Since the late 1960s, the study of school attendance in the nineteenth century has been one of the most vigorous research interests of social historians in the field of educational history. One line of research has investigated the growth of the institution of schools, the “rise of mass schooling,” using enrollment rates as a key indicator (Field, 1976, 1979, 1980; Fishlow, 1966; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1974). Another line has been more interested in the social distribution of schooling, exploring how rates of attendance differed across time and across such social divisions as age, gender, race, class, religion, and ethnicity (Denton and George, 1974; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1980; Katz, 1972, 1975; Katz and Davey, 1978; Soltow and Stevens, 1981; Thernstrom, 1964; Troen, 1973; Vinyard, 1972).

Since the publication in 1936 of Blake McKelvey’s American Prisons (1972), social historians have developed a sizeable body of work that traces, and in some cases tries to explain, the evolution of U.S. penal institutions. These studies are important for what they tell us about perceptions of social problems in the past. They also have policy implications, indicating the historical roots of current dilemmas and alternative approaches to penal problems. Nearly all of these studies are limited, however, by their blindness to gender differences between prisons for men and women. Written mainly by men, prison histories have focused nearly exclusively on male prisoners. Perhaps their authors would argue that this bias is natural and insignificant since over time the vast majority of prisoners have been male. But by overlooking the variable of gender, prison historians have ignored an important influence on the nature and development of penal institutions.

R. J. Collingwood compares the historian to a detective. Both, in his opinion, are dissatisfied with what is contained in the documents and engage in a search for hidden or lost information. Both follow their intuition, guided by scientific positivist methods, and base their work on hypotheses and the strict logic of question and answer (1980: 253-269). In recent years the research laboratories of detectives and historians almost simultaneously have been replenished by quantitative methods of analysis, which substantially increased the possibility of achieving the desired goals: to find hidden information and go beyond the bounds of what is directly contained in the documents.

Contract Labor played a critical role both in financing European trans-Atlantic migration and in providing a hirable labor force to work the estates of the New World. During the seventeenth century at least three-quarters of the Chesapeake colonists arrived under some form of short term contract (Walsh, 1977: 111). By the American Revolution, a majority of English, German, and southern Irish emigrants still used servant contracts to finance their migration to Pennsylvania (Grubb, 1985). For the year 1773, 61% of the 387 southern Irish immigrants, 18% of the 1,420 Ulster immigrants, 25% of the 382 Scotch immigrants, and 52% of the 174 English immigrants to Pennsylvania entered servitude. For the years 1771–1773, out of 747 German adult male immigrants to Pennsylvania 58% entered servitude. For 1785–1804, 45% of the 7,837 German immigrants to Pennsylvania entered servitude.

Internal migration remains one of the most important issues in European social history. Our entire concept of community and of social life rests on certain assumptions about residential stability, yet these assumptions have only been inadequately tested for most historical periods and in most places. We now know that previously accepted characterizations of the stable peasant community are erroneous, for numerous studies have documented the great population flux in much of western Europe in preindustrial times (Schofield, 1970; Tilly, 1978). Yet, for the most part, our ideas about life in communities of the past tend to rest on an assumption of a bedrock of residential stability to which the limited population movement is anchored.

Historians of mid-nineteenth-century American politics all know it to be an era when intraparty factional rivalry was almost as bitter as the struggle between parties. Recent studies, such as Joel Silbey’s A Respectable Minority (1977) and Michael Perman’s The Road to Reaction (1984), concentrate on disagreements between “legitimists” and “purists” in both parties. My own A Compromise of Principle (Benedict, 1975) stressed factionalism among Republicans in the 1860s, while the first chapter of Robert D. Marcus’s study of political structure in the Gilded Age, Grand Old Party (1971), is entitled “Faction.”

