Between 1935 and 1940, President Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico mobilized a populist coalition in support of land reform, workers’ rights, and a more inclusive political system. For years, scholars either ignored the crucial role of the Mexican Communist Party (Partido Comunista Mexicano [PCM]) in Cardenismo, or considered it a tool used and then discarded by the emerging national state (Shulgovski 1968; Anguiano 1975; Ianni 1977). Recently, Barry Carr’s monumental study (1992) of the ambiguous relationship between the PCM and the Mexican state argued convincingly that Cárdenas relied on the party to mobilize popular forces, while never incorporating either the PCM or Communist ideology into his project. Much less is known of Mexican Communism below the national level. Its social base, and its importance on the regional and local levels, remains largely unexplored outside of a few areas (Friedrich 1986: 128; Craig 1990; Carr 1987). Although the southeastern state of Yucatán boasted one of the PCM’s largest and most active regional organizations in the 1930s, and although Yucatán served as a crucial testing ground for Cárdenas’s reforms, the Yucatecan Left and its popular base has yet to be thoroughly examined.

To many historians, and to most of their students, the question of the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon the poor of Britain has become confused, an arcane debate of ever greater statistical complexity. This is a pity, for “the most sustained single controversy in British economic history” still has, and should have, the capacity to excite and rouse the imagination, as it did for those who began, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Condition of England debate (Mathias, 1975: vii; Taylor, 1975: xi). For Friedrich Engels, Edwin Chadwick, John Stuart Mill, or Lord Shaftesbury, and for many who as government inspectors or members of local statistical societies provided the evidence, the condition of the working classes was something tangible, to be seen in the streets of Manchester or London, demonstrated in the faces and bodies of the artisans and laborers who walked those streets and worked in the workshops and factories. The moral outrage felt by Engels, Chadwick, Shaftesbury, Barnardo, and many others in the nineteenth century came from the sight not only of squalid living conditions but of the malnourished bodies of the poor themselves.

When an unprecedented and unanticipated downturn strikes a community, resources from disparate sources combine to aid those harmed by the distress. Today as in the past, public and private sources coordinate relief efforts, and the persistence of distress beyond that which had been anticipated and provided for by insurance brings in resources from outside the community. However, it is possible to crowd out a resource when the efforts of one source decrease the efforts of another. Modern research documents public welfare crowding out private charity (see, for example, Abrams and Schmitz 1978), and this also occurred in the past. Exploring this kind of concern, the present article highlights aspects of income assistance that played a role during the Lancashire cotton famine (1861-65).

How did a person become a heretic in the Middle Ages? Then, once the person was affiliated with a heretical group, how was the affiliation sustained? What social processes and mechanisms were involved that forged bonds among heretics strong enough, in some cases, for them to choose death rather than return to the bosom of the Church? Two competing accounts of what attracted people to medieval heresies have marked the extremes in historical explanations (Russell 1963): one is a materialist account elucidated by Marxist historians; the other one focuses on ideal factors, as proposed by the eminent historian Herbert Grundmann.

On New Year’s Day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in much of the South. Lincoln’s act transformed the Civil War from a sectional rebellion to a war of liberation. Although the proclamation’s immediate legal effect was minimal, since it touched only those areas still resisting Union authority, its political effect was far reaching and dramatic. With a single stroke of his pen, Lincoln ensured that the Union victory would create a new class of citizens, the freedmen, numbering well over 3 million. Almost all of these new citizens were landless and destitute. Despite their new legal status, they were faced at the war’s end with a social structure that regarded them as inferior, treating them with contempt at best and with violent fury at worst. In emancipating the slaves and overturning the economic and social basis of southern society, the federal government shouldered the responsibility of finishing what it had begun, making the freedmen citizens.

A sense of crisis and uncertainty seems pervasive among many social historians and historical sociologists who have studied the relationship between economic disadvantage and protest politics. Within the last five or so years, edited volumes and special issues of journals have encouraged scholars to “bring class back in,” to explore what some worry is the “end of labor history,” or to “rethink working-class history” in the wake of postmodernism, the turn to discursive and cultural analysis, and the growing number of scholars whose substantive interests involve issues of race and gender.

