In the United States, tax favoritism—an approach that has weakened the extractive capacity of the federal government by providing tax loopholes and preferences for taxpayers—has remained since the 1930s. It has consumed the amount of tax revenue the government can spend and therefore weakened the possibility of the redistribution of fiscal resources. It has also made the federal tax system complicated and inequitable, resulting in undermining taxpayer consent. Therefore, since the 1930s, a tax reform to create a simple, fair, and equitable federal income tax system with the capacity to raise revenue has been long overdue. Many scholars have evaluated the Tax Reform Act of 1969 (TRA69), which Richard M. Nixon signed into law on December 30, 1969, as one of the most successful steps toward accomplishing this goal. This article demonstrates that TRA69 left tax favoritism in the United States. Furthermore, it points out that TRA69 turned taxpayers against the idea of federal taxation, a shift in public perception that greatly impacted tax reform in the years to follow.

The lynching literature often considers how the Populist Party affected lynching, yet the Southern Farmers’ Alliance—a short-lived but influential voluntary association that mobilized large numbers of white farmers—is overlooked. We argue that this is a critical oversight, as the Alliance was the origin of populism in the South. Specifically, we hypothesize that where the Alliance had more local organizations, the greater the likelihood of lynching from 1888 to 1895, the peak period of populism. To test this, we focus on two states with different experiences with the Alliance: North Carolina, in which the state’s Alliance was a strong supporter of the Populist Party, and South Carolina, where the Democrats sought to court Alliancemen and deter the creation of, and voting for, the Populist Party. Our empirical findings reveal that lynchings were more common in counties where the Farmers’ Alliance had more organizations in South Carolina, but no similar connection exists in North Carolina. These findings suggest that the Southern Farmers’ Alliance is, at times, pivotal to understanding populism’s connection to lynching in the late-nineteenth century American South.

This article analyzes the changing age structure of Swedish and Finnish sailors for almost 200 years. We show that the proportion of the youngest men increased during the age of sail (i.e., the older technology). The average age increased significantly during the early twentieth century as steam (i.e., the newer technology) replaced sail in Nordic shipping. Thus, a technological revolution did not displace the older workers, but rather diminished the demand for the younger ones. This study shows, however, that technological changes were not the only drivers of changes in the age structure of Nordic sailors. Institutional and societal changes also played an important role, though they were at least partly coevolving with the technological changes. This study also shows that the maritime industry experienced professionalization especially during the latter part of the period.

Due to the central position it assigns to the longue durée, the Annales school—impetus for and crossroads of historical debate—used quantitative methods from the beginning and granted them their patents of nobility. For some decades now, it has been inconceivable for good historical research in France not to devote an important part of its efforts to the measuring of phenomena. True, the Annales school has never spoken with a single voice; the changes that have occurred in its membership and in neighboring disciplines, as well as new historical sensibilities, have modified its original characteristics. The study directed by A Burguière of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales will soon report on the content and evolution of the themes, the network of contributors, and the intellectual climate that shaped the first generation of the Annales. Therefore this article limits itself to a rapid survey of publications, followed by an examination of the distinctive traits of the quantitative dimension of French historical work, the directions for and reasons behind new research. The picture must remain somewhat general because it focuses on only three major points: the preeminence of serial history over quantitative history; the underrepresentation of international comparative works, despite the example of F. Braudel; and the development of individual-level data banks, an important source for social and serial history.

Some eight or nine years ago, David Nixon—a political scientist from Penn State University—was struck by the open dumping of industrial wastes into Pittsburgh’s rivers. Research on the topic indicated that under terms of the River and Harbor Refuse Act of 1899, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintained responsibility for issuing permits to private concerns for the discharge of wastes into the nation’s waterways. The Act had also been successfully employed by the Justice Department in prosecuting a handful of past offenders. When the Corps’ district office in Pittsburgh denied any knowledge about such permits, David and a biologist friend began taking water samples from the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. Subsequent chemical analyses of more than 400 samples verified the polluted condition of the stream caused by certain industrial sources. Upon taking his evidence to the district U.S. Attorney’s office, David Nixon persuaded Richard Thornburgh to file charges which were upheld by the federal district court in 1971—although final resolution would not come until years later. The suit eventually involved the Pennsylvania Chemical Corporation, U.S. Steel, Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, and Jones & Laughlin Steel, but David Nixon’s goal was to induce the government to enforce clear violations of existing law. In that regard, President Richard Nixon revived enforcement of the 1899 Refuse Act by Executive Order in December, 1971, and the “permit program” became the basis of enforcement for compliance with the Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. For more than 20 years prior to 1971, federal efforts to abate water pollution struggled to find some means to enforce compliance and in the process expended well over a billion dollars, without any apparent knowledge of the 1899 law.

