This introductory essay, firstly, offers a comparative, historical perspective on the transformation of petitioning into a vehicle for mass popular politics across North America and Western Europe during the “long” nineteenth century (1780–1914). While petitions were well established as an instrument of state in many early modern states, from the late eighteenth century a new type of mass, public, collective petitioning, based on established or invoked rights, emerged on an unprecedented scale in many countries. Mass petitioning underpinned the nascent repertoires of collective action pioneered by social movements. At the same time, the reception of petitions was institutionalized by political authorities, particularly legislatures elected under limited suffrage, as a potential source of legitimation. Secondly, the introduction suggests why people petitioned, and continued to petition, when their campaigns were often unsuccessful in achieving immediate results. The answer lies in the manifold advantages of petitioning in enabling political organization, mobilization, identity formation, citizenship, political change, and the forming of networks with elite political actors. By shaping an emerging field examining petitioning and petitions, raising awareness of petitions as sources and the methodologies to exploit them, and addressing broad questions of interest to historians and social scientists, this special issue hopes to stimulate further research and contribute to a rich dialogue in the years to come.

It is revealing and important to preface this paper by noting the fact that a paper of this sort could hardly have been written as recently as 15 years ago. In sociology at large, historical methods and approaches were quite uncommon from the 1940s through the early 1970s. Further, mainstream American sociology organizations have distinguished themselves worldwide by their neglect of matters rural and agricultural. In part, this is because American rural sociologists have had their own professional association, the Rural Sociological Society, since 1937. There has accordingly been a fairly substantial separation and division of labor between “general” and rural sociology/sociologists, with “non-rural” sociologists having their major allegiance to the American Sociological Association (ASA) and regional disciplinary groups, while rural sociologists have had their closest identification with the Rural Sociological Society. Further, in American rural sociology prior to the late 1970s and 1980s, there had never been a major tradition of work along the lines of “historical sociology” as the notion is commonly understood today.

In recent years, due in part to the increasing diffusion of constructivist conceptions of the social and historical world, statistics has attracted the attention of historians more as an object than as a means of investigation and analysis. While quantification and statistical methods have lost the popularity they gained among social historians in the 1960s and 1970s, new and important histories of statistics and of the theory of probability have appeared that shed new light on the subject (Porter 1986; Stigler 1986; Kriiger et al. 1987; Hacking 1990). These works have traced—at times in highly original and sophisticated ways—genealogy and developments of the statistical methods and probabilistic conceptions that are at the basis of today’s quantitative practices.

Results of an original analysis of Cherokee town placement and population c. 1721 are presented. Period and contemporary information were analyzed using local statistics to produce multivalued, mappable characterizations of the intensity of the processes of town placement and population. The analysis focuses on the scale and the space in which these processes took place among the Cherokee in order to open the way for examining the legacy of human-induced environmental change in southern Appalachia.

The modern working class is not especially noted for its optimism or idealism. Indeed, the industrial proletariat may well have pioneered in the adoption of those secular and cynical life-styles and values that have come increasingly to pervade twentieth-century society and culture (Hobsbawm, 1978a). This makes it all the more surprising, then, to rediscover the deep feelings and high expectations with which Europe's workers launched the greatest wave of strikes in their history just after World War I. For a brief moment, the apocalyptic hopes of the left-wing socialists and the fantastic fears of the forces of order seemed about to come true: Soldiers deserted en masse and turned against their officers and their governments; workers in almost every industry struck for unprecedented demands; workers’ councils were established from Limerick to Budapest (Kemmy, 1975-1976). And if Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Gramsci were wrong in their optimism, they were no more misguided than their panic-stricken opponents, such as Churchill, Lloyd George, the diplomats at Versailles, and the various generals and police commanders charged with controlling and suppressing the volatile crowds of urban workers and discontented ex-soldiers (Mayer, 1959, 1967).

The basis of most historical research including social science history is quite unsystematic. This characteristic results from the ways in which researchers find and choose historical sources for examination. Despite claims to be systematic, historians still tend to identify relevant evidence in impressionistic ways. Many social science histories involve the rigorous study of a source happily discovered by chance. Of course, access to the past has never been easy. Researchers have always lamented a presumed lack of “essential” records. Nonetheless, the actual ways we discover existing evidence have received little attention despite the fact that this process is fraught with difficulties and hidden dangers especially for researchers of a social scientific bent. Do not the presuppositions of social science history extend to the identification of sources? How do we know when we have all the “relevant data” for a particular project? Can systematic data analysis be justifiably built upon unsystematic identification of sources?

