Numerous scholars consider the economic origins of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US married women's property acts. Researchers investigate how economic downturns and women's inroads into business spurred lawmakers to reform property laws to give married women the right to own separate property. Such economic explanations, however, are only a partial story. Our investigation reveals the important role of women's collective activism in winning these legal changes. Women mobilized for property rights often as they pressed for voting rights and, in one case, as they campaigned for an equal rights amendment. We examine circumstances leading to passage of married women's property acts in seven states to show that as women mobilized for property rights alongside voting rights or a broader equal rights law, a radical demand effect unfolded. Lawmakers often considered demands for woman suffrage or an equal rights amendment as more far-reaching and thus more radical and threatening. Such feminist demands, then, provided a foil for property-rights activism, and the contrast led lawmakers to view property demands as more moderate. In addition, as they pressed for these combined reforms, women often engaged in hybrid framing that allowed them to moderate their demand for property reforms by linking their property goals to beliefs already widely accepted. The confluence of these circumstances led political leaders to deem property changes as more moderate and acceptable in an effort to steer feminists away from their radical goals. In the end, the radical demand effect created a political opportunity for passage of the married women's property acts.

From 1870 to the present, the city of New York has built and maintained municipal bathing places including river baths, indoor bathhouses, indoor pools, and outdoor pools, designed around competing motivations of hygiene, recreation, and play. In this paper, I consider what it means for different groups to play in public space using Caillois's (1961) division of ludus—competitive, rule-bound play, and paidia—exuberant, unstructured play. First, using historical examples, I show how these notions of play were expressed in two shifts in the construction of municipal swimming and bathing infrastructure in New York City. In 1870, the enclosure of formerly unstructured bathing spaces at the riverbanks, and the establishment of floating baths in the rivers was meant to structure both time and behavior in the water; in 1936, the construction of 11 enormous swimming pools under Parks Commissioner Robert Moses provided bathing spaces, with recreation at the center of their design program and social function. Second, I offer contemporary ethnographic data from two outdoor pools in Brooklyn to demonstrate how rules around acceptable play are differentially enforced inside of the same institution. Through these historical shifts and contemporary variations, I demonstrate how both the construction and everyday use of municipal bathing infrastructure has been the site of an ongoing tension between ludus and paidia, inflected with urban problematics of class and race.

Recent interpretations of the neoliberal transformation of welfare states emphasize the formative role of crises in which old institutions are rolled back to make way for the “rollout” of neoliberalism’s program of austerity, markets, and privatization. Policy scholars and social historians argue, however, that major social changes combine long-term institutional development, sudden pivots, and cyclical trends. This article draws on a case study of municipal employee labor relations in New York City to examine the temporality of neoliberal transition. It acknowledges that actual neoliberalism involves a mix of policies that depart from its market-liberal ideal type and that include elements of statist, communitarian, and/or corporatist policies. Thus the article engages a puzzle: if paths to neoliberalism are not always sudden and are populated by policies that are not necessarily driven by neoliberal assumptions, how should we understand what neoliberalism is and how it develops? The article traces the history of municipal labor relations from the 1950s through the present to show that the transition to neoliberalism was characterized by the transition from a contentious corporatism that took shape in the 1950s and went through a neocorporatism forged in the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and that kept corporatist institutions in place while undermining their social power and laying the groundwork for neoliberal policies from the 1990s forward. The article shows how longer-term trajectories and shorter-term crises intertwine to produce a neoliberalism better understood as a repertoire of governance than as an undifferentiated set of policy preferences for market mechanisms.

The New Deal marked a critical conjuncture of civil rights and welfare policy in American political development. During the Progressive Era, civil rights policy and social policy developed independently and often antithetically. While the American state expanded its reach in economic regulation and social welfare, laying the institutional and intellectual groundwork for the New Deal, policies aimed at protecting the rights of minorities progressed barely at all (McDonagh 1993). But with the Great Depression, the welfare and civil rights agendas came together powerfully. For African Americans, who had already been relegated to the bottom of the political economy, the Depression created even more desperate conditions, and issues of economic opportunity and relief became paramount. The African American political community pursued an agenda that linked advances in civil rights to expansions of the state's role in social welfare (Hamilton and Hamilton 1992).

Social science historians engage in relatively few large, collaborative projects, yet many of their activities, especially data collection and several aspects of analysis, benefit from what economists call economies of scale. Here I briefly review the historical background of big projects, place research by social science historians in perspective relative to other disciplines, and ponder possible explanations for the dearth of collaborative efforts. Large projects are not to everyone’s taste, and they demand vision, logistical skills, and fund-raising. In conclusion, I suggest 15 large projects that are interesting and feasible.