Recent studies in social history suggest that the practice of female infanticide was widespread in early medieval society. While much of the work on female infanticide is sound, particularly the anthropological studies which observed the practice first hand, the interpretations of historical data are much less certain. In particular, data from the ninth-century French monastic tax rolls known as the Carolingian polyptychs are assumed to reflect female infanticide (Coleman, 1971; 1974; 1976; de Mause, 1974; Guttentag and Secord, 1983). The data recorded on the Polyptychs are biased in a manner reflecting the Church’s teachings and social functions, giving the impression of a skewed sex ratio favoring males in this population. Anthropological studies lead us to doubt that female infanticide was practiced to the extent suggested by the sex ratio on the polyptychs.

This study examines how changes in the growth model of the US sports business since World War II—namely, changes in stadium design and ticket sales strategies—have transformed the accessibility of major league stadiums and the class composition of the fans inside. While survey data show an overrepresentation of wealthy fans in stadiums at the end of the twentieth century, they reveal little about whether or not this was a new phenomenon. I use ticket sales data to demonstrate that the displacement of working-class fans by the relatively affluent began in earnest at least as early as the 1950s. Before “premium-seating” options like luxury boxes became the norm, the expanded sale of season-ticket packages requiring large up-front payments made it more difficult for wage earners to attend games. While this crowding out of working-class fans has a longer history than very recent outcries over “stadium gentrification” suggest, it has intensified significantly over the last quarter century. Using an original data set containing information on seating arrangements at both the current and previous facilities of 73 of 91 active Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and National Football League franchises, this article offers the first systematic evidence in support of claims that the proliferation of luxury suites and other exclusive seating options has resulted in the subtraction of large numbers of relatively affordable seats. This research not only deepens our understanding of the history of urban gentrification and postwar consumption, but also has important implications for the ongoing debate over public stadium subsidies.

Ireland is often seen as an outlier within the western world in terms of demographic behavior. As a society it has also been noted for its religious fervor, including religious division, at least until fairly recently. Might there be connections historically between these two spheres? One intriguing area of enquiry relates to possible links between religious denomination and child mortality. We explore this possibility using individual-level data from the household schedules of the Irish Census of 1911. The study area is Belfast, Ireland’s leading industrial city, which allows for a wide range of occupational and social class differences. Combining regression techniques and the mortality index proposed by Preston and Haines (1991), we seek to tease out the relationship between child mortality and religious affiliation while controlling for a range of other explanatory variables. We show that religious identity is clearly associated with different infant and child mortality outcomes. Of the three major religious denominations, Catholics suffered the most from high infant mortality, Church of Ireland (Anglican) families were only a little better off, while the largest Protestant denomination, the Presbyterians, had the best infant mortality outcomes. These differences were related, in the main, to the varying socioeconomic composition of the three major religious denominations but religious affiliation also mattered in its own right.

Three Declining Plateaus of population growth provide an empirical framework for American social history (Nugent, 1981). After a pre-history, self-sustaining demographic regimes appeared in the form of a frontier-rural mode of life common to most Americans by about 1720 and remained unchallenged until the mid-nineteenth century. From the 1860s to the 1920s, the frontier-rural mode continued to exhibit considerable strength but in rapidly contracting areas of the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Columbia Plateau. During that period of fifty years, however, the second plateau was increasingly supplanted by the metropolitan (or urban-industrial) mode of life. After 1920, by demographic measures, the frontier-rural mode of life had been replaced virtually everywhere by the metropolitan one familiar to Americans ever since.

Once upon a time, historians and political scientists expended a great deal of effort in tracing the complex development of the United States Congress in the twentieth century—a time, especially from the 1930s onward, during which Congress faced a remarkable expansion in government activity as a surge of new concerns, foreign and domestic, and, as a result, an unprecedented load of business, all but overwhelmed the institution. During this same time, Congress’s role within the American political system has been Social Science transformed in the face of the rise of the imperial presidency, the Supreme Court’s insistence on changing rules of representation, and the consequent shift in the institution’s makeup and internal power structure. Finally, public perceptions of Congress, increasingly negative as they have become, have had some significant impact on the transformation of Congress within the American political system as well (Sundquist 1981; Harris 1993; Rieselbach 1994).

