With this issue, Social Science History begins its fortieth year of publication. The journal is also in its second year of publication with Cambridge University Press. So this seems an especially propitious moment to take stock of who we are and how we conceive of our mission, to both our parent organization and to the wider world of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry. Since our founding in 1976, the journal remains firmly rooted in the organizational and intellectual apparatus of the Social Science History Association (SSHA). We embrace the cross-disciplinary and grassroots “network” structure of the annual meetings in forming our Editorial Board, with its rotating membership and diverse representation from across the historical and social science disciplines. We actively seek out new scholarship, as well as encourage SSHA members to propose special issues that address a common theme or scholarly question from multiple disciplinary points of view and address different places and time periods. But we also remain fundamentally historical in our purview, dedicated to “improv[ing] the quality of historical explanation in every manner possible, but particularly by encouraging the selective use and adaptation in historical . . . research of relevant theories and methods from related disciplines, particularly the social sciences.”

Past research suggests that although political violence in mature democracies is rare, it does occasionally occur along ethnic, religious, and/or linguistic lines. Jamaica is an exceptional case in that it is a relatively mature democracy that experiences political violence between demographically similar groups. This article examines the origins of political violence in Jamaica—that is, the conditions that led to its development, intensification, and institutionalization during the late colonial period. Through original archival research, this article supports past findings identifying personality politics, the politicization of race/class divisions, and clientelism as contributing factors to the development of political violence. The research also, however, makes a major new contribution by providing evidence that colonial nonintervention during the early stages of political violence was a crucial factor leading to its escalation and then institutionalization. This finding gives the British colonial state a different and more central role than the extant literature suggests and has broader implications for all democracies.

Because the US Census Bureau changed the way they reported workers’ marital status, the subfield of US women's labor history unwittingly perpetuated a key misinterpretation of women's labor force participation, allowing historians to believe that women in the workforce between 1880 and 1920 were overwhelmingly young and single women: the daughters of their families rather than the mothers and wives. This change in census reporting was reinforced and promulgated by Joseph A. Hill's 1929 work, Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870–1920. Why was this change made? This article argues that this change came about because of a confluence of various factors, including the Census Bureau's continual struggles with organizational and technological changes, the beginning of World War I, and reformers’ arguments about the efficacy of pushing for maternity insurance for women workers. The story of this change once again reminds us that statistics are never neutral nor apolitical.

It has been almost 40 years since Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published an English translation of his (at the time) deeply unsettling essay, “Motionless History,” in the second issue of Social Science History (SSH, Winter 1977). For many historians, whose livelihoods depended on narrating the “march of history,” his claim that long periods of history were characterized by a distinct absence of change—his example was Europe from late antiquity up to the early eighteenth century—was nothing short of heretical. The newly established SSH was, however, an entirely logical place from which to launch this fusillade against the disciplinary norms of the Anglo-American historical profession, as the journal was the product of a contra-establishment project, the Social Science History Association (SSHA). Founded in 1974 and hosting its first annual conference in Philadelphia in the fall of 1976, the SSHA emerged out of the more general social and political ferment of that period. Its organizers had the specific intention to disrupt (to use our word and not theirs) what they thought were the rigid practices and limited vision of the then American Historical Association. In so doing they hoped to make space for a new kind of historical enquiry that had much to learn from the social sciences, and hoped to teach them something in return. They were joined in that enthusiastic moment by historically minded rebels from the American Sociological Association, as well as small numbers of anthropologists, demographers, economists, geographers, and political scientists who were all eager to incorporate both historical context and a theoretical appreciation of contingency into their work. In the intervening years since that hopeful beginning, many have argued that the anticipated interdisciplinary exchange failed in one way or another. But let me not get ahead of myself.

This paper examines the extent of local government support for the elderly, in the form of poor relief, in Victorian England. It presents newly constructed estimates of old age pauperism rates for each of England's ten registration divisions from 1861 to 1908, the year the Old Age Pension Act was adopted. My estimates show that the share of persons aged 65 and older receiving government assistance in the nineteenth century was far larger than most contemporaries, and many historians, believe. The share receiving poor relief declined after 1871, largely as a result of changes in relief administration, but on the eve of the adoption of the Old Age Pension Act more than one in five persons over 65 was in receipt of public assistance. In sum, government support for the elderly is not a post-welfare state phenomenon. Old age pauperism rates differed substantially across registration divisions and in general were higher in southern than in northern England. I present evidence that much of the north-south differential was due to differences in wage rates and employment opportunities and differences in the administration of poor relief, although differences in welfare customs might have played a role.

