There is no Doubt that Sweden, at least from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, belonged to the European countries where legal control of extramarital sex was most extensive. First of all, there was a difference between Protestant and Catholic countries, not in principle but in emphasis and form. The Spanish Inquisition was, for instance, mainly interested in whether people thought that a certain behavior was a sin or not. Religious confessions proved that the sinner realized that he had done something wrong, and he could therefore be treated with a certain mildness afterwards (Benassar et al. 1979; Henningsen et al. 1986). Protestantism, at least in Sweden, tended to be more interested in people's actual behavior, usually leaving the internal spiritual life of the sinner aside. This dichotomy between thought and behavior was of course not total in practice, but it tells us something important about the difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards religious control. Religious homogeneity also explains some of the success of Swedish orthodox Protestantism in creating a system of tight control. There was no escape for dissenters except emigration, since the creed was protected by the civil state.

Racial inequality remains a painful and central feature of daily life in the United States. Yet few would deny that decades of political struggle have transformed the nation’s racial landscape. In this article, we seek to advance long-standing sociological efforts to disentangle this braiding of persistence and change. Specifically, we intervene in two ways designed to build on national studies of inequality trends for black and white Americans. First, by shifting measurement to the state level, we reveal distinctive subnational trajectories and dynamics of convergence that have been obscured by the field’s emphasis on aggregate national trends. Second, by drawing on relational theories of boundaries and positions, we develop a new empirical strategy for measuring racial inequalities over time. Identifying two key analytic dimensions (exclusion and subordination), we analyze the relative positions of whites and blacks in two domains (work and housing) across the decades from 1940 to 2010. Our results suggest that racial inequalities rooted in boundary-based dynamics of social closure (exclusion) proved far more durable than inequalities tied to inferior positions alone (subordination). Moreover, we find evidence of a significant nationalization of racial relations, with subnational units converging on a more uniform structure of racialized relations over time. We conclude that the period from 1940 to 2010 was marked by a “consolidation” of racial exclusion (i.e., convergence around relatively stable levels of inequality) paired with the comparatively greater “equalization” of racial subordination (i.e., stronger convergence around more substantial declines).

No matter how one measures its commitment to public education, the S outh in 1890 lagged far behind the rest of the nation. Twenty years later, southern public schools were still characterized by relative backwardness, but the preceding two decades had seen impressive expansion in absolute terms. Among the salient features of this transformation were sharply increased per pupil expenditures, school terms, and enrollment rates; greater provision of normal schools and related institutions; and high rates of investment in school capital. State legislatures increased their appropriations, limitations on local taxes were abolished, and the number of counties and school districts voting to increase school expenditures skyrocketed.

By the close of the nineteenth century, Hawai‘i had become a newly annexed territory of the United States and was tightly controlled by a cohesive oligarchy of haole sugar capitalists. The “enormous concentration of wealth and power” held by the Big Five sugar factors of Honolulu up until statehood was unparalleled elsewhere in the United States (Cooper and Daws 1985: 3–4). In contrast, native Hawai‘ians and immigrants recruited from China, Portugal, Japan, and the Philippines—in successive and overlapping waves—endured the low wages and poor working and living conditions characteristic of other agricultural export regions.

Health conditions in United States cities at the turn of the twentieth century were very poor. Bleak pictures of crowded dwellings, contaminated water supplies, and filthy streets have been painted by numerous observers of urban areas at the time (Smith, 1964). While the effects of these conditions on mortality levels have not been precisely measured, urban mortality rates were consistently higher than rural mortality rates in 1900 in the United States (Condran and Crimmins, 1980). Nevertheless, considerable variation in the mortality levels of different cities also existed. Our goal in this article is to explain the variation in the mortality conditions in U.S. cities for which death registration data were collected in 1900. The analysis is done in two stages. First, the causes of death which accounted for the different mortality levels are isolated. Second, a multivariate analysis of the factors affecting the rates of occurrence of these causes of death is performed.

Efforts to improve public health and sanitation began in China well before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Between 1911 and 1931, the Chinese-run North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service carried out a range of public health activities in northeast China, successfully fighting not only plague but a variety of other epidemic infectious diseases, such as, for example, cholera. At the same time, there were local efforts to improve health, mainly in urban areas, by establishing medical colleges and hospitals, improving infrastructure, promulgating hygiene regulations, making vaccinations available, and carrying out educational campaigns. In Beijing, the subject of this study, the sewage system was renovated, the water supply was improved, and a variety of initiatives were undertaken to improve sanitation and public health. During the 1930s, the Nationalist government established a Ministry of Health and formulated a comprehensive national health policy focusing on rural areas. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Communists instituted a wide range of public health measures in the rural areas they controlled.