Even those who celebrate the rich diversity of subject matters explored by contemporary labor and working-class historians are worried about scholars jumping ship because “engaged history, in possession at least of the conceit of making a difference, has moved elsewhere, to other subject areas,” to quote Ira Katznelson (1994: 7). I myself have chosen to take a “leave of absence” from studying the mutual constitution of gender and class.

Montreal in 1881 was highly segregated along four distinct social dimensions: language, religion, socioeconomic status, and sector of employment. By 1901 the population had doubled, and we examine changes in residential distributions over the two decades. Despite the increased integration of certain groups, segregation remains high, and multiple dimensions are still discernible. In addition to long-established communities of French Canadians, Irish Catholics, and Anglo-Protestants, we see new streams of immigrants occupying their own patches in the urban fabric. To make meaningful observations of sociospatial changes over two decades, we used a geographic information system (GIS) to situate individual census households with spatial precision on 1 of 12,000 lots in 1881 and 30,000 in 1901, so that we could reaggregate them into meaningful districts of different scales and districts with identical boundaries for both years of observation, thereby overcoming the major methodological problems hindering previous comparative analyses. Coupling well-established statistical indexes of segregation and diversity in a GIS framework lends new analytic power to grasp the scale of phenomena and inquire into behavioral choices of nineteenth-century households. The empirical evidence shows how both concentration and diversity were built into the urban fabric. This study also offers methodological cues for comparative studies in other places and periods.

Using case pattern analysis, this study examines Catholic male workforce trends in the majority Catholic countries of Chile, Ireland, and Poland. Employing denominational data for three categories of church male professionals in the 1950–2010 time period, I document four important trends. First, ordinations to the diocesan priesthood in Ireland went into decline especially after Vatican II, have been relatively stable in Chile with only a moderate increase in the 1990s, and spiked in Poland in the 1980s, 20 years after Vatican II. Second, in all three countries the average defection rate among diocesan seminarians increased in the 2000s compared with the earlier two decades. Third, the religious priest workforce has declined in Chile, has been relatively stable in Ireland until the 2000s, and is growing in Poland. Fourth, from the late 1960s there has been a decline in the workforce of religious brothers in each country, especially in Ireland. The theoretical contribution to the Catholic workforce literature is discussed in terms of a critical events argument emphasizing the impact of Vatican II, prophetic stances, sexual scandals, and papal visits on labor market trends. I conclude with implications for the study of religion and society in general.

Traditionally it is assumed that “modern” civil society originated in the associations, clubs, and public sphere of the eighteenth century as a result of the “liberation” of the individual from the “shackles” of absolutism, religious intolerance, and the patriarchal family. However, recent research goes further back in time. Scholars such as Robert Putnam (sociologist), Antony Black (political scientist), and Katherine Lynch (historian) associate the origins of civil society with the heyday of confraternities and guilds in the late Middle Ages. This has serious consequences for our understanding of the characteristics and functions of civil society. Given that confraternities were permeated by religious devotion and crafts were inextricably bound to the (often undemocratic) political establishment, fundamental questions arise about the importance of religion in civil society and the role of associations in the political participation of individuals. This article suggests that several long-term trends can be observed when broaching civil society from the perspective of guilds (or brotherhoods). In early modern guilds, the fraternal ideals related to mutual aid and equality appear to have gradually disappeared. Craft guilds stopped being “brotherhoods” and “substitute families” and transformed into formal and bureaucratic juridical institutions, while retreating into a sphere separate from household and family.

