This paper uses the notion of animal spirits introduced by John Maynard Keynes in the General Theory, and more recently employed by George Akerloff and Robert Shiller in their book Animal Spirits, to explain the speculative bubbles and decisions for war from 1914 to 1945. Animal spirits are a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction that produces decisions that are not bounded by rational calculations. My analysis shows how confidence, fear, and a propensity to gamble can encourage aggressive behavior that leads to speculative “bubbles” in financial markets and military or political crises. Elements of prospect theory are added to demonstrate how the presence of risk in crises tend to produce a very strong bias toward taking gambles to avoid economic or military loses. A basic premise of the paper is that war and economics were inexorably joined together by 1914 to a point where economic strength was as important as military might in determining the outcome of a war. The final section of the paper deals with the problem of measuring military and economic strength by using the Composite Index of National Capability created by the Correlates of War Project to evaluate the riskiness of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914 and the changes in military capability of major powers between 1914 and 1919.

This study examines how changes in the growth model of the US sports business since World War II—namely, changes in stadium design and ticket sales strategies—have transformed the accessibility of major league stadiums and the class composition of the fans inside. While survey data show an overrepresentation of wealthy fans in stadiums at the end of the twentieth century, they reveal little about whether or not this was a new phenomenon. I use ticket sales data to demonstrate that the displacement of working-class fans by the relatively affluent began in earnest at least as early as the 1950s. Before “premium-seating” options like luxury boxes became the norm, the expanded sale of season-ticket packages requiring large up-front payments made it more difficult for wage earners to attend games. While this crowding out of working-class fans has a longer history than very recent outcries over “stadium gentrification” suggest, it has intensified significantly over the last quarter century. Using an original data set containing information on seating arrangements at both the current and previous facilities of 73 of 91 active Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and National Football League franchises, this article offers the first systematic evidence in support of claims that the proliferation of luxury suites and other exclusive seating options has resulted in the subtraction of large numbers of relatively affordable seats. This research not only deepens our understanding of the history of urban gentrification and postwar consumption, but also has important implications for the ongoing debate over public stadium subsidies.

The 1920s American prohibition of alcohol is notorious but not unique. Many countries experienced similar struggles. However, none went through such a protracted struggle as New Zealand, the only country to hold nationwide referendums on prohibition at every general election for almost eight decades from 1911 to 1987. Indeed, if the majority threshold of its first referendum in 1911 had been set at 50 percent instead of at 60 percent, New Zealand would have been the very first country in the world to become prohibitionist. In our empirical analysis, we focus on the first five of those referendums, held from 1911 to 1922, because the 1910s was the most critical period when the fight between Drys and Wets reached its highest intensity. We first investigate how the different referendum designs influenced voting patterns. This is possible because the district-level referendum results present rare features such as the participation rate by gender in 1911, the identification of the military votes in the two referendums of 1919, the option of prohibition with compensation in 1919, and from 1919, the addition of a state-control regime as a third option. Second, we estimate the effect of the main determinants of voting preferences identified in the historical and sociological literature on temperance and prohibition. Our results confirm the influence of two factors: (1) Evangelicals were more likely to be supporters of a total ban whereas Anglicans and Catholics were more moderate and (2) women were more likely to vote Dry.

A growing empirical literature links political centralization with urban development. In this paper we present evidence showing how different patterns of political centralization in the United States and Canada affected urban agglomeration during the twentieth century, with a specific focus on the impact on the population of capital cities. Using data on Canadian and US cities and metropolitan areas, we find that the national capital effect on population grew over time in both countries but more so in the United States whereas the subnational (i.e., provincial or state) capital effect rose much more significantly in Canada than in the United States, controlling for other factors like geography and climate. We argue that these patterns in the national and subnational capital city effects reflect different trends in federalism in the two countries. In the United States, the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition of states’ rights and localism was transformed into a more nationally centralized form of federalism during the Progressive Era, but states and localities continued to retain significant autonomy. In Canada, federalism came to favor provincial rights but not localism. We believe that that these diverging trends were driven by institutional differences that gave the various levels of governments in Canada and the United States different access to revenue sources.

Contemporary discussions of immigrant assimilation in the United States often take the experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a benchmark, yet significant gaps remain in our understanding of the generality and rate of immigrant progress during that era. Using four decades of Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples census microdata, we utilize both ordinary least squares microdata regression and double cohort methodology to examine socioeconomic assimilation across arrival cohort and country of origin during the Ellis Island era. Our results show, contrary to some writing, that while the first generation (the foreign born) exhibit decidedly inferior labor market outcomes, socioeconomic attainment (measured by Socio-Economic Index points) increased quickly with duration in the United States. Persons of the second generation and those of mixed parentage show much less penalty than immigrants. At the same time, we uncover differences in outcome by European region that do not disappear over the decades we examine.

Development economics was born as a distinct disciplinary field in the aftermath of World War II, when the development of so-called Third World countries, due to the dynamics of decolonization and the Cold War, became an international priority. At the institutional level, the birth of development economics was paralleled by the reorientation of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (so-called the World Bank) from the support of European reconstruction to funding development policies worldwide. Not surprisingly, the paths of the Bank and of pioneers of development economics often crossed, and it is fair to say that the Bank and the new discipline—from the perspective of the history and sociology of social sciences—are part of the same story. Indeed, one would think that the Bank was the natural place for the breeding of development economics. This seems coherent with the image we have of the Bank today: the reign of economists. Yet, for most of the years when development theory was shaped, the Bank, although very active in development policies worldwide, was remarkably silent in the field of development economics. This paper will connect the study of economic ideas and economists in international organizations with the history of economic policies. Based on previously untapped archival sources, it will discuss how the history of development economics and of development organizations—and especially the largest among them, that is, the World Bank—proceeded separated for a long stretch of time, and how they later converged.

