To begin on a low-key, disarming note, I emphasize that this paper’s title has two clauses. The second is more important than the first. The first clause reads, “Changing Social Science to Change the World.” The second reads, “A Discussion Paper.” The second clause is more important than the first because it indicates the paper’s primary function. It is primarily designed to serve as a springboard for general and more elevated discussion of a set of topics that I hope interests all or most members of the Social Science History Association, despite their professional membership in different academic disciplines and their engagement in widely diverse fields of research specialization.

The high rate of population turnover in nineteenth-century North American cities no longer requires emphasis. However, students of historical migration have progressed very little beyond merely documenting its existence. As a result, the relationship of social, economic, and demographic factors to migration remains imperfectly understood, and the extent to which rates of population movement varied with economic growth, population size, or other factors still is a matter of conjecture.

In another essay, we began the systematic exploration of population movement through an analysis of patterns in Buffalo and rural Erie County, New York, in 1855. The 1855 New York state census recorded how long each individual had lived in the place in which he or she was enumerated. Using this information, and correcting for mortality, we developed estimates of population persistence and of the determinants of length of residence, which are two conceptually distinct phenomena. We compared both to patterns in Hamilton, Ontario, during the same period and, less systematically, to what historians reported for other places. We concluded that the rate of population persistence in Buffalo was higher than in a number of other cities, and we attributed the difference to the dynamism of the city’s economic life, compared especially to Hamilton in the same years. Nonetheless, despite differences in rates of persistence, the social and demographic correlates of length of residence were strikingly similar in each city and in the countryside as well.

One responds to Lee Benson’s conversational gambits with prudence and to his considered formal arguments with great care. If, as in the present circumstance, he is making a “statement,” trepidation is in order. His revolutionary zeal is as formidable as the scholarly understanding which lies behind his advocacy. Moreover, whenever I am tempted to disagree with the manifest content of a Benson argument, I hesitate to express that disagreement because of an experientially based apprehension that I may be totally missing the latent truths that lie within the argument. However, as I recall the SSHA meeting where the presidential address was first presented, I then had the temerity to offer a rather all embracing disagreement with his diagnoses and assessments, if not his prescriptions, where the state of the health of the social sciences is concerned. Emboldened by the realization that I am on record with a public demurral, I will now proceed to restate the nature of my disagreement.

We are all familiar with situations in which we study an historical event, think that we understand it, and then, to our surprise, discover that other historians interpret it quite differently. This happened to me recently, and I should like to describe here what happened, meaning my original understanding and then the interpretations of others who had studied it before me but whose works I had not known about, and then try to draw some conclusions from the experience.