Many Historians of the social aging process have focused primarily on the experiences of aging white men. A prime example is provided in the seminal work of David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978). In tracing the reversal in societal attitudes toward the aged, from gerontocratic to gerontophobic, Fischer argues that the authority of the elders in the eighteenth century was very great (1978: 220). Clearly, he was not referring to women for, as Fischer himself acknowledges, “no one would claim that colonial females exerted much political power.” And obviously, he was not including black male and female slaves or poor white men. Nor does his general theme of exultation apply to aging colonial widows who

Travel is an essential part of everyday life for most people, and it inevitably brings inconvenience at times, but women have often experienced particular and distinctive constraints and harassments while traveling that may inhibit or reduce their mobility. However, we know relatively little in detail about how, why, and how much women traveled in the past. This article provides new evidence about female mobility in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain by analyzing the daily movements that were recorded in the personal diaries of nine young women. The diary entries show that all the women traveled frequently both alone and with others, used a variety of transport technologies that were available at the time, and rarely recorded incidents that caused them concern or alarm. Mobility was not only essential for carrying out everyday activities but it was also central to the development of friendships and, especially, courting. Both social class and location did have some influence on the ways in which the young women traveled, on their freedom to travel alone, and on the inconveniences they faced. However, overall, the similarities between the experiences of the nine diarists were much greater than the differences. Although it is not possible to generalize widely from just nine accounts, these diaries do provide new insights into female mobility in the past.

In contrast to their interest in interdisciplinary cooperation, quantitative historians have neglected the international dimension of their work. Many of the pioneers of quantitative methods in the United States (like L. Stone, C. Tilly, or W. O. Aydelotte) specialize in European history, but the bulk of quantitative work deals with American topics; or, if it ventures abroad, investigates other countries in their own national terms (Kousser, 1980). Where there is a broader awareness, scholars tend to draw upon British and, due to the acclaim of the Annales school, also on French examples; while Germany, and even more so Russia, Latin America, or the Far East, remain in the outer darkness of quantitative consciousness (Rowney and Graham, 1969, as can be contrasted with Aydelotte, 1972). Some fields like economic history (due to its strong international organization) are internationalized; but others like the “new political history” are somewhat provincial, considering that few countries developed comparable democratic institutions in the nineteenth century, thereby providing material for similar research (Temin, 1981; Bogue, 1980). In less cosmopolitan scholarly communities than the American, the situation is worse, if anything. French quantitative historians seem to have shown some interest in their British or Hispanic neighbors, but have done little international or comparative work (Bourdelais, this issue; for an exception see Graham, 1982). Similarly, German historical social scientists appear to borrow methods freely, but do not occupy themselves much with transnational concerns (Jarausch, 1978).

When and how do tax regimes become sites of social protest and support broader movements of social policy reform? This question has drawn increasing interest from political sociologists and political scientists who have looked at the ways in which tax regimes create political cleavages that create the foundations for major shifts in state policy making or become the focal points of collective identity formation, leading to “tax protests.” In this paper we seek to contribute to this line of inquiry through an examination of the politics of Canadian tax policy from 1988 through 2008. What makes this case so compelling is that during these years the debates over tax policy raged over, first, the implementation and, later, the reduction of a federal value-added tax (VAT). However, rather than fueling a broad-based tax protest, debates over the VAT heightened interprovincial political cleavages that allowed the Conservatives to tie the question of the VAT to a broader economic program of typically “neoliberal” reforms: improving private-sector competitiveness and shrinking the size of the state. Drawing on a statistical analysis of the Canadian Election Study and an historical analysis of the conflict over taxation, we show how the federal structure of the Canadian state, and its policies of revenue equalization across the provinces, created an interprovincial adversarial politics that made sales tax reduction a key issue for Canadian voters. Our findings show how recognizing the historically contingent and institutionally specific context of struggles over tax policy helps to explain cross-national variation in the politics of taxation.

Literacy underwent revolutionary growth in northwestern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This revolution coincided with other dramatic changes in European society, such as the industrial, demographic, agricultural, political, and religious revolutions (Deane 1969: 20–84). While the relationships between literacy and these other revolutions are not fully understood, their association is apparent and many potential influences exist (Cipolla 1969; Cremin 1970; Graff 1981: 232–60; 1987a, 1987b; Jensen 1986: 114–28; Maynes 1985: 117–31; Mitch 1984, 1988; Sanderson 1983; West 1978). The transplantation of European society across the Atlantic brought the literacy revolution to the American periphery. While numerous studies have shown that colonial America participated in this expansion of literacy, the common longitudinal patterns of literacy growth across the various regions and populations of colonial America have received less attention.

Numerous studies have shown that since about 1900 the largest industrial, financial, and transportation companies have interlocked extensively through a sharing of directors and, much less often, officers (e.g., Bunting and Barbour, 1971; Bunting, 1976a, 1976b; Dooley, 1969). In fact, this interlocking has been so extensive that a virtual network exists whereby nearly any large corporation in principle is able to participate either directly or indirectly, once or twice removed, in the top-level policy deliberations of any other large concern (Mizruchi, 1982; Pennings, 1980).

