, to bury the deceased within the parish grounds. Depending upon the status of the deceased, burial would take place under the choir of the church (solennels); under a lateral wing (demi-solennels); or in one of the two exterior cemeteries adjoining the church—the first of which was for ordinary parishioners (bourgeois), the second for unbaptized children. Briefly, the Ordinance of 1779 established a common cemetery outside of the city walls and forbade further burials in the five parish cemeteries of Lille. The four traditional distinctions by rank were maintained in the new cemetery and a system of funeral hearses drawn by horses was introduced by the magistrates to transport the deceased to the new cemetery. The ordinance was the product of several years of negotiation among the magistrates of Lille, the Bishop of Tournai, and royal authorities at Versailles. This reform was partially the result of a new campaign for urban hygiene or l’air pur and an attempt by the magistrates to appropriate valuable urban property since the ordinance stipulated that parishes would sell their cemetery land to the magistrates.

After more than a decade's impressive achievement in the “new” social history and the “new” political history, two distinct though related problems require us to reconsider the data appropriate to these inquiries. First, recent commentators (Foner, 1974; Formi-sano, 1976) have pointed to the relative failure of research in these areas to converge, a failure made more obvious in the light of the programmatic optimism of the 1960s which held out the prospect of an integrated approach to the social basis of politics and to the political implications of social structure. Second, there has been in recent years some acknowledgment by historians (see below) of the vexing question of inferences across levels of data, a matter central to other social sciences and particularly pressing for historians of electoral behavior.

Recent work in women's history suggests that the dramatic rise in female labor force participation in the first decades of the twentieth century cannot be understood solely in terms of labor market forces. Although the demand for female labor increased substantially between 1900 and 1920 (Oppenheimer, 1970), such variables as religion, education, ethnicity, and social class interacted to determine the supply of women available for hire at any one time. It should not be surprising, therefore, that “cultural” variables such as these also served to limit the ability of women to improve their position in the labor market generally. This article will examine the ways in which the family and work environments interacted to determine the responsiveness of working women to different sorts of organizations which (theoretically) could have assisted them in altering the basic conditions of their work and family experiences.

A decade ago, Richard Hofstadter wrote that historians were approaching consensus on the political origins of the War of 1812. Blending elements of the work during the early 1960s of Norman K. Risjord, Bradford Perkins, and Roger H. Brown, Hofstadter (1969: 181) concluded that Republicans were convinced “the Republic itself and the fate of republican government had come to rest on the ability of the Republican party to take a forceful stand against foreign incursions on American rights.” Republicans, in other words, melded national with partisan goals and pursued war to save national honor and the Republican party.

Today, however, one would have to conclude that Hofstadter’s prediction was premature, based upon the spate of articles published since 1972 addressing the partisan nature of the vote for war in the House of Representatives, the role of the War Hawks in the debates and legislation of the war session, and the leadership (or lack thereof) supplied by James Madison (Hatzenbuehler, 1972b, 1976; Egan, 1974; Stagg, 1976; Hickey, 1976; Fritz, 1977; Bell, 1979).

Much of political sociology has its roots in the history of the French Revolution of 1848. Between the collapse of the July Monarchy in February 1848 and the proclamation of the Second Empire in December 1852, powerful factions vied for control over the state. The outcomes were uncertain until the coup d’etat of December 1851 ended the Second Republic and secured the control of the Bonapartist party. Generations of analysts would carry on the debates of contemporaries over the failure of the working class to take state power in the months following the February Revolution.

Among contemporary interpretations, the most enduring was offered by Karl Marx. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx (1963) traced the shifting coalitions of class actors against the background of events which culminated in the demobilization of the democratic-socialist movement and the coup d’etat.

Internal migration plays an important role in the redistribution of the population which normally accompanies industrialization. This was clearly the case in nineteenth-century England, where a major redistribution of the population occurred during the Industrial Revolution. Despite its potential theoretical importance, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the dynamics of internal migration in this classic example of industrialization.

Since the time of the two Fredericks—Engels and Le Play—the history of the family has served as a vehicle for social criticism. That is as it should be: The way we relate our current family lives to our understanding of the past defines who we are and who we ought to be. The analysis may unfold as Art: as an effort to recreate the experiences of living in different sorts of families. It may proceed as Science: as an attempt to trace reliably what changed and why. Or it may take the form of Politics: the drive to establish who was responsible for changes in the family and whose interests those changes served. For Lasch, the history of the family is mainly Politics, with a dab of Art. Science—or, as he thinks of it, pseudoscience—is the enemy. Stone writes history chiefly as Art, although he is not adverse to the trappings of Science when they serve his purpose.

In the course of my current research I have made machine readable a variety of socioeconomic data that was not available before. Because most of this data bank can be displayed in graphic form, and because it covers a vast amount of information, I want to describe its contents and make it available to the scholarly community. I have used the arrondissement and department codes employed by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, and I hope that everyone doing quantitative work on France will use this system, so that all of our efforts will be compatible. Anyone who is using this coding system will be able to add data easily to my four sets, and ideally we will be able to develop a data bank with even more variables and a wider time frame.

Three years ago in this journal, J. Morgan Kousser( 1977) offered a stunning challenge to historians—a program for significantly improving the quantitative competence of historians and for expanding the number and range of quantitative studies. Faithful readers of Social Science History, however, will have noted that no response has been made to Professor Kousser's “Agenda for ‘Social Science History'“; indeed, not so much as passing notice of Kousser's argument has appeared in this medium. Were it not for the often spectacular, informal debates that have surrounded Kousser's agenda and similar proposals, the absence of response in these pages might well be taken for consensus on what once was the tenderest of issues among historians, quantitative analysis. Nevertheless, the debate is very much alive, and the issue, though less tender now than even a few years ago, continues to possess great importance to historians actively engaged in many areas of historical research.

The strike, an organized work stoppage to compel employers to accept workers' demands, is a form of class struggle that predates the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, however, the strike became one of the most common forms of collective action in Western Europe and a major expression of class struggle. “No doubt concerted work stoppages date back as far as organized work itself,” write Shorter and Tilly (1974: 34), “but the form of work stoppage we call the strike became a standardized and frequent form of collective action in western countries with the industrialization of the nineteenth and twentieth century.” Sociologists and historians have generally recognized that the nineteenth century marked the emergence of the strike as an important form of working-class collective action, but they have offered diverse interpretations as to why early industrialization generated intense strike activity.