Towards the end of the nineteenth century, leisure was reserved for the few. By the end of the twentieth century, however, most workers had a regulated normal working time of 40 or fewer hours per week, annual paid leave, and overtime compensation. In this paper, I investigate which political parties brought forth these changes – which party constellations supported or opposed working-time reforms and argue that sector and class differences drive party preferences. Lower-class and urban middle-class workers demanded regulation as demand for leisure increased with income. In contrast, employers and farmers opposed such reforms. Accordingly, the study argues that socialist and social-liberal parties were inclined to support leisure-securing working-time reforms, whereas conservative and farmer parties opposed them. Due to their linkages with workers and farmers, liberal parties may be divided into a rural constituency that tends to oppose working-time reforms and an urban constituency that supports them. I test these expectations using parliamentary data: 65 roll-call votes from Norway between 1880 and 1940, combined with analysis of major reforms and legislative appeals. Finally, I undertake a generalization test using country-level reform data from 33 democracies between 1880 and 2010. Results generally fall in line with expectations, and the pattern is stable over time.

This article undertakes an examination of the origins and evolution of a discourse of alterity against the Vascones –the alleged forefathers of the Basques – and other Western Pyrenean peoples from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The methodology employed involves the study of literary references made to these peoples, which are then compared to recent scholarly and archeological evidence. Through this analysis, it becomes possible to evaluate the accuracy of these mentions and interpret them within their specific historical context. The results of this research indicate that mentions of the Vascones during this timeframe were mainly polemic in nature and lacked substantial grounding in empirical reality. Instead, it seems that the underlying objective of these narratives of alterity was twofold: to enhance the social and political standing of their authors and to support their claims to political control over the Western Pyrenees. The abandonment of these interpretative repertoires during the tenth century, coinciding with the emergence of the kingdom of Pamplona and the county-duchy of Wasconia, further emphasizes the connection between the display of these tropes and imbalances in political power between the region and its neighbors. The conclusions of this article directly challenge the underpinnings of discourses that depict the ancient Vascones as entirely alien to the political and religious paradigms derived from the Roman and Christian traditions. In so doing, it thus confront narratives about these “ancient Basques” that are prevalent in contemporary Basque cultural production.

In this paper, we study differential infant and child mortality according to the origin of the mothers, natives of Madrid or immigrants, between 1916 and 1926. From 1880 to 1939, Madrid experienced spectacular demographic growth, with a massive influx of immigrants, mainly from the Castilian Plateau. Using the city’s records of births and deaths, which we linked for the study period, we demonstrate an important spatial heterogeneity in infant and child mortality across the city. Although the development of the town was planned in the 1860s, the infrastructure and the real estate market were overwhelmed by the continuous arrival of new inhabitants. Moreover, major investments in public health increased the gap between the wealthy districts and peripheral areas. These improvements deepened inequality. During years marked by the waves of the influenza pandemic, we isolate the impact of poverty, which threatened the survival of newborns through poor nutrition, deficient hygienic infrastructures and deplorable housing conditions. Such features explain the impressive association between summer and the risk of dying from enteritis, diarrhea and other diseases of the same type among weaned children. However, the mortality differentials between the offspring of native and migrant mothers were surprisingly small, which we explained in terms of behavioral adaptation to the large city and its mass society.

The persons in this story make up a stem family at a particular point in its life course; that is, they form a domestic group composed of parents (in this case, a single surviving parent) living with one married child who has taken over the family property and has begun rearing offspring of his own. There are a number of variations on this story in the folklore of early modern Central Europe. Each story treats the discords which can arise in such families. For example, in a shorter and somewhat coarser version than that given above, the father was hungry and a pig’s trough replaces the two yards of cloth. Despite differences in language and emotional content, however, the moral is generally the same: parents deserve to share in what they have helped create, and their presence in the family serves to teach intergenerational cooperation and respect to the young. In the version quoted here this point is made especially well by having the child remind the father of his obligations. We are confronted here by a thoroughly socialized child whose invocation of the Golden Rule reestablishes order and harmony in the family’s affairs.

This article conducts an analysis of public meetings in Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The profound changes in frequency and character, the enormous increase of public meetings and the sharp decline in the relative frequency of violent gatherings, serve as an indicator of the expansion of the public sphere and its capacity to shape the social process. The article explains the rise of the public meeting and why it became so central to British political life during the nineteenth century through four intertwined changes: the development of British capitalism, the growing importance of Parliament, the multiplied opportunities for political entrepreneurs, and the effect of public contention itself.

I know just how pleased Charles Tilly was to receive the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an institution he cherished, and Hirschman is a person for whom Tilly had almost limitless admiration.