Sex on college campuses has fascinated scholars, reporters, and the public since the advent of coeducational higher education in the middle of the nineteenth century. But the emergence of rape on campus as a public problem is relatively recent. This article reveals the changing social constructions of campus rape as a public problem through a detailed examination of newspaper reporting on this issue as it unfolded at Columbia University and Barnard College between 1955 and 1990. Adapting Joseph R. Gusfield’s classic formulation of public problem construction, we show the ways police and other judicial and law enforcement authorities, feminists, university faculty, student groups, university administrators, and health professionals and institutions have struggled over ownership of how the problem should be defined and described, attribution of responsibility for addressing the problem, and prescriptions for what is to be done. Our findings show how beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the simultaneous swelling of the women’s liberation movement and the exponential integration of women into previously male-dominated institutions of higher education and medicine catalyzed the creation of new kinds of knowledge, institutions, and expertise to address rape and sexual violence more broadly on college campuses. New actors—feminists and health professionals—layered frames of gender and health over those of crime and punishment to fundamentally transform how we understand rape on campus, and beyond.

Between 1973 and 1977, Louise Tilly and Joan Scott wrote two articles and a book on the history of women that became a standard in the history of women, work, and the development of industrial capitalism. The authors occasionally met to work together, and they spoke on the phone, but mostly, the collaboration was based on their exchange of hundreds of letters. Based largely on the letters that Tilly wrote to her, Scott's reminiscence looks at the way that Louise combined her scholarly work with raising a family, and how she advanced the production of knowledge about women's history through her efforts to put more women and women's history on the program of major history conferences. Finally, the author details how their efforts to critique prevailing assumptions that the history of women's work was an expression of advancing individualist values, made possible by the expansion of the industrial city, resulted in the publication of Women, Work, and Family.

While previous research conceptualizes genocide as an outcome of complex interactions between multiple social factors, the specific ways in which these factors interact and combine with each other, and how their individual effects may be mediated through such interaction, remain to be empirically specified. Using historical accounts given by survivors of the Cambodian genocide, and drawing from insights in the collective action literature, this study presents a configurational and comparative analysis of the collective dynamics of genocidal violence. The analysis focuses on how changing local patterns of relational and cognitive collective mechanisms created distinctly local patterns of violence, affecting both levels of victimization and the targeting of different groups over time. While the expansion and consolidation of central state power accounts for a generalized increase in violence, official framing practices mediated how groups became targeted. These findings confirm and extend the insights of other meso-level studies of genocide, and demonstrate the utility of comparative configurational methods for further inquiry.

This article delves into the processes of territorial transformation by foregrounding the material dimension of infrastructure. The entry of the research is infrastructure network design and planning. We will trace the concepts of territorial transformation inscribed into the material layout of large technical systems by analyzing the discourse of engineers and policy makers involved in the conception of infrastructure networks. In so doing, the material politics of infrastructure networks will be studied: How did engineers and policy makers design infrastructure to generate a specific territorial transformation? Moreover, how did technological plans hold the idea that one could influence modernization processes by means of a territorial transformation instigated by infrastructure? The neutral status of technology is thus fundamentally challenged by showing that engineers, in association with policy makers, were essential actors in the planned transformation of the territory as they organized infrastructure networks according to specific ideas relating spatial and societal transformation. The article focuses on two decades after the independence of Belgium (1831), when engineers conceived comprehensive networks of rails, waterways, and roads. The material politics of two major public works initiatives will be analyzed: (1) the centrally positioned railway network that connected all industrial centers within the territory as well as with the markets of neighboring countries, positioning Belgium into Europe as international turntable, and (2) a network of roads and canals in peripheral, so-called unproductive, regions that had to integrate these regions within national borders, and indeed extend these borders, as well as buffer and govern the side-effects and risks generated by the accelerating industrialization in the central parts of the nation.

Recent theoretical and methodological developments within anthropological archaeology have transformed the discipline in such a way that archaeology is now beginning to make contributions to a number of areas of social science. Two of the more significant of these areas are the question of socioeconomic change over long time spans and the study of past economic systems. The former contribution arises out of the stratigraphie character of the archaeological record and the development of increasingly accurate methods of measuring past time. Archaeological studies typically deal with change over periods of time equivalent to or even longer than Braudel’s (1980) “longue durée” (e.g., Sanders, Parsons, and Santley, 1979; Blanton et al., 1981), and many archaeologists see this diachronic social perspective as the primary contribution of archaeology to social science knowledge (Plog, 1973). The second major contribution of archaeology—the study of past economic systems—is made possible by archaeologists’ reliance upon material culture. Beyond the obvious link between material objects and the study of ancient technology, material culture can be quite revealing about many types of economic activities as well as other sociocultural phenomena (e.g., Gould and Schiffer, 1981). This focus on material objects is so crucial to archaeologists that some have suggested that the major social science contribution of the field is its concern with the relationship between behavior and material culture in modern as well as ancient societies (e.g., Rathje and Schiffer, 1982; Rathje, 1979).