The history of German research and writing about migration has been heavily influenced by politics. The assumptions and methods of successive generations of migration researchers demonstrate the interplay of social science and politics across very different political regimes. Soon after serious research began in the late nineteenth century, migration researchers divided into two camps. Urban statisticians with liberal political ideas used city migration registration data to analyze the circulatory movement of migrants within Germany. Conservative writers used census data to argue that migration was essentially movement from countryside to city, and was politically and morally injurious to the German people. These two sides hardened after World War I, as the conservative side increasingly incorporated racist ideas into their critique of migration. This debate continued even after the Nazis took power in 1933 with the competing publications of Rudolf Heberle and Wilhelm Brepohl. Heberle was forced to leave Germany and Brepohl became the Nazis’ favorite analyst of migration. After 1945, Brepohl retained his standing as a leading migration researcher in the German Federal Republic. The dominance of this conservative interpretation of migration continued into the 1970s. In recent decades, the writings of the liberal statisticians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been rediscovered, and German migration research has shifted again toward a more empirically based understanding of migration.

Although some scholars treat racial residential segregation in northern cities as a twentieth-century phenomenon, recent research on New York and Chicago has shown that black-white segregation was already high and rising by 1880. We draw on data from the Philadelphia Social History Project and other new sources to study trends in this city as far back as 1850 and extending to 1900, a time when DuBois had completed his epic study of The Philadelphia Negro. Segregation of “free negroes” in Philadelphia was high even before the Civil War but did not increase as the total and black populations grew through 1900. Geocoded information from the full-count data from the 1880 Census makes it possible to map the spatial configuration of black residents in fine detail. At the scale of the street segment, segregation in that year was extraordinarily high, reflecting a micropattern in which many blacks lived in alleys and short streets. Although there was considerable class variation in the black community, higher-status black households lived in areas that were little different in racial and class composition than lower-status households.

This paper analyzes in detail the role of environmental and economic shocks in the migration of the 1930s. The 1940 US Census of Population asked every inhabitant where they lived five years earlier, a unique source for understanding migration flows and networks. Earlier research documented migrant origins and destinations, but we will show how short-term and annual weather conditions at sending locations in the 1930s explain those flows, and how they operated through agricultural success. Beyond demographic data, we use data about temperature and precipitation, plus data about agricultural production from the agricultural census. The widely known migration literature for the 1930s describes an era of relatively low migration, with much of the migration that did occur radiating outward from the Dust Bowl region and the cotton South. Our work about the complete United States will provide a fuller examination of migration in this socially and economically important era.

The interdisciplinary field of historical geographic information systems (HGIS) took root and flourished at the Social Science History Association (SSHA) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This essay first recounts the growth of HGIS at SSHA and beyond. It then considers challenges that GIS continues to pose for historians and other scholars, such as the unfamiliarity of its conceptual framework and the time and expense often involved in building HGIS databases. The bare-bones visual culture of Social Science History may inhibit submissions by HGIS scholars, whose work typically includes color maps. Yet the enduring methodological and interdisciplinary interests of SSHA members provide a strong basis for continuing involvement by historians who use GIS. The essay closes with new directions in HGIS scholarship, including study of empirical uncertainty, historical gazetteers, textual analysis linked to GIS mapping, and comparison of topology and topography.

Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record is one “laboratory” in which hypotheses developed by sociologists, economists, and even natural scientists can be explicitly tested, especially using dual forms of geographical and chronological comparison. As one example to demonstrate this, a case is made for the stimulating effect of “disaster studies.” Historians have failed to interact with ideas from disaster studies, not only because of the general drift away from the social sciences by the historical discipline, but also because of a twin conception that medieval disaster study bears no relation to the modern, and that medieval coping strategies were hindered by providence, superstition, fear, and panic. We use the medieval disasters context to demonstrate that medieval economic history can contribute to big narratives of our time, including climate change and inequality. This contribution can be in (1) investigating the root causes of vulnerability and resilience, and recovery of societies over the long term (moving disaster studies away from instant impact focus) and (2) providing the social context needed to interpret the massive amount of “big data” produced by historical climatologists, bioarchaeologists, economists, and so on.

Interdisciplinarity is among the most talked about but most misunderstood topics in education on all levels today. Seen as the savior of research and teaching, especially in universities, and of society, or the seeds of destruction, interdisciplinarity's proponents and critics talk past each other. Seldom do they seek common terms; typically, they mean very different approaches when they refer to interdisciplinarity. They erroneously dichotomize disciplines and interdisciplines, confuse specialization and synthesis, and misconstrue “integration.” They also date the historical turn to interdisciplinarity too late. This article critically reviews the history, historiography, and sociology of knowledge of interdisciplinarity with a focus on etiology, epistemology, definitions, relationships among and between disciplines, intellectual and institutional locations, and the organization of knowledge. A new, more historical approach to the “problem” of interdisciplinarity is proposed.