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.

It has been interesting to follow Joyce Burnette's work over the last few years and to see its culmination in Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (2008). As will be obvious to the book's readers, much of it is an argument with me and several other feminist economic historians who have a different take on the reason that female wages were, in general, so much lower than male wages in the period 1750–1850. It is worth saying at the outset that Burnette has the a priori assumption that economic forces are the crucial determinant of behavior. Burnette's explanation also has a different departure point from mine. Hers is to explain why men’s pay is so much higher than women’s pay. Mine is to explain why payments to women are so much lower than those to men.

Louise Tilly’s thoughtful and provocative essay “Gender, Women’s History, and Social History” makes a genuine contribution to our thinking about the research that has been done in women’s history by proposing new categories for analysis and by addressing the current debate over the usefulness of deconstruction as a methodological tool for historians. She demonstrates that we have been engaged in “the study of women in time,” with some success. We have studied women’s occupations, sexuality, personal relationships, marriage choices, family roles, and education. We have examined changes in women’s legal and political rights, their engagement in social and political causes, their successes and failures in the political arena. We have analyzed the ways in which states have tried to regulate women’s behavior, the social and economic constraints under which women have functioned, and the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. And we know infinitely more than we did two decades ago about these subjects.

In her complex and subtle paper, Louise Tilly raises a host of intriguing, debatable issues. She tells us, pace Joan Scott, that women’s history has “arrived” in terms of both institotionaliza-tion within the academy and development into a separate historical specialty. She tells us that we must strive towards a women’s history that is not only descriptive (seeing the task “of retrieving women’s lives and achievements ... as sufficient unto themselves”) but also analytical (“connecting its problems to those of other histories”). She tells us, again pace Joan Scott, that a literary approach to gender downplays human agency and offers no constructive means of historical explanation. And she tells us that social history, as it has been informed and altered by women’s history in the last twenty years, is the best place for connection between women’s history and “the agenda of history as a whole.”

Before Julian Zelizer called with the idea for this forum, I had marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Building a New American State as just one more entry on a growing list of reminders of the swift passage of time. Now, as I read the reflections of scholars who have risen to prominence during this period in political science, sociology, and history, the fullness of these years is readily apparent. Building a New American State has aged gracefully as the symbol of a larger enterprise, one that Julian Zelizer, Elizabeth Clemens, Dan Carpenter, and Brian Balogh have done much to expand, sustain, and enrich. Reflecting back on my own experience, I realize that my inclination as author to find something of critical significance on every page of the book gave way some time ago to admiration for the growing corpus of work that was engaging its themes and pushing its arguments in new directions. I count myself lucky to have had this work seized upon by a generation of scholars ready to rethink the development of American government and politics, and I am grateful to them for giving it a life of its own.

Social historians formed an important part of the Social Science History Association from its early days, and they widened its intellectual space beyond initial emphases on political history and quantitative methods. Lee Benson and other faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Charles and Louise Tilly, were particularly influential in attracting a broad mix of scholars to the group. The openness of the association and its interdisciplinarity appealed to younger scholars, and those interested in the “new urban history” were early recruits. A growing number of women, many of whom were social historians, participated in the first conventions and newly organized networks.

Sir George Clark (1947: 98) once remarked that “during the whole course of the seventeenth century there were only seven complete calendar years in which there was no war between European states.” The impact of the longer land wars on civilian mortality during this period was often extreme. The reasons for this had little to do with the fighting itself. Wartime civilian mortality crises were precipitated by fatal epidemic diseases and starvation. Modern demographic historians attribute the starvation to military supply systems that stripped civilians of food and the means to acquire it, and the epidemics to decreased resistance to disease caused by undernutrition and to increased rates of disease transmission brought about by troop movements and civilian refugee flows (Flinn 1981: 52–53).

It has been almost 40 years since Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published an English translation of his (at the time) deeply unsettling essay, “Motionless History,” in the second issue of Social Science History (SSH, Winter 1977). For many historians, whose livelihoods depended on narrating the “march of history,” his claim that long periods of history were characterized by a distinct absence of change—his example was Europe from late antiquity up to the early eighteenth century—was nothing short of heretical. The newly established SSH was, however, an entirely logical place from which to launch this fusillade against the disciplinary norms of the Anglo-American historical profession, as the journal was the product of a contra-establishment project, the Social Science History Association (SSHA). Founded in 1974 and hosting its first annual conference in Philadelphia in the fall of 1976, the SSHA emerged out of the more general social and political ferment of that period. Its organizers had the specific intention to disrupt (to use our word and not theirs) what they thought were the rigid practices and limited vision of the then American Historical Association. In so doing they hoped to make space for a new kind of historical enquiry that had much to learn from the social sciences, and hoped to teach them something in return. They were joined in that enthusiastic moment by historically minded rebels from the American Sociological Association, as well as small numbers of anthropologists, demographers, economists, geographers, and political scientists who were all eager to incorporate both historical context and a theoretical appreciation of contingency into their work. In the intervening years since that hopeful beginning, many have argued that the anticipated interdisciplinary exchange failed in one way or another. But let me not get ahead of myself.

