The domestic politics of American military spending during the Cold War confronts scholars with an important but often overlooked puzzle: the two major parties appear to have switched positions on the issue. During the early Cold War era, Democrats were generally supportive of increased military spending, while Republicans were critical. After the mid-1960s, Democrats increasingly tended to oppose larger military budgets, while Republicans more often favored them. This article presents evidence about the process through which this change took place. It identifies several developments in the domestic and international environments that may have contributed to this party switch and evaluates preliminary evidence about each of them.

On a late winter day in the early years of this century, Alice Solenberger met an unemployed male laborer on a Chicago street. Solenberger worked for the city’s Bureau of Charities, and she recognized the “Irishman” as one of the many seasonal workers who had applied there for work during the past winter. Although the man had worked steadily from April to October on railroads and in the harvest, Solenberger recounted, he was “unusually extravagant” this particular winter and found himself broke by December. Not the type to beg, the Irishman had applied for work at the Bureau of Charities and finally found employment in the ice harvest. Surprised to see him back in the city only a few weeks later, Solenberger asked why he was not working in the ice fields. When the man replied that he did not need to work there, Solenberger assumed that he had another job and inquired about that. To this question the laborer replied, “No, I mean I’ve got money. I don’t need to work any more” (here and two subsequent paragraphs—Solenberger 1911: 141–45).

Social science historians bring a wide range of topical interests and methodological skills to the investigation of historical conditions. Those with an interest in the changing distribution and locational relationships of social, demographic, economic, political, cultural, physical, and other phenomena may now be considering the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for historical analysis. As an urban form historian and mapping scientist who uses GIS to document, visualize, and interpret spatial history, I am writing this account of my development of a GIS spatial history of Tokyo with the hope that it will convey the benefits and challenges of using GIS for historical research.

It is conventional in the social sciences to treat the worlds of theory and empirical analysis as separate and distant from one another, and the theory construction literature is replete with proposed solutions to the problem of “bridging the gap” between theory and empirical practice. But for purposes of understanding empirical research literatures, especially interdisciplinary literatures such as those in social history research, the more pressing problem may be separating out theoretical and observational elements within existing research practice. Whether we are trying to “bring theory in” to our research setting or trying to identify that which has already been embedded in the research of others, we are engaged in the construction of theoretical models. This paper begins with Murphey’s discussion of the “theory-laden” nature of historical research, and uses this as a stepping-stone into an elaboration of how theoretical model building can contribute to our understanding of empirical research in social history.

The question whether socioeconomic status gradients in adult mortality have changed over a broad historical period has become an important political and theoretical issue but is hard to test. In this article we study long-term trends in social inequality in adult mortality by using data for 2 (of the 11) provinces of the Netherlands for the period 1812–1922. We apply indirect estimation techniques, which have been developed for the analysis of mortality patterns in countries with deficient data. Our article shows that indeed there was a clear social class gradient in mortality, with the elite having higher survival chances between ages 35 and 55 than the middle class and farmers. Differences were even more apparent in comparison with workers. Over time there was a strong convergence among social classes in mortality levels. The implications of our results for the dominant views on the change in living standards in the past are discussed.

Chicago is amythic city. Its representation in the popular imagination is varied and has included, at various times, the attributes of a blue-collar town, a city in a garden, and a gangster's paradise. Myths of Chicago “grow abundantly between fact and emotion,” and they selectively and simultaneously evoke and defer attributes of the city. For one perduring myth, social scientists may be held largely responsible: namely, that Chicago is “one of the most planned cities of themodern era,” with a street grid, layout of buildings and waterways, and organization of its residential and commercial architecture that reveal a “geometric certainty” (Suttles 1990). The lasting scholarly fascination with Chicago's geography derives in part from the central role that social scientists played in constructing the planned city. In the 1920s,University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess worked with his colleagues in other social science disciplines to divide the city into communities and neighborhoods. This was a long and deliberate process based on large-scale “social surveys” of several thousand city inhabitants.Their work as members of the Local Community Research Committee (LCRC) produced the celebrated Chicago “community area”—that is, 75 mutually exclusive geographic areas of human settlement, each of which is portrayed as being socially and culturally distinctive.

Drawing on multiple perspectives and different analytic takes, Howard Kimeldorf ’s, Ari Adut’s, and John R. Hall’s comments raise three broad issues at the center of the agenda laid out in Ruling Oneself Out. The first issue concerns the motivational underpinnings of decisions reached in conditions of high uncertainty. The second draws the focus on the logic of the argument and its possible connections with models of organizational behaviors. The third points to the explanatory scope of the theory and the indeterminacy of the processes at play. In this article I address these critical remarks and, along the way, stake out claims and implications.

An argument about decisions cannot avoid delving into motivations and subjective perceptions. Several of Ari Adut’s and Howard Kimeldorf ’s comments focus on this issue. Adut draws attention to the possible effects of coercive pressures and pervasive expectations of retaliation in July 1940. In addition, his comments suggest that we should not downplay the significance of opportunism as a motive for endorsement.

