During the 1960s in Sweden, socioeconomic differentials decreased sharply and both the labor force participation of married women and aggregate divorce rates increased more rapidly than during any other period of the twentieth century. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the socioeconomic composition of the couple influenced the probability of divorce during this period of rapid restructuring. The study uses a large data set covering the entire married population of Sweden in 1960 and applies a binary model whereby the couples are analyzed as units rather than separate individuals to model divorce during the period from 1960 to1965. The main results show that the equalization process between genders and social classes during this period contributed to the decrease in marital stability. Dual-provider families exhibit substantially higher probabilities of divorce as compared to traditional single-provider families. We also find that the socioeconomic gradient of divorce had become negative by the early 1960s and that couples with low socioeconomic status contributed more to the increase in divorce than did couples in the higher strata. A difference between the results reached in this study and those from divorce research covering later decades is that children do not reduce the probability of divorce when the wife's labor force participation is controlled for. The results indicate that the determinants of divorce have varied across different phases of the divorce transition during the twentieth century and that a historical perspective is necessary if we are to understand the long-term process that has produced current marital behavior.

This contribution focuses on analyses of specific themes in the encyclopedic Nature and Power, by Joachim Radkau. The analysis is shaped by insights derived from pairing individual chapters from the book with related readings. Examples will include traumatic environmental experiences, early modern colonialism and colonial “ghost acreage,” industrialization and uses of the forest, and manipulations of the hydrologic cycle. The structure of the contribution is explicitly comparative.

The French settlers who peopled Quebec during the seventeenth century were, by and large, detached individuals without kin in the New World. Of the 5,007 permanent settlers, only 661 (13%) had relations beyond the nuclear family amongst other settlers (Guillemette and Légáré 1989: Table 8). These figures suggest that for the majority of settlers kinship was not an important factor in the decision to migrate to New France.

All Dr. Katz's students admired how quickly he expressed a point, often through tidy lists. In honor of that style, I want to focus these remarks about Michael Katz and activism on four dimensions: (1) his understanding of the activist/academic tension; (2) how he advised his graduate students to wrestle with it; (3) how he engaged nonhistorians; and (4) how his work's prognosis of the prospects for social change transformed markedly in the last five years of his career.

This article highlights the usefulness of family trees for visualizing and understanding changing patterns of kin dispersion over time. Such spatial patterns are important in gauging how families influence outcomes such as health and social mobility. The article describes how rapidly growing families, originally from England, dispersed over the US North and established hubs where they originally settled that lasted hundreds of years, even as they repeated the process moving West. Fathers lived much closer to their adult sons in 1850 than they do today and many more had an adult son within a radius of 30 miles. Big Data from genealogical websites is now available to map large numbers of families. Comparing one such data set with the US Census of 1880 shows that the native-born population is well represented, but there are not as many foreign born or African Americans in these data sets. Pedigrees become less and less representative the further back in time they go because they only include lines that have survived into the present. Despite these and other limitations, Big Data make it possible to study family spatial dispersion going back many generations and to map past spatial connections in a wider variety of historical contexts and at a scale never before possible.

We examine the socioeconomic consequences of discrimination against people of Southern origins during the US Great Migration of the first half of the twentieth century. We ask whether people living in the American North and Midwest in 1940 fared worse with respect to education, occupation, and income if they were perceived to be of Southern origins. We also assess variation in these effects across racial groups and across actual region of origin groups. Using linked data from the 1920 and 1940 US censuses, we compare the life outcomes of about half a million pairs of brothers who differed with respect to the regional origin implied by their first names. For both Whites and Blacks, we find statistically significant associations between outcomes and the regional origin implied by names; regardless of where they were born, men living in the North or Midwest in 1940 did worse if their names implied Southern origins. However, these associations are entirely confounded by family-specific cultural, socioeconomic, and other factors that shaped both family naming practices and life outcomes. This finding—that regional discrimination in the early-twentieth-century United States did not happen based on names—contrasts sharply with findings from research in more recent years that uses names as proxies for people’s risk of exposure to various forms of discrimination. Whereas names are a basis for discrimination in modern times, they were not a basis for regional discrimination in an era in which people had more immediate and direct evidence about regional origins.

American ethnic groups vary in terms of movement on the economic ladder, position on the political spectrum, and educational attainment. Members of individual groups also congregate in particular occupations; Koreans in Los Angeles are overrepresented in the retail liquor industry (Light and Bonacich, 1988) and Greeks in New England are concentrated in pizza businesses (Lovell-Troy, 1980). While many of these differences may be obvious, an explanation for why they occur poses a serious challenge to social scientists. In response, scholars have proposed two theoretical frameworks, cultural and contextual, for understanding ethnic behavior. A cultural interpretation stresses that American ethnic groups’ behaviors are based on cultural traits brought from their countries of origin. In contrast, a contextual analysis explains ethnic conduct as immigrants’ responses to their new societies.

