This multi-method study uses statistical and comparative-historical investigations to find that abortion values shape genetic counseling practices across societies. Genetic counselors and genetically interested social scientists have long questioned, but never systematically demonstrated, whether this relationship exists. Genetic counseling data are drawn from cross-national surveys of genetic counselors (n = 2,906) from the mid-1990s, the key historical moment after this profession was globally established but before potentially confounding transnational professional effects. Data focus on Trisomy 21, severe open spina bifida, and Huntington’s chorea. Abortion data are drawn from a new comparative-historical investigation of abortion attitudes in 36 countries based on law, frequency of policy debate, incidence rates, and public opinion polling. The key overall finding is that the more controversial abortion is within a society, the less directive genetic counselors are willing to be, whereas the less controversial abortion is, the more directive the counseling. Polynomial regressions, t-tests, likelihood ratios, and Wald tests provide statistical evidence for the relationship observed through qualitative clustering.

From the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, gangs and secret societies (banghui) exercised enormous influence on Chinese society and politics. The two portrayals of banghui in historiography – as modern criminal syndicates that came out of an emerging capitalist economy or, alternatively, a cultural succession of traditional secret society – are so distinct that their proponents often speak past each other. Revisiting primary and secondary materials on the Shanghai Green Gang, one of the most active banghui organizations during the Republican era (1911–49), this article aims to bridge the two understandings by focusing on the gang’s self-legitimation claims. Facing rapid social changes of the early twentieth century, I argue, the Green Gang reframed its use of violence as disciplinary, revolutionary, and nationalistic to gain public legitimation. Together with its involvement in state building and resource extraction, the gang’s cultural work contributed to its prominence and led multiple political authorities to promote it to an exceptional degree.

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.

In many Western countries, including the Netherlands, couples marrying in the interwar period experienced unprecedentedly high levels of childlessness. Only recently do we witness a return to these levels, as part and parcel of the so-called second demographic transition. Looking back on the interwar period, many scholars have attributed the decline of fertility and the increase of childlessness to rampant economic and political instability. However, contemporary social scientists ascribed the phenomenon to individualization, secularization, and the priority newlywed couples gave to a career and a luxurious lifestyle. From this perspective, childless couples in the interwar period could be seen as “pioneers” of the second demographic transition. To disentangle “traditional” and “modern” backgrounds of childlessness, we have studied the fertility histories of nearly 3,000 Dutch couples married between 1919 and 1938. Our results, in particular the strong association of childlessness with religiously mixed marriage, confirm that an important part of childlessness in the interwar period can be associated with a modern, individualized lifestyle.

The Canadian-American borderlands have been configured and reconfigured by dynamic flows of trade, investment, migration, family connection, cooperation, and community across the border. One can view this and other borderlands as a dynamic spatiotemporal network with flows, gateways, corridors, and places or as a matrix: a complex web of interactions and dependencies that can in many places at different times be seen to be embedded in unequal economic relations. This article focuses specifically on migration flows in the Canadian-American borderlands during the turn-of-the-twentieth-century period. Flows of people during this period integrated communities on both sides of the border, but such movements varied among the regions that make up the borderland zone. The article uses Canadian and American border-crossing records to show that Canada-U.S. migration must be viewed in relation to patterns of regional transborder development.

During the late nineteenth century the transport revolution and growing agricultural output, especially in North America, engendered an agrarian crisis (1878–96) when intensifying international competition in foodstuffs led to dramatic price declines, particularly in wheat and other cereals. This comparative study of the process in Britain and France examines regional and local patterns of rural change in relation to the expansion of railways, the agrarian crisis, and the responses to the crisis by the governments and farmers of the two countries. Using spatial statistics and geographically weighted regression (GWR) to identify spatially varying relationships, it offers a new approach and results. Case studies of Dorset County in England and the Allier Department in France show that railways facilitated the shift from cereal production to livestock and dairy farming during the era of agrarian crisis. In Dorset the analysis using GWR provides an explanation for patterns of the agricultural depression that a pioneering article identified but could not explain and thus illustrates the promise of blending narrative and spatial history. Further, it argues that in France railway expansion and the construction of a secondary network reduced regional disparities in rail service and likely in agricultural productivity, too. More broadly, it concludes that the differing political economies of Britain and France led to different trade and railway policies during the crisis and to different agrarian outcomes in which agricultural productivity declined in Britain and improved in France.

