In the early 1900s, Washington, D.C. contained many alleys in the interior of blocks inhabited by impoverished Black residents. Elite reformers engaged in an aggressive campaign to eliminate alleys, on the grounds of their purported unsanitary environment and high disease prevalence. In this paper, I combine quantitative, qualitative, and spatial sources to explore new perspectives on segregation, public health, and the racialized efforts of housing reformers during this period. I find that reformers overstated the horrors of conditions in alleys and their effects on residents’ health: poorer health among alley residents was in large part due to Black residents’ marginalization wherever they might live. Alleys’ status as racialized space, coupled with progressive paternalistic racism, facilitated the discursive construction of alleys as pathological “breeding grounds of disease.” Further, my findings shed new light on micro-configurations of segregation within racially mixed neighborhoods, as well as the social experience and meaning of such configurations. Far from indicating harmonious coexistence, the proximity of such alleys to white homes and institutions spurred elite Washingtonians’ self-interested fear of disease spreading beyond the alleys. Thus, this pattern of segregation helps explain the zeal of the campaign to eradicate alleys: as a means of achieving separation from undesired Black neighbors whom white reformers associated with contagion.

Historical research on urban epidemics has focused on the interaction of diseases with social and spatial gradients, such as class, ethnicity, or neighborhood. Even sophisticated historical studies usually lack data on health-related behavior or health-related perceptions, which modern analysts tend to emphasize. With detailed source material from the Finnish city of Tampere during a typhoid epidemic in 1916, we are able to combine both dimensions and look at how material and social constraints interacted with behavior and knowledge to produce unequal outcomes. We use data on socioeconomic status, location, and physical habitat as well as the self-reported behavior and expressed understandings of transmission mechanisms of the infected people to identify the determinants of some falling ill earlier or later than others. Applying survival analysis to approximately 2,500 cases, we show that disease avoidance behavior was deficient and constrained by physical habitat, regardless of considerable public health campaigning. Behavioral guidelines issued by authorities were sub-optimally communicated, unrealistic, and inadequately followed. Boiling water was hampered by shared kitchens, and access to laundry houses for additional hygiene was uneven. Centralized chemical water purification finally leveled the playing field by socializing the cost of prevention and eliminating key sources of unequal risk.

The U.S. federal government adopted aggressive policies to control animal diseases decades before it made significant attempts to improve human health. Progressive-era reformers crafted a powerful argument that the male-dominated, rural-oriented political system valued the lives of hogs more than the well-being of babies. The invidious hog-baby comparison became a pervasive theme in debates over the Children’s Bureau, a National Department of Health, and the Sheppard-Towner Act, and it has been reproduced uncritically in recent years. This article investigates the important historical relationships between U.S. animal and human health policies. Human health champions would have been better served by embracing a One Health approach when possible, drawing more on the lessons learned in combating animal diseases.

What happens at the point of interchange between scholarly communities? We examine this question by investigating the case of growing ties between historical sociology and ethnography, two social scientific methods that once seemed to have little in common. Drawing on methodological writings by ethnographers and original interviews with practicing historical sociologists, we argue that these ties have been shaped by structural and methodological homologies between the two disciplines. Structurally, ethnography and historical sociology are similarly positioned in sociology more broadly, as enterprises with sometimes-tense relationships with dominant assumptions of the social sciences. Methodologically, both ethnographers and historical sociologists face the challenges of bounding the research process, navigating access to data, analyzing and retaining data while “in the field,” and overcoming cultural distance between themselves and the worlds they are studying. Taken together, these findings extend work in the sociology of science and knowledge and suggest some key conditions for intellectual efflorescence.

This paper discusses the implications of organizational control on the race for technological leadership in merchant empires. I provide an illustrative framework in which poor organizations have reduced incentives to invest, which in turn stifle technology improvements making leaders lag new entrants. In the late sixteenth century, Portugal’s large ships carried more merchandise and were more fitting of the monarch’s grandiose preferences, but they also were more prone to disaster. The merchant-controlled Dutch East India Company however, invested in smaller but more seaworthy vessels conducting more voyages at a much lower loss rate. The surviving historical evidence shows Portugal relying on large ships well into the seventeenth century suggesting her technological edge was gone by the time the Dutch dominated the Indian Ocean.

This article undertakes an examination of the origins and evolution of a discourse of alterity against the Vascones –the alleged forefathers of the Basques – and other Western Pyrenean peoples from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The methodology employed involves the study of literary references made to these peoples, which are then compared to recent scholarly and archeological evidence. Through this analysis, it becomes possible to evaluate the accuracy of these mentions and interpret them within their specific historical context. The results of this research indicate that mentions of the Vascones during this timeframe were mainly polemic in nature and lacked substantial grounding in empirical reality. Instead, it seems that the underlying objective of these narratives of alterity was twofold: to enhance the social and political standing of their authors and to support their claims to political control over the Western Pyrenees. The abandonment of these interpretative repertoires during the tenth century, coinciding with the emergence of the kingdom of Pamplona and the county-duchy of Wasconia, further emphasizes the connection between the display of these tropes and imbalances in political power between the region and its neighbors. The conclusions of this article directly challenge the underpinnings of discourses that depict the ancient Vascones as entirely alien to the political and religious paradigms derived from the Roman and Christian traditions. In so doing, it thus confront narratives about these “ancient Basques” that are prevalent in contemporary Basque cultural production.

Scholarship demonstrated the major role of inheritance and kinship for elite’s power reproduction, particularly among noble families. In the absence of monarchic and court structures, ruling classes that enjoyed privileges and engaged in social closure could become the functional equivalent of a nobility. In this paper, we examine the evolution of the power of Swiss patrician families in the three major Swiss cities (Basel, Geneva, and Zurich) since the end of the nineteenth century and assess whether urban oligarchies endure in the twentieth century and what role kinship ties play in the reproduction of power structures. Building on a systematic database of 5,199 urban elites who hold power positions in the main economic, political, academic, and cultural institutions, we describe the evolution of Swiss patrician families between 1890 and 1957. Using social network, kinship, and sequence analysis, we provide a comprehensive investigation of the Swiss patrician elite’s evolution at both the individual and the family level. Our analyses show a general decline of patrician families’ presence in urban positions of power, however with significant variations according to both the cities and the spheres of activity. Furthermore, we identify distinct trajectories of families who have either lost their access to power positions, managed to access again or have remained in urban power positions according to different survival strategies. Beyond the Swiss case, we contribute to the literature on power and kinship through an interdisciplinary approach combining historical and sociological perspectives.

The recent crisis of democracy in the United States and around the world has highlighted the value of both historical and comparative analysis and brought the subfields of American political development and comparative politics into frequent conversation with each other. In fact, these subfields emerged from common origins and draw on similar conceptual and methodological tools. This essay identifies the historical and intellectual connections between the two fields and suggests the emerging possibilities of bringing the cross-national study of political development onto a common platform. It then draws out some themes that emerge from this pathway and considers how these themes might point the way toward a more systematic enterprise that can help illuminate some of the most pressing challenges of a turbulent political era.