The nineteenth century saw the beginning of large-scale migration of population from western Europe to various countries of the world. North and South America had proven hospitable in previous centuries and the southern tip of Africa presented an equable climate as well as strategic location. The islands of the southern seas reached by Cook and Van Diemen proved equally attractive if more remote. In retrospect it seems inevitable that, with the exception of South America, they were bound to be English-speaking. Even South America had its British farming colonists at one stage. In 1826 just under two hundred Highland Scots embarked for Topo in the highlands of Colombia (United Kingdom, 1827). Significantly, one hundred and two of them were under fourteen years of age.

The Rapid increase in public spending for white schools that occurred in North Carolina after the turn of the century led to a large racial disparity in the amount spent per child by 1910. Previous scholars have attributed this racial difference in school spending to the disfranchisement of the black voter (Margo, 1982). It was argued that once blacks were prevented from voting, the white members of the school boards were able to divert the public funds which were initially allocated for the education of black children. The most widely accepted version of this theory is credited to Horace Mann Bond (1934) who studied education expenditures for black children in Alabama. Bond argued that the governmental level at which schools were financed was important in determining the racial division of public school funds since the white members of the county school boards were particularly inclined to divert the funds allocated by the state government. The state funds which were allocated to the local school boards in Alabama were not required to be shared equally between black and white students. After blacks had been disfranchised, the county school boards responded by allocating a disproportionate share of these state funds for the education of white children.

Historical social mobility research has played an important part in the coming-of-age of “the new social history” as an active arena for empirical social research. The contribution of this social mobility research tradition can be traced in part to its success in providing three critical elements that lie at the heart of most coherent social science research traditions. These critical elements include the following: 1) the identification of important substantive questions that are susceptible to empirical analysis; 2) the identification of data sources that can provide empirical information relevant to these questions, and 3) the provision of a set of methodological operations and research practices that link substantive questions to the results of empirical analysis. The importance of Thernstrom’s (1964, 1973) landmark works on historical mobility in providing these fundamental elements is reflected in the widespread adoption of his research design by subsequent empirical studies of occupational mobility in historical settings.

From Olympus, Samuel Eliot Morison (1965) reminds us that “we owe admiration as well as pity to the simple folk of America who suffered so grievously under the depression.” And no doubt we do. But those who would understand the long-term political and social impacts of the Great Depression must gain a fuller understanding of the ways in which Americans made sense of their Depression experiences. The critical passage through Roosevelt’s Hundred Days largely satisfies most historians’ appetites for understanding the impact of the Great Depression upon Americans’ personal attitudes. The effects of the whole Depression era upon the ways Americans felt are assumed to be congruent with changes in political institutions and ethos. In particular, the durable partisan realignment and its concomitant “New Deal coalition” occurring in the middle of the Depression calls up images of major modifications in attitudes. Thus Clubb, Flanigan, and Zingale (1980) explain the endurance of the New Deal realignment with reference to the “vital and active concern for a suffering citizenry” that FDR and the New Deal came to connote.

The basis of most historical research including social science history is quite unsystematic. This characteristic results from the ways in which researchers find and choose historical sources for examination. Despite claims to be systematic, historians still tend to identify relevant evidence in impressionistic ways. Many social science histories involve the rigorous study of a source happily discovered by chance. Of course, access to the past has never been easy. Researchers have always lamented a presumed lack of “essential” records. Nonetheless, the actual ways we discover existing evidence have received little attention despite the fact that this process is fraught with difficulties and hidden dangers especially for researchers of a social scientific bent. Do not the presuppositions of social science history extend to the identification of sources? How do we know when we have all the “relevant data” for a particular project? Can systematic data analysis be justifiably built upon unsystematic identification of sources?

