This article addresses three critiques that pull at the loose ends of Logics of History, revealing weaknesses and bringing new theoretical resources to problems raised by but not satisfactorily resolved in the book. Each critic suggests reformulations of my claims about how structures, events, and social transformations should be theorized: George Steinmetz from wide-ranging and theoretically eclectic perspectives, Dylan Riley from a broadly Marxist standpoint, and David Pedersen from a perspective that is predominantly Peircian. While agreeing with aspects of their critiques, I also reaffirm certain features of my own arguments.

The first phase of New Deal historiography saw a clash between attackers from the right, who held that the New Deal went too far and did too much, and liberal-centrist defenders, who maintained that the New Deal was a practical, democratic middle way between left and right totalitarianisms. The second phase, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, saw the triumph, among politicians as well as historians, of the liberal-centrists over the rightist critics. In the mid-1960s, radical or left historians launched an attack on the New Deal, claiming that it did not go far enough and did not do very much—that, in fact, it did very little to reduce enduring inequities in American life by effecting significant changes in the distribution of wealth, income, and power. The radical critics also went beyond the question of what the New Deal should have been—from their point of view essentially socialistic—to the question of what it could have been, insisting that it could have gone much further in reshaping American society. The liberal-centrists, who do not subscribe to the radicals’ socialistic prescription, have made substantial concessions to the radicals’ estimate of what the New Deal was by recognizing the New Deal’s limitations, but they reject the radicals’ judgment on the question of what the New Deal could have been. They continue to assert that the New Deal accomplished about as much reform as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

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.

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.

In 1906, the Reverend Frank G. Smith, of Chicago’s Warren Avenue Congregational Church, warned that “we are in the throes of a moral spasm” (Chicago Tribune, 22 January 1906). The Reverend W. R. Leach shared this view, bemoaning that “not in twenty years as pastor in Chicago have I seen crime as it stalks to-day. It is an epidemical scourge” (Chicago Record-Herald, 26 September 1904). Another critic termed the city “Satan’s sanctum” (Curon 1899). Other commentators eschewed the language of the jeremiad but of fered similar assessments, often casting their observations in comparative and quantitative terms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Labor (meaning both wage workers as well as their collective representation) in Russia was a major loser in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Aggregate data on prices, average wage and pension levels, wage arrears, and unemployment indicate a serious decline in workers’ standard of living that is unprecedented in the post-World War II era, while strike data show an upsurge in this form of worker militancy during the mid-1990s but a decline thereafter.

This article seeks to explain both why these developments occurred and what prevented workers from adequately defending their collective interests. Four explanations have been advanced by Western and Russian scholars. The first is that workers were victims of state policies pursued in line with the“Washington consensus” on how to effectuate the transition from an administrative-command to a market-based economy. The second points to workers’ attitudes and practices that were prevalent under Soviet conditions but proved inappropriate to post-Soviet life. The third, claiming that several key indices of workers’ standard of living are misleading, denies that labor has been a loser. The fourth and most compelling of the explanations is derived from ethnographically based research. It argues that despite changes in the forms of property and politics, power relations at the enterprise level remained intact, leaving workers and their unions dependent on the ability of management to bargain with suppliers of subsidies and credits. The article concludes with some observations about workers’ survival strategies and the extent to which collective dependence on economic and political strongmen has worked against structural change in favor of labor.

The article discusses the conceptual and methodological challenges of comparative economic history, focusing on recent debates concerning alternative pathways of development in Europe and Asia, the agricultural systems of early modern England and the lower Yangzi region in China, and the historical demography of Eurasia. The article concludes that such debates support the perspective that there is substantial path dependency and contingency in economic history and that alternative development paths can be discerned across and within Europe and Asia.

In 1986, 585 out of 5,686 members of the Association of American Geographers declared their allegiance to the Historical Geography Specialty Group; among 50 AAG specialty groups, the historical geographers ranked 7th. Yet one prominent human geographer regards historical geography as “overdetermined,” an “empty concept” conveying “few (if any) significant analytical distinctions” (Dear 1988: 270). Dear’s argument is that, by definition, all geography should be historical, since “the central object in human geography is to understand the simultaneity of time and space in structuring social process.” So the only subdisciplines of human geography which have any intellectual coherence are those focused on distinct processes—political, economic, social. To me, even this distinction is unrealistic and impracticable for research purposes. But Dear does not go so far as to argue that historical geography or other “overdetermined,” “multidimensional,” or “peripheral” subdisciplines are wrong, merely that they are incidental to geography’s “intellectual identity.”

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.

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).

Wheat market integration between the US and the UK before the “first era of globalization” (in the second half of the nineteenth century) was frequently interrupted by policy and “exogenous” events such as wars. This paper adds Canada to this story by looking at trade and price data, as well as contemporary debates. This allows us to triangulate the role of policy and wars, since Canada as a small open economy was part of the British Empire. We find that, despite its privileged access to British markets, Canada faced similar barriers to the US, suggesting that membership of the British Empire provided only a modest benefit to trade. We also describe the limitations she faced accessing the US market, in particular after American independence.

In June 1938 China's Nationalist government breached a major Yellow River dike in a drastic attempt to use flooding to slow the Japanese invasion. The strategic breach caused the Yellow River to abandon the northern course it had followed since 1855, and its new southeastern course led to eight years of catastrophic flooding. After World War II, the Nationalists, with extensive aid from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), aimed to close the breach and divert the river back to its pre-1938 course. However, the Chinese Communists had taken control of much of that course, and local interests there opposed the plan to bring back the river. The Yellow River diversion project thus became intensely politicized. This article examines how the diversion plan became embroiled in the Chinese Civil War of 1946–49, how the river's return to its northern course in 1947 impacted communities in its path, and how the Communists and Nationalists imagined the river and made different tactical and rhetorical uses of it during the war. I find that the campaign to reroute the river was complicated not only by the civil war but also by tension between local and national interests within the Communist Party, and that UNRRA's attempts to mediate between the Nationalists and Communists at times put the organization at odds with both parties. Moreover, in 1946 and 1947 the intense struggle to tame, make strategic use of, or cross the Yellow River became an important metaphor for the battle to control China.