Progressive Era campaigns to establish juvenile courts maintained that police and criminal courts failed to distinguish between children and adults. They suggested that law enforcement agencies either sentenced juveniles as if they were adults, imposing excessive punishments, or let kids go, failing to discipline them and encouraging them to commit further crimes. However, this case study of juvenile arrests in turn-of-the-century Detroit indicates that, before the creation of juvenile court, criminal justice institutions had more complex interactions with delinquent youth than has been recognized previously. Boys typically were arrested for very different offenses than were adults, and the police and courts often segregated children and adolescents from the harshest elements of the criminal justice system. The police sought every opportunity to decide the outcome of juvenile arrests themselves, without a court hearing, particularly if boys had committed only status offenses such as truancy or if crime victims decided not to prosecute. When juveniles did appear in criminal courts, judges found ways to soften their experiences, rarely jailing younger boys and instead sentencing some to reform school for ostensible rehabilitation. After 1900, efforts to protect young offenders from criminal justice institutions expanded as specially assigned police officers increasingly sought to discipline delinquents prior to arrest and the courts introduced an unofficial form of probation. Rather than constituting a break from the past, the creation of Detroit’s juvenile court in 1907 mainly made official juvenile offenders’ growing separation from the criminal justice system.

Britain has been a model of political stability for so long that thinking of it as anything but that is difficult. The familiar image of Edwardian England is that of an Indian summer spent with a jovial uncle. This was a system, however, that was in crisis and was recognized by its contemporaries as being so. Regardless of whether the challenges of the Irish question, labor unrest, and suffragette militancy were connected or merely coincidential (see Pelling, 1968: 147-164), all three shared the common characteristic of extra-parliamentary activism and of violent—either actual or anticipated—methods. Furthermore, the system also was burdened with other contentious issues, as “politics after 1901 were increasingly dominated by controversies about matters which most Victorians had regarded as settled and closed to discussion” (Read, 1972: 16-17). If ever a governmental system suffered from an overload of simultaneous demands from a multiplicity of pressing and intractable problems, this was it. Contrary to what sometimes has been supposed, Britain’s political elite did not regard the approaching international hostilities as providing a means of alleviating these burdens by welding the country together with patriotic fervor. Instead they feared that war would be the final blow undermining the governments’s authority and, perhaps, producing civil war (French, 1982: 85-95).

This article examines the event structure of the labor conflict known as the Everett Massacre, which occurred in Everett, Washington, on November 5, 1916. The much-celebrated confrontation between members of the Industrial Workers of the World and local law officials and citizen groups came to symbolize the sharp class divisions that shaped the lumber industry in the latter years of the nineteenth century in the Northwest. The article uses event structure analysis (ESA) to identify the causal structure of this conflict. Guided by this analysis, the focus turns to the structure of discourse in newspaper articles to reveal changes in the contrasting accounts of mill owners and union members, or Wobblies. The article draws on the concepts of relational distance and the monstrous double as a theoretical interpretation for the comparatively more violent labor struggles in the Far West.

For the residents of the former model town of Pullman, Illinois, 1994 was an important year. In May, 100 years earlier, a strike had broken out that pitted workers at the Pullman Car Works against George M. Pullman and the company that bore his name. Before the strike finally collapsed in August, it shutdown railroad traffic across much of America, brought federal troops into Chicago and cities as far away as Los Angeles, and led to the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs, the president of the American Railway Union (ARU). It also brought to a close the long-standing debate on the most famous of the company’s social experiments: the model town located on Chicago’s far south side. Since 1880, George Pullman had trumpeted the architecturally and socially crafted town and life inside it as solutions for the problems of urban, industrial America, and large numbers of observers had concurred with that evaluation (Wright 1884; Smith 1995: 177–270; Reiff and Hirsch 1989: 104–6). For almost as long, its critics had excoriated the town as representing the worst excesses of a capitalist society where one man and his company could dominate every aspect of a worker’s life in their dual roles as landlord and employer (Ely 1885; Carwardine 1973 [1894]).

One of the persisting problems in the religious history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has been a question of taxonomy. Authors still puzzle over whether we should have a name for the moderate, conforming section of the Church of England, to distinguish it from those whom we call Puritans. Was there, in fact, an essential difference between those two groups? A second question is, How far to the “left” on the religious “continuum” can we go before Puritanism changes into something qualitatively different? This usually becomes the problem of whether the Quakers were the extreme fringe of Puritanism or something altogether different. This study will offer evidence, statistically expressed, that there were consistent and significant differences between these positions.

