This article considers the relationship among race, stature, and proximity to Pennsylvania's nineteenth-century dairy-producing regions. Previous studies demonstrate a positive relationship between stature and access to dairy products. However, Pennsylvania's dairy-producing region was also close to urbanized Philadelphia. Here a new dataset is used from the Pennsylvania state prison system to track the heights of black and white males incarcerated from 1829 to 1909. It is documented that both blacks and whites living in southeastern Pennsylvania near both dairy-producing counties and urbanized Philadelphia were consistently shorter than individuals born and incarcerated elsewhere, indicating that the effects of urbanization dominated proximity to dairy production. Black inmates were consistently shorter than their white counterparts. The well-known midcentury height decline is confirmed among white men and is extended to blacks as well.

This article addresses three critiques that pull at the loose ends of Logics of History, revealing weaknesses and bringing new theoretical resources to problems raised by but not satisfactorily resolved in the book. Each critic suggests reformulations of my claims about how structures, events, and social transformations should be theorized: George Steinmetz from wide-ranging and theoretically eclectic perspectives, Dylan Riley from a broadly Marxist standpoint, and David Pedersen from a perspective that is predominantly Peircian. While agreeing with aspects of their critiques, I also reaffirm certain features of my own arguments.

To assess claims about the role of the extended family in late imperial Chinese society, we examine the influence of kin network characteristics on marriage, reproduction, and attainment in Liaoning Province in Northeast China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We compare the influences on outcomes of the number and status of different types of kin as well as the seniority of the individual within each type of kin group. We find that the characteristics of kin outside the household did matter for individual outcomes but that patterns of effects were nuanced. While based on our results we concur that kin networks were important units of social and economic organization in late imperial China, we conclude that their role was complex.

Funding for schools of all kinds was largely market-based until the Civil War. Parents in New York and other northern states continued to pay tuition, or rate bills, in addition to taxes to support common schools. Previous research relied on aggregate state-level data to estimate the amount of funding from public and nonpublic sources for common schools, while existing case studies of local school practices focus exclusively on Massachusetts or on urban locations and thus on exceptions to the rule. This study looks at local practices of school funding for multiple types of schools in one unexceptional rural town in western New York from 1815 to 1850. The results reveal considerable in-state variation in the proportion of public and private funding for common schools that is otherwise obscured by state-level data. The proportion of school funds that came from tuition was much higher for rural areas than for urban areas. The article also compares tuition funding for common schools with that for other types of market-based schooling, including two local venture schools and one local academy. The results show that, although tuition prices for academies and venture schools were predictably higher than for common schools, the overall structure of school funding for rural common schools and academies was more similar than different in New York in the antebellum era.

The recent shift away from the idea of centrally planned public systems and toward market-based models of schooling opens new territory for scholarship in the history of education. What is the history of education markets? How has the structure of education markets changed over time? This article addresses these questions by surveying existing literature, with an emphasis on the early national and antebellum periods. In the process it brings new perspectives to standard narratives of the history of education in the nineteenth century, particularly regarding the development of state-based educational systems. It then proposes areas for future research and concludes by introducing two examples of new work in this field.

This article examines a place utility model of how destination assets influenced inmigration for the 1950s African American urban system. Archival and historiographical data are combined with census data to conduct weighted least-squares regressions that compare economic, ethnogenic, and other place utilities. Despite declines in migrant selectivity and net southern out-migration, ethnogenic characteristics increased the size of in-migrant streams during the 1950s, net of the momentum from prior migration and, most important, net of economic and demographic place utilities. Even as several dramatic changes began or intensified during the period, ethnogenic attractions continued to shape destination selection during this “bridge” decade of civil rights–era migration.

Visual and oral, video and audio evidence are brought to bear to examine the history of the U.S. census and the practice of social science history. The article explores how artists have appropriated and depicted census taking in America and how census takers used “artistic” forms of evidence to advertise and promote the census and explicate census results to the public. The article also suggests how social science historians have understood and used the new electronic environment of the Internet and the World Wide Web to present their data and findings.

This article studies how policy on venereal disease participated in the construction of twentieth-century Swedish citizenship. Contact tracing and mandatory medical treatment, the two cornerstones of the Swedish attempt to eradicate venereal disease, became part of the contemporary citizenship discourse. Policy on venereal disease in Sweden was administered by infectious disease officers in every county and provincial physicians in every district. These civil servants were helped by the local police, who searched for recalcitrant patients. To be fully entitled to the rights of free medical care required extensive cooperation from the ill, some of whom found it impossible to comply. In Stockholm women were more frequently targeted by this legislation and were often treated more severely.

