The belief that the social class position an individual inherits at birth is not itself a prime determinant of subsequent personal achievement is a cherished part of American democratic tradition. Social historians attempting to measure whether the mobility opportunities so eagerly sought by immigrants were in fact realized have looked at the occupations of immigrant men and their sons. Evidence from such diverse areas as Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New York City indicates that at the turn of the century many men did experience upward occupational mobility; some groups, notably blacks, did not fare as well as did white immigrants, and not all white immigrants experienced the same rates of occupational improvement (Bodnar et al. 1982; Lieberson 1980; Model 1988; Thernstrom 1964, 1973; Zunz 1982). This essay turns to the first decade of the twentieth century to explore some of the factors contributing to socioeconomic mobility.

According to David Mayhew (2002: 58-59, 35), “Neither statistics nor stories bear out the canonical realignments calendar of 1860, 1896, and 1932,” and “no certifiable electoral realignment has occurred since 1932.” This study examines the national division of the U.S. presidential vote and House of Representatives seats from 1868 to 2004 to determine whether realignments occurred in 1896, 1932, and 1968 and whether other elections might be better designated as realignments. The analysis demonstrates the onset of realignments in the 1894-96 and 1930-32 elections and a staggered realignment in recent decades. Republicans registered significant durable gains in presidential voting starting in 1968 and in congressional elections in 1994. The analysis also finds evidence of a realignment favoring the Democrats in 1874-76.

This paper examines the extent of local government support for the elderly, in the form of poor relief, in Victorian England. It presents newly constructed estimates of old age pauperism rates for each of England's ten registration divisions from 1861 to 1908, the year the Old Age Pension Act was adopted. My estimates show that the share of persons aged 65 and older receiving government assistance in the nineteenth century was far larger than most contemporaries, and many historians, believe. The share receiving poor relief declined after 1871, largely as a result of changes in relief administration, but on the eve of the adoption of the Old Age Pension Act more than one in five persons over 65 was in receipt of public assistance. In sum, government support for the elderly is not a post-welfare state phenomenon. Old age pauperism rates differed substantially across registration divisions and in general were higher in southern than in northern England. I present evidence that much of the north-south differential was due to differences in wage rates and employment opportunities and differences in the administration of poor relief, although differences in welfare customs might have played a role.

People in the Icelandic Sagas, and with them the narratives themselves, are impelled by powerful human passions: love, hate, pride, envy, fidelity. This is easy to see and easy to explain. In stories that are intended to captivate their audience, it is vital to spellbind listeners of both sexes and all ages with the excitement of eternal existential problems.

Yet there are other features in the sagas that modern cultural analysis has considered less dependent on the requirements of the literary genre and thus more revealing expressions of the Scandinavian mentality. These include the legalism that pervades the sagas (see, e.g., Gurevich 1985; Hastrup 1985; Byock 1988). One is struck by the extent to which people think and argue in legal terms. This applies to men in conflict, to men demonstrating their power and influence.

This presidential address argues that capitalism must be understood as an epochal phenomenon, that is, as a historically specific and temporally limited form of life with social and temporal dynamics that set it off from previous eras of history and that are not destined to last indefinitely. Capitalism's most distinctive feature—sustained secular economic growth in per capita terms—has brought great benefits to the human race, not only increasing economic well-being but endowing people with bigger, stronger, and more resilient bodies and radically increased life spans. It has also made possible an astounding increase in society's technical, educational, and scientific powers. The experience of sustained economic growth has led to a particular sense of time as open-ended and progressive—making possible modern historical consciousness. Meanwhile, the relentless commodification of social relations under capitalism has tended to free people from domination based on personal status, but also to subject them to more abstract forms of domination. Creative destruction, which is capitalism's key mechanism for producing sustained economic growth, has also produced an unmasterable cyclical pattern of boom and bust, creating new forms of insecurity at the same time that it tends to lift people out of absolute poverty. Capitalist development has always been spatially uneven. There is reason, however, to think that the capitalist era may be approaching its end. The shape of the postcapitalist era will depend on how well we collectively make use of the powers that the capitalist era has produced—science and technology, to be sure, but also the critical historical consciousness that lies at the heart of social science history.

Historians often despair of their ability to write histories of child murder, because the crime was easy to commit and conceal. Even today, coroners can determine only in rare instances whether a deceased infant or newborn was suffocated or died of natural causes (Knight 1996: 441–44, 345–60). No reliable test can determine, once decomposition has begun, whether a deceased newborn ever took a breath; and suffocation, unlike strangulation, leaves no physical marks, unless excessive pressure is applied to the face or lips. A murderer needed but a few moments to smother a child and could claim that the child was stillborn, had been accidentally overlain, or had died from natural causes. Unwanted pregnancies could be kept from public notice with the help of family or friends, especially pregnancies that came to term in late winter or early spring, when expectant mothers could live quietly out of the public eye or stay wrapped in heavy clothing. In New England, a large proportion of suspected neonaticides—nearly a quarter—occurred in April or early May, “mud season” in the Yankee vernacular,when people emerged from their long winter “hibernation.”

