This exercise reproduces and assesses the historical time series on the top shares of the wealth distribution for the United States presented by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty's best-selling book has gained as much attention for its extensive presentation of detailed historical statistics on inequality as for its bold and provocative predictions about a continuing rise in inequality in the twenty-first century. Here I examine Piketty's US data for the period 1810 to 2010 for the top 10 percent and the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution. I conclude that Piketty's data for the wealth share of the top 10 percent for the period 1870 to 1970 are unreliable. The values he reported are manufactured from the observations for the top 1 percent inflated by a constant 36 percentage points. Piketty's data for the top 1 percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810–1910) are also unreliable. They are based on a single mid-century observation that provides no guidance about the antebellum trend and only tenuous information about the trend in inequality during the Gilded Age. The values Piketty reported for the twentieth century (1910–2010) are based on more solid ground, but have the disadvantage of muting the marked rise of inequality during the Roaring Twenties and the decline associated with the Great Depression. This article offers an alternative picture of the trend in inequality based on newly available data and a reanalysis of the 1870 Census of Wealth. This article does not question Piketty's integrity.

The relationship between economic performance and wealth inequality at a regional level is examined using county-level wealth for Ontario in 1892 and 1902. The results find that after controlling for confounding factors, declining wealth inequality was generally accompanied by slower economic performance as measured by changes in wealth levels and manufacturing output over time. This suggests that a more egalitarian wealth distribution came perhaps at the price of less robust economic performance.

This article explores the social interactions of immigration, occupation, and wealth in two urban industrial cities of nineteenth-century New England that were largely built upon, and shaped by, immigration: the very rapidly growing factory town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, and a more mixed-market and steadily growing nearby community of Northampton, Massachusetts. Both communities were emergent, rapidly industrializing, inland cities, providing a quite distinct immigration context than large established cities of the East Coast. Both were destinations for the same general ethnic immigration waves over the late nineteenth century, but with very different, and differently impacted, social spaces into which immigrants arrived. Contrasting and considering both these emergent cities allows us to ascertain the extent to which the occupational distribution and accumulation of wealth by immigrant groups supports the broad pattern of nineteenth-century assimilation, and reveals ways in which other migration processes may have been at odds, or intertwined, with the long-term historical assimilation of immigrants in such communities. Our findings support a traditional assimilationist perspective in emergent urban-industrial centers. However, they also reveal the role of universal immiseration in an industrial city dual-labor market in facilitating or forcing assimilation, the temporal advantages for ethnic groups of arriving early in growing settlements, and the more individualistic nature of economic enclaves in gaining advantages over time that did not manifest across broad immigrant or occupational groups.

Historians and social scientists have relied on contemporaneous textual accounts to document African American mobility in the immediate aftermath of emancipation after the Civil War, but they have interpreted them in widely varying ways. Some emphasize large-scale migration across the South, while others suggest that most movements were local and limited. This research tracks the early or “first wave” of African American migrants between 1865 and 1867 within and out of the South in an attempt to map the motion taking place after the war and to document the scale, direction, and intensity of African American mobility in the period between 1865 and 1867. The Freedmen's Bureau records indicate certain kinds of movements within the South, while our census methodology shows that there was more movement out of the South than accounted for in the Freedmen's Bureau labor records or previously accounted for in the historiography. Further, we observe two types of movement: short-term migration based on one-year contracts, perhaps returning to the point of origin, and another movement not always mediated through the Freedmen's Bureau that was more long term, but also subject to the freedperson's return to the point of origin. We seek to chart the process of emancipation over time and across space, detecting spatial patterns on an otherwise highly variable individual experience. No study has used the Freedmen's Bureau labor contracts to trace African American labor movements, and no study has deployed the 1880 individual census data to examine African American migration based on birthplace cohorts.

The rise of voluntary associations in the late nineteenth century has received significant scholarly attention over the last few decades. Some studies argue that modernization facilitates group formation, but other analyses (e.g., Crowley and Skocpol 2001; Gamm and Putnam 1999) find little support for the argument that modernization caused group formation. Here, we extend this debate to the study of the strength of state-level, voluntary associations with clear political objectives. Using state-level dues paid to national organizations as a measure of group strength, we find evidence that more modernized states typically had the strongest state-level organizations in the 1880s and 1890s. These empirical findings lend support to the modernization thesis but also suggest that group formation and strength may be explained by different processes.

The GI Bill's college-attendance provisions posed an evaluation problem. How would returning veterans, most of whom were without high school diplomas, be judged fit for college? Drawing from a variety of primary source material from the years surrounding the close of World War II, we show how leaders in government, the military, and academia cooperated to produce a measure of college fitness that would deem virtually all veterans fit for college entry. We use this historical moment to develop a novel theoretical insight. Measurement is diplomatic when it facilitates transactions across institutional distinctions while recognizing and honoring those distinctions. This insight has broad utility for students of American political development.

I first met Michael Katz on a clear, cool autumn afternoon in 1970. I was an uncertain first-year graduate student at the University of Toronto intending to complete a doctorate in British history with a project on antisocialism. Feeling confused, anxious, and unsatisfied by my courses, I began to share my concerns with fellow students. One of them, who became a lifelong friend (and editor), suggested that I contact that “young professor up the street” in history of education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education who worked in the new social history. Having read Thernstrom, Tilly, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Barrington Moore, and so forth, in a senior honors seminar, I drew up my courage and went to meet Michael.

I recently told one of my graduate students that I was contributing to the panel on which these papers are based, and he replied that reading Michael Katz's The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (2001a) led him to apply to graduate school. My story is the same. When I was deciding whether to pursue a graduate degree, Katz's Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (1975) convinced me to study the history of education. What Katz's scholarship, and later his mentorship, taught me was that one could be a historian with an eye toward justice, that one need not compartmentalize scholarly, political, and ethical commitments.

“It is hard to capture the sense in which life in the past, especially in cities, differed from living today,” Michael B. Katz wrote in the conclusion of his first book-length work of urban history, The People of Hamilton, Canada West (Katz 1975: 311). “For the recognizable components of past urban life lull one into imagining a continuity greater than that which exists. In fundamental ways the patterns and texture of urban existence have changed.”

Michael Katz began work on social welfare during the late 1970s with a project entitled “The Casualties of Industrialization.” That project led to a series of essays, Poverty and Policy in American History (Katz 1983), and a few years later to In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (Katz 1986). His reading in twentieth-century literature for Shadow—and the ideological and policy nostrums of the Reagan administration—allowed Katz to pivot to two books that frame contemporary welfare debates in their historical context—The Undeserving Poor in 1989 and The Price of Citizenship in 2001, as well as a set of essays Improving Poor People (Katz 1995) that he published between the two.

All Dr. Katz's students admired how quickly he expressed a point, often through tidy lists. In honor of that style, I want to focus these remarks about Michael Katz and activism on four dimensions: (1) his understanding of the activist/academic tension; (2) how he advised his graduate students to wrestle with it; (3) how he engaged nonhistorians; and (4) how his work's prognosis of the prospects for social change transformed markedly in the last five years of his career.