The historiographical hegemony of the “new” social history in recent years reflects, and undoubtedly has contributed to, the decline of scholarly interest in nineteenth-century Canadian political history. What we know now of federal and provincial parties, politics, politicians, electorates, political leadership, and parliamentary behaviour in Victorian Canada derives from the studies of a generation of scholars whose major contributions to the literature were made in the 1960s, the work of a handful of more recent commentators notwithstanding. But as Allan Bogue has observed in a study of the recent historiography of American political history, new sources, methodologies, and intellectual preoccupations have created new opportunities for the re-examination and re-interpretation of political history. He cites “middle-range” re-interpretations of local and regional political elites, based on pro-sopographical analyses, as a necessary first step toward more “behavioral” studies (Bogue, 1980: 243–245). Elsewhere, students of British political history have been much interested in the intersections of the “new” social history and political history, especially in the relationship between the structures and attitudes of local societies and the political characteristics and parliamentary behaviour of their elected representatives (Aydelotte, 1977; Moore, 1967; Clarke, 1971).

In the reichstag election of June 1920, Germany’s Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) more than doubled its 1919 vote, while the Social Democratic Party (SPD) declined precipitously. Coming only nineteen months after the establishment of a German republic, the election indicated widespread discontent with the governments led by the Social Democrats, who had assumed power in November 1918. In Essen, located in the center of the Ruhr and dominated by coal mines and the giant Krupp works, the SPD was almost eliminated as a political force (Essen, Amt für Statistik und Wahlen, n.d.).

Many Historians of the social aging process have focused primarily on the experiences of aging white men. A prime example is provided in the seminal work of David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978). In tracing the reversal in societal attitudes toward the aged, from gerontocratic to gerontophobic, Fischer argues that the authority of the elders in the eighteenth century was very great (1978: 220). Clearly, he was not referring to women for, as Fischer himself acknowledges, “no one would claim that colonial females exerted much political power.” And obviously, he was not including black male and female slaves or poor white men. Nor does his general theme of exultation apply to aging colonial widows who

It is an article of faith for social scientists that substantive considerations should guide the choice of research topics and dictate the selection of analytic tools, never the reverse. Most scholars share a certain disdain for colleagues who learn a new statistical technique and then apply it willy-nilly to every set of data within reach. Although we would not want, in general, to quarrel with the venerable maxim that technique should be the slave and not the master of substance, exceptions exist. In the Middle Ages a tremendous amount of scientific and creative energy was invested in the attempt to transform base metals into gold—surely an activity of great substantive interest but, ultimately, no payoff. On the other hand, vast new areas of scientific achievement were opened when someone built a better telescope and turned it on the stars or when cathode ray equipment, developed for other purposes, led to the discovery of X-rays. As Thomas Kuhn (1962) notes, increased precision in instrumentation is usually undertaken to test hypotheses under an existing paradigm. Yet these technical advances in measurement occasionally lead to surprising anomo-lies that open up entirely new substantive areas.

A casual observer may very well consider America’s dwellings in the period after independence as being homogeneous in character. A log cabin was a log cabin, after all, and Mount Vernon and Monticello, owned by famous leaders, were, rather, the exceptions that somehow prove the rule, or at least provide evidence that there was a second economic class consisting of only a few cases. The idea of a continuous distribution of housing values, from hovels to mansions, seems absent from a common perception of living conditions in the United States in its early, formative, years. A city’s exhibit of an original log cabin is presented as being an example of typical housing; a series of log cabins in an historical village often shows remarkable uniformity; and the Williamsburg reconstructions convey the impression that there was no significant variation in value between the homes belonging to a lawyer, a doctor, an artisan, or a day laborer. The subject of this paper is the determination of the degree of inequality in housing values that did, in fact, exist, as well as to demonstrate the shape of the configuration of those values. The data for this study are a result of the elaborate inventory of housing values which was made in the United States in 1798 for taxation purposes; almost every house in the entire country was evaluated carefully because a strongly progressive tax rate schedule was a prominent part of the law. We can determine exactly how much inequality existed by determining the numbers of houses in the various tax classes.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the United States was undergoing an intense period of rapid industrialization which produced dramatic effects on many social institutions. One such institution was the family. The roles and behaviors of the family members were being redefined in response to the changes that were occurring in the family’s economic environment. In particular the family was called on to devise new income producing strategies through the allocation of its household labor resources. The utilization of such supplemental income sources as wives, children, and/or boarders was common during this period.