In March 1900, William Edward Burghart Du Bois addressed the third annual meeting of the American Negro Academy on “the present outlook for the dark races of mankind.” He cautioned, though

This article measures inequality at the provincial level in Spain for different benchmark years between 1860 and 1930. It then empirically assesses the relationship between economic growth and inequality. The results confirm that, although growing incomes did not directly contribute to reducing inequality, at least during the early stages of modern economic growth, other processes associated with economic growth such as the rural exodus to urban and industrial centers, the demographic transition, and the spread of literacy, among others, notably improved the situation of the bottom part of the population.

The rise of the global university is often associated with the concomitant wave of late twentieth-century neoliberalism and privatization and correlated with universities embracing “corporate” models of governance. However, it is a phenomenon with roots in the earliest years of the Cold War that emerged out of a set of institutions and policies with diplomatic rather than explicitly economic aims. Notable among these were the programs aimed at bringing foreign students and scholars to the United States and exporting American-style educational experiences abroad. While only a fraction of these foreign visitors had the US government as their primary financial sponsor, they as a class became the object onto which political values of a particular era were projected, from the postwar internationalism of the Truman years to the Great Society liberalism of Lyndon B. Johnson to the free market ethos of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The decentralized and privatized means by which policy makers administered these measures obscured the degree to which they influenced the shape of the higher education system and their wider impacts on the American economy and society. This article explores international educational exchange as a critical element of American universities’ evolving public identity during the Cold War and post–Cold War periods and as an example of the governmental use of the university as an agent of state power and as a tool of political ideology.

Many recent studies of interlocking directorates have paid special attention to the possible existence of interest groups or cliques within the corporate world (Allen, 1978; Dooley, 1969; Mariolis, 1977; Mintz and Schwartz, 1981a; Mizruchi, 1982b). The search for economic groupings of this type dates from the early part of the twentieth century when financial domination of industrial firms was thought to characterize American business. Bank control theory, in particular, posited the coalescence of individual companies into a number of competing groups, each organized around banking interests. Thus, Baran and Sweezy (1966: 17) define interest groups as “a number of corporations under common control, the locus of power being normally an investment or commercial bank or a great family fortune.”

Early work in this area, therefore, attempted to identify separate groups of companies organized around either family or financial interests. Rochester (1936), for example, used information on stock ownership, banking dependence, service relationships, capital investments, and joint ventures to identify many autonomous cliques headed by founding families. Sweezy (1939) used a similar set of criteria to identify eight dominant financial interest groups. Perlo (1957) replicated these results 20 years later.

It is now commonplace to acknowledge that self-sufficiency never really existed in North American farming. From the earliest years of settlement farmers had some degree of orientation to the market. Even on the frontiers of most recent settlement, farms generally could not be characterized as being of a wholly subsistence nature. Nor was there some mystic moment when agriculture shifted from self-sufficiency to commercialization. The real issue is the extent of commercialization at any time and place. One way of examining that is to determine the extent to which specialization and resort to the market was feasible, through assessing the magnitude of marketable surpluses. How much did farms typically produce over and above the consumption needs of their own households, and how did that vary according to circumstances?

Some of the most severely affected communities in the world during the 1918–19 influenza pandemic were in Labrador and Alaska. Although these two regions are on the opposite ends of North America, a cultural continuum in the Inuit populations extends throughout the North American Arctic. Both regions contain other population groups, however, and because of these similarities and differences, a comparison of their experiences during the pandemic provides new insights into how culture and environment may influence patterns of spread of infectious disease. We describe here analyses of the patterns of influenza mortality in 97 Alaska communities and 37 Labrador communities. The Alaska communities are divided into five geographic regions corresponding to recognized cultural groups in the region; the Labrador communities are separated into three regions that vary in the degree of admixture between European and indigenous (primarily Inuit) groups. In both Alaska and Labrador mortality was substantially higher than the worldwide average of 2.5–5 percent. Average mortality ranged from less than 1 percent to 38 percent at the regional level in Alaska and from 1 percent to 75 percent at the regional level in Labrador with up to 90 percent mortality in some local communities in both Alaska and Labrador. A number of factors influencing this heterogeneous experience are discussed, including the impact of weather and geography; attempts to protect communities by implementing quarantine policies; accessibility of health care; nutritional deficiencies; cultural factors, such as settlement patterns, seasonal activities, and ethnicity; and exposure to earlier outbreaks of influenza or other diseases that may have increased or lessened the impact of influenza in 1918–19.

