Quantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

The second decade of the twentieth century is viewed as the pivotal period for ghetto formation in the United States. This decade witnessed the onset of the Great Migration and it was during this time that modern ghettos, massive agglomerations of tens of thousands of Blacks and virtually only Blacks, became visible. Despite the importance of this period for ghetto formation and the subsequent segregation experienced by Blacks, our understanding of the dynamics of segregation during this period is incomplete. We utilize recently released fine-grained census data to present a more precise and complete picture of segregation in American cities in the second decade of the twentieth century and in doing so make several contributions to the historical literature on residential segregation. First, we document how segregation varied across the full range of American cities, including Southern and smaller cities overlooked in most historical accounts. Second, we assess how the influx of Southern Black migrants into Northern cities was related to increasing segregation. Third, we ascertain the role of Blacks’ socioeconomic status in determining proximity to Whites. Fourth, we examine racial zoning’s impact on segregation. Finally, we consider how the presence of immigrants in a city was related to the residential segregation experienced by Blacks. This research thus adds to the literature on residential segregation by providing more reliable estimates of the degree of residential segregation experienced by Blacks at the beginning of the Great Migration as well as exploring other factors associated with varying levels of segregation at that time.

When do states grant social rights to noncitizens? I explore this question by examining the extension of Old Age Assistance (OAA) to noncitizens after the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act. While the act contained no alienage-based restrictions, states were permitted to bar noncitizens from means-tested programs. In 1939, 31 states had alienage restrictions for OAA. By 1971, when the Supreme Court declared state-level alienage restrictions unconstitutional, only eight states still did. States with more Mexicans and Asians were slower to repeal restriction, however. Using in-depth case studies of New York, California, and Texas, I demonstrate the importance of federal and state institutional arrangements and immigrant political power for the extension of social rights to noncitizens. I also show that to secure access to OAA, immigrant advocates adapted their strategies to match the institutional and political context.

Scholars have long examined how generations or, more technically, cohorts produce social change. According to theory, people’s lives are shaped by the years in which they were born because they experience, along with their peers, particular historical events at the same points in the life course. Despite the importance of history, however, many scholars have evaluated cohorts not defined by clear start and end dates, but rather by arbitrary cut points, such as five-year intervals. In contrast, this article uses defined changes in military service in the United States stemming from shifts between war and peace, and from draft to volunteer service to assess how cohorts have contributed to change in socioeconomic attainment. It uses the Current Population Survey from 1971 to 2017, which has not previously been used to evaluate how veteran status may have produced shifting outcomes across cohorts. It finds evidence that cohorts had different average income overall and between groups, with veterans earning more money than nonveterans who were eligible to serve during the draft era before the Vietnam War. These gaps are partially explained by racial and educational differences. The findings provide a model for analyses of changes in the relative status of other groups, as well as information about how the role of military service in social mobility changed historically.

This article measures the impact of early-life household composition on adult height and chest size in men born in Catalonia in the late nineteenth century. It combines data from military drafts with census records, observing the same individual twice over his lifetime. For family composition characteristics I control for the number of siblings, intergenesic interval, parental occupation and educational level, fatherless or motherless families, and other relatives living in the household. I show that taller individuals were more likely to come from well-off families and that men who grew up in orphanages or in motherless households were shorter than their counterparts. Results also uncover that there was a negative association between height and the number of siblings and the age gap between them. However, this negative association is driven by having more brothers (instead of sisters). If we are to gain a fuller understanding of the factors that have influenced height, we need to consider the composition of the household as an explanatory variable.

Policies excluding ethnoracial and religious minorities reinforce the power of political elites. This study addresses an extreme case of exclusion: urban expulsions of Jews in the medieval western Holy Roman Empire. Expulsions were official edicts proclaimed by Christian princes, lords, or town councils, whomever ruled a territory. Changing religious and political culture, in the form of new value on community righteousness and the beginning of territorialization, provided incentives for polities to expel their Jewish residents. Using a new database of Jewish settlement and city development in the Western Holy Roman Empire 1000–1520 CE, I show that the relational structure of political power between Christian elites could insulate or expose Jewish communities to political contests of the time. Jews were derided, lesser members of Christian society, but in spite of increasing focus on Christian piety and legislating community purity, most cities did not expel their Jewish residents. City rulers that did expel were attempting to solve challenges for sovereignty through their policies toward Jews.

The state executions of 81 IRA men during the Irish civil war have long been a bitter, almost taboo subject in Irish society. This article provides a geographical perspective on these executions. While the origins of the policy can be traced to elite divisions, the geographical spread of the executions, especially in 1923, reflected the geography of the civil war, and the need to broadcast state power at the local level during its guerrilla phase. The article maps the geographical spread of the executions and analyzes their diffusion in terms of a number of general and Irish-specific theories of civil war violence. Because the civil war originated in elite differences over a treaty, and because the two sides of the conflict had been so personally close at the elite level, historians have tended to explain the executions in terms of elite psychology. Yet while the initial development of the policy reflected the centralization of power by the protreaty elite, in terms of timing, strategic rationale, and location territorial perspectives on civil war explain much more about their diffusion in 1923.

Four synchronous epidemics of measles and scarlet fever are observed in the historical data collected by colonial authorities in Victoria, Australia from 1853 to 1876, suggesting some sort of synergistic relationship between the two diseases. While epidemics of measles, as recorded by the colonial record keepers, still occurred during the remainder of the study period (until 1916), no further epidemics of scarlet fever occurred after 1876. This is suggestive of a change in Victoria’s disease ecology in the late 1870s. After analysis of the historical data for potential artifactual cases, it does not appear to be the result of confusion in diagnosis and changes in case definitions do not appear to have affected reporting of the causes of death. We conclude that the most likely explanation for the observed pattern is an epidemic synergy that ended after the 1876 epidemic. We hypothesize that this synergistic relationship between measles and scarlet fever in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria ended due to a shift in the dominant group A streptococci (GAS) M-type or the loss of a GAS bacteriophage. Support for this hypothesis comes from observations that other diagnoses associated with group A strep infections also changed their mortality profiles during the 1870s, particularly “Bright’s disease,” a possible descriptor of post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis. We situate the emergence and end of this pattern within the demographic and socioeconomic conditions of the Victorian gold-mining boom in the 1850s to 1870s and postboom changes in fertility, mortality, and housing infrastructure, highlighting the importance of social conditions in disease evolution.