This article highlights the usefulness of family trees for visualizing and understanding changing patterns of kin dispersion over time. Such spatial patterns are important in gauging how families influence outcomes such as health and social mobility. The article describes how rapidly growing families, originally from England, dispersed over the US North and established hubs where they originally settled that lasted hundreds of years, even as they repeated the process moving West. Fathers lived much closer to their adult sons in 1850 than they do today and many more had an adult son within a radius of 30 miles. Big Data from genealogical websites is now available to map large numbers of families. Comparing one such data set with the US Census of 1880 shows that the native-born population is well represented, but there are not as many foreign born or African Americans in these data sets. Pedigrees become less and less representative the further back in time they go because they only include lines that have survived into the present. Despite these and other limitations, Big Data make it possible to study family spatial dispersion going back many generations and to map past spatial connections in a wider variety of historical contexts and at a scale never before possible.

In this article, we study social mobility across multiple generations in premodern Korea. Using two extant oldest family records, jokbo, we construct a prospective genealogical microdata containing the entire records of public offices and reproduction over five generations of the two elite family lineages in premodern Korea. We argue that the confluence of an ambiguous stratification system with a limited number of high-ranking offices generated a trade-off for parents between the quantity and quality of positions attained by their offspring. The result of the trade-off was unequal distributions of mobility-related family resources to maximize the lineage’s collective goal, rather than to maximize individual children’s social ranks. Using a novel empirical strategy to consider the heterogeneous resource-allocation within elite families, we present empirical evidence on associations between parents’ and grandparents’ social ranks and quality of offices achieved by children of elite Korean families.

The agrarian populist movement of the late nineteenth century remains among the largest social movement and third-party revolts in American history. It embodied a full-scale critique and mobilization against the inequities of the Gilded Age, and its influence stretched well into the Progressive and New Deal eras. While most accounts of the movement and party’s emergence and rapid demise have centered on economic conditions and interests, we link movement and third-party emergence and failure to the institutional arena second only to partisan politics in its impact on southern society at large, namely organized religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism. This article offers the first systematic analysis of the extent to which organized religion in the South channeled the mobilization of agrarian populism. The results both support and contradict the argument that agrarian populism was rooted in organized southern religion by suggesting that evangelical Protestantism channeled the mobilization of the Farmers’ Alliance movement but not the People’s Party. While white southern evangelical religion served as a potent cultural resource and mobilizing structure for the movement, the move to partisan politics helped create a disjuncture between movement and party from which Populism never recovered.

Through a case study of the emergence of rights-infringing “illiberal” policies and practices in the field of Danish alcohol treatment from 1900 to 1943, this article shows how new scientific ideas on “degeneration” as the cause of alcoholism and the use of force in treatment were adapted and promoted by Protestant revivalist groups and Social Democrats alike. The article analyzes how new scientific ideas resonated with the cultural ideals of Danish Social Democracy and the evangelical temperance organization the Blue Cross. The article challenges the established view in the literature that eugenic and similar illiberal practices were the result of a “high modernist” state ethos and “communitarian-organic” thinking on the left. Building on secondary literature and archival sources, it is shown that illiberal policies and practices as well as theories of heredity in the case of Danish alcohol treatment were adopted as the result of common liberal-conservative ideals regarding the value of family shared by Social Democrats and Protestant activists across the civil society and state spheres.

We contribute to an understanding of the determinants of voter support for US prohibition policies in the early 1900s, by separating substantive preferences for wet versus dry policies from preferences for centralized versus decentralized control. Prior studies of prohibition referenda have generated various conclusions about which groups supported and opposed prohibition, whether regarding the role of religion, urban/rural residence, immigrant status, gender, or class. But none of these studies has considered the impact of preferences regarding decentralization on voter support for prohibition measures. We exploit a combination of referenda unique to the 1933 Ohio ballot, where voters considered prohibition-repeal measures alongside a county home-rule amendment. By viewing support for home rule as a proxy for decentralization preferences we clarify and explain anomalies in prior studies regarding determinants of support for prohibition and its repeal, especially regarding urban counties and some evangelical denominations, which are shown to have been guided by a preference for local control of alcohol policy, and counties with larger proportions of women, which are associated with greater support for more centralized and uniform alcohol policy.

Most recent explanations of social welfare and development outcomes have focused on the role and impact of formal institutional arrangements, particularly the state. The institutional legacies of colonial rule and the role of democratic institutions have been common explanatory variables. This article focuses on the historical origins, persistence, and increases in inequality in Mexico and Chile during the twentieth century. It argues that despite important historical economic and political institutional differences, similar processes account for the unequal distributional outcomes that characterize the two cases. Critical conjunctures involved bitter struggle between social groups. While popularly based countermovements (along the lines predicted by Karl Polyani) arose periodically and struggled to improve social conditions, these movements were unable to alter the underlying sources of inequality. By mid-twentieth century, popular pressure had been able to exact only an unequal form of embeddedness (or social protection from the market) that contributed to inequality. Further, waves of popular mobilization linked to critical conjunctures produced reactive historical sequences involving fierce resistance from propertied elites and their middle-class allies. This resistance inevitably gave rise to new conjunctures ushering in new institutional arrangements that entrenched or increased inequality. The absence of a distributive settlement between propertied classes and popular groups was at the heart of the mobilization and countermobilization cycles in both cases; indeed, it was the depth of this disagreement, particularly the disagreement over private property, that fueled reactive sequences and their unequalizing outcomes.

Racial inequality remains a painful and central feature of daily life in the United States. Yet few would deny that decades of political struggle have transformed the nation’s racial landscape. In this article, we seek to advance long-standing sociological efforts to disentangle this braiding of persistence and change. Specifically, we intervene in two ways designed to build on national studies of inequality trends for black and white Americans. First, by shifting measurement to the state level, we reveal distinctive subnational trajectories and dynamics of convergence that have been obscured by the field’s emphasis on aggregate national trends. Second, by drawing on relational theories of boundaries and positions, we develop a new empirical strategy for measuring racial inequalities over time. Identifying two key analytic dimensions (exclusion and subordination), we analyze the relative positions of whites and blacks in two domains (work and housing) across the decades from 1940 to 2010. Our results suggest that racial inequalities rooted in boundary-based dynamics of social closure (exclusion) proved far more durable than inequalities tied to inferior positions alone (subordination). Moreover, we find evidence of a significant nationalization of racial relations, with subnational units converging on a more uniform structure of racialized relations over time. We conclude that the period from 1940 to 2010 was marked by a “consolidation” of racial exclusion (i.e., convergence around relatively stable levels of inequality) paired with the comparatively greater “equalization” of racial subordination (i.e., stronger convergence around more substantial declines).

The quantity theory of money is applied to the paper money regimes of seven of the nine British North American colonies south of New England. Individual colonies, and regional groupings of contiguous colonies treated as one monetary unit, are tested. Little to no statistical relationship, and little to no magnitude of influence, between the quantities of paper money in circulation and prices are found. The quantity theory of money does not explain the value and performance of colonial paper monies well. This is a general and widespread result, and not a rare and isolated phenomenon.