On the whole we don't treat old people well in this country, but old scholars probably fare better than most. We let them use our libraries and come to our annual meetings. Occasionally we have them chair a session on some not-too-current topic. We refer to them in footnotes and we thank them in prefaces. We donét, in other words, completely depersonalize them, cut them off from our lives and banish them from our ceremonies, as happens too often with other people of advanced age.

The paper focuses on the development in Australia of minimum wage-setting and its relationship to unemployment. A variety of industrial tribunals embarked on a course of wage-setting early in the twentieth century as part of their task of reducing industrial conflict. In varying degree, the tribunals kept in mind what was thought of as wage justice for workers with low bargaining power. By 1921 a standard minimum wage for unskilled men had emerged and formed the basis of the wage system. It was a wage which had a strong welfare basis. Other wages more closely reflected the market. During the 1920s unemployment was not high but was concentrated on less-capable unskilled men. The limited evidence available points to the wage structure as the main cause.

The Long Drive has captured the popular imagination to an extent almost unmatched by other events in American history. The Chisholm Trail, the Red River, Abilene, and Dodge City are only a few of the names that owe their immortalization to the cattle drives of the two decades after the Civil War; such legendary figures as Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson owe their glorification to the cattle towns of Kansas, which grew up as markets for the millions of Texas Longhorns driven on the hoof as much as a thousand miles from their native ranges. Few today are unaware of the grim gunfighters who once faced each other at high noon on the dusty streets of Dodge City, or of the hardy cowboys who herded Longhorn steers over endless trails fraught with peril.

Economic development and “modernization” have certain universal consequences for the structure and organization of the labor force. The history of each advanced country shows a shift of population out of agriculture and the replacement of family enterprise and particularistic employment relationships by large enterprise and wage labor. But the pace and completeness of these inevitable changes have varied widely among different countries.

The pioneers' trek across the land has long been taken as a central element in American social history. But that redistribution of resources has been no less vital in fueling the advance of productivity, in supporting the varying pattern of final outputs. Because migration both caused, and was a consequence of, these massive changes there has long been an interest in measuring the scope and detail of population redistribution.

The dissertation is a study of the service industries in the United States during the period 1839 through 1899. The primary purpose of the study is to provide three series relating to the quantitative development of the sector. These series—value-added, gainful workers, and capital stock—provide benchmark estimates at decade intervals centered on census years. Series are presented for the aggregate sector; the major components, final and intermediate services; and eight industries. These eight industries, defined as the service sector, are trade, transportation and public utilities, finance and insurance, professional services, personal services, government, education, and the independent hand trades.

Nineteenth-century romanticism and the hardships of capitalist individualism have caused scholars to emphasize collectivistic social and economic institutions i n the Middle Ages. Carried to extremes by the English socialists, this attitude tended to ignore or even to deny the competitive aspects of medieval production. Church authorities and guild ordinances were often cited in support of the thesis that the era was noncompetitive. Even Sombart was able to see in the medieval craftsman and tradesman a petit bourgeois who typically held to the morals prescribed by church authorities.

The purpose of this note is to examine the method by which N. S. B. Gras establishes his thesis concerning the evolution of the English grain markets. According to his book, grain, markets evolved through several distinct stages, culminating in the “metropolitan market.” Although the influence of the London market by the sixteenth century can be demonstrated without reference to the existence of the early stages, it is nevertheless they that constitute the essential novelty of Mr. Gras's approach and, presumably, the main contribution of the book to the study of economic history. It will be contended below that the existence of certain of these early stages is at least doubtful and that, in any case, their economic significance is either negligible or not provable.

Outside of the United States, few studies have estimated the effects of World War II service. In Australia, general war-time conscription and minimal involvement in the Korean War led to large cohort differences in military service rates, which we use for identification. We find a small, temporary negative effect on employment and a substantial positive effect on post-school qualifications, but not at the university level. While service increased home ownership slightly, it greatly reduced outright home ownership, consistent with the incentives provided by veterans' housing benefits. We also find a positive effect on marriage, but only from 1971.