Social scientists and historians have identified the exclusion of agricultural workers and domestic servants from social insurance programs during the New Deal as a cause of the racially divided US welfare state. The most prominent explanation for these exclusions is that they originated in a Southern-dominated congress and were deliberately designed to exclude a majority of African-American workers from the emerging welfare state. This article examines recent historical scholarship, archival evidence, and information on unemployment compensation programs internationally to situate this policy choice in a wider context. The exclusion of these categories of workers is consistent with the experience of other unemployment insurance programs. Given the close linkages between the technical experts who drafted the US legislation and their counterparts abroad, the exclusion of agricultural workers and domestic servants from unemployment insurance is best understood as an example of policy diffusion.

Multidisciplinary conversations are tough. Language, habits of thinking, and styles of presentation and criticism differ profoundly across disciplines. Academic rewards to multidisciplinary research are unpredictable. Yet year after year, for 40 years running now, the Social Science History Association (SSHA) has hosted increasingly large, multidisciplinary conferences that attract scholars from a diverse set of academic fields and geographic regions. By fostering debate in an atmosphere of civility, respect, and inclusiveness, the SSHA has become a premiere venue for introducing the latest in social scientific topics, methods, and data. Here I salute the founders and guardians of the culture responsible for this impressive achievement with a multidisciplinary foray into the history of America's chop suey craze of the early twentieth century. Like the remarkable history of the SSHA, the history of chop suey illustrates the importance of civility, respect, and democratic inclusiveness in fostering innovation. It is a story that celebrates the rewards to institutions that promote such virtues.

This article explores how variations in party systems shape the intensity of insurgency against national authorities in nineteenth-century Latin America. I argue that, under certain conditions, two-party systems may polarize and lead to intense insurgency because they simplify the process of blame attribution, encourage the incumbent party to exclude its opponent from power positions, and motivate leaders to emphasize extreme ideological positions. Conversely, multiparty systems may encourage flexible electoral and congressional alliances among parties, resulting in lower insurgency. I test the argument in four nineteenth-century Latin American republics with different insurgency levels. While in Colombia and Uruguay two-party systems polarized and fueled intense insurgency across the century, Chile and Costa Rica developed flexible multiparty systems that prevented polarization and favored low insurgency.

How do insurgents engaged in high-risk collective action maintain solidarity when faced with increasing costs and dangers? Based on a combination of process tracing through qualitative evidence and an event-history analysis of a unique data set assembled from naval archives concerning a mass mutiny in the Royal Navy in 1797, this article explains why insurgent solidarity varied among the ships participating in the mutiny. Maintaining solidarity was the key problem that the organizers of the mutiny faced in confronting government repression and inducements for ships’ companies to defect. Solidarity, proxied here as the duration of a ship's company's adherence to the mutiny, relied on techniques used by the mutiny leadership that increased dependence and imposed control over rank-and-file seamen. In particular, mutiny leaders monitored and sanctioned compliance and exploited informational asymmetries to persuade seamen to stand by the insurgency, even as prospects for its success faded.

Recent research suggests that economic inequality thwarts attempts to establish a welfare state. The corollary of this view is that today's welfare states had witnessed an equality revolution already before the rise of social policies aiming at redistribution. The paper brings this insight to bear on the creation of the welfare state in Sweden, for many the very model of a universal welfare state, and enquires into whether equality really predated the formation of universal welfare policies in the 1950s. We present evidence on inequality based on labor market outcomes and corroborate the view that there has been a sharp reduction in inequality during the 1930s and 1940s. Hence Sweden underwent a true equality revolution prior to the establishment of the welfare state. A leveling of incomes is a necessary precondition for the rise of the universal welfare state, we suggest, because of trust, which correlates negatively with inequality. High trust levels solve the problems associated with collective goods and boosts support for universal solutions of income security. The paper provides a narrative in which the formation of institutions, the removal of large income differentials, and the creation of higher trust levels interacted in the 1930s and 1940s to form the foundation for the welfare state in the 1950s. It adopts a dynamic view of trust by departing from the assumption that trust arises endogenously as a concomitant to changes in the underlying fundamentals like income inequality and redesigned institutional frameworks.

