I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb’s 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986).

Although individual and personal, names take on their significance in social interaction. Since the context of social interaction changes with immigration, names can be expected to change as well. In this paper, we use information from the Public Use Sample of the 1910 U.S. census to compare the patterns of personal (given) names of first- and second-generation Italian and Jewish immigrants and native-born whites of native parentage, and to examine the association of naming patterns of immigrants with several measures indicating interaction with those outside the ethnic group. Because the information from the census is at a single point in time, we also draw on interviews with elderly Italian and Jewish women in order to provide more direct evidence of change and of the contexts in which this change occurred.

In the Americas, two types of racial systems developed at the confluence of migration streams from Europe and Africa. In the Caribbean, free persons of color emerged as an intermediary group between whites and large populations of Negro slaves. In British mainland colonies, whites came to treat all blacks, whether free or enslaved, mulatto or Negro, as a single social category (Hoetink 1967; Mörner 1967: 136–38).

Research on the Balkan joint family, often incorrectly generalized as zadruga, shows three striking characteristics. First, although there is an abundance of scholarly literature on this issue, most of it is not linked to general questions about family and household structure in western Europe or even eastern Europe. This is unfortunate because findings are not seen in a broader context and are interpreted in isolation.

In 1965 Morris David Morris, by questioning the view that British rule had led to the impoverishment of the Indian people, reopened the debate about the course of Indian economic welfare in the nineteenth century. Aspects of the question continue to concern scholars.

The American professions took on their modern shape in the period between 1870 and 1920. After Jacksonian democracy had severely weakened the organizational structures of the professions, a series of interrelated reforms raised academic standards, improved professional schools, and standardized and strengthened licensing requirements.