The transportation revolution had several important effects on the antebellum political equilibrium. First, it caused western and southern political views to differ by bringing more easterners and European immigrants into the West. Second, it reduced the costs of rerouting western exports to the non-South, which decreased the expected costs to the West of conflict with the South. Third, it greatly increased western population, which brought more free states into the Union and changed the balance in the Senate. Fourth, it increased northern numerical superiority over the South, giving the North a major advantage if an armed conflict did occur. These changes led the West to ally with the East and caused the South to secede.

The primary reasons for understanding homicide in the past are the same as for the present, and in fact most present studies use some comparisons over time. Because homicide varies across time and over political territories, we know that it is not an invariant human phenomenon. For social historians, homicide is also important because in both coroners and newspaper accounts we catch fascinating snatches of everyday life. Through its incidence and the records generated around the events we are able to explore otherwise hard-to-see aspects of our past.

In his recent essay in this journal on my writings on the “egalitarian myth,” Robert E. Gallman is kind enough to express admiration for “the scope of Pessen’s empirical undertaking, the skill and ingenuity with which he carried it out, his learning, and his grasp of his materials.” If praise from any source is sweet, praise from so admired a scholar as Professor Gallman is doubly sweet. Yet, “one may doubt,” he continues, that I have “in fact dealt a death blow to the egalitarian hypothesis.” Criticism, while not nearly so pleasing, alas, is to be expected, particularly for work such as mine that challenges a most influential, durable, and still popular thesis and challenges it on the basis of admittedly partial data. Scholarly disagreement on important issues is of course inevitable. For, as Peter M. Blau and Otis D. Duncan have observed, even collaborators in a joint study will interpret their data differently. I have taken pen in hand and availed myself of the opportunity graciously afforded me by a managing editor of Social Science History to publish my “observations on Gallman’s essay,” not because that essay criticizes my work but because a number of its references to my work are misleading and inaccurate.

State intervention into the ownership, financing, and regulation of various industries and sectors of the capitalist economy is a phenomenon as old as capitalism itself. In the last 15 years this topic has become a focal point of vigorous interest among social scientists. Given the manifest problems to be found within current political-economic relationships, it is not surprising that a great deal of this attention has been focused on the contemporary scene. Nevertheless, a small number of works have undertaken the explanation of the historical development of state intervention. Unfortunately, the historian in search of explanatory guidance is confronted here with a series of less than comprehensive analyses which move at descriptive and explanatory cross-purposes. The first tasks of the social scientist or historian who wishes to address the development of state intervention therefore must be to classify and clarify the accounts which have been proposed.

Those Native American tribes which did not disappear or disintegrate as a result of their contact with Western invaders are currently undergoing the demographic transition. Like most of the world’s pre-industrial peoples they have experienced a dramatic fall in their traditionally high death rates followed by an accelerated period of population growth. The degree to which traditional fertility patterns have responded to these changes has proved to be somewhat easier to determine in the case of select Native American groups than it often is in other parts of the world because most tribes are small, geographically concentrated, and encapsulated in an advanced bureaucratic state. But the relative ease with which contemporary demographic change can be observed and analyzed, is not paralleled by a similar situation with respect to the earlier stages of the demographic transition. Little is known about the demographic situation prevailing among most tribal groups in the early stages of demographic transition when mortality rates began a sustained decline (generally the 1930s). Next to nothing is known about overall tribal mortality and fertility patterns in the decades immediately preceding the formal onset of the transition. Hence it is not presently possible to explore the extent to which traditional demographic differences between tribal groups have been and may still be influencing present differences in demographic response patterns.

One million fewer American farms had telephones in 1940 than in 1920; the instrument was disconnected in at least a third of the farm homes that once had it. Knowing how and why this “devolution” (Mattingly and Aspbury, 1985) occurred can expand our understanding of the social role of technology, diffusion of innovation, and more generally, twentieth-century modernization in America.