Recent accounts of transnational activism have examined a variety of social movement organizations (SMOs) but have paid little attention to labor transnationalism. This article utilizes and adapts this new transnational social movements scholarship to understand contemporary labor activism in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries. Exploring the preexisting networks and intramovement cleavages that helped spawn labor opposition to NAFTA, it focuses on labor activists' complaints under the treaty's labor side accord. I explore how rising political opportunities associated with the treaty and its new institutions created new political arenas, targets for activists, and incentives for cross-border collaboration. The cross-border political exchanges that formed part of labor activists' strategies to utilize these new institutions helped activists create new movement frames, transnational identities, and coalitions. While these outcomes support the findings of literature on transnational SMOs, they point to the particular dilemmas labor activists faced in confronting these issues due to their vulnerability, the status of unions as formal organizations embedded in national institutional structures, and the difficulty of imagining policies and strategies that might be effective in this new transnational sphere.

Employing the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series of the University of Minnesota, we chronicle the changing timing and duration of transitions to adulthood in the twentieth century. Successive generations of young Americans reinvented the transition to adulthood to accommodate shifts in the economy and the American state. The patterned choices of young people delineate three eras of social history in the twentieth century: the era of reciprocity (1900–1950), the era of dependence (1950–70s), and the era of autonomy (1970s-2000). We also explain why African Americans differed from the general trend; they developed distinctive transitions to adulthood in response to persistent inequality.

Within the last 15 years historians, political scientists, and sociologists have played major roles as expert witnesses in southern voting-rights cases. In most of these lawsuits, black plaintiffs challenged the racially discriminatory effects of at-large elections, contests in which candidates must run citywide or countywide rather than from single-member districts. Unless a white majority casts its votes as a bloc against minority candidates, at-large elections do not have a discriminatory impact. For this reason, the court’s decision frequently turns on its assessment of the degree to which electoral patterns in the jurisdiction are polarized along racial lines. Although the expert witnesses on whom the court must rely have employed a variety of statistical methods, they increasingly have preferred a technique known as ecological regression analysis to measure the degree of racial bloc voting (Loewen 1982: 179–94; Grofman et al. 1985; Engstrom and McDonald 1985; Jacobs and O’Rourke 1986).

This study proposes a conceptualization of the industrial revolution in England in terms of the interaction of demographic and economic processes linked by the nutritional status of the population. By the eighteenth century the English economy had reached an important conjuncture. It had a larger accumulation of capital, and a larger urban sector capable of expanding commerce and production, than ever before. In addition, the population was well nourished by preindustrial standards and was about to benefit from the propitious harvest conditions of the 1730s and to procreate at a rate unsurpassed within recent memory (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Population growth accelerated and had a market-expanding effect in a Boserupian fashion, triggering the industrial revolution; the roots of this transformation, however, extended back into the Middle Ages (Jones 1981; Boserup 1981). Thus the factors that have been regarded as crucial in unleashing the industrial revolution, such as the rise in the rate of saving, are less important within the framework presented here than the acceleration in the growth of a well-nourished population in a relatively developed economy.

In the United States, significant variation regarding the quality of public goods exists across local governments. In this article, I seek to explain these patterns. I argue that economically and racially homogenous communities are collectively willing to invest more resources in public goods relative to diverse communities. I provide evidence in support of this claim by analyzing the relationship between race and income diversity and the share of community security and education that is provided by private entities. I find that as racial diversity and income inequality increase, the share of private security guards and white children enrolled in private school is higher.

Between the 1960s and 1990s a series of urban redevelopment projects in Manchester radically transformed ethnic settlement in the city. The ward of Moss Side, which had been a gateway for Caribbean and African immigrants, experienced repeated slum clearances in which whole communities were relocated and large tracts of housing stock were demolished and redesigned. The relationship between these physical and demographic changes has been overshadowed by the persisting stigmatization of Moss Side as a racialized “ghetto,” which has meant that outsiders have constructed the area as possessing a fixed and homogenous identity. This article uses geographic information systems in conjunction with local surveys and archival records to explore how the dynamics of immigrant mobility within Moss Side were shaped by housing stock, external racism, family strategies, and urban policy. Whereas scholarship on ethnic segregation in Britain has focused on the internal migration of ethnic groups between administrative areas, using areal interpolation to connect demographic data and the built environment reveals the intense range of movements that developed within the variegated urban landscape of Moss Side.

In this article we use network theory to explain the adoption of the Protestant Reformation. We use new historical data on the connections between Hansa towns that allow us to conduct the first social network study of the Protestant Reformation. Based on an analysis of cities in central and Western Europe between 1517 and 1530, we find evidence for diffusion through both simple and complex contagion. Our operationalization of network data based on medieval Hansa Diets points to the complex association between tie weights (i.e., the strength of ties) and numbers of ties in network diffusion. Using optimal tuning parameters for simple adoption models, we show that a combination of strong ties and weak ties fostered Protestant adoption in northern cities.