He particularly esteemed the assertive analytic power and intellectual modesty that characterized Hirschman's “Rival Interpretations of Market Society,” the brilliant 1982 Marc Bloch Lecture that addressed competing interpretations of modern markets as, respectively, “civilizing, destructive, or feeble.” “However incompatible the various theories may be,” Hirschman (1982: 1481) argued, “each might still have its ‘hour of truth’ and/or its ‘country of truth’ as it applies in a given country or group of countries during some stretch of time,” and he concluded by asking whether it is “not in the interest of social science to embrace complexity, be it at some sacrifice of its claim to predictive power?” (ibid.: 1483). These features, too, were hallmarks of Tilly's audacious originality.

Historians have often portrayed American Indian populations as relatively homogeneous. Notorious in this regard is the genre of formulaic tribal histories, in which individuals or subgroups are scarcely seen and amorphous tribes merely react to U.S. policy directives and agents’ actions (Clifton 1979; Iverson 1984). When internal differences are noted, they tend to be lumped into dichotomized categories, with little attention given to their composition or to the historical processes from which they arose. Hence the literature is replete with references to traditionalists and progressives, Christians and pagans, and mixed bloods and full bloods, to name only a few. But history does not unfold in fixed oppositional stages, and dichotomizing these terms, even if they were employed by historical participants themselves, reveals little about social processes. They indicate, instead, a recognition that intratribal heterogeneity was increasing, perhaps in patterned ways (Clifton 1989).

This article answers Larry Gerber's (1995) challenge for a renewed appreciation of the social science literature on corporatism and state theory by explaining variations in corporatist institutions through the concept of policy legacies. To understand the variation in corporatist forms of governance, three policy areas are key: the long-standing trade policies of the England and Canada, the forms of government intervention during World War I, and prior political battles within the dairy industries. In their own unique way, these policies shaped the character of the market failure, the political capacities of farm organizations, and the institutional response that incorporated private interest groups within the formulation and implementation of public policy. By viewing the emergence of corporatist institutions in England and Canada as examples of governmental responses to economic crisis, this research on corporatism contributes to the larger theory of the determinants, as well as the effects, of the state in capitalist democracies.

Of the myriad terrorist organizations that emerged in the late 1960s and the 1970s, those supporting the destruction of socialist Yugoslavia and the establishment of an independent Croatia were among the most active. This article explores the geopolitical context behind the radicalization of certain segments of the émigré Croatian population in the three decades following World War II and the processes that led them to adopt terrorism as an acceptable form of political expression. Specifically, it examines how changes in the realities of the Cold War political landscape during the 1960s and 1970s directly shaped the strategies of Croatian separatist groups outside Yugoslavia. These developments led Croatian radicals to cultivate a culture of abandonment, betrayal, and persecution, in which the Croats were portrayed as a nation of victims without allies. This helped precipitate a radicalization of the separatist movement, as many within the Croatian diaspora were increasingly convinced that only “self-initiated action”—that is, political violence and terrorism—could hasten the establishment of an independent Croatian state. Difficulties in dealing with the realities of Cold War international politics also led to the emergence of significant cleavages and conflicts within the émigré separatist movement, which further helped frame the processes of strategic thinking among radical activists. Drawing evidence from state archives and the political writings of radical émigré Croatian separatist organizations, the article traces the trajectory of radical Croatian separatists from staunch supporters of the West to desperate and disillusioned advocates of realpolitik thinking.

While families have historically provided the basis of business organization in the United States, in the late nineteenth century the development of corporations and managerial capitalism weakened their role in business, especially in management (Bell 1962; Chandler 1977; Farber 1972; Hall 1977,1988; Kanter 1978; Mills 1956; Shammas et al. 1987). Chandler (1977) has postulated a historical decline in family management, control, and decision making in firms with the growth of industrial capitalism; others have asserted a continued presence of the family in business ownership (Davis and Stern 1980; Lansberg et al. 1988).

Even though it declined in the last decade of the twentieth century, homicide remains anAmerican problem of extraordinary importance. Yet our empirical knowledge is remarkably shortsighted. Simply put, most researchers focus on the past decade or two—usually for reasons having to do with convenience, not theory—and ignore the longer term. However, recent work has shown that past lethality is inherently recoverable, and that there is every reason to expect that comparable homicide rates across time and place should be used to set current research in context (Gurr 1981; Johnson and Monkkonen 1996; Ylkiangas forthcoming; Eisner 2000).This paper builds on some of my recent research and responds to the challenge of a recent paper by Douglas Eckberg (1998), who has shown that not only can we recover the past, but that we can even estimate missing data counts.

Health insurance with high deductibles is an important feature of the Bush administration's health savings accounts initiative. A similar type of insurance, known as major medical, was the most common type of health coverage in the United States from the 1950s through the 1970s. This article traces the history of cost sharing in health insurance from its origins in insurers' concerns about “moral hazard” to the heyday of major medical insurance to the temporary comeback of first-dollar coverage during the era of managed care. Proponents of deductibles and co-payments, today and in the past, have argued that they bring down costs by forcing consumers to make more careful health care choices. The history of major medical insurance, however, shows that high-deductible insurance failed to curb medical inflation and also hurt consumers who expected their coverage to protect their incomes from the costs of sickness and injury.