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.

How does the logic of language combine with the logic of labor to explain historical change? This article suggests that William H. Sewell Jr.'s work can be divided into three periods, each characterized by a different answer to this question. In the work of the early cultural turn, labor and language codetermine historical change; in that of the high cultural turn, the logic of language becomes dominant; and in that of the postcultural turn, labor returns to a more central position. The article argues that these shifts result from tensions in Sewell's account of historical change and suggests a comparison with Jürgen Habermas's account of work and interaction.

This article presents a history of medicine from the patient's viewpoint. Using archival materials from the Takinogawa Health Survey, conducted in Tokyo in 1938, the article examines differences in self-reported morbidity according to patients' ages and genders. It also examines differences in their choices of treatment according to income. The article proposes to understand these differences with reference to sociocultural, biological, and economic factors.

The article discusses the conceptual and methodological challenges of comparative economic history, focusing on recent debates concerning alternative pathways of development in Europe and Asia, the agricultural systems of early modern England and the lower Yangzi region in China, and the historical demography of Eurasia. The article concludes that such debates support the perspective that there is substantial path dependency and contingency in economic history and that alternative development paths can be discerned across and within Europe and Asia.

When explaining the success of the Prohibition movement in the United States between 1900 and 1920, scholars argue that prohibitionists were able both to tap into the distrust of many rural, native-born, evangelical Protestants toward modern urban life and to bring together disparate groups of reformers around one goal: the elimination of the saloon. Furthermore, localized campaigns resulting in the elimination of saloons from many rural areas kept this base of voters energized, ultimately leading to impressive dry turnouts in statewide Prohibition referenda. This study extends and amplifies these findings through an analysis of three sets of factors on voting outcomes: the percentage of various demographic groups (urban, immigrant, and ritualistic religious populations) residing in a county; the distance of each county to saloons; the presence or absence of producers of alcohol in a county. Results of ordinary least-squares regression demonstrate that access to saloons and the percentage of immigrant and ritualistic church members in a county are the variables that most influence the results of Prohibition referenda. Furthermore, unlike what previous research has demonstrated, these variables have their greatest influence by affecting wet turnout rates.

Enumeration, even the contemporary census, cannot be characterized as neutral and objective data collection; official categories both shape and are shaped by national cultures. This article examines the forms, laws, and procedures of Japanese household registration (koseki) and national censuses in three cases from the modern period (1868 to post-World War II). Each case isolates a particular time period to show how broad political cultures, such as Westernization, the development of state welfare, and democratization, were codified or reflected discursively in enumerative programs. In each case, categories shifted the substantive and practical meanings of individuals in families and of household heads in relation to the state. In the early Meiji period (1868-1912), an aristocratic, head-centric social order was imposed on all classes through household registration. By the late Meiji and through the Taisho (1912-36) and early Showa periods (1936-89), census categories reflected a new household model based on economic and spatial relations. In the reconstruction period following World War II, the household register embodied the dramatic changes to the civil code that established equality of sexes and the nuclear family as the fundamental social unit. By the 1960s, however, census forms reflected a return of national cultural discourse to hierarchical, extended-stem family households.

Victor Lieberman'sStrange Parallels is the culmination of an extended effort to compare many major polities of the Eurasian continent in the early modern age. Lieberman finds common cycles of administrative integration and disintegration that were increasingly synchronized over time. Although he does not give a single-factor explanation for this synchronization, his model provides a common vocabulary for political, economic, and cultural analysis that can inspire all comparative world historians. China, however, is missing from this analysis, even though its dynastic cycles share much with the other polities. China's ambivalent position in Eurasia deserves comparative study because of divergent interpretations of Chinese dynastic relations with frontier warriors, the strong influence of Chinese trade and power on its neighbors’ polities, and China's long-lasting cultural and bureaucratic tradition.

This article takes up a central theme in William H. Sewell Jr.'s Logics of History, the relationship between relatively durable structures or systems and the more fleeting and contingent moments of their formation, their reproduction, and occasionally their radical altering. The article seeks to highlight how this tension between generals and particulars lies at the heart of the theoretical and disciplinary divisions that Sewell's book seeks to overcome. Arguing that Sewell's partial reliance on a framework inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure is inadequate for the goals of the book, the article points out that an alternative approach derived from the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce is more in keeping with Sewell's objectives.