We study the role of denominational competition in the expansion of higher education in the nineteenth-century United States. We document that nearly all colleges established in this period were affiliated with a Christian denomination. Empirical analysis reveals a robust positive relationship between the denominational fragmentation of the county and the number of colleges established. We take several steps to rule out competing explanations and also highlight the causal channel by utilizing two historical case studies. We conclude by estimating a model of school choice and showing that students exhibited strong preferences to attend same-denominational colleges in terms of willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-travel. Therefore, we argue that religious diversity softened the extent of tuition competition between institutions and precipitated an “excess” entry of schools.

IN recent years much has been said and written about milk as the most nearly perfect of all modern foods, but it is important to realize that it is also the most venerable of human nutriments. Its use began long before recorded history, and it has continued throughout the ages to be a staple part of the human diet. Man's making friends with the lactating animals, such as the cow and the goat, was a significant step in the advancement of human nutrition and therefore of civilization as well. Butter and cheese proved to be important ways of preserving the food values of milk, and their invention, though probably accidental in both instances, was an important contribution to human nutrition. In the long history of dairying, custom and accidental discovery have probably been more important than conscious experimentation and innovation.

It is now five hundred years since the Byzantine empire was brought to an end by the Ottoman Turks, Scholars today quite justly reject Gibbon's assumption that the Byzantine empire was, throughput its entire existence, in a state of decline. They have come to rank it, instead, as one of the great empires in history. And this for good reasons. It endured for over a thousand years. Down to about the middle of the eleventh century it was the center of civilization in Christendom. It preserved the thought and literature of antiquity; it developed new forms of art; it held back the barbarians. It produced great statesmen, soldiers, and diplomats as well as reformers and renowned scholars. Its missionaries, aided by its diplomats and sometimes by its armies, spread the gospel among the pagan tribes, especially the Slavs, which dwelt along its frontiers and beyond. As a Czech historian has put it, Byzantium “molded the undisciplined tribes of Serbs, Bulgars, Russians, Croats even, and made nations out of them; it gave to them its religion and institutions, taught their princes how to govern, transmitted to them the very principles of civilization—writing and literature.” Byzantium was a great power and a great civilizing force.

This article analyzes aspects of secular urban growth in two systems of cities in the mid-Atlantic states. One system centers on New York City; the other on Philadelphia. The author finds that the growth oi New York's hinterland was an important factor in explaining that system's relatively rapid expansion through the War of 1812. In subsequent years, this situation changed; basing his analysis on cross-sectional data, the author shows that relatively simple patterns of development gave way to complex situations shaped by the differential impacts of transportation, manufacturing, and commerce on these two urban systems.

The analysis of labor and capital productivity in the New England cotton textile industry has been extensive in recent years. The well-preserved records of the early textile firms have provided the basis for major studies by Layer, McGouldrick, Davis and Stettler, Zevin, David, and Williamson. Although these studies vary in approach and focus, they are alike in using measures of labor input that are primarily based on data for mill operatives. The labor productivity indices thus constructed have indicated increasing labor productivity prior to the Civil War. These estimates not only have substantially revised traditional historians' often implied beliefs of falling labor productivity due to declining labor quality in this period, but also have led to a variety of explanations of the relationship between labor productivity, capital productivity, and technological innovation.

Newly estimated national accounting data for the Arab community are utilized to provide a comparative economic profile of the Arab and Jewish sectors in mandatory Palestine's dual economy. It is shown that the Arab economy grew substantially, but at a much slower rate than the Jewish economy. Productivity advance, however, seems to have made a significantly larger relative contribution to Arab growth. General and specific dualistic features of Arab-Jewish trade and their growth promoting effects are also explored, suggesting that the political conflict between the two communities played only a minor role in shaping their economic interrelationship and performance.

The possession of a few copper cents [in 1862] meant that the owner could ride [the street car] rather than walk…. It meant that he could buy a postage stamp without an altercation with the clerk, or a cigar without receiving in change a handful of the dealer's own manufactured currency.