The portrayal of individuals in the media usually affects the way the public perceives and treats them. The negative views of the elderly in this country are often blamed on the way in which the media have depicted the aged in our society. For example, in hearings on “Age Stereotyping and Television” before the House Select Committee on Aging, Representative William S. Cohen testified:

Many scholars have noted the theoretical importance of remarriage in twentieth-century American life (Burch 1995; Cherlin 1998; Furstenberg 1980; Glick 1980; Thornton 1977; Uhlenberg and Chew 1986), yet few historical studies have examined remarriage in the United States empirically. This gap in the literature is noteworthy for two reasons. First, the turn of the twentieth century seems to have marked a crossover in the remarriage transition of the United States, reflecting changes in the pool of persons eligible to remarry. This transition was characterized by decreases in remarriage resulting from declines inmortality and probability of widow(er)hood, followed by increases in remarriage resulting from higher divorce rates. The crossover in the transition was likely to have occurred when the pool of eligibles was at or near its nadir. Second, there is ongoing debate about the implications of remarriage for families and individuals (Booth and Dunn 1994), and about the impacts of remarriage on family functions (Cherlin 1978; Cherlin and Furstenberg 1994). In the light of these considerations, we believe it is important to examine remarriage and its consequences in the United States at the turn of the century so that we may better understand the ways that remarriage influences family life and shapes the life course of persons within families (see London and Elman 2001).

This article shows that late-nineteenth-century wealth inequality was associated with rising wealth levels supporting the existence of a Kuznets-type curve, but this curve is not unconditional.The tendency of wealth inequality to vary with age means that wealth inequality was also a function of the changing age composition of the population and may have been the result of portfolio allocation decisions across the life cycle. Canada's population “aged” during the late nineteenth century, with the proportion of population under age 20 dropping from 53% in 1871 to 43% by 1911. The general aging of the population could have increased inequality in both wealth and income. These results follow recent work by Jeffrey Williamson (1998), who argues that Kuznets curves are not unconditional. In other words, as the results of this article confirm, wealth inequality is the outcome of a complex economic process, not a single determinant cause.

The essays by Hans Marks and Don Kalb represent important contributions to a growing literature on class formation. Much of the current attention to class formation flows from the contemporary concern with larger processes of identity formation (Hanagan 1989; McNall 1988; Tilly 1992). Scholars such as Ira Katznelson and Adam Przeworski have emphasized the contingent character of class identity while, at the same time, reminding us of the need to understand why millions of people in the late nineteenth century chose to band together and fight under banners labeled proletarian (Katznelson 1986; Przeworski 1977).

The unique feature of geographic information systems (GIS) and other forms of historical data visualization is the capacity to hold and display large amounts of data associated with spatial reference points. This software can display all data for a given point, a single variable for all points, or, most important, any combination of variables across all reference points. In doing so, these systems bring to the screen instantly and cheaply a display of information once visible only in paper form, drawn slowly and expensively, first by cartographers and then by vector plotters. This project deploys GIS to help us understand the intersection of social and political life in nineteenth-century Alexandria, Virginia, and Newport, Kentucky—medium-sized cities with populations under 20,000. Commercial Alexandria, with a race-based labor system, and industrial Newport, with an immigrant labor system, present an analytically useful mix of commonalities and differences.

From their recent analysis of the relationship between place of enlistment and place of birth of eighteenth-century American militiamen, Villaflor and Sokoloff (1982: 542-543; 559-560) concluded that “a high level of mobility stands out,” a finding that they note is now “a commonplace both in the discipline of American history and in studies of pre-industrial communities.” While these empirical studies have surely refuted the romantic belief in the permanence of all of the personnel of preindustrial localities, they have not demonstrated that mobility was uniformly “high” everywhere. Imprecision in comparing the rates of mobility in two places is inevitable without a comparable index of the extent of movement.