What explains mass party formation? Prevailing approaches explain party formation as a process of reflection of preexisting social constituencies, or as the consequence of the rise of the bureaucratic state and in particular the advent of universal suffrage. These approaches fail to explain why Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) emerged as a mass party in some regions but not others despite attempts to do so and similarity in conditions that have been posited as central to party formation. I put forth a novel approach that posits that parties emerge as mass organization through a process of constitution of the very social base they claim to represent, but their constitutive powers are conditioned by fundamental economic structures. Relying on agrarian censuses and archival data, I show that the PRI emerged as a mass party in areas where land privatization had been more intensive. In these areas the party during its process of formation was able to build new, and absorb existing, peasant unions and organizations and carry out strong electoral mobilization. These findings suggest that mass party formation is dependent on the destruction of “pre”-capitalist agrarian structures.

After two centuries of demographic change, societies of European origin face a new reality of aging populations and heightened competition for resources between young and old. Research on the history of the family adds important perspectives on our current problems. In northwestern Europe, transfers of resources to the young and old were constrained by an unusual marriage and household formation system. The transition to small families increased downward intergenerational transfers (parents to children), and compensating upward transfers now take place outside the family. The growing independence of the elderly in the twentieth century is based on earlier investments in children. The members of each generation profit from the investments their parents make in them and the investments they make in the children of others.

This article explores how variations in party systems shape the intensity of insurgency against national authorities in nineteenth-century Latin America. I argue that, under certain conditions, two-party systems may polarize and lead to intense insurgency because they simplify the process of blame attribution, encourage the incumbent party to exclude its opponent from power positions, and motivate leaders to emphasize extreme ideological positions. Conversely, multiparty systems may encourage flexible electoral and congressional alliances among parties, resulting in lower insurgency. I test the argument in four nineteenth-century Latin American republics with different insurgency levels. While in Colombia and Uruguay two-party systems polarized and fueled intense insurgency across the century, Chile and Costa Rica developed flexible multiparty systems that prevented polarization and favored low insurgency.

The agrarian populist movement of the late nineteenth century remains among the largest social movement and third-party revolts in American history. It embodied a full-scale critique and mobilization against the inequities of the Gilded Age, and its influence stretched well into the Progressive and New Deal eras. While most accounts of the movement and party’s emergence and rapid demise have centered on economic conditions and interests, we link movement and third-party emergence and failure to the institutional arena second only to partisan politics in its impact on southern society at large, namely organized religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism. This article offers the first systematic analysis of the extent to which organized religion in the South channeled the mobilization of agrarian populism. The results both support and contradict the argument that agrarian populism was rooted in organized southern religion by suggesting that evangelical Protestantism channeled the mobilization of the Farmers’ Alliance movement but not the People’s Party. While white southern evangelical religion served as a potent cultural resource and mobilizing structure for the movement, the move to partisan politics helped create a disjuncture between movement and party from which Populism never recovered.

In recent years, American society has engaged in what is frequently described as a “sexual revolution” involving significant changes in relationships between men and women. As a result of extensive social surveys, we know that both specific behaviors and the prevailing ideology regarding appropriate standards of behavior have been subject to rapid change. In the past two decades, rates of sexual intercourse and intimacy have increased (Hunt, 1974; Westoff, 1974), use of effective contraception has become widespread, and it is increasingly accepted that a physical and emotional attraction between members of the opposite sex might lead to a sexual relationship. In short, participation in sexual activity has come to be seen as a natural outgrowth of the enjoyment of sex.

Working out large-scale processes through close attention to local-level analysis remained central to Louise Tilly's approach to social history. An ongoing commitment to agency and strategy undergirded her vision for a global history that made connections between large-scale processes across space, between human agency and structure, and between the past and present. Her vision remains an important influence in my coauthored comparative history of the welfare state in England, France, and the United States. This is illustrated by a discussion of unemployment policies in the three countries at one particular moment of crisis, the Great Depression, concentrating on the United States, where the Depression hit first and hit the hardest. Important differences in demography, the mobilization of ordinary citizens, the responsiveness of state structures to democratic pressure, and public attitudes about the legitimate role of government all affected the history of unemployment policy in each country.