The national petitioning campaign for parliamentary reform in 1816–17 was the biggest such movement before Chartism. It generated more than 700 local petitions with approaching a million signatures, representing perhaps 25 percent of adult males and extending the political nation well into the working classes. It was particularly strong in the Lancashire manufacturing districts, where economic grievances such as hunger and exploitation were converted through petitioning into arguments for political reform. The moving figure was Major John Cartwright, a veteran reformer who emerges as a more radical figure than usually supposed. The rejection of so many petitions by Parliament provided a legitimation for remonstrance and resistance, feeding through into extraparliamentary protests such as the march of the Manchester “Blanketeers” in 1817 and the mass platform movement of 1819 and “Peterloo.” The research combines a study of the petitions and the radical press with a close examination of the Home Office material, yielding insights into both grassroots organization and the strategies of the authorities, local and national. While the strategy of mass action was defeated by repression, the right of the unenfranchised masses to engage in political petitioning was conceded in principle long before the advent of formal democracy.

Over the last four decades, historians and social scientists have become increasingly interested in the way in which information about stature might be used to explore the impact of environmental factors on the physical growth and well-being of past populations. A particular problem encountered by many researchers is that height data is only available for selected populations, typically military recruits or those admitted to correctional institutions. Evidence from Australian military and prison records demonstrate how the two social groups, soldiers and prisoners, differed from each other and from the wider population in terms of age, birthplace, occupation, and stature. Different patterns of observable characteristics conceal additional differences in intergenerational experience. We trace male prisoners and soldiers born between 1870 and 1899 in Tasmania to their birth records and thence to the marriages of their parents. This allows us to contrast social and occupational change from father to son for both prisoners and soldiers. We conclude that evidence arising from these institutionalized populations can be used to estimate wider societal trends, although caution needs to be exercised.

This paper explains election fraud historically in the case of Sweden, drawing on original data from second-instance election petitions filed in 1719–1908. These petitions reveal systematic procedural violations committed by local election officials toward the end of the Age of Liberty in the eighteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, fraud had been largely purged from Swedish elections, and most petitions instead concerned unclear regulations pertaining to suffrage and eligibility criteria. I argue that this development cannot be explained by changes in electoral rules, the degree of competitiveness, or shifts in economic development or inequality. Instead, the ebb and flow of electoral fraud in Sweden could best be understood as stemming from the professionalization of the bureaucracy in combination with the extent to which elections were partisan. This novel mechanism for generating election fraud is corroborated qualitatively in a within-case longitudinal analysis and from quantitative data on city elections in 1771. I argue that similar processes may explain the rise and fall of election fraud historically in other established Western democracies, such as Britain and the United States.

In the wake of Hawaii's annexation by the United States, congressmen engaged in a series of intense debates about the suffrage laws that would govern the new territory. This article documents how these 1900 congressional debates contributed to a growing schism between the territorial definition of the state and the sociopolitical definition of the nation. The state officially expanded beyond the North American continent while the definition of the nation remained racially restrictive. A simultaneous espousal of inclusive, universalistic principles and exclusive, racist preferences characterized efforts among European American policy makers and political observers to exercise political domination over indigenous Hawaiians while, at the same time, maintaining white control of political power.

Historical accounts of the evolution of child labor are limited to the United States and to the core European economies. The experience of countries outside the prosperous European core has rarely been investigated. This paper draws on data from censii, labor force, and household surveys and qualitative information such as the testimonies of various stakeholders and news articles to provide an analysis of the evolution of child labor in Portugal. The Portuguese experience is set against the backdrop of the country's economic structure and economic growth, demographic changes, educational expansion and schooling, and labor legislation. Our assessment suggests that the long-run evolution of child labor in Portugal was determined mainly by the needs of the economic structure of the country and it was the progressive adoption of skill-biased technologies that pushed children away from work. While the passage of compulsory schooling and minimum working-age laws may have provided additional impetus, they were not the main drivers as changes in these laws tended to follow declines in child labor.

Quantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

This article refines our understanding of abolitionism as “the first modern social movement” through a microhistory of abolitionism in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British town. Examining requisitions, which collected signatures calling on a mayor to convene public meetings to launch parliamentary petitions or other associational activities, the article shows how antislavery mobilization in Plymouth grew amongst a multiplying variety of religious, political, cultural, and economic institutions. Through a prosopography of those initiating antislavery petitions, an analysis of the other requisitions they supported, and qualitative evidence from leading abolitionists’ personal papers, the article details the ways local leaders raised petitions for a national campaign. Civic and religious dynamism at this local level facilitated new forms of contentious mobilization on national and imperial issues. The article therefore directs causal attention to those socioeconomic changes that underpinned the associational cultures of abolitionism.

Since 1950, the world’s urban labor force has expanded dramatically, a process that has been accompanied by a large increase in informal employment. Accounts of these phenomena generally assume that urban workers without formal work are mostly recent migrants from the countryside. This article shows that outside of China, most of the growth of the world’s urban workforce has been the consequence of demographic expansion rather than rural-to-urban migration. A large portion of the world’s growing urban-born workforce has ended up in informal employment. I develop a concept of demographic dispossession to explain the relatively autonomous role demographic growth has played, first, in the proletarianization of the global population and, second, in the informalization of the urban workforce. I then explore the reasons why demographic growth in low- and medium-income countries tended to be more rapid and urban than demographic growth had been historically in the high-income countries.