The 1920s American prohibition of alcohol is notorious but not unique. Many countries experienced similar struggles. However, none went through such a protracted struggle as New Zealand, the only country to hold nationwide referendums on prohibition at every general election for almost eight decades from 1911 to 1987. Indeed, if the majority threshold of its first referendum in 1911 had been set at 50 percent instead of at 60 percent, New Zealand would have been the very first country in the world to become prohibitionist. In our empirical analysis, we focus on the first five of those referendums, held from 1911 to 1922, because the 1910s was the most critical period when the fight between Drys and Wets reached its highest intensity. We first investigate how the different referendum designs influenced voting patterns. This is possible because the district-level referendum results present rare features such as the participation rate by gender in 1911, the identification of the military votes in the two referendums of 1919, the option of prohibition with compensation in 1919, and from 1919, the addition of a state-control regime as a third option. Second, we estimate the effect of the main determinants of voting preferences identified in the historical and sociological literature on temperance and prohibition. Our results confirm the influence of two factors: (1) Evangelicals were more likely to be supporters of a total ban whereas Anglicans and Catholics were more moderate and (2) women were more likely to vote Dry.

This article examines a place utility model of how destination assets influenced inmigration for the 1950s African American urban system. Archival and historiographical data are combined with census data to conduct weighted least-squares regressions that compare economic, ethnogenic, and other place utilities. Despite declines in migrant selectivity and net southern out-migration, ethnogenic characteristics increased the size of in-migrant streams during the 1950s, net of the momentum from prior migration and, most important, net of economic and demographic place utilities. Even as several dramatic changes began or intensified during the period, ethnogenic attractions continued to shape destination selection during this “bridge” decade of civil rights–era migration.

This article focuses on large-scale petitioning campaigns, or petitionnementen as they were called, organized between 1828 and 1878, including contemporary reflections and debates on this new phenomenon. Although there were only a handful of petitionnementen, they had a remarkable impact—not only on the issues at hand but also on the balance of power between Crown, Cabinet, Parliament, and people. Mass petitions necessarily challenged the political system, whose legitimacy was based on elections under a limited franchise. Based on parliamentary reports, pamphlets, and other sources reflecting on petitioning in general and the petitionnementen more specifically, this article asks how petitioners claimed legitimacy, and how politicians and other observers responded to those claims. Special attention is given to the international context within which Dutch petitioning practices developed. The article focuses on three case studies, representing the major petitioning campaigns of this period: the Southern petition movements of 1828–1830 that were a catalyst for the Belgian revolution (thus reinforcing the association between mass petitioning and revolution), the Anti-Catholic “April Movement” of 1853, and the so-called People’s Petitionnement of 1878, against the liberal education law. Remarkably enough, in the Netherlands it was not progressive reformers, but most prominently conservative Orthodox Protestants who organized petitionnementen.

Throughout his distinguished career, Herbert Gutman has displayed a rare genius for dredging up the most gloriously obscure historical evidence and deriving from it new perspectives on the largest themes. The Black Family is another triumph of this kind: my awe of Professor Gutman’s energy and insight is enhanced by this volume. At the same time, Gutman makes clear that the volume is not demographic in its intent. Since my commentary is to be from a demographic perspective, I will take particular pains to direct this perspective to the purposes Gutman sets forth in The Black Family. These are identified by the author as discerning “what sustained common slave beliefs and behavior,” rather than merely documenting “regularities in behavior,” the latter being Gutman’s characterization of the results of the application of quantitative methods (1976). My task, then, is to examine the links that Gutman establishes between demographic argument and explanation, in his sense, and to assess their adequacy. No demographer, I suspect, would have undertaken the kind of investigation Gutman assays; but demographic skills would have served Gutman’s intentions. I will here try to be severe with this imposing volume, recognizing the importance and aptness of its central thesis, and the audacity of its author’s empirical reach, but questioning the adequacy of his demography to his own ends.

Two political cartoons from the 1905 Chicago Tribune portrayed how some elements in society viewed the rise of a powerful Teamsters Union.On 29 April 1905, the front page cartoon depicted a husky teamster engaged in a sympathetic strike while the caption read, “The Dictator in His Old Act of Blocking Commerce” (Figure 1). A month later, on 3 June 1905, a cartoon played on the coincidence of the June 1905 uprising in Russia and a grand jury investigation of Teamster strike leaders in Chicago. The title caption read, “The Grand Dukes of Russia and the Grand Dukes of Chicago” (Figure 2). Both cartoons emphasized the theme of irresponsible power—either that of a dictatorship or of an unprincipled grand duke. Teamster leaders were tyrants, these images said.The sphere in which this irresponsible power was wielded extended beyond the realm of union affairs, and the relay the true menace conveyed by these images.They asserted that Teamster leaders held it in their power to stop the flow of business activity in Chicago.