The early decades of the nineteenth century are widely recognized as formative years for the English working class. During the first two decades a wide variety of trade groups struggled at both the regional and national levels to protect artisanal rights and unmuzzle the legally muted voice of labor (Prothero 1979; Randall 1991; Rule 1986; E. P. Thompson 1966). Success was at best uneven. Revocation of the Statute of Apprentices in 1813–14 was an alarming defeat for artisans who sought to protect their trade privileges from growing capitalist incursions. The successful repeal of the Combination Laws that had barred trade unions in 1824 encouraged a clamoring among many of London’s trades to resuscitate wage rates, precipitating strikes in many industries. Also emerging from the lean years was a new understanding of the relations between capital and labor. “The interests of the masters and men,” London’s Trades’ Newspaper pronounced, “are as much opposed to each other as light is to darkness” (Hollis 1973: 45).

Past empirical research into the history of racially motivated mob violence in the American South has relied almost exclusively on the record of completed lynchings. In this article, we propose that a better definition of “racialized terrorism” would also include the record of lynching threats. Using a newly available confirmed inventory of lynching threats for 11 Southern states from 1880 to 1929, we demonstrate that the total quantum of racialized terrorism nearly doubles when completed lynchings and lynching threats are combined, with some states and decades affected more than others. Parallel analyses suggest that previous conclusions regarding important environmental predictors of Southern mob violence, such as agricultural specialty, political party strength, and racial population composition, are robust to an expansion of racialized terrorism to include threatened lynchings. However, sufficient differences are found between the predictors of completed and threatened lynchings to suggest the need for future researchers to consider broadening the measurement of racialized terrorism.

As much as any other site in the nineteenth century, Francophone Lower Canada saw immense waves of popular petitioning, with petitions against British colonial administration attracting tens of thousands of signatures in the 1820s. The petition against Governor Dalhousie of 1827–28 attracted more than 87,000 names, making it one of the largest mass petitions of the Atlantic world on a per-capita scale for its time. We draw upon new archival evidence that shows the force of local organization in the petition mobilization, and combine this with statistical analyses of a new sample of 1,864 names from the anti-Dalhousie signatory list. We conclude that the Lower Canadian petitioning surge stemmed from emergent linguistic nationalism, expectations of parliamentary democracy, and the mobilization and alliance-building efforts of Patriote leaders in the French-Canadian republican movement. As elsewhere in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, the anti-Dalhousie effort shows social movements harnessing petitions to recruit, mobilize, and build cross-cultural alliances.

Prefamine Irish living standards have proved enigmatic. They are intriguing because they hold the key to understanding the trajectory of economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century. They have remained elusive because of the paucity of available information. Using Australian data, this paper examines regional trends in Irish-born female convict heights, identifying divergent tendencies between west and east that left Ulster women the tallest in the land.

Assessment of the extent of civilian casualties during times of conflict presents significant challenges in data collection, quantitative methods, interpretation, and presentation. In this article, we briefly consider the motivation and use of casualty accounting and review historical approaches to these questions with illustrative comments on the US Civil War, World War I, World War II, and other conflicts. We provide an overview of several accounting methodologies including excess mortality, epidemiologic surveys, direct and indirect counts, multiple list estimation, and crowdsourcing. We reflect on the evolution toward modern approaches to casualty assessments, permitted by both a deeper understanding of human rights and by contemporaneous technological advances in data collection techniques. Our goal is to introduce several areas of research that deserve attention from social science historians and statisticians.

Historical analyses of demographic phenomena from the past few decades have provided new insights requiring the reassessment of a number of traditional paradigms, such as the venerable demographic transition theory. Fertility studies have dominated this research, but there is a growing interest in the interrelationships of several demographic variables, such as family formation and infant mortality (Knodel and Hermalin 1984; Nault et al. 1990; Potter 1988a; Working Group on the Health Consequences of Contraceptive Use and Controlled Fertility 1989a, 1989b). This article falls into the latter category; in it we investigate the relationship between childbearing (fertility) and infant mortality in the Utah frontier population during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

History is full of reactions and revolutions from which even the scholarly world is not immune. The revision in French economic history during the last two decades affords an example of one of the most complete turnabouts in recent scholarship. In the 1940s and 1950s a number of scholars, mainly American, believed that the problem to be explained was French economic retardation in the nineteenth century. Much was written about the unenterprising character of French entrepreneurs, anticapitalist social attitudes, the persistence of the family firm and the small farm, and other sociocultural characteristics that were deemed inimical to economic growth. The Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard (1948-1958) provided inspiration for analysing French entrepreneurial failure in terms of Parsonian sociology, and the classic retardationist view of French industrial development remains enshrined in David S. Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), originally written during the 1950s for the Cambridge Economic History of Europe.