Over the last twenty years political scientists and sociologists concerned primarily with western European developments since 1945 have attempted to define corporatism as an ideal model for use in analyzing this region's political economies. Several influential American historians in recent years have also employed the concept of corporatism in examining the development of the modern American political economy. Although these historians have not ignored the contemporary European-oriented social science literature, the relationship between the work of historians describing the evolution of America's political economy and the theoretical literature based primarily on more recent European experiences and European concerns remains problematic.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, farmers in extreme southern Illinois, along with farmers throughout the state and region, organized politically and economically. The first big upsurge of organization was in 1873 with the organization of farmers’ clubs and granges of the Patrons of Husbandry. In Union County, Illinois, all sectors of the local society appear to have been swept up in the tide of discontent, although a close analysis of those active in the movement and the associations that succeeded it indicates that the movement gave voice and organized expression to a specific class. To use McNall’s (1988) analysis of the later populist movement, the agrarian movement of the mid-1870s was an incipient “class movement,” although it failed to articulate a program that effectively welded farmers into a unit that could contend for political power, even as it provided a vehicle for elite farmers to transform preexisting economic relationships. “A class movement,” McNall (ibid.: 5) writes, “is one in which the participants are involved in a struggle over the very definition of their political, economic, and ideological interests. All class movements have at their core an economic dimension and, like class relationships, are about relationships of power.” The organizations formed in the populist era, he argues, were attempts by farmers to create a “class in and for itself” (ibid.: 12).

The relationship between economic performance and wealth inequality at a regional level is examined using county-level wealth for Ontario in 1892 and 1902. The results find that after controlling for confounding factors, declining wealth inequality was generally accompanied by slower economic performance as measured by changes in wealth levels and manufacturing output over time. This suggests that a more egalitarian wealth distribution came perhaps at the price of less robust economic performance.

In a deservedly much-quoted phrase, Edward Thompson set out in The Making of the English Working Class “to rescue the poor stockinger, the ‘obsolete* hand-loom weaver, the ‘Utopian* artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” It is no criticism of that great, rugged, sprawling, big-hearted book to say that what the English working class most needs to be rescued from is the enormous condescension of middle-class intellectuals. Ever since Marx and Engels, if not indeed James Mill and Andrew Ure, English working people have not, at least until very recently, been allowed to have their own history but have had it imposed upon them from above by self-appointed champions and apologists from the “higher” classes.

Thompson himself is something of an exception, more an old fashioned independent country gentleman than a middle-class intellectual, living in a mansion in Worcestershire and exhibiting in his concern for the long dead poor the traditional paternalism which he decries in the eighteenth-century squire.

Modern research demonstrates that there may be wide differences between scientific and popular risk assessments. Popular risk perception is multidimensional; some risks that seem uncontrollable or dreadful are especially abhorrent. Risks are also socially constructed and they may be augmented or attenuated by opinion leaders, advocacy groups, and media treatments. In extreme cases “information cascades” can lead to a self -reinforcing process that amplifies perceived risks resulting in the stigmatization of a technology or a company. We apply these insights to an historical case study of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad during the years 1911 through 1914. During these years the New Haven experienced a burst of train wrecks. Sensational reporting of these accidents, along with increasingly shrill government investigations, coincided with ongoing exposés of the company's questionable financial practices and turned the New Haven into a pariah company, stigmatizing and forcing out its management. Yet statistics available at the time show that the New Haven was no more dangerous than average. The example of the New Haven also encouraged all railroads to introduce safer methods and technologies than they otherwise would have.

R. J. Collingwood compares the historian to a detective. Both, in his opinion, are dissatisfied with what is contained in the documents and engage in a search for hidden or lost information. Both follow their intuition, guided by scientific positivist methods, and base their work on hypotheses and the strict logic of question and answer (1980: 253-269). In recent years the research laboratories of detectives and historians almost simultaneously have been replenished by quantitative methods of analysis, which substantially increased the possibility of achieving the desired goals: to find hidden information and go beyond the bounds of what is directly contained in the documents.

For nine weeks during the 1866 cholera epidemic, the registrar general for England and Wales published details of more than 13,000 deaths in London. Although the names of the deceased and the informant were withheld, all other information available from the death certificate was reproduced in the capital city's Weekly Returns, including registration district and subdistrict, precise address (house number and street, or institution), sex, age (sometimes down to hours for infants), occupation, cause(s) of death, and duration of final illness. Since historians’ access to original death certificates in England and Wales is restricted, this source presents an opportunity to analyze systematically the practice of cause of death certification in the middle of the nineteenth century, albeit during a period of mortality crisis. Variability of diagnostic “depth”—that is, the listing of multiple causes and duration of final illness—is considered for three major causes: cholera, diarrhea, and respiratory tuberculosis. Deaths in workhouses and general hospitals were chronically underdocumented compared to home deaths. This finding supports the notion that the institutionalization of sickness in the nineteenth century was accompanied by a loss of the “patient narrative” and also points to the entrenchment of institutional cultures of record keeping and administration.