Despite the emergence of social science history, the profession remains organized around the study of periods in the history of societies. Departments of history still structure their curricula mainly along national and temporal lines, and the same principle of socialization thereby defines most academic positions (Darnton, 1980). To judge by the sessions of the annual meetings of the Social Science History Association (SSHA), those sympathetic with that orientation focus on topics, approaches, and methodologies. Only one association network, that for the study of Asia, mentions a locale in its title, and none specifies a particular time period. This article will examine the findings and implications of social science history for one well-established national/period field, that of early American history.

Migration research has long recognized and effectively documented the significance of demographic and economic variables in affecting the propensity for individuals to migrate. The decision to move is often seen as a function of age, family status, length of residence, and economic circumstance. In addition, there is the assumption that relative location in kinship networks is significant in that the idea to migrate is implanted or resisted as a function of personal and associative links within the community. This latter process, however, is more difficult to document. As a consequence, most studies can only infer its operation and its relationship to other variables.

A major problem in demonstrating the influence of kinship networks is that the pattern of associations between households in any sizable population is exceedingly difficult to unravel and define. This is especially true of historical studies. While detailed information frequently exists for some households in a given population, it rarely exists for all.

Modernization theory provides a successful conceptual model in gerontology for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it establishes an integrative framework for those who focus on cross-cultural and historical patterns of aging in comparative contexts. In addition, together with the age-stratification model (Riley, Johnson, and Foner, 1972), it has fostered a movement away from an emphasis on individualistic, psychological explanations of adjustment and adaptation toward a more macrolevel orientation. As a consequence, research in aging has gradually become more attuned to the importance of structural arrangements and their impact on the roles and statuses accorded the elderly. The purpose of this article is to expand further the focus on societal factors and to suggest a needed redirection of our research interests.

It is wholly appropriate that this article should follow Professor Hendricks’s, for historians’ perspectives on modernization theory generally build on the insights of social scientists. Although its intellectual foundations were laid by social philosophers and critics such as Adam Smith, Malthus, and Condorcet at the end of the eighteenth century, the main lines of modernization theory were formulated in earnest after World War II by economists, political scientists, and sociologists concerned with “developing nations” outside the Western world (Levy, 1966). Historians, in contrast, only began to join serious discussions during the past fifteen years. Our involvement in gerontology—the study of old age and aging—is of even more recent vintage. Whereas social scientists were exploring the “modernization of (old) age” during the 1950s and 1960s, few social science historians or humanists have investigated how the process of modernization affected the meanings and experiences of growing old(er) over time and across geopolitical boundaries (Maddox and Wiley, 1976; Achenbaum, forthcoming).

Readers of this journal have been treated to a lively and interesting debate between Professors Robert Gallman and Edward Pessen over what seems to be emerging as an important issue in American social history—the extent to which population age structure explains observed inequalities in the distribution of wealth. The issue is significant because inequality that is attributable to differences in age does not carry the same implications as inequality attributable to any other source. If young men generally begin their careers in modest circumstances, and generally accumulate wealth as they grow older, the resulting disparities between older and younger men at any moment in time would tend to confirm rather than disprove the hypothesis of fundamental equality in society as a whole. As Gallman puts it, “I earn more income and hold more wealth than does my son. Neither of us regards this as inequitable… nor as evidence of the inegalitarian nature of American society.

In his essay in this issue, Stuart Blumin attempts to sort out the debate between Edward Pessen and me. Professor Blumin begins: “Gallman advances the view that inequality between generations—the association between age and wealth—does explain nearly all of the very striking differences in personal fortune that Pessen and others have discovered.” This is not the view I had intended to advance and is certainly not a view I hold. Many factors bore on the wealth distribution of the United States in the “age of the common man.” The age structure of population surely did not account for “nearly all” of the observed wealth differences. (See, for example, my treatment of this subject— based on manuscript census data for 1860—in Davis et al., 1972: 31-32. This discussion treats the influences on wealth holding of age, sex, nativity, color, occupation, and inheritance.) How Professor Blumin came to misunderstand me so badly I cannot say, but I suspect he was misled by my ill-advised comparison of the results drawn from my model with the actual distribution of wealth in 1860 (Gallman, 1978:198).