The complex relationship between the history of infectious diseases and social inequalities has recently attracted renewed attention. Smallpox has so far largely escaped this revived scholarly scrutiny, despite its century-long status as one of the deadliest and widespread of all infectious diseases. Literature has demonstrated important differences between rural and urban communities, and between cities, but has so far failed to address intra-urban disparities due to varying living conditions and disease environments. This article examines the last nationwide upsurge of smallpox in the Netherlands through the lens of Amsterdam’s 50 neighborhoods in the period 1870–72. We use a mixed methods approach combining qualitative spatial analysis and OLS regression to investigate which part of the population was affected most by this epidemic in terms of age and sex, geographic distribution across the city, and underlying sociodemographic neighborhood characteristics such as relative wealth, housing density, crude death rate, and birth rate. Our analyses reveal a significant spatial patterning of smallpox mortality that can largely be explained by the existing social environment. Lacking universal vaccination, the smallpox epidemic was not socially neutral, but laid bare some of the deep-seated social and health inequalities across the city.

During the 40 years since its founding, the Social Science History Association (SSHA) and its journal have attracted many scholars to the field of social science history, stimulating many new lines of research, but it has only had limited success in developing some of the more prominent new trends in the history field. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's early presence in the journal Social Science History did not stimulate much further work on the longue durée. In environmental history, transnational history, and studies of the non-Western world, the SSHA has not led the way. The article calls on members of the SSHA to think about creative responses to these new directions of inquiry.

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.

This study addresses changes in the public conversation on school desegregation since the early 1970s. It applies the concept of discursive opportunity structure to the debates on desegregation in order to illustrate how a dynamic and balanced conversation, which involved both positive and negative views on the policy, has evolved into an anemic and overly negative one. The study relies on insights from social movement research on political opportunity structures for debates on contentious issues and on interpretive framing processes. Several inferences are offered on the nature of the discursive turn in desegregation at the national level, followed by a detailed analysis of desegregation and resegregation in Cleveland from 1973 to 1998. This involves the systematic examination of local newspaper coverage and also draws on court documents, administrative student records, and census information. The findings suggest that political and social structural factors that have restricted the chances for a balanced conversation have also complicated desegregation implementation and may have undermined the policy’s intended student benefits. By the 1990s even the most dedicated advocates had withdrawn from the debate, allowing the conversation to atrophy and become dominated by critical views. As a result, public education has risked failing to address the ill effects of resegregation and to produce reforms that foster quality schools for all.

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).

“There simply are no reliable historical statistics on church membership,” writes a prominent sociologist of religion, Glock (1959: 39), “and it is extremely doubtful that accurate statistics can be produced through manipulating the unreliable ones.” Problems have so regularly hampered the collection of religious statistics in the United States that historians as well normally hold them in disrepute (Landis, 1957). “Nothing is more elusive in church history,” Littell (1971: 36) has written, “than honest statistics.” Commager (1950: 166) goes further: “Church statistics,” he charges, “attain an unreliability that would be a penal offense in a corporation.”

Since the publication of V.O. Key’s seminal article, “A Theory of Critical Elections,” numerous scholars have worked to add theoretical depth and analytical sophistication to the study of critical elections. On the latter count, efforts have been ambitious and illuminating; on the former they largely have not. Typologies of elections and descriptions of electoral change have emerged from empirical analyses of aggregate vote data. A variety of techniques ranging from straight forwara t-tests to correlation matrices to a particularly rich analysis of variance approach have been employed to uncover patterns of electoral change. But while a good deal of descriptive, analytical headway has been made, the development of a theory of electoral change has lagged behind.

What theoretical overtures have been made, generally regard critical elections both as the products of prolonged malfunctions in the political system and as the means by which the system begins to correct these malfunctions. According to this view, American electoral politics follows a cyclic dynamic. Critical elections mark the beginnings and the ends of adjoining periods (i.e., party systems) in a repeating cycle of stability, disequilibrium, and adjustment.