The battle between narrative history and social scientific history, which has broken out again in the pages of the American Historical Review, is a new battle of ancients and moderns. Like many battles of the books, it is deeply foolish and tends to bring the reading of books into disrepute.

It is the old battle of the sciences against art, poetry, and the humanities, refought in history as analysis against narrative, model against story, number against word. The official battle was joined in the seventeenth century. Plato banished poets from the Republic, of course, but his notion that science and poetry are adversaries was not taken up in the ancient world. Plato himself wrote poetic prose, Lucretius a few centuries later presented an atomistic physics in poetry, and down to Galileo and beyond the dialogue served science as much as it served comedy and tragedy.

The goal of this article is to describe and explain the specific strike pattern of American bituminous coal miners in the last part of the nineteenth century (between 1881 and 1894).The central thesis is that the evolution of strike patterns in bituminous coal mining differed substantially from the development of strike patterns in other industries during this period. According to scholars like Gerald Friedman (1988) and Kim Voss (1993), the evolution of the American labor movement until 1886 was strongly determined by the Knights of Labor’s strategy of inclusive unionism, which sought to increase worker power through solidarity and broad-based strikes. As this strategy proved unsuccessful—especially in 1886—American labor unions later conducted a different type of walkout: planned, small strikes of strategically located, skilled workers, which were more successful.

This article uses census microdata to address key issues in the Mexican immigration debate. First, we find striking parallels in the experiences of older and newer immigrant groups with substantial progress among second- and subsequent-generation immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Mexican Americans. Second, we contradict a view of immigrant history that contends that early–twentieth–century immigrants from southern and eastern Europe found well–paying jobs in manufacturing that facilitated their ascent into the middle class. Both first and second generations remained predominantly working class until after World War II. Third, the erosion of the institutions that advanced earlier immigrant generations is harming the prospects of Mexican Americans. Fourth, the mobility experience of earlier immigrants and of Mexicans and Mexican Americans differed by gender, with a gender gap opening among Mexican Americans as women pioneered the path to white–collar and professional work. Fifth, public–sector and publicly funded employment has proved crucial to upward mobility, especially among women. The reliance on public employment, as contrasted to entrepreneurship, has been one factor setting the Mexican and African American experience apart from the economic history of most southern and eastern European groups as well as from the experiences of some other immigrant groups today.

Not so long ago the skilled worker was regarded by labor historians as the black sheep of the labor movement, and the artisan's attempt to preserve his position and to retain his shop-floor autonomy was condemned out of hand. No more. Spurred on by the studies of E. P. Thompson in England, Albert Soboul in France, and George Rudé in both countries, historians have discovered the skilled worker's importance in labor protest and rebellion; everywhere artisans have been found in the midst of what once were thought to be proletarian crowds. The continuing inspiration of Thompson, Soboul, and Rudé is apparent in all of the articles in this collection, although they are by no means simple reiterations of these historians’ insights. Viewing working-class life from the perspective of an entire century and two continents, the following essays suggest new generalizations and, inevitably, raise fresh questions.

The introduction of the Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR) in 1930 remains one of the most important events in the history of criminal statistics in the United States. Based on local police reports, it is the oldest extant national crime data system in the United States, with the possible exception of prison statistics. It continues to be a vitally important data system because of its extensive use by scholars, social critics, governmental organizations and the media, and as such it has made a major contribution to our understanding of crime in the United States in the last half century. The UCR has also had its share of controversy, involving not only scientific issues of validity and reliability, but the possibility of covert agendas on the part of the police and the FBI to foster an image of effective law enforcement. Despite its importance and controversial nature there is no single objective and definitive written history documenting the beginnings of the UCR. That which exists tends to be brief and superficial, and at times even ideologically biased (Leonard 1954; Maltz 1977; Sherman et al. 1982; Thompson 1968; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation 1940).