Villaflor and Sokoloff (1982) implicitly reject the notion of a “mobility transition,” a construct that associates higher rates of internal migration with more rapid rates of economic growth (Zelinsky, 1971), which Jones (1981) discerned in his comparison of the handful of studies of local population persistence in the colonial period with those for the nineteenth century. They realize, however, that a precise comparison of the place of enlistment with the birthplace of young men of an average age of 24 with the proportion of adult males who appear on two successive decennial censuses is not possible.

For most of the nineteenth century, French people associated hospitals with death and destitution. These institutions served as places where the poor went to die, not to be cured. As a result, hospitals (including maternity hospitals) were shelters of last resort for the poorest classes of society. Anyone who could avoid going to one of these institutions would shun them, at all possible costs. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, with the development of anesthesia and with the implementation of antiseptic and sterilization procedures, hospitals became safer places.

Even when historians disagree profoundly over causation, periodization, and perhaps the ultimate purpose of historical inquiry, they may still be able to find common ground in the discussion of primary sources and of the appropriate methods of extracting from them accurate information about a vitally important but heretofore neglected dimension of past social life. Such an impression emerges when Heldur Palli‘s account of the historical demographic research at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR is placed in the context of Western inquiries into the history of European populations. The methodological adjustments required in the application of well-known demographic techniques to unusual data sources should be better understood when the Estonian researchers conclude their work of family reconstitution from multi-lingual evidence about a peasantry with highly unstable naming practices. Also, Coale and Anderson (1979) described how the demographic characteristics of the Baltic area (including Estonia) in the late nineteenth century distinguished it from Russia proper, thus raising the question of when, in the distant past, these characteristics first appeared and how they can be described quantitatively before the first modern Baltic census of 1881. The sources being used by Palli and his colleagues no doubt will contain at least the beginnings of a concrete answer to these questions. Furthermore, the research by Peter Laslett and others on a regionalized model of premodern European household structure has suggested that the Baltic area stands somewhere between the West—with its high proportion of simple family households—and Russia—with its impressively high incidence of multiple family structures, a proposition which the cadastral revisions and fiscal censuses of Estonia should help to refine. There are also the questions of population turnover and social mobility, to which the frequent enumerations of the Estonian population ought to bring considerable quantitative evidence illustrating Eastern European patterns. Finally, Estonian peasants, like many other peasantries in the centuries discussed by Palli, were serfs; but, unlike all but a very few peasantries elsewhere, the Estonian population continued to be precisely enumerated by state authorities even after the abolition of serfdom in 1816-1819. The availability of detailed household-level data before and after legal emancipation will be of interest to Western scholars who have had to deal with the social structural consequences of emancipatory measures among servile agricultural populations in their own societies.

The contentions in this paper arose tangentially from a study of London coroners I began in the summer of 1998. I had intended to examine the verdicts from nineteenth-century coroners’ courts in order to assess the differences in verdicts that might arise depending on whether the coroner was a doctor, a lawyer, or neither. Was a physician more likely to detect murder as a cause of death than a lawyer or a “civilian?” Instead, as I read hundreds of inquest reports and explored the history of the coroners’ courts, I began to realize that no matter who the coroners were, it was rare for any of them to bring in a verdict of “wilful murder,” even in cases that seemed very suspicious to me.

The modernization/development process, both historically in Europe and in developing nations of the twentieth century, has involved the transformation of the labor force from one primarily engaged in agricultural pursuits to one largely involved in secondary- and tertiary-sector activities. This change has often been brought about in stages, beginning with the introduction of nonagricultural work in rural areas—proto-industrialization—as a supplement to industrial development in urban locations, concomitant with or followed by massive migration of the rural population into cities. Proto-industrialization may have been a response to population pressure, serving as a means to provide work for the surplus rural labor force when cultivable land became overtaxed and as a way for households to gain much-needed additional income during periods of agricultural shortfall.