The history of American socialism is a history of failure, unless one accepts the more charitable interpretations of Michael Harrington (1972). Why did it fail? Why, among industrial democracies in the West, is the United States exceptional for its lack of a labor party? These questions are perennial ones, yet the lines of explanation invariably curve back to one of the two distinct points-of-view. One line of explanation was framed at the beginning of this century in the now-classic volume by Werner Sombart (1906 [1976]), Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Socialism, in Sombart’s structuralist interpretation, was an incompatible philosophy in an American environment characterized by high wages, a fluid social and economic structure, and—their precondition—cheap land. Yet perversely, at the very moment when Sombart’s thesis appeared in the Archivfur Sozialwissenschaft and Sozialpolitik in 1905, socialist politics experienced a remarkable expansion in the United States—an expansion that warranted skepticism toward the structuralist interpretation.

Recapturing people's experiences as part of understanding specific social and cultural processes leads us to the art of differentiating. We need to ask by whom, when, and why certain developments are defined. All historical sources bring knowledge, often in absolute and definite terms. But sometimes sources depart from the dominant societal discourse. How is one to evaluate the explanatory value of the different sources of interpretation placed hierarchically? This article takes on the evaluation of different discourses surrounding the process defined by historical demography as “rising illegitimate fertility.” Although it will imply a reevaluation of proletarianization processes as well, the central focus will be on illegitimacy.

Accounts abound of slaves suffering from lack of water during the middle passage, many of them collected during testimony before the British Parliament and by British abolitionists. A Captain Hayes spoke of a cargo “labouring under the most famishing thirst. . . being in very few instances allowed more than a pint of water a day” (Buxton, 1844: 154–155). Thomas Clarkson (1969 [1789]: 573) claimed that he had seen slaves “almost dying from want of water,” and Thomas Buxton (1844: 151-152) alleged that “there is nothing which slaves during the middle passage suffer from so much as want of water.”

The ideas of socialism grew in ordinary people’s lived experience of all-encompassing markets, totalizing doctrines of individualism, the power of capitalist property over human dignity and destiny, and equations between market success and human merit. Codified into doctrine, socialism was pro-ductivist, seeing the work experience as that which determined personal identity and the shape of social collaboration. It was also class analytical, mapping the social world in terms of classes in conflict and specifying the working class as the central social actor and agent for change. Third, it was egalitarian democratic, rejecting arbitrary distinctions determining different stations in life. Finally, socialism was Utopian, revolutionary at least in aspiration if not always in deed. The capitalist order could be, and ought to be, radically transcended. Socialism, which would follow, would reappropriate control over work and its fruits by “the workers” and would facilitate full democracy, equality, and the consecration of a creative and cooperative social order.

One of the more debilitating digressions in the evolution of the scientific enterprise is the controversy over the relative importance of models and data. Time and again, in every discipline from archaeology to zoology, the issue has reappeared with sufficient force to engage scholarly attention and to generate reams of rhetoric. In the social sciences, as in the biological and physical sciences, we have expended considerable energies on the data versus model (some would say “theory”) emphasis, usually to the detriment of scientific advancement.

Few paid-up readers of this journal will deny the importance, as a historical source, of the U.S. manuscript population censuses, particularly those since 1850, which supposedly contain the names of all individuals. Since from 1965 to 1989 my work concerned primarily the four earliest such “nominal” censuses, 1850–80,1 shall restrict my remarks and estimates to them.

Some interesting research has been done, but much more cries out yet to be done, on the manuscript population census as a source, especially on its accuracy and comprehensiveness. Trudging along the road of improvement, we begin to learn that there are potholes aplenty in it, but how many, where, and, most vital of all, how deep? It is sloppy technique for historians to be less critical of the census than of other sources they employ.

Before the 1940s Puerto Rico was an obscure possession for most American social scientists, as indeed it was for most United States citizens. Conquered in the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico was overshadowed in the American consciousness by its more tumultuous neighbor Cuba. To be sure, by the 1930s, there were sparks of interest among foundation staffs, New Dealers, and radicals in the plight of the Puerto Rican poor. Yet on the whole the island continued to merit only cursory attention.