Generally uniform and high rates of school participation have become an article of faith in postwar America. But at the turn of the century there was wide variation in school enrollment practices from one part of the country to another. This article will examine the determinants of interurban differences in school participation in 1900. Recent studies of school enrollment have focused on a narrow range of cities and have emphasized the importance of family background variables on the decisions of individual children to remain in school or to drop out (Katz, 1972; Troen, 1973; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1979). Most studies have focused on the ability of children from different backgrounds to attend school. In his ground-breaking article, “Who Went to School,” Michael Katz (1972) called for more research on interurban variation in school enrollment, but few historians have considered how the social and economic environments of different cities may have conditioned decisions to go to school in the past. In their studies on youth and early industrialization, Katz and Davey (1978a and 1978b) demonstrate that school attendance dropped when industrial jobs became widely available in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, but they made little effort to identify the precise relationship between school attendance and the requirements of different sorts of jobs. Why should the advent of industralism mean lower school participation? This question will be addressed.

Nineteenth-century Pittsburgh and New Orleans were a mess: trash filled the streets impeding travel, hindering commerce, and spreading disease. City officials in Pittsburgh turned to private contractors to collect trash at public expense while in New Orleans they relied on city employees (through the mechanism of widows carts). Like Pittsburgh and New Orleans, nineteenth-century cities faced a mounting garbage problem and, like Pittsburgh, northern cities more often chose contract while southern cities more often chose city collection. In this paper, we look in depth at how Pittsburgh and New Orleans chose contract and city collection, what those solutions looked like in practice, and how these two cases might shed light on the North-South difference. We find that both cities rebuffed offers of assistance that may have led to better trash collection and instead based their collection practices on politics. Moreover, the solutions in practice defied the dichotomous labels of public and private and the assumptions that underlie each.

The history of German research and writing about migration has been heavily influenced by politics. The assumptions and methods of successive generations of migration researchers demonstrate the interplay of social science and politics across very different political regimes. Soon after serious research began in the late nineteenth century, migration researchers divided into two camps. Urban statisticians with liberal political ideas used city migration registration data to analyze the circulatory movement of migrants within Germany. Conservative writers used census data to argue that migration was essentially movement from countryside to city, and was politically and morally injurious to the German people. These two sides hardened after World War I, as the conservative side increasingly incorporated racist ideas into their critique of migration. This debate continued even after the Nazis took power in 1933 with the competing publications of Rudolf Heberle and Wilhelm Brepohl. Heberle was forced to leave Germany and Brepohl became the Nazis’ favorite analyst of migration. After 1945, Brepohl retained his standing as a leading migration researcher in the German Federal Republic. The dominance of this conservative interpretation of migration continued into the 1970s. In recent decades, the writings of the liberal statisticians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been rediscovered, and German migration research has shifted again toward a more empirically based understanding of migration.

Globalization is transforming the spatial organization of the world economy. In particular, it is leading to the “shrinking globe” phenomenon and the speeding up of social interaction between places across the planet. Given that international labor solidarity is a process of coming together across space, I argue that the spatial reorganization of global capitalism has important consequences for practices of solidarity. Specifically, I suggest that the spatial context within which they find themselves is likely to impact the types of political praxis in which workers engage. Thus, whereas globalization may encourage some workers to engage in traditional international solidarity campaigns it might also, paradoxically, lead others to focus on highly local campaigns, the consequences of which can quickly be spread far and wide as a result of the growing spatial interconnectivity of the planet that globalization has augured. Likewise, the spatial context within which they find themselves may lead some workers to defend their class interests while others defend their spatial interests. Equally, while some unions are focusing upon organizing what I call the spaces of production, others are organizing around the spaces of consumption. Given that workers’ spatial context impacts their spatial goals and political praxis, I argue that it is important to conceptualize international labor solidarity in explicitly spatial terms if we are to understand why different groups of workers may pursue radically different types of political praxis in different places and at different times.