Relations between workers and managers underwent a profound transformation in the early years of the twentieth century. Employers began a systematic attempt to control production and rationalize shop floor processes through technological innovation, subdivision of tasks, and the scientific management (or Taylorism) movement. A concern for a tractable labor force compelled the development of the profession of personnel management and “corporate welfare” work on the part of employers. The all-round skilled craftsman, trained by a union apprenticeship and able to work in any area of the trade without management instruction and supervision, was replaced by the semiskilled machine operative trained by the company to work on a few tasks using modified and specialized machinery. On the other side, craftsmen accustomed to autonomy in their work and governed by a collective ethic felt their organized power threatened by this management offensive that debased skill, imposed new forms of discipline, and promoted individualism and competition. Craftsmen challenged management's encroachment upon the shop floor through militant union action, but in doing so they were forced, by the “dilution” of their trade (the British term for the destruction of skilled jobs), to rethink their traditional reliance on exclusive craft knowledge. The key to any new strategy was the ability of craftsmen to transcend old craft lines, join with the less skilled workers whose jobs were created by management reorganization, and formulate new demands. The World War I years and the production crisis produced by the war saw the permanent institutionalization of the “new factory system” in the United States and elsewhere. The metal trades were the industrial sector most affected by management reorganization, and during the war years this sector was the most strike-prone (Nelson, 1975; Taylor, 1967; Braverman, 1974; Montgomery, 1974, 1976; Nadworny, 1955; Hinton, 1973; Bing, 1921).

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century industrialization provoked quantitative and qualitative changes in traditional European migratory patterns. Most of the economic and social history literature concerning the study of European internal migration during the industrializing period has emphasized permanent migration. This article shows, however, that temporary internal migration was common not only in preindustrial societies but in industrializing ones too. The article also examines the causes and the consequences of the persistence of temporary internal migrations in Spain from the mid-nineteenth century to the period leading up to the outbreak of the Spanish civil war (1936–39). Aggregate data sources are used in depth for this purpose. The information derived from aggregate sources is supplemented by reference to secondary sources, mainly comprising local and regional studies.

The question is absurd—of course there was an industrial revolution, as obviously as there was a French Revolution—but let me take it seriously. It is absurd because it is counterintuitive—intuition based on the obvious differences between developed and underdeveloped economies, between industrial and agricultural areas, between cities and villages, between factories and farms, between industrial workers and peasants, differences which point unambiguously to the revolutionary nature of industrialization—and because it can be asked only with a heroic disregard of the massive historical evidence for the existence of the industrial revolution. Other phrases used to describe it—“the great transformation” (Polanyi 1985), “the great divide” (Tawney 1982), and “the great discontinuity” (Hartwell 1971)—also underline its revolutionary character, in terms of the break with the past, the changing of the economy, and the making of a new society quite different from that which preceded it.

In the last two decades historians have begun to examine the political role and importance of religion. Many have concluded that religion provided a broad social perspective and served as the main basis for partisan identification and political activity (as summarized in Swierenga, 1971; McSeveney, 1973; VanderMeer, 1977; Silbey et al., 1978: 253-56). This position has by no means been universally accepted. Some of the criticism involves how the strength of that relationship has been evaluated and measured (Bogue et al., 1977; Wright, 1973; McCormick, 1974; Kousser, 1976). Other objections, focusing particularly on use of the pietist-liturgical (or ritualist) typology to analyze the late nineteenth century (notably Jensen, 1971; Kleppner, 1970), concern a prior and more significant problem: providing a consistent and coherent explanation of why religion was politically important (McCormick, 1974; Wright, 1973). It is argued that the pietist-liturgical typology cannot account for the opposition by some pietists to using government to enforce behavioral standards. The typology also fails to explain why the liturgical perspective was politically salient except when under pietist attack. Finally, there is the paradoxical situation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which pietist churches were becoming less pietistic—adopting more elaborate worship services and deemphasizing revivalism—but at the same time were increasing and winning their demands for government regulation of morality. Taken as a whole, these criticisms suggest a fundamental weakness in the pietist-liturgical typology and indicate the need to reexamine the entire question of how religion has related to politics.

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 recent articles Bourke and DeBats (1978, 1980) have made a number of interesting points, which are of immediate concern to the study of electoral mobilization and participation over time. They have pointed to the existence of a number of poll lists recording individual votes after 1820 in what they term viva voce states (1980:232ff). These lists certainly must attract the attention of anybody concerned with the empirical study of political development in the United States and elsewhere in the nineteenth century. Some of these lists have been known for quite a while, and some of them have also been used in various studies mentioned by Bourke and DeBats. Nevertheless, much tedious work remains to be done before all of these poll lists can be utilized and before they can be made available to the scientific community.

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.

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.

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.

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.