During the 40 years since its founding, the Social Science History Association (SSHA) and its journal have attracted many scholars to the field of social science history, stimulating many new lines of research, but it has only had limited success in developing some of the more prominent new trends in the history field. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's early presence in the journal Social Science History did not stimulate much further work on the longue durée. In environmental history, transnational history, and studies of the non-Western world, the SSHA has not led the way. The article calls on members of the SSHA to think about creative responses to these new directions of inquiry.

Using case pattern analysis, this study examines Catholic male workforce trends in the majority Catholic countries of Chile, Ireland, and Poland. Employing denominational data for three categories of church male professionals in the 1950–2010 time period, I document four important trends. First, ordinations to the diocesan priesthood in Ireland went into decline especially after Vatican II, have been relatively stable in Chile with only a moderate increase in the 1990s, and spiked in Poland in the 1980s, 20 years after Vatican II. Second, in all three countries the average defection rate among diocesan seminarians increased in the 2000s compared with the earlier two decades. Third, the religious priest workforce has declined in Chile, has been relatively stable in Ireland until the 2000s, and is growing in Poland. Fourth, from the late 1960s there has been a decline in the workforce of religious brothers in each country, especially in Ireland. The theoretical contribution to the Catholic workforce literature is discussed in terms of a critical events argument emphasizing the impact of Vatican II, prophetic stances, sexual scandals, and papal visits on labor market trends. I conclude with implications for the study of religion and society in general.

The Whig and Tory parties played an important role in British politics in the decades following the Glorious Revolution. This article introduces new data on the political affiliation of all Members of Parliament in England and Wales between 1690 and 1747. The data have numerous applications for research. The focus here is on majority party representation and the electoral politics of constituencies. I show that the Whigs had stronger representation in municipal boroughs with small and narrow electorates, whereas the Tories were stronger in county constituencies and in boroughs with large and more democratic electorates. The Whigs were stronger in the Southeast region and the Tories in Wales and the West Midlands. After the Whig leader, Robert Walpole, became prime minister in 1721 the Whigs lost some presence in their traditional strongholds including counties where the Dissenter population was large. Finally, I incorporate data on electoral contests and show that the majority party generally lost strength in constituencies following contests.

Federal housing policy reveals an unexpected political cycle of Republican innovation and Democratic appropriation. The political trajectory of rental housing vouchers since their inception reveals a partisan policy cycle. Vouchers were originally proposed as a Republican alternative to Democratic public housing construction and slowly emerged as a viable component of housing policy in the United States. In the mid-1990s, a shift occurred in which Democrats embraced vouchers and Republicans retreated from their innovation. This article suggests a partisanship model of policy making that both challenges and supplements conventional models of the policy process.

Research on the beginning of the physical therapy profession in different countries often identifies it as a traditional female occupation. Its original semiprofessional character is also pointed out. It lacked professional attributes with masculine connotations, such as a high degree of autonomy and a unique scientific body of knowledge. But on all accounts this understanding is wrong. Originally the profession was an occupation for men only, who were very professionally independent and in charge of a state-sanctioned science of their own. Yet no modern physical therapists know about this, and neither do scholars studying the profession's origin. Why is that? The aim of this article is to highlight the gender mechanisms shaping a discourse strong enough to change our historical consciousness, in this case preventing us from seeing the masculine context out of which the physical therapy profession grew. The analysis explaining the phenomenon centers on two gender-altering and conflict-laden processes, one that was homosocial (men against men) and one that was heterosocial (women against men). Common to both was that they were ultimately powered by a fear of masculinity, here conceptualized as androphobia. Simplified the physical therapy profession came to be perceived as too masculine, and due to this its excess of masculinity was actively eliminated from the profession even in physical form (read: males). The profession was demasculinized and the same happened to its old history, which made the latter unwanted and finally obscured behind new herstories.

