There has been over the last several decades an active campaign for the use of systematic methods in historical research, particularly for the verification of contentions by the most rigorous means that our information and our analytical tools, quantitative ones when possible, can provide. It is probably correct to say that by now this battle is largely won, in principle at least. Few historians still object to formal arrangement of the evidence or to counting, even if many of them do not do things quite this way themselves. Methods that a generation ago were regarded as outrageous and on the lunatic fringe of scholarship are no longer controversial. It is true that a few diehards in the profession still protest against these innovations. On the other hand, some at the opposite end of the methodological spectrum contend that we have not gone far enough—that historical projects have not maintained acceptable technical standards and that ventures of historians into formal methods have been elementary and intellectually sloppy (Kousser, 1977). It is proper that these questions should be raised and no doubt there is room for improvement. Yet at least scholars have become aware of the value of systematic research and have begun to discuss in constructive fashion what needs to be done to make it more effective.

The portrayal of individuals in the media usually affects the way the public perceives and treats them. The negative views of the elderly in this country are often blamed on the way in which the media have depicted the aged in our society. For example, in hearings on “Age Stereotyping and Television” before the House Select Committee on Aging, Representative William S. Cohen testified:

In this essay, taking as a case study the comparative history of the two groups that gave absolute idealism a leading edge in late nineteenth-century intellectual debate in the United States and Great Britain, I attempt to make a contribution to the recent trend toward the use of sophisticated or “difficult” ideas in comparative analysis (see Moore, 1979). My intentions are twofold: (1) to assist in the clarification of how “social theory” is developed, and (2) to provide an outline of how such comparative cultural analysis can be achieved. After a preliminary discussion of the concept of “social theory” and the component parts into which it can be separated, I proceed to identify the two groups in question, locate their philosophical schemes in the development of contemporary thought, and finally, attempt to demonstrate the value of the approach in an analysis of one aspect of their specifically social and political theories.

In the last two decades historians have begun to examine the political role and importance of religion. Many have concluded that religion provided a broad social perspective and served as the main basis for partisan identification and political activity (as summarized in Swierenga, 1971; McSeveney, 1973; VanderMeer, 1977; Silbey et al., 1978: 253-56). This position has by no means been universally accepted. Some of the criticism involves how the strength of that relationship has been evaluated and measured (Bogue et al., 1977; Wright, 1973; McCormick, 1974; Kousser, 1976). Other objections, focusing particularly on use of the pietist-liturgical (or ritualist) typology to analyze the late nineteenth century (notably Jensen, 1971; Kleppner, 1970), concern a prior and more significant problem: providing a consistent and coherent explanation of why religion was politically important (McCormick, 1974; Wright, 1973). It is argued that the pietist-liturgical typology cannot account for the opposition by some pietists to using government to enforce behavioral standards. The typology also fails to explain why the liturgical perspective was politically salient except when under pietist attack. Finally, there is the paradoxical situation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which pietist churches were becoming less pietistic—adopting more elaborate worship services and deemphasizing revivalism—but at the same time were increasing and winning their demands for government regulation of morality. Taken as a whole, these criticisms suggest a fundamental weakness in the pietist-liturgical typology and indicate the need to reexamine the entire question of how religion has related to politics.

The settlement of Tennessee and Kentucky in the decades before and after statehood can be thought of as displaying great inequality. Large tracts owned by nonresidents contrasted with those of rather uniform size held by resident settlers. The fact, however, that at least a minor portion of settlers were tenants can distort this view. The very presence of the poor leads to the suspicion that relative inequality among settlers may have been rather great, whether or not unoccupied holdings of nonresidents are considered. A clear understanding of the concept of a proper statistical distribution of holdings and a study of the available evidence can add meaning to land settlement at the end of the eighteenth century.

In the Winter 1980 special issue of Social Science History on working-class protest, James E. Cronin writes about labor insurgency during the European crisis of 1917-1920. He argues that a greater proportion of the semiskilled and unskilled workers were active in the 1917-1920 wave of insurgency than at any other time in our century. According to him, this emergent proletariat, created by rapid industrialization, constituted the very core of the insurgency. But he adds that many craftsmen, particularly in the engineering industry, were also strong supporters of the labor left (Cronin, 1980: 138-140).