Maintaining soil fertility was the most pressing problem in preindustrial agriculture. Prior to the arrival of industrial inputs, farmers relied on ecological soil replenishment processes and biological fertilizing techniques to sustain the productivity of soil. Central European farmers actively managed the cycling of nutrients by keeping livestock. Farm animals provided the means to recycle nutrients from crop production and to transfer nutrients from land-use systems dedicated for biomass extraction, such as grasslands. This article explores the unequal distribution of these vital resources in the Manor Bruck, Austria, and its impact on landlord’s and peasant’s abilities to meet the “land costs” of sustaining soil fertility. The article tests the hypothesis as to whether inequality was a major driver for unsustainable farming practices and the degradation of agro-ecosystems in the long run. Focal points are commons and communal land-use systems and their role in cycling nutrients through the agricultural landscape. Commons in the Manor Bruck comprised vast grasslands, which provided an important ecological buffer to balance the continuous export of nutrients from crop production for all actors. The aim is to demonstrate how social conflict emerging from the competition over commons guides us to the specific sustainability challenges faced by farmers.

We analyze the effects of the Married Women’s Property Acts and Earnings Acts (EAs) on divorce rates in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. We find that the property acts increased divorce rates, which is consistent with the predicted outcome, in household extensive bargaining models, of an increase in the married woman’s relative bargaining power. We also find some evidence that the EAs had a positive effect on divorce rates, though it is not statistically significant after accounting for the possibility that divorce rates changed prior to the enactment of an EA. To support our causal argument, we control for regional trends in the divorce rate and account for the timing of the laws’ effects. We also assess alternative explanations for the rise in divorce rates during the late nineteenth century, including age structure, divorce law, urbanization, economic development, and foreign immigration, and we find that only age structure and urbanization positively affected divorce rates along with the property acts. Finally, we provide support for our argument from court cases in which the acts were used to defend a woman’s property rights against claims from her ex-husband.

The seven decades framed by the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and institutionalization of organized labor in the wake of World War II constituted a unique period of US labor relations, one that labor historians have identified as the most violent and bloody of any Western industrialized nation. Despite long-standing scholarly interest in the issues of labor-management conflict, however, important questions regarding the causes of extreme labor-management violence within the United States have never been adequately addressed. In this paper, I utilize a recently compiled and unique data set of American strike fatalities to statistically model the causes of extreme strike violence in the United States. The time-series evidence suggests that picket-line violence increased in association with (1) the struggle for and against unionization and (2) economic desperation associated with tightening labor markets. The results also both depict the stultifying effect of massacres and suggest that state support for labor's right to organize tended to decrease the likelihood of violence and vice versa. This paper not only thus provides fresh insights into classic questions, but also offers a basis for both transhistorical and international comparison.

Perceived threats to established social order can influence the willingness of those in authority to inflict punishments as well as the severity of those punishments. Our article explores that proposition in the case of summary punishment by flogging in the Royal Navy. In the Royal Navy commanders were given the power to inflict flogging for a host of offenses. Prevailing penal thinking emphasized general deterrence, whereby punishment of a few serious offenders would deter the body of seamen. Eighteenth-century reforms were intended to rationalize and normalize flogging and limit its severity. Qualitative evidence indicates that naval commanders saw the established order under attack after 1789 and, emphasizing moral offenses, imposed tighter discipline on their crews. The evidence we have assembled based on a randomly selected sample of ships between 1740 and 1820 shows that flogging aboard ships was moderate up until the “Age of Revolution” that began after 1789 but increased dramatically in its frequency and severity in the wake of the French Revolution. Multivariate analysis shows that greater penal severity is associated with several factors, including a period effect associated with the onset of the revolutionary age. Our findings are consistent with existing research that suggests that disorder influences the willingness to punish.

While state legislative rollbacks of public-sector workers’ collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and other US states in 2011 appeared to signal an unprecedented wave of hostility toward the public sector, such episodes have a long history. Drawing on recent work on “governance repertoires,” this article compares antistate initiatives in Wisconsin in 2011 to two previous periods of conflict over the size and shape of government: the 1930s and the 1970s. We find that while small government advocates in all three periods used similar language and emphasized comparable themes, the outcomes of their advocacy were different due to the distinct historical moments in which they unfolded and the way local initiatives were linked to political projects at the national level. We explore the relationship of local versions of small government activism to their national-level counterparts in each period to show how national-level movements and the ideological, social, and material resources they provided shaped governance repertoires in Wisconsin. We argue that the three moments of conflict over the size of government are deeply intertwined with the prehistory, emergence, and rise to dominance of neoliberal political rationality and can provide insight into how that new “governance repertoire” was experienced and built at the local level.