To assess claims about the role of the extended family in late imperial Chinese society, we examine the influence of kin network characteristics on marriage, reproduction, and attainment in Liaoning Province in Northeast China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We compare the influences on outcomes of the number and status of different types of kin as well as the seniority of the individual within each type of kin group. We find that the characteristics of kin outside the household did matter for individual outcomes but that patterns of effects were nuanced. While based on our results we concur that kin networks were important units of social and economic organization in late imperial China, we conclude that their role was complex.

Transport routes are basic elements that are inextricably linked to diverse political, economic, and social factors. Transport networks may be the cause or result of complex historical conjunctions that reflect to some extent a structural conception of the political systems that govern each territory. It is for this reason that analyzing the evolution of the transport routes layout in a wide territory allows us to recognize the role of the political organization and its economic influence in territorial design. In this article, the evolution of the transport network in the Iberian Peninsula has been studied in a broad chronological framework to observe how the different political systems of each period understood and modified the transport systems. Subsequently, a second analysis of the evolution of transport networks in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula is included in this article. This more detailed and geographically restricted study allows us to visualize in a different way the evolution and impact of changes in transport networks. This article focuses on the calculation of the connectivity to analyze the intermodal transport systems. The use of network science analyses to study historical roads has resulted in a great tool to visualize and understand the connectivity of the territories of each studied period and compare the evolution, changes, and continuities of the transport network.

This article examines collective petitioning in metropolitan Spain during the Age of Revolution, focusing on the practices and discourses that framed petitioning as a meaningful form of action. There was a deeply rooted tradition of petitioning in old regime Spain, which was part of the ordinary bureaucratic workings of the crown and also provided a legitimizing framework for rioting in specific contexts. The collective experimentation in popular participation after the 1808 Napoleonic invasion transformed petitioning. Petitioning was first reconceptualized in accordance with the emerging language of rights and popular sovereignty. Activists and commentators had some awareness of the use of public petitioning in Britain, and once the representative Cortes met in Cadiz in 1810, public petition drives on public issues became part of the political culture. At the same time, the need to legitimate unconventional forms of action in the context of a crisis in the state converted petitioning into an all-embracing right. The right to petition, not only encompassed signed protest texts but also legitimated the old tradition of petitioning by riot and further was used to justify provincial rebellions, juntas, and military pronunciamientos. In comparative terms, this article highlights the elasticity of the language of petitioning during the Age of Revolution and cautions against narrowly associating it with one particular form of collective action or historical trajectory.

Kinship ranks second only to economic factors in social-scientific attempts to explain who migrates, when they move, and where they go. A person’s household circumstances are commonly thought to influence his or her propensity to move, as is the presence of other kin in the same community. Furthermore, the existence and location of kin in other communities are commonly thought to affect both the propensity to move and the choice of destination. Much of the international migration literature, accordingly, focuses on kin chains of migration, while much of the contemporary internal migration literature focuses on rural-urban kinship ties and on the continuing importance of extended kinship ties in societies experiencing high rates of urban-bound migration.

The rise of disciplines is connected with the formation of groups or networks of specialists. It is connected with the emergence of “scientific communities,” theorized about since Thomas Kuhn and Robert Merton. But how is such a community of specialists brought together; how are common orientations among members of a scientific community upheld? In this article it is argued that scholarly journals play a key role in the modern scientific disciplines. Journals both secure the shared values of a scientific community and endorse what that community takes to be certified knowledge. Publications in scholarly journals have become the basic units of scientific communication in a discipline. Against this theoretical background, I analyze in this article the evolution of the leading scholarly journal in the field of education in the Dutch-language community, Paedagogische Studiën (Studies in Education). The analyses illuminate a number of historical evolutions in this journal in the period 1920–75: the increase in coauthorship and the concomitant standardization of publication formats; the changing role of the editorial board, especially in its function of gatekeeper of scientific communication; and the increase and the shifting “global” nature of cited work in the journal. Because of the close relationship between journal and discipline, this analysis highlights basic characteristics of the patterns of communication and the constitution of disciplinary identity in Dutch-language educational science.