V. O. Key’s proposition that one-party politics in the American states has been destructive of both the dominant and minor parties in such systems fits California’s political experience very nicely. From 1893 to 1932 California Republicans captured almost all statewide offices and they maintained huge legislative majorities. Furthermore, both parties entered the 1930’s with little institutionalized capacity for performing the basic nominating and campaigning functions. It appears, therefore, that the notorious weakness of political parties in California could be accounted for in terms of Key’s theories of the debilitating impact of one-party politics. Understandably, however, this line of speculation raises questions in the minds of those students of California politics who are aware of the several studies that particularly credit crossfiling for the weakness of California parties at mid-century. Consequently, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate the relationship between intensity of interparty competition and crossfiling in California politics during the first half of this century. In establishing this relationship, this study first shows that crossfiling did not become a general practice until after the end of California’s one-party era (1893-1932). The analysis then goes on to demonstrate that, during the one-party 1920’s, crossfiling occurred more often in the relatively competitive areas of the state than in the most profoundly one-party areas. Finally, a deviant case analysis develops the correspondence between the incidence of successful crossfiling (winning both parties’ primaries) and the relative competitiveness of types of offices.

Seventy-three years ago pioneer American medievalist Dana Carlton Munro (1911: 504) delivered a paper in Philadelphia to the American Philosophical Society entitled “The Cost of Living in the Twelfth Century.” He threw down the gauntlet by concluding that

This article takes up this challenge with new material on the cost of living in Italy in the twelfth century.

To the western visitor around the turn of the century, Korean women seemed the most secluded on earth. Isabella Bishop, the adventurous English traveler who visited Korea in the last years of the nineteenth century, reported that women there experienced a unique confinement: from the closing of the city gates of Seoul at dusk, all men except for the blind and officials were banished from the streets; then, and only then, in the safety of a male-free darkness, were the women at liberty to stroll and make social calls. And the higher the woman’s status, the more severe her seclusion. The queen herself conceded that she knew little of her country, having never seen the streets of Seoul by daylight. This deprivation stemmed from the peculiar practice of rigidly segregating and secluding girls when they reached the age of six (Allen 1908; Bishop 1898; Glünicke 1904; Jones 1896). The custom was observed so faithfully that Bishop, during her extensive Korean travels, never saw a girl who looked above six. The traditional Korean society therefore lacked the “brightness which girl life contributes to social existence” (Bishop 1898: 342).

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

In our article “Alchemist’s Gold”, we tried to make three main points. First, a large number of models of individual behavior can fit observed ecological patterns, and these models entail different assumptions about the nature of the individual relationship within and across the ecological units. This topic has been most impressively developed by Gudmund Iversen (1981). Second, there is nothing in the ecological data or the various types of ecological analysis that informs the researcher about how to choose among the many dissimilar models. All the models are compatible with the ecological data, and we have no way of knowing whether a particular inference about individual behavior is quite accurate or extremely misleading. Because of the inherent ambiguity over the unobserved individual behavior within ecological units, we made a third point of recommending techniques for reducing the amount of uncertainty surrounding estimates.

Thirty years ago Frank Tannenbaum in Slave and Citizen first catalogued the many occasions for the manumission of slaves in Latin America. He indicated that baptism was an important occasion of manumission. Any slave owner, motivated by generosity and religious sentiment or a minimal payment made by the parent or godparent of the child, could free his slave at baptism. Tannenbaum cited this as one of many instances where Catholic practice and ritual effected a more humane and hopeful existence for the slave in Latin America, denied to slaves held in Protestant colonies.

The results of recent investigations of slave manumission in Brazil, however, have challenged the idea that slaves were frequently manumitted. Kátia M. Queirós Mattoso and Mary Karasch, in studies of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, found that only a small percentage of those who were freed were children. In addition, it was revealed that few infant slaves were freed at baptism. Stuart Schwartz found that for colonial Bahia “there is no evidence [in notarial records] that large numbers of children were given their liberty at the baptismal font.” Arnold Kessler discovered that baptism was the occasion of manumission of only fourteen children, representing 2 percent of his sample of manumitted slaves (libertos) in nineteenth-century Bahia. For the small coastal town of Paraty in southern Brazil there was a similar pattern. Of the 325 slaves whose freedom was recorded in the notarial archive between 1789 and 1822 only six slaves, or 1.8 percent of the total sample, were infants freed at baptism.