In a Recent Critical review of sociological perspectives on historical problems, Skocpol observed, “Until the 1970s, ‘historical sociology’ was not a phrase one often, if ever, heard in conversations among sociologists in the United States” (Skocpol, 1984: 356). Of course there was a good deal of prior historical work by sociologists, some of which Skocpol herself goes on to cite. Yet, by her phrasing, she has inadvertently raised a question about the place of history in the discipline of sociology. Like almost all sociologists who use historical materials or perspectives, Skocpol sees reason to complain about the failure of sociology to give a larger place to history. But for me, a prior issue, in the spirit of a historically minded sociology, involves discovering what happened to the name “historical sociology.” The naming of an activity, in this case historical sociology, and its performance—historical research and interpretations by sociologists—are quite distinct. The first task is to clarify their relationship.

Recent years have witnessed an intensification of interest in research on family behavior. Economists have increasingly turned their attention to analysis of the determinants and consequences of family decisions, and historians have become more concerned with charting trends in the composition and behavior of families in the past. Considerable study has been devoted to some key decisions in the life-cycle of individuals that affect the family, including the determination of the age at marriage and the timing of fertility. Another such decision that has been recognized but has received relatively little attention is that of when children departed from the parental home.

Recent theoretical and methodological developments within anthropological archaeology have transformed the discipline in such a way that archaeology is now beginning to make contributions to a number of areas of social science. Two of the more significant of these areas are the question of socioeconomic change over long time spans and the study of past economic systems. The former contribution arises out of the stratigraphie character of the archaeological record and the development of increasingly accurate methods of measuring past time. Archaeological studies typically deal with change over periods of time equivalent to or even longer than Braudel’s (1980) “longue durée” (e.g., Sanders, Parsons, and Santley, 1979; Blanton et al., 1981), and many archaeologists see this diachronic social perspective as the primary contribution of archaeology to social science knowledge (Plog, 1973). The second major contribution of archaeology—the study of past economic systems—is made possible by archaeologists’ reliance upon material culture. Beyond the obvious link between material objects and the study of ancient technology, material culture can be quite revealing about many types of economic activities as well as other sociocultural phenomena (e.g., Gould and Schiffer, 1981). This focus on material objects is so crucial to archaeologists that some have suggested that the major social science contribution of the field is its concern with the relationship between behavior and material culture in modern as well as ancient societies (e.g., Rathje and Schiffer, 1982; Rathje, 1979).

I would like to examine two aspects of German scholarly emigration to the Western democracies, especially the United States and Great Britain. I do not necessarily seek to offer a full explanation of this complex historical and ideological issue, but rather an analysis that attempts to avoid the maze of sociological generalizing that has grown up around the politically inspired migration of scholars.

Let me state quite frankly that I am neither a devotee of the history of ideas approach nor an apologist for any particular group of exiles or their ideology. Rather, I seek to understand the common denominators, or better, the root elements that recently led René König (1984) to locate the source of the German sociological exodus in the virulent nationalism of the 1920s, and to argue that the fusion of conservative and radical elements in post-1933 rational socialism was a culmination rather than a cause of social scientific breakdown. As Otto Neurath put this plight: “We are like sailors who must rebuild their ships on the open sea without benefit of a dock, or an opportunity to select the best replacement parts” (Blum, 1985).

It has become clear that the onset of widowhood, perhaps more than any other event of the aging process, involves a dramatic change in the family status of older persons. Because many elderly are neither emotionally nor economically prepared for widowhood, the death of a spouse often requires a realignment of social and familial relationships, economic conditions, and living arrangements. The ability to cope with hardships associated with loss of spouse certainly may be enhanced or limited by living arrangements. Not only does the type of household indicate the individual’s sociodemographic status, it also gives us insight into the individual’s family life in old age. Widowhood may initiate the final stage of the family cycle when the widowed person, as the only household survivor, must either change residence or live alone. In either case, a reordering of kinship links or provision for formal assistance may be necessary.

As Dykstra and Silag (1985) have noted, the analysis of American frontier towns continues to yield a plethora of local histories that might provide an empirical basis for generalization, if a theoretical basis for comparative analysis might be offered. The development of a rigorous methodology for historiographie and statistical analysis has facilitated the accumulation of empirical evidence, but the analysis of local history has not advanced far beyond the initial debate regarding the basis for democratic governance (Taylor, 1956). Instead, two research traditions have developed—one seeking to identify the socio-cultural basis for community solidarity, the other focusing on the partisan struggles that shape democratic governance.

