The Question Of the relative efficiency of agricultural production within the institutional framework of slavery flared in the 1970s. Fogel and Engerman (1971, 1977) found antebellum Southern agriculture to have been considerably more productive than previously thought. Although this aspect of their finding became generally accepted, the controversy focused on just how efficient slave production actually was compared to Northern agriculture (David and Temin, 1974; David et al., 1976; Schaefer and Schmitz, 1979; Wright, 1979).

This essay probes two matters. First, it establishes the extent and pattern of partisan-based dissent on the California Supreme Court during the so-called “party period” of American history, the years from roughly 1840 to 1920 (McCormick, 1979). It concludes that the concept of judicial independence retained great vitality despite a strongly partisan scheme of accountability. Second, it suggests that constitutional arrangements and environmental conditions were important in conditioningjudicial behavior. While these findings are preliminary, they nonetheless constitute an important first step toward unraveling the character of California’s and the nation’s judicial cultures during this extraordinary period of party development (Hall, 1984).

The Committee on Historical Studies was established in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in 1984. The Graduate Faculty has long emphasized the contribution of history to the social sciences. Committee on Historical Studies (CHS) courses offer students the opportunity to utilize social scientific concepts and theories in the study of the past. The program is based on the conviction that the world changes constantly but changes systematically, with each historical moment setting the opportunities and limiting the potentialities of the next. Systematic historical analysis, however, is not merely a diverting luxury. Nor is it simply a means of assembling cases for present-oriented models of human behavior. It is a prerequisite to any sound understanding of processes of change and of structures large or small.

Migration has long been recognized as an important mechanism for allowing populations to adjust to changing economic conditions (Goldstein and Goldstein, 1981; Findley, 1977, 1982). Massive population movements from rural to urban locations were an integral part of the European modernization process, as were movements to hitherto undeveloped frontier regions including ones overseas. Rapid urban growth, due in part to migration, has more recently characterized many of the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.