This article describes the intensification process of agriculture and its environmental limits regarding soil fertility in the rural community of Fonsagrada, in the inner region of Galicia in northwestern Spain. It addresses changes in land use, crops, and agricultural productivity between 1750 and 1890, framed within the theory of social metabolism and based on the method of nutrient balances. That technique measures nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium flows across the landscape within a given agro-ecosystem to assess its biophysical functioning and to detect environmental constraints related to management. The intensification of cropland resulted in net losses of potassium in outlying rough grazing land and hay meadows that served as the sources of cropland nutrients. Agricultural intensification was possible due to the close stabling of livestock, which allowed for more manure availability. Doing so, however, deprived pastureland of nutrient recover through manure deposition, which created a metabolic rift in the agro-ecosystem.

When do states grant social rights to noncitizens? I explore this question by examining the extension of Old Age Assistance (OAA) to noncitizens after the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act. While the act contained no alienage-based restrictions, states were permitted to bar noncitizens from means-tested programs. In 1939, 31 states had alienage restrictions for OAA. By 1971, when the Supreme Court declared state-level alienage restrictions unconstitutional, only eight states still did. States with more Mexicans and Asians were slower to repeal restriction, however. Using in-depth case studies of New York, California, and Texas, I demonstrate the importance of federal and state institutional arrangements and immigrant political power for the extension of social rights to noncitizens. I also show that to secure access to OAA, immigrant advocates adapted their strategies to match the institutional and political context.

Many scholars contend that the “Glorious” Revolution of 1688 restrained governmental abuses in Britain by preventing the Crown from engaging in irresponsible behavior. However, the question of whether it imposed similar restraints on Parliament has received limited scrutiny. This oversight applies in particular to the religious sphere and outside of England. Rather than create the general conditions for liberty, we contend that the institutional legacy of the Revolution of 1688 was biased toward those in the winning coalition and that its positive effect on liberty is overstated. Analyzing the institutional legacy of the Glorious Revolution on religion in Scotland, we use narrative evidence and systematic evaluation of legislation to show that, rather than establishing the conditions for religious liberty in Britain, the revolution transferred power from one denomination to the other. The arbitrary religious repression symptomatic of the prerevolutionary Crown persisted because the religious liberties enshrined in the Revolution depended largely on whether a group was a member of its winning coalition. Whereas the Crown and the Episcopalians suppressed the Presbyterians prior to 1688, afterward an alliance between the Scottish Presbyterians and the English Parliament reinstated Presbyterianism as the established Scottish Church. This reversal allowed the Presbyterians to suppress the Episcopalians. Religious tolerance and attendant civil rights expanded only with secularization in the nineteenth century when the political representation of other denominations and religions increased and factionalism undercut Presbyterian monopoly.

“Civil society,” in the definition proposed in the introduction to this special issue, was not solely a product of the Enlightenment or of elite sociability. This article focuses on eighteenth-century confraternities in Paris and Milan to argue that these religious associations fostered the kinds of values and behaviors that most writers associate with the formation of civil society: cooperation, charity, a sense of responsibility, and peaceful interaction both among the members and between them and others in society. Many of them encouraged a culture of independence and a sense of rights among their members. They also offered experience of organization to a very large number of men and a smaller number of women. They thus contributed to the formation of eighteenth-century “civil society.”

In a span of thirty years, from 1832 to 1862, American abolitionists were able to reverse public opinion in the North on the question of slavery.Despite the dramatic political shift, the emergent hostility to “slave power” did not lead to an embrace of racial equality. Abolitionists, in the face of America’s long history of racism, sought to link opposition to slavery with a call for civil rights. For black abolitionists, this was not only a strategic problem, it was a matter of self-definition. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the meanings of liberty, labor, and independence were the basis of contentious republican politics. Black abolitionists used this rhetorical raw material to fashion “fighting words” with which to generate solidarity and deliver their moral claims to the nation. This research employs an innovative strategy for the analysis of the discursive field, in an exploratory content analysis of five black newspapers in antebellum New York State. Computerized content analysis coded for themes, rhetoric, and ideology in a sample of more than 36,000 words of newspaper text. Although the discourse of black abolitionism is a social critique, it also contains a positive assertion of what free blacks would become. As important as the theme of “slavery” was to the discourse, so too were “colored” and “brotherhood.” This analysis consistently showed the key features of political antislavery argumentation to be most common in the Douglass newspapers (the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper).