Social historians formed an important part of the Social Science History Association from its early days, and they widened its intellectual space beyond initial emphases on political history and quantitative methods. Lee Benson and other faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Charles and Louise Tilly, were particularly influential in attracting a broad mix of scholars to the group. The openness of the association and its interdisciplinarity appealed to younger scholars, and those interested in the “new urban history” were early recruits. A growing number of women, many of whom were social historians, participated in the first conventions and newly organized networks.

From 1800 to the present the average person on the planet has been enriched in real terms by a factor of 10, or some 900 percent. In the ever-rising share of places from Belgium to Botswana, and now in China and India, that have agreed to the Bourgeois Deal—“Let me earn profits from creative destruction in the first act, and by the third act I will make all of you rich”—the factor is 30 in conventional terms and, if allowing for improved quality of goods and services, such as in improved glass and autos, or improved medicine and higher education, a factor of 100. That is, the reward from allowing ordinary people to have a go, the rise at first in northwestern Europe and then worldwide of economic liberty and social dignity, eroding ancient hierarchy and evading modern regulation, has been anything from 2,900 to 9,900 percent. What needs to be explained in a modern social science history is not the Industrial Revolution(s) but the Great Enrichment, one or two orders of magnitude larger than any previous change in human history. The article takes seriously the lesson of comparative history that Europe was not unique until 1700 and argues that ideas—specifically Bourgeois liberal ideas—not capital or institutions, made the modern world.

Between the 1960s and 1990s a series of urban redevelopment projects in Manchester radically transformed ethnic settlement in the city. The ward of Moss Side, which had been a gateway for Caribbean and African immigrants, experienced repeated slum clearances in which whole communities were relocated and large tracts of housing stock were demolished and redesigned. The relationship between these physical and demographic changes has been overshadowed by the persisting stigmatization of Moss Side as a racialized “ghetto,” which has meant that outsiders have constructed the area as possessing a fixed and homogenous identity. This article uses geographic information systems in conjunction with local surveys and archival records to explore how the dynamics of immigrant mobility within Moss Side were shaped by housing stock, external racism, family strategies, and urban policy. Whereas scholarship on ethnic segregation in Britain has focused on the internal migration of ethnic groups between administrative areas, using areal interpolation to connect demographic data and the built environment reveals the intense range of movements that developed within the variegated urban landscape of Moss Side.

Historians of the American mental hospital still do not firmly grasp who mental hospital patients were. Although the field's signature debate on the nature of the mental hospital as “repressive” or “humanitarian” involves the characterization of the patients —based on their demographic traits—as victims of repression or beneficiaries of humanitarianism, there has actually not been a thorough demographic analysis of the patients. This article ascertains and examines the defining characteristics of the patient population within the context of that enduring debate. It first identifies demographic groups that were more prone to institutionalization than would have been expected from their susceptibility to insanity. They symbolized the patient population in the late nineteenth century when insanity did not necessarily result in institutionalization. This article then discovers essentially the same demographic groups ended up in mental hospitals in both the hinterland and metropolitan areas of the North from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It also finds a protective effect that marriage had against institutionalization operated in a socially conservative way. Finally, it weaves together the demographic traits of the patients deemed indicative of the mental hospital's repressiveness and the ones considered reflective of its humanitarianism into a panoptic portrayal that presents the patients as both victims and beneficiaries of the mental hospital. This article's analysis of the patients as a complex, multifaceted population helps transcend the binary framework of the debate on the nature of the mental hospital and deepen our understanding of who they were.

Many studies have reported that US presidents often become more popular at the onset of wars and other security crises. Research on this “rally-round-the-flag” phenomenon has focused on either rational calculation of success, chances of military actions, popular perceptions of security threats, or the role of opinion leaders. This paper proposes a new approach: I argue that challenges to the symbolic status of the nation vis-à-vis other nations drive rally periods. This study examines the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon from a comparative historical perspective, using a new database of war events and security crises from 1950–2006. The analysis reveals that two types of status challenges result in nationalist rally reactions: first, the public has rallied behind presidents when wars and security crises were viewed as an opportunity for the United States to reclaim its previously damaged national honor; and second, rallies have emerged when the president claimed the mantle of “leader of the free world” in an internationally authorized coalition attack on a foreign country.