In his 1911 film What Shall We Do with Our Old? D.W. Griffith dramatized the belief that urban, industrial America had no place for the elderly. Fired for being too slow at his work, an impoverished old man cannot buy food or medicine for his wife, who languishes in their drab, one-room apartment. Justice Benjamin Cardozo told a similar tale in upholding the constitutionality of the Social Security Act (Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 [1937]): “The number of [aged] unable to take care of themselves is growing at a threatening pace. More and more our population is becoming urban and industrial instead of rural and agricultural.” Cardozo relied on studies by the U.S. Social Security Board (1937: 3), which found that “the major part of the industrial population . . . earns scarcely enough to provide for its existence. Savings are small and generally cover little more than the cost of burial insurance.” As a result, “industrial workers in [urban] areas . . . reach old age with few resources” (ibid.: 33).

This paper analyzes rural conflict in one of the most volatile areas of interwar Europe, the latifundia regions of the South of Spain. The historical and economics literature argues that rural conflict is a bottom-up response of landless peasants to unemployment, bad harvests, landownership inequality, changes in property rights, and poor enforcement of proworker legislation. A second generation of historical studies has focused on democratization and concomitant changes in collective bargaining and labor market institutions. Was conflict caused by structural factors like poverty, inequality, or unemployment or was conflict an endogenous response to political change? This paper uses municipal-level time series and cross-sectional variation in rural conflict in three Andalusian provinces (Córdoba, Jaén, and Seville) in the early 1930s to argue that, although collective misery certainly shaped the main issues of contention, inequality or deteriorating living standards did not explain the explosive intensification of conflict during the Second Republic. Geographic variation in conflict would be consistent with unobserved locational advantages and higher agricultural incomes, thicker labor markets, facility of communication, and market access and information, irrespective of the intensity of inequality or the degree of local Socialist political power. Poor harvests can only explain a small part of the time-series evolution of conflict from April 1931 to June 1934, while good harvests probably intensified the competition of temporary migrants and local workers for well-paid harvest jobs. Large gains in rural laborers’ bargaining power, organizational buildup, and reactions to policy changes and state intervention are more promising explanatory factors of the temporal evolution of conflicts in the period.

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.

The period around the turn of the twentieth century has been called the “era of finance capital” in American history. It was during this period that the first of the great trusts were formed, combining in some cases hundreds of corporations into one. Investment bankers, in particular J. P. Morgan, were the major orchestrators of these schemes, but other leading financiers and industrialists were also active in controlling several corporations apiece. George F. Baker and James Stillman in banking; Edward H. Harriman, James J. Hill, and the Moore brothers in railroads; and John D. and William Rockefeller in oil and other industries were prominent among the leading capitalists of the age, and they dominated much of the business scene at that time.

One of the remarkable aspects of this period is the rare unanimity among scholars and journalists about its main characteristics. There is general agreement that financial corporations were the most powerful of the period, that a relatively small number of individuals dominated the corporate world, and that if it was ever possible to speak of a ruling class in American society, this was the period (e.g., Riesman, 1953; Bell, 1960; Parsons and Smelser, 1957).

During the twenty year period of 1945 through 1965 perhaps the most dramatic example of presumed presidential opinion leadership is President Truman’s speech proclaiming what came to be called the Truman Doctrine. Delivered to Congress and broadcast across the nation on radio, the speech has been widely acknowledged as establishing the temper of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Historians whether sympathetic or critical of the Truman administration agree that this speech more than any other single event marks the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, its implications for the future did not require hindsight available only to historians. Immediately, contemporaries in Washington and abroad grasped that President Truman was advocating a fundamental change in the U.S. responsibility and posture toward the world.

The creation of legal parameters to structure social relations is a basic feature of modern capitalist society. Law plays a major role in shaping the institutional setting within which conflicts arise, develop, and reach their resolution. Likewise, legislative solutions to pressing social conflicts create new possibilities and strategies for social change. The struggles between capitalists and the working class that have historically marked capitalist economic development constitute a central arena for the legislative restructuring of social relations. Yet, few have systematically studied the role of law in shaping the development of capital-labor relations (for some important exceptions, see Steinberg, 1982; Tomlins, 1985). In this paper, we explore the legal structuring of American working-class militancy in the twentieth century, a prominent dimension of capital-labor relations, but one for which the legislative underpinnings remain unclear.