More than 7,000 assaults were reported to the magistrates of Portsmouth, England, between 1700 and 1781. Time-series analyses were run to see (1) what effects, if any, war had on levels of aggression and (2) whether overall levels of aggression decreased over time. Aggression was measured in two ways: (1) the extent to which assailants ganged up on adversaries and (2) levels of violence in individual confrontations (whether a weapon was used, and if so, what type; whether assailants refrained from using a weapon; and whether they stopped short of physical violence and instead merely insulted or threatened their enemies). Neither measure showed a significant variation over time. The participation of women in brawls decreased, but the aggressiveness of those who continued to brawl actually increased. Complaints about insults and threats declined, while complaints of a more serious nature showed a modest increase, reflecting, among other things, the emergence of new definitions of actionable behavior.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, for the first time in American history, a movement based on a broad agenda of political reform arose to dominate the political discourse. It inspired the growth of the regulatory state, the doubling of the size of the electorate, many reforms that were aimed at weakening the grip of machine politics, and other changes too numerous to list here. According to influential studies, the period gave us a “new American state” (Skowronek 1982) combined with the “onward march of party decomposition” (Burnham 1970).

For both major parties, we are told, there were clear divisions associated with support for or opposition to the progressive movement. Within the Democratic Party, William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson held high the banner of progressivism, while Alton B. Parker, John W Davis, and other heirs of Grover Cleveland spoke for conservatives.

In this article I consider the bottom-up, narrative process through which traditions are invented, using rejoneo (mounted bullfighting) as a case study. I explore the construction of rejoneo as “the newest but also the oldest” form of bullfighting. To understand this apparent contradiction, I synthesize “narratives of tradition” with Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's (1995 [1983]) “invented tradition.” In doing so, I consider rejoneo through multiple and overlapping narratives structured into historical “chapters” with common narrative elements of heroes, villains, tragic downfalls, and triumphant comebacks. These narratives are contextualized in periods of intense social, political, and economic transformation in Spain over the past three centuries. This article combines a review of the lay and expert understandings of the history of the Spanish bullfight with ethnographic fieldwork undertaken with mounted bullfighters in Andalusia from 2000 and 2001. It redresses a significant lack of attention to the mounted bullfight in relation to the footed bullfight, thereby contributing to a more comprehensive literature of bullfighting in Spain. Moreover, this article provides a model for understanding that one of the ways traditions are invented is through narratives of tradition, contextualized by the wider social, political, and economic forces emphasized by the invented traditions approach.

Anthropometric studies have given much attention to the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the biological standards of living of urban populations. Instead, we know less about the evolution of height and the disparities within the rural world and how they have changed during the modern economic growth process. This article analyzes the evolution and the determining factors that would explain the inequality of the biological welfare of a group of rural populations in Mediterranean Spain. Using a database of the heights of military conscripts (N = 146,041) of the study area, a comparison is made of the biological well-being of the cohorts born between 1840 and 1965 in different rural environments (irrigated vs. dry farming). The results show that the recruits residing in irrigated areas were taller than those in dry farming areas and that the nutritional differences were greater among the latter. The advantage of the heights in irrigated areas widened with the development of commercial agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century and, although it began to reduce from the early decades of the twentieth century, the anthropometric gap persisted throughout the period analyzed. The data also suggest that the distribution of income was also more unequal in the dry farming areas, where the diet was less varied and rich than in the irrigated areas. This situation could be largely explained by the existence of low productivity agriculture in these dry farming areas, among other possible factors.

Historical research can contribute to greater understanding of economic growth, but only if it proceeds without theoretical blinders and assumptions imposed by past definitions of capitalism. We will make this case, by taking one particular historical example—mortgage markets in nineteenth-century France—and analyzing the financial development that accompanied the rise of capitalism there. The French example demonstrates that there is an immense amount that historians and social scientists still do not know about economic growth or capitalism. One common assumption is that little financing takes place before big banks and other modern financial institutions arrive on the scene. No one, however, has ever tested this implicit assumption by estimating how much lending or other financial dealing occurred before the arrival of the banks and modern financial institutions in developed economies. Although scholars have studied financial dealings back into the Middle Ages or before, no one knows whether the sums involved were big or small. We do so and discover that the sums involved were enormous. That so much borrowing went on outside modern financial institutions raises serious doubts about the argument that connects financial development and economic growth. Our research also makes it clear that context was critical when entrepreneurs raised money in the early stages of economic growth or when young businesses or firms in new industries sought funds.