It is conventional in the social sciences to treat the worlds of theory and empirical analysis as separate and distant from one another, and the theory construction literature is replete with proposed solutions to the problem of “bridging the gap” between theory and empirical practice. But for purposes of understanding empirical research literatures, especially interdisciplinary literatures such as those in social history research, the more pressing problem may be separating out theoretical and observational elements within existing research practice. Whether we are trying to “bring theory in” to our research setting or trying to identify that which has already been embedded in the research of others, we are engaged in the construction of theoretical models. This paper begins with Murphey’s discussion of the “theory-laden” nature of historical research, and uses this as a stepping-stone into an elaboration of how theoretical model building can contribute to our understanding of empirical research in social history.

Over the ten years of its existence, the Social Science History Association has been a meeting place for groups in rebellion against the dominant orthodoxies of their disciplines. Thus it is fitting that an SSHA panel should assess the accomplishments and relationship of “social history” and “historical sociology,” two movements that have grown up as critiques of formerly dominant orientations in (respectively) the disciplines of history and sociology.

Political Conflict Over the past decade has brought about considerable scholarly attention to public attitudes regarding the rights of women. Some scholars have reexamined the suffrage movement during the progressive era to discover links with such recent developments as the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (McDonagh and Price, 1985).

The study of the origins of educational systems is a topic that has commanded the attention of both history and sociology. This disciplinary overlap arises because the origins of educational systems are seen as problematic. The “problem” about the origins of educational systems is highlighted most by the interdependence of historical timing and institutional form. The first denotes the historical point when provisions were established for some popular, and largely elementary instruction under the jurisdiction of the state. The second embraces both the hierarchical structure and pedagogical (curricular) content which educational systems assume. The two dimensions are closely linked, for the comparative lateness of formation can distinguish educational systems in significant ways from those which were formed early. Antecedent networks of instruction retain some presence and effects in spite of their legislative subordination to the state.

A Commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue should not mask the unwieldy complexity of “social science history,” this strange-sounding compound word invented to stress the equality of partners in their joint enterprise. Some of the benefits as well as the difficulties inherent in crossing disciplinary boundaries can be detected, from a historian’s point of view, in Theda Skocpol’s Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984) in which a group of young historical sociologists and two “sociologically acclimated social historians” reassess the work of major figures in the subfield of historical sociology. approached this book with considerable excitement, for at the time of its publication, I had just sent to press the manuscript of Reliving the Past (1985), a volume in which five historians of different regions of the world reappraise the use of social-scientific models in historical analysis, examine the ways in which these models are applicable to different geographic areas and take a fresh look at the place of social history within history. To add to my excitement, Charles Tilly, who contributed an essay on European social history to Reliving the Past, was one of the nine major figures whose work was examined in Vision and Method, a testament to the influential role this scholar has played in the two disciplines of sociology and history.

Economic Historians in the United States have begun to take up the study of tenant agriculture in that country from the perspective first of describing the characteristics of tenant farmers and their contracts, and second, of explaining the changes in tenancy over time and the spatial distribution of tenant farms at one specific point in time (e.g., Reid, 1973, 1976, 1979; Alston, 1981; Alston & Higgs, 1982; and Higgs, 1973).

This effort continues the work of earlier generations of historians and agricultural economists. In contrast, almost nothing has been done on tenant farming in Canada even though in Ontario in 1871 about 16% of all farms were tenant occupied with some census districts such as York having approximately 30% of their farms in the control of tenants (Canada, 1870-1871). For example R. L. Jones’s book (1946), which represents the most thorough study of Ontario’s agriculture before the 1880s, contains almost no reference to tenant agriculture.

Critical analysis is the basis of the liberal arts education, and computer analysis is so much a part of contemporary society that liberal arts majors need to learn to assess the veracity of computer-derived information just as they do the sources for a historical monograph. It is increasingly clear that humanists should acquire basic understandings of the use of the computer. Jobs for traditionally trained liberal arts majors are scarce, and computer skills will make history graduates more competitive in the job market. We are not necessarily suggesting that all historians understand “computerese,” or the way some computer users talk to one another. What is important for the historian, or for any humanistic scholar for that matter, is the ability to understand the algorithm, or in the language of the humanist, the logic of how a computer program operates to produce output. This is also essential if scholars in the humanities are to be able to understand and evaluate the new social science research.