Little is known about the origins of this network. Most research implicitly assumes that the network has resulted from some relatively recent decline in competition and subsequent movement toward economic concentration. This conclusion follows from the commonly accepted proposition that competition precedes monopoly in industrial development. Scherer (1979:47), an authority on modern American industrial organization, cites Marx for the essence of this notion: “‘One capitalist always kills many’ (creating) a ‘constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process.’” In less colorful but more factual terms, Burns (1936:1-42) and many others have described the “decline of competition” and the factors leading to the domination of many industries by relatively few large corporations (literature reviewed in Scherer, 1979:67-70; Blumberg, 1975:16-83).

In Part I of this study, our focus was on the bases of crime in Imperial Germany during the 1880s—the “take-off” stage of German industrial development. In Part II, we will extend the time dimension of our analysis to include the period of growth between the 1880s and 1914, and we will also broaden the scope of the issues and explanatory variables to be considered.

In many ways, German society in the decades prior to the outbreak of World War I represents an excellent historical context for a study of the impact of urban-industrial development on crime. The German criminologist Aschaffenburg notes: “The last twenty years [1885-1905] of German criminality are especially suitable for such an analysis, because no transfiguring upheavals have taken place; the years having been marked by a great economic and cultural advance.” German society during this time enjoyed a period of international peace unknown since the years between 1815 and 1848. This period of relative tranquility allows the scholar a chance to analyze the problem of crime in its relations to socioeconomic conditions without having to control for the serious disturbing factors induced by war. La belle époque, as this period has been referred to by contemporary historians, also graced Germany with a respite from the bellicose domestic turmoil that it suffered in the past century. The movement for national unification had finally been completed, and the struggle for social reform had changed from the vitriolic confrontations of the watershed years of 1830 and 1848 to a peaceful and evolutionary, if no less manifest, nature.

Historical social science—which I understand to be analysis of change over time that is informed by the theories, methods, and questions of the social sciences—has in the past 25 or 30 years established itself as an important area of interdisciplinary study. It emerged at a point in time when, in the United States at least, several of the social science disciplines were dominated by positivist epistemologies and models drawn from the natural sciences. In practice, much of what has been understood as social science history has centered on the recovery and analysis of largely quantifiable sources that allowed the writing of the collective biography of large populations—the ordinary people arguably under-or unrepresented in classic historical accounts of previous eras. Drawing upon social-scientific traditions provided concepts and methodologies for analyzing processes that encompassed everyone, rather than merely the events dominated by an elite, and for studying relatively anonymous collectivities rather than merely the “great men.”

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).

Historical mortality analysis is often confounded by changing disease environments, diagnostic criteria, and terminology. Recorded causes of death are shaped by these local and historical contexts. We analyze changing literal causes of death during the shift from miasmatic to germ theories of disease using death records from two Massachusetts towns for selected years spanning 1850 to 1912. This analysis demonstrates that (1) International Classification of Diseases (ICD) classifications are more stable, yet potentially less informative, than the literal causes recorded in death accounts, (2) recorded causes of death often include additional qualifications and elaborations beyond basic literal causes of death, and the use of such qualifiers rose dramatically during the late nineteenth century, (3) social biases are clearly evident in the extent to which causes of death were further described or qualified, and (4) the additional descriptive qualification of deaths during this period of often ambiguous historical causes of death can potentially aid in efforts to classify causes of death and derive robust estimates of cause-specific mortality trends.

It is a truism that the personal is political: State power and other forms of publicly constituted power can penetrate interpersonal intimacy. Feminists and other scholars have criticized the notion that “private” and “public” spheres can be separated; they have asserted that the processes and experiences of the home and family are indissolubly linked with those of the state and the institutions of politics.

A necessary step in any assessment of early national economic growth is a characterization of market development before independence from Great Britain. Drawing up such a characterization, however, presents problems as at least two different pictures of the eighteenth-century economy are currently available. One depicts the intense involvement of early Americans in markets and overseas trade, while another equally powerful image suggests a colonial landscape of sleepy villages inhabited by farmers devoid of a profit orientation and almost entirely dependent upon their own households and neighborhood reciprocity for goods and services.

Students of federalism in the United States and elsewhere have long been fascinated by the relationships between lower and higher levels of government. State municipal leagues are one important, yet understudied, means by which cities interact with states in the United States. I examine the history of these municipal leagues, arguing that the timing of their formation in U.S. states was in part dependent on state restrictions on special legislation and in part due to the efforts of nationwide networks of policy entrepreneurs. Drawing on scholarly literatures on collective action and associational networks, I develop and test an account of how state municipal leagues formed and how they spread.

Contemporary discussions of immigrant assimilation in the United States often take the experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a benchmark, yet significant gaps remain in our understanding of the generality and rate of immigrant progress during that era. Using four decades of Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples census microdata, we utilize both ordinary least squares microdata regression and double cohort methodology to examine socioeconomic assimilation across arrival cohort and country of origin during the Ellis Island era. Our results show, contrary to some writing, that while the first generation (the foreign born) exhibit decidedly inferior labor market outcomes, socioeconomic attainment (measured by Socio-Economic Index points) increased quickly with duration in the United States. Persons of the second generation and those of mixed parentage show much less penalty than immigrants. At the same time, we uncover differences in outcome by European region that do not disappear over the decades we examine.