Enumeration, even the contemporary census, cannot be characterized as neutral and objective data collection; official categories both shape and are shaped by national cultures. This article examines the forms, laws, and procedures of Japanese household registration (koseki) and national censuses in three cases from the modern period (1868 to post-World War II). Each case isolates a particular time period to show how broad political cultures, such as Westernization, the development of state welfare, and democratization, were codified or reflected discursively in enumerative programs. In each case, categories shifted the substantive and practical meanings of individuals in families and of household heads in relation to the state. In the early Meiji period (1868-1912), an aristocratic, head-centric social order was imposed on all classes through household registration. By the late Meiji and through the Taisho (1912-36) and early Showa periods (1936-89), census categories reflected a new household model based on economic and spatial relations. In the reconstruction period following World War II, the household register embodied the dramatic changes to the civil code that established equality of sexes and the nuclear family as the fundamental social unit. By the 1960s, however, census forms reflected a return of national cultural discourse to hierarchical, extended-stem family households.

In comparative-historical analysis, countries are always different places before critical junctures set them on divergent pathways. By comparing the legacies of politicized ethnic diversity for the construction of state infrastructural power in Latin America and Southeast Asia, we elaborate the methodological and substantive importance of these “critical antecedents.” The critical antecedent in each region was the inheritance at independence of a sharp indigenous cleavage. This indigenous inheritance shaped threat perceptions and state-society coalitions in both regions in similarly powerful path-dependent ways—yet in intriguingly divergent directions. A salient indigenous cleavage hindered but did not preclude state building in nineteenth-century Peru, while fostering but not predestining state building in post–World War II Malaysia. Divergent levels of postcolonial state infrastructural power thus exhibit deep if indirect foundations in the identity cleavages inherited from preindependence eras. This cross-region comparative exploration highlights the analytical leverage gained from systematically incorporating preexisting cross-case differences into critical juncture accounts.

What social conditions produce positivism? One position, common to both positivists and some of their major critics, suggests that positivism is an “ideology” or “worldview” of industrial capitalism. Positivism therefore resonates with the basic experience of capitalism for all social groups. Intellectuals draw on this experience in formulating positivist social science. A second position suggests that positivism is a strategy of distinction by which intellectuals attempt to accumulate symbolic capital against their rivals. This position suggests that positivism is a resource for establishing a social science that imitates the methodology of natural science. Our article argues for a third view focused on the internal structure of the intelligentsia as a social group. Positivism could emerge in both industrial capitalist and preindustrial contexts; however, the types of positivism differ in these two cases because the structure of the intelligentsia differs. In preindustrial contexts, such as nineteenth-century Italy, which is the focus of our analysis, positivists claim an ontological continuity between natural and social sciences. In industrial contexts, on the basis of which most theories of positivism rest, positivists claim a methodological similarity between natural and social sciences. We conclude our analysis by reflecting on the implications of our study for work on positivism and social ontology in the social sciences.

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.

Two different theoretical frameworks, the interorganizational and the intraclass, guide empirical research on the origin and function of corporate interlocks. Conclusions from this research often have been used as the basis for more general claims about the structure of power in the American economy. To a great extent, these claims are based on the implicit assumption that a majority of interlocks facilitate one type of interfirm relationship—formal coordination.

This article presents evidence about the continuity of interlocks which have been disrupted accidentally by such events as death and retirement. What happens after an interlock is broken reveals something of the extent and manner in which different types of interlock ties facilitate formal coordination. This in turn provides the basis for assessing the applicability of the interorganizational and intraclass approaches to the phenomenon of interlocking.

The hell’s-fire revivalism of western New York, christened the Burned-Over District by nineteenth-century contemporaries, was a colorful and important chapter in the Second Great Awakening. The main characters—Joseph Smith, the Fox sisters, Charles Finney, and the like—led a religious rejuvenation that presumably reorganized spiritual life in the Finger Lakes vicinity between 1820 and 1850.

Stephen Skowronek’s Building aNew American State remains one of the most influential books in political science and history of the past two decades. In political science, Building engendered a set of deep disciplinary transformations that simultaneously sent scholars sprinting into the history books for new cases with which to ply and test theory, goaded them into rethinking what it meant for the United States to possess a “state,” and welcomed them in embracing the study of institutions as a worthwhile endeavor in political science. In history, Skowronek’s book challenged scholars to reconceive the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as a fundamentally distinct period of governance, a peculiar challenge to the institutional forms that had dominated nineteenth-century American politics. Two decades later, historians and political scientists are still laboring to answer Skowronek’s call.

Among the various facets of the new public history movement, applied history holds particular interest for social science historians. Public history generally involves the effort to use historical work for nonacademic audiences; it thus embraces historical museum work, aspects of archive preservation, and media presentations for general audiences. All these are admirable goals, not of course novel, but receiving new and explicit attention in a variety of recent programs, and in the Public History Association. Applied history, though part of public history in its broadest sense, has a more specific mission (one must note that some of the presentation training programs in public history are labeled “applied,” a terminological confusion that one hopes can be remedied). Applied historians seek directly to integrate certain kinds of historical research with the process of policy research, in both public and private sectors. Applied historians do this research themselves, most typically on a contract basis from academic sanctuaries but potentially as policy researchers independent of a direct academic base. They are also involved in training graduate students in this research mode, and in several cases have also mounted undergraduate courses or programs in the genre.