The evidence is adduced from a number of European countries, but no mention is made of Scandinavia, except for one brief reference to Sweden (Cronin, 1980: 131). Actually the Scandinavian countries would seem to be relevant, and perhaps Norway more so than Sweden. In fact, the Scandinavian case has been cited by a number of authors as an illustration of the thesis that skilled workers and artisans represent the main obstacle to industrial militancy. The process of radicalism was much stronger in Norway than in either Denmark or Sweden, and it has been suggested that the pronounced differences in the economic development of the three Scandinavian countries provide an explanation. While growth of the manufacturing industry proceeded slowly and gradually in Sweden and particularly in Denmark, Norway experienced a sudden spurt of industrialization in the first two decades of this century.

At eighteen, Marius Pouzergue was a student at the regional secondary school in the Southern French city of Nîmes. He lived near the lycée with his family in a solid bourgeois neighborhood. The small but prosperous Pouzergue household included Marius’s father, his mother, his eighteen-year-old sister Lucie, and a cook. Marius’s father was a court lawyer. Nineteen-year-old Adèle Lafont, like Marius, lived with her family. The Lafonts resided on the fashionable Boulevard Victor Hugo, where Monsieur Lafont owned a jewelry establishment. A domestic servant lived with Adèle, her parents, her brother aged 16, and her sister aged 26.

In the last two decades, the most interesting new perspectives on the history of American voting behavior have come from a small group of historians writing what Bogue (1968) termed the “New Political History.” While members of this group have been characterized by theoretical and methodological concerns that transcend their interest in quantitative analysis, they have emphasized the use of statistics in historical research. At first, this technical innovation awed traditional historians and limited critical commentary on the techniques employed by the “new” historians. Recently, however, both the substantive findings and the methods of these historians have received increasing scrutiny Wright, 1973; McCormick, 1974; Kousser, 1976).

In The Other Bostonians, Stephan Thernstrom argues that there has been “a fairly constant migration factor operating throughout American society since the opening of the nineteenth century.” Patterns of geographic mobility, according to Thernstrom (1973: 228, 220), “were products of forces that operated in much the same way throughout American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Finding considerable mobility everywhere—both in his own examination of Boston and in studies of other communities—he stressed the similarities among urban areas and postulated an “American pattern.” But while the principal finding of his examination of geographic mobility— that there was a great deal of it—remains secure, work done in recent years has rendered less satisfactory the emphasis on inter-urban uniformity. Indianapolis, for example, constitutes a striking exception to Thernstrom’s postulations; and when considered in conjunction with the results of other recent studies of urban population movement, the findings for Indiana’s capital indicate a need to reevaluate the validity and utility of using the term “pattern” to describe geographic mobility in urban North America.

One of the perplexing questions that one faces when addressing the problem of literacy and the diffusion of knowledge and culture in early nineteenth-century America relates to the factors that determined whether or not an individual participated in the cultural uplift described by so many early nineteenth-century commentators. When reformers spoke of reading as a moral imperative in consonance with a more general social and spiritual moral order, when educators described Americans as “unquestionably a reading people” or labeled the late 1820s as “emphatically the age of reading,” the questions of who were the subjects of such remarks and what socioeconomic factors determined whether or not an individual was a “participant in culture” must be raised (Welter, 1975: 254; Ohio Journal of Education, 1856: 97; Story, 1876: 419-420). These questions are part of a more basic and more complex question: What were the factors that determined the diffusion of knowledge and culture in the America of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Such a question is, of course, exceedingly complex and lends itself readily to an interdisciplinary as well as a multidisciplinary approach.

This essay will explore the relationship between the modernization of Congress and one of the main forces that is alleged to have produced it, the critical election of 1896. This is the election in which William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska ran for President on the Democratic ticket on a platform urging currency reform and bimetallic coinage. He was opposed on the Republican side by William McKinley of Ohio.