Before 1890, German emigrants were one of the largest European groups to emigrate overseas in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most of them settled in North America, but a handful of Germans landed in countries south of the equator. This article examines those who chose uncommon paths and settled in the Southern Hemisphere, focusing on Hessians who went to either Australia or South America. Those who emigrated to the Southern Hemisphere were quite different from the Hessians who moved to the United States. More striking, however, are the contrasting backgrounds of the Australian-bound versus the South American–bound groups: These two groups were comparable in size, but in terms of any identifying socioeconomic characteristic they were poles apart from each other. Those bound for Australia were poorer, less skilled, and more likely to use a multiyear migration strategy to get their family members across the ocean, typical of the ways of those bound for the United States. In contrast, those who went to South America were wealthier, more skilled, and mostly emigrated as intact families without the use of such migration networks. This work shows that the choice of destination mattered for individuals and that certain destinations attracted particular types of individuals and groups, reemphasizing the role of self-selection in the migration experience.

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.

The development of the Republican Party is a significant event in American political history. While scholars describe its formation as a realignment caused by the slavery issue, this article reinterprets this perspective. Focusing on gubernatorial elections in New England from 1840 to the mid-1850s, I present evidence that the rise of the Republican Party in the region was due to a lack of strategic voting coupled with third-party, antislavery voting that did not consistently affect the Whigs across states. A counterfactual argument suggests that Whig elites would have sought to change the nature of party politics and, had the distribution of third-party voting affected the Whigs similarly across states, then the Republicans may not have formed. Thus, the distribution of antislavery, third-party voting was more important than the presence of antislavery sentiment. This finding is important for understanding American party development and how strategic voting fits into the study of US elections.

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.

By analyzing the different factors affecting labor agricultural productivity in early-twentieth-century Spain, this article shows that common lands were not detrimental to agricultural development. Even though privatization fostered output per worker by bringing more land into cultivation, the role of the commons as provider of pasture and fertilizing materials counteracted that effect, especially in humid regions. The supposed advantages of dismantling the communal regime are thus not supported by the data.

This article addresses the legacies of Louise Tilly's work on women and the family in Europe for current studies of girls’ agency in history. Using my preliminary analysis of a body of German periodicals written for girls during the late Enlightenment, I propose some methodological possibilities for combining cultural histories of reading with social historical approaches to the roles played by girls and women in European social life. Tilly's focus on the life cycle as an organizing principle and the family economy as a key site of history established the importance of such groups to social historical understandings of the past. Though my study incorporates sources outside the usual bounds of social history, it also depends on the analysis and methods of pioneering feminist social historians such as Louise Tilly.

There may have been a time when one could characterize the difference between sociology and history in terms of sociological attention to generalization and theory in contrast to historical specificity. A quarter of a century ago, E. H. Carr (1961) was earnestly exorcising the ghost of Ranke from his discipline while C. Wright Mills (1956) was vehemently ranting against the twin devils of abstract empiricism and grand theory. Happily, we now only evoke the distinction between sociological universalism and historical particularism in required graduate classes or in ritualistic self-affirmations at professional meetings. When sociological books include chapters on Marc Bloch or E. P. Thompson and historical books liberally cite Marx, Weber, and Durkheim while urging social historians to seek higher levels of generalization, how do we explain the difference between the two disciplines to our poor confused graduate students?

This article explains Mauritius’s exceptional state building and development during late colonialism as the product of a conjuncture of two separately determined historical processes. The first causal chain involves the creation of a bureaucratic state, which was built over two centuries of French and British colonial rule. The second main causal path concerns the development of a society with dense associational ties. This process was set into motion by land distribution that occurred in the late nineteenth century and resulted in the emergence of several villages of small landholders. The essay argues that a prolonged period of labor riots beginning in the late 1930s and the more interventionist policy of the British government after World War II combined to initiate a “critical-juncture period” that increased relations between state and societal actors. This increased embeddedness made possible state-society synergy, which promoted broad-based development by engaging and strengthening both state institutions and societal associations, thereby endowing Mauritius with the institutions necessary for broad-based development after colonial independence as well.