Social Scientists use historical data. Historians use social science concepts. The intersection of these two disciplines, history and social science, has been a vibrant source of research questions over the last fifteen years but also raises the issue of how they are to be interrelated. The search for an answer to this question has resulted in the publication of Theda Skocpol’s Vision and Method in Historical Sociology and Olivier Zunz’s Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, which juxtapose the two words in different order. In Skocpol (1984) history modifies sociology; in Zunz (1985) social science modifies history. Both books are collections of articles. Skocpol’s volume contains nine reviews of the work of masters in this field along with an introduction and conclusion by the editor. Zunz’s has an introduction which reviews the literature of social history in five areas of the world: Western Europe, the United States, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and China. This review highlights the strength of Skocpol’s method and of Zunz’s commitment to analysis of non-Western societies but argues that both authors, in limiting their definition of the field to studies of production, ignore an equally vital topic for social analysis of the past, reproduction.

Canadian Political Analysts generally agree that nonvoters have played a decisive role in determining the outcome of elections in the twentieth century. Political scientists have identified categories of nonvoters with some degree of precision. They tell us that in twentieth-century Canada nonvoting is often related to such socioeconomic factors as education, occupation, and income. These ‘class’ indicators are, in turn, often associated with a low level of political information and a low sense of political efficacy. Age and sex have also been associated with nonvoting in the twentieth century. The very young and the very old are less likely to vote. And women are slightly less likely to vote than men. Some Canadian analysts have argued that Catholics, and, more specifically, French Canadian Catholics, vote less often than Protestants, and that farmers vote more consistently than do urban dwellers.

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 fourth president of our Association made a presentation totally different from those of his predecessors, stating that he wanted to interdict any presumption that such addresses ought to fit a particular mold. Subsequently, these addresses have been comfortingly varied—the eighth just not given at all in the cheery din of a great Chinese restaurant in Toronto. I feel free, therefore, to do exactly what I please today, and I appreciate the supportive precedents.

There may have been a time when one could characterize the difference between sociology and history in terms of sociological attention to generalization and theory in contrast to historical specificity. A quarter of a century ago, E. H. Carr (1961) was earnestly exorcising the ghost of Ranke from his discipline while C. Wright Mills (1956) was vehemently ranting against the twin devils of abstract empiricism and grand theory. Happily, we now only evoke the distinction between sociological universalism and historical particularism in required graduate classes or in ritualistic self-affirmations at professional meetings. When sociological books include chapters on Marc Bloch or E. P. Thompson and historical books liberally cite Marx, Weber, and Durkheim while urging social historians to seek higher levels of generalization, how do we explain the difference between the two disciplines to our poor confused graduate students?

SSHA was formed in the hope that if enough historians and social scientists could be brought together, they might fall in love and in due course produce offspring having the best features of both parents. Whether the issues that have come forth exemplify the best or the worst features of the parents is a matter of some disagreement into which I will not enter. It may be granted that a great deal of quantitative work has been done, most of which is uninspired, but inspiration is a rare thing, and at this stage perhaps it is enough of an achievement that quantitative work is being done at all. It seems to me, however, that we ought to be exploring other approaches in addition to the quantitative ones, and in particular that interesting work has been done in symbolic analysis. It is with the faint hope of clarifying some of the notions in this domain and of suggesting some topics for exploration that the following contribution is offered.

The idea of forming a new scholarly association has been generated in the lonely study of scholars hungry for supportive contact, in the interaction of kindred seekers in convention bars or bull sessions, and no doubt, in many other kinds of circumstances. The Social Science History Association began as an exercise in transmogrification, and although, in retrospect, its origin may appear to have been an act of secession, it was not intended as such. Institutional manifestation of what came to be called the “New Political History” was apparent as early as 1957 when a small group of historians interested in the political history of the American early national period met at Rutgers under the sponsorship of the Social Science Research Council to discuss the methodology of political history. The draft report of that conference, prepared by Richard P. McCormick (1957), rather accurately forecast significant developments during the next decade.