This article tests Federalist and Anti-Federalist explanations for state contributions to the confederation government using data on troop requisitions from 1775 to 1783. The Federalists claimed that state politicians acted unilaterally and contributed when the Continental army protected their state's interests. The Anti-Federalists claimed that state politicians understood their duty to the Union and contributed to advance its needs. The results suggest that, with one important caveat, states contributed more consistent with the Federalist argument. This helps explain why the Articles of Confederation needed reform.

In the 1970s, when the social science history movement emerged in the United States, leading to the founding of the Social Science History Association, a simultaneous movement arose in which historians looked to cultural anthropology for inspiration. Although both movements involved historians turning to social sciences for theory and method, they reflected very different views of the nature of the historical enterprise. Cultural anthropology, most notably as preached by Clifford Geertz, became a means by which historians could find a theoretical basis in the social sciences for rejecting a scientific paradigm. This article examines this development while also exploring the complex ways cultural anthropology has embraced—and shunned—history in recent years.

Guest registers for six commercial hotels are analyzed to reveal everyday, nonmigratory travel patterns associated with small towns and villages in the upper Susquehanna valleys of New York and Pennsylvania at the turn of the twentieth century. The residences of guests are mapped using geographic information system (GIS) software and reveal two broad patterns of connectivity, a translocal cluster of visitors from places within the immediate vicinity and a set of visitors from more distant places up the urban system. Census and directory data identify many repeat visitors, such as hucksters and peddlers extending the reach of rural stores and merchants traveling circuits as agents of metropolitan manufacturing centers. In addition to commercial travelers, the presence of traveling entertainments, such as vaudeville acts and circuses, in hotel guest registers reveals shifts in American popular culture and entertainments on small-town Main Streets. These registers offer a fixed window onto a mobile world, and the signatures hint at the types of connections between these settlements and the outside world.

In the historical study of contentious politics, political economy theories see the transformation of the dominant form of contention from reactive violence to proactive demonstration in early modern Europe as a result of large-scale political-economic processes like state formation and market expansion. Culturalist theories emphasize instead the significance of large-scale cultural reconstitutions in forging such transformation. Judging between these two theories is no easy task, as macropolitical-economic and cultural changes were concurrent in most cases. Mid-Qing China (c. 1683-1839), which experienced state centralization and commercialization in conjunction with a relatively stable neo-Confucianist hegemony, constitutes a telling case that helps resolve the debate. By analyzing a catalog of political protest events derived from archival sources, I find that Chinese protest changed from predominantly reactive violence in the seventeenth century to proactive demonstration in the mid-eighteenth century and back to reactive violence in the nineteenth century. The general direction of change can be explained by the cyclical trajectories of state formation and market development alone. At the same time, the specific claims and repertoires of protest were always delimited by the cultural idioms available in the overarching neo-Confucianist orthodoxy of the time. This study suggests an integrated perspective synthesizing both culturalist and political economy accounts to offer a fuller explanation of macrohistorical changes in contentious politics.