Many theories of demographic transition stem from attempts to explain fertility differentials across economic and social groups. These differentials typically emerge once a decline in natality commences. Thus it is commonly observed that the fertility of urban populations falls short of that recorded for agricultural districts, that the upper classes tend to precede the working classes in the adaptation of family limitation, and the like. These observations are, in turn, used to justify economic and sociological theories which, by associating both social status and economic costs and benefits with occupation and residence, account for the fertility decline in terms of status and constrained choice.

The rapid expansion of historical demography as a discipline has meant a growing number of studies of past migration (excellent examples are Tugault, 1973; Chatelain, 1976; Piore, 1979), although migration still receives considerably less attention than does fertility or mortality. The study of industrializing cities during the nineteenth century has focused interest on those patterns of migration that caused rapid urban population growth (Anderson, 1971; Anderson, 1980; Crew, 1979; Thernstrom, 1970). Most of these recent studies of internal migration are based on localized information over relatively short periods of time. They provide us with demographic data of unprecedented precision, but the local nature of such studies accentuates their dependence on currently accepted generalizations as guides in the search for and interpretation of evidence.

In the winter of 1978 Social Science History published a short note by me (Gallman, 1978) that questioned certain features of Professor Edward Pessen’s critique of the egalitarian hypothesis. In the winter of 1979 Professor Pessen (1979) responded to me, at great length. The editors have kindly offered me the opportunity to reply. The space limitations they have imposed upon the debate do not permit me to comment on each issue raised by Professor Pessen, nor do I think that that is necessary. I plan only to repeat the main points of my orginal note and to indicate how far I think Professor Pessen’s paper has affected them. As will appear, I believe my note has survived Professor Pessen’s critique well, and has gained strength from research done since it was written.

As recently as a decade ago, an authoritative introduction to computing for historians recommended an approach which essentially employed the computer as a rigid, if very large, tabulator. Edward Shorter’s The Historian and the Computer (1971) described how to reduce complex information to simple fixed-choice codes, transfer the coded data to punched cards, read the cards into fixed-format package programs, and prepare large tabulations or statistical analyses from the data. Shorter’s advice made sense: it encouraged historians who knew little about computers or quantification to move ahead, and enabled them to produce useful results without becoming programmers. During the 1970s, however, three important changes in computing made the sturdy old procedures obsolete. The first change was the increasing availability of flexible, inexpensive microprocessors—small machines with memories as big as many large computers of the 1960s, which would operate by themselves or in conjunction with powerful central computers, which came with a great variety of prepared programs, and which would serve for the entry, transmission, storage, editing, manipulation, analysis, and presentation of many different sorts of information, including ordinary words. The second change was the improvement of interactive computing, in which a relatively inexperienced analyst could carry on a prompted “conversation” with a sophisticated machine while searching or analyzing a complex machinereadable file. The third was the development of data base management systems which, from the user’s point of view, greatly simplified the storage and manipulation of large bodies of machine-readable evidence.

In recent years the social sciences have been asked to demonstrate that they are of some practical use. Knowledge for its own sake is a difficult policy to defend in a time of many crises, escalating costs, and shrinking resources for research. The result has been a tilt by the social sciences toward “relevance” and a growing emphasis on “applied” or “policy-oriented” or “action” research. Increasingly, the search for general, theoretical knowledge has become secondary to (or a fortuitous by-product of) more immediately “practical” endeavors.

The reputation of the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848 has undergone a partial revision in the last few years. Its members used to be considered political novices from whom one could learn little about how to run a parliament (Huber, 1960: 613 is typical). Ziebura (1963) was perhaps the first to challenge this view. He showed that the Frankfurt Assembly was, in fact, run in a very professional way: It created sophisticated and disciplined political parties, and these parties actually exerted effective control over parliamentary business. They even joined together to form a coalition that gave reliable political support to a German provisional government. Kramer (1968), Boldt (1971), Botzenhart (1977), and Langewiesche (1978) have subsequently documented the skillful organization of these parties and their attempts to control members, to create extraparliamentary connections, and to maintain both a formal government coalition and an organized opposition. Kramer (1968: 175-178) has shown that they were particularly successful in applying party discipline to voting behavior: The results of voting could often be foretold simply from a knowledge of how the parties stood on the question at issue.