Nature and Power is to be understood not only as human power against nature but also as power by nature in the sense of Michel Foucault's biopouvoir (biopower) or Francis Bacon's “Naturae non imperator nisi parendo” (Only by obeying nature may we dominate nature). The fragile human attempts to get power over nature and by nature have a long history, reaching back over millennia until prehistoric times, and much of world history may be explained in part by the unstable relationship between humans and nature. The environmental approach offers a fresh look at global history. The great change that has happened in modern times seems to have been described best by Karl Polanyi (1944) in his Great Transformation, which also refers to a revolution in the human relation to nature. There are primeval symbioses of humans and nature that are the basis of environmental history until modern time. A global history of the environment may be written for a long time along the three great commons of history: woodlands, water, and pasture. The dark tune of Garrett Hardin's (1968) “Tragedy of the Commons,” to be sure, does not dominate the whole melody of environmental history. There is also a lot of historical evidence for Elinor Ostrom's rehabilitation of the commons. But it is better to be cautious with dogmatic theories and sweeping judgments. In modern times Hardin may be right, at least in this or that regard. Ostrom's concept applies only to local, not to global commons. The underlying philosophy of Nature and Power is neither optimism nor pessimism but possibilism.

Since the emergence of distinctive social science disciplines in American universities in the late nineteenth century, there have been recurring tensions over whether history should be practiced within or pursued separately from particular social science disciplines. This study considers this issue for the case of economic history in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. Economic history was active as an inter-disciplinary field throughout the twentieth century, and it had a substantial presence throughout the twentieth century at Chicago, in one of the world’s leading economics departments. This study focuses on how economic historians and economists at Chicago have conceived of the relationship between economic history and economics over the past century. It argues that a key set of tensions has been, on the one hand, developing a conception of the economy that is subject to historical forces yet, on the other hand, allowing adequate scope for employing the tools of economics.

As furstenberg et al. (1979: 497) suggested over a decade ago, “The enormous promise of quantitative history can only be fulfilled when we are intimately acquainted with the limitations of our sources of information.” This collection of articles follows that suggestion by assessing the limitations of perhaps the most important source of information for social science researchers: the U.S. census. Certainly the degree of underenumeration may seriously affect research in many disciplines. For example, our estimates of migration rates might be inflated. In the process of nominal record linkage, researchers typically assume that those who are not listed in the linked census document out-migrated, when in reality many may simply have been missed by the census taker. As a result, past populations (especially in cities) may appear to have been much more mobile than they actually were. Census underenumeration might also exaggerate voter turnout. If the census in a particular community listed 1,215 eligible voters and election returns showed that 1,150 voted in an election, the voter turnout would be estimated at 95%. However, if just 10% of the eligible voters were not counted by the census taker, the estimated level of voter participation would decline to 85%. Finally, our understanding of the rural economy in the past might be affected by underenumeration. Agricultural production might be overstated if the more successful landowning farmers were more often enumerated and less productive farm tenants were missed. In short, the accuracy of the U.S. census should be a central concern to social science historians.

I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb’s 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986).

This paper examines the changing nature of the female labor force in Ireland and the United States. Data from the two countries are used to illustrate both similarities and variations in the Western experience of women during the period of rapid change in work and family life since the late nineteenth century.

A central facet of how Western families have been transformed during the past century has involved the increased participation of women in the paid labor force, and in the most recent decades, a dramatic rise in the labor force participation of married women. In his classic work, World Revolution and Family Patterns, Goode suggests that the increase in female participation in the non-agricultural labor force was clearly evident in Western countries but was not dramatic during the first half of this century (1963: 59-60). Since 1950, however, increases in the economic activity of women have occurred throughout the West. For example, using data from Scandinavian countries, Haavio-Mannila and Kari (1980) document the increased economic activity of women throughout this century, the transformation of the economies of Scandinavia from an agricultural to an industrial base, and the rapid increase in labor force participation of married women since 1950.

The long-debated issue whether social scientists should be concerned with improving the human condition, and if so how they should attempt this task, has been raised afresh in the exchange of views between Lee Benson (1978) and Warren Miller (1978) on “Changing Social Science to Change the World.” Before plunging into this debate, however, I should like to suggest that all of us who participate in it are viewing the world from a particular occupational perspective. Some years ago, when George Lundberg’s Can Science Save Us? (1947) was current, a friend suggested to me that a prior question was, “Should science save us?” He may have meant, as Miller suggests, that saving or changing the world is not the principal task of social scientists; or in another meaning, he may have been anticipating more recent critics in noting that a world “saved” by social science might not be one in which everyone would prefer to live. I hope that our efforts will not be counter-productive.

At this stage in the development of the Social Science History Association it is appropriate for us to consider some of the general problems concerning the development and use of machine-readable data and the Association’s role in such matters.