The articles in this section are based on a Social Science History Association roundtable organized in 2008 in response to Donna R. Gabaccia's presidential call “It's about Time: Temporality and Interdisciplinary Research” (see Gabaccia 2008; see also Gabaccia 2010). Her emphasis on questions of periodization resonated with concerns with which we had grappled for a decade. The questions that the roundtable and these articles address initially emerged from our experiences as teachers of a course on world history with a temporal frame of a few centuries (1450 to the present). But the course that really forced us to confront the challenges of periodization is one we introduced in the fall of 2009 on “the family from 10,000 BCE to the present.” In trying to connect research from around the globe on the domestic group as a site of world history to narratives that begin with human origins, we were struck by the inappropriate presumptions embedded in most conventional periodizations. Our inherited vocabulary of terms to describe eras, ranging from “the Neolithic revolution” to “early modern,” implicitly place all regions of the globe on a yardstick measured against European temporalities and based on activities typically gendered male.

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.

In this article three pathways into armed activism are identified among those who joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1972. The accounts of former volunteers generally suggest that for those who were already involved in the Republican movement before 1969, a trajectory of mobilization emerged because of the long-standing counterhegemonic consciousness present in their homes, which in turn strongly influenced them as committed Republican militants. For those who joined after 1969 and had previously been involved in other political activities, mobilization was a result of a particular transformative event that triggered the belief that armed struggle was the only approach capable of bringing change in the new sociopolitical situation of the time. For the majority, that is, those who joined after 1969 at a very young age without any previous involvement in organized networks of activism, it began as a more abruptly acquired sense of obligation to defend their own community and retaliate against the Northern Ireland establishment, the Loyalists, and the British army. Overall, the accounts of former volunteers generally suggest that Republican volunteers were fighting first and foremost to reclaim dignity, build honor, and instill a sense of pride in themselves and their community through armed activism. In these terms, the choice of joining the PIRA was justified not as a mere reproduction of an ideological alignment to the traditional Republican aim of achieving Irish reunification but as part of a recognition struggle. At an analytic level, this article illustrates the utility of a multimechanisms interpretative framework. And it contributes to broadening the empirical basis by presenting and analyzing a series of 25 semistructured interviews with former PIRA volunteers.

In agricultural settings, environment shapes patterns of settlement and land use. Using the Great Plains of the United States during the period of its initial Euro-American settlement (1880–1940) as an analytic lens, this article explores whether the same environmental factors that determine settlement timing and land use—those that indicate suitability for crop-based agriculture—also shape initial family formation, resulting in fewer and smaller families in areas that are more conducive to livestock raising than to cropping. The connection between family size and agricultural land availability is now well known, but the role of the environment has not previously been explicitly tested. Descriptive analysis offers initial support for a distinctive pattern of family formation in the western Great Plains, where precipitation is too low to support intensive cropping. However, multivariate analysis using county-level data at 10-year intervals offers only partial support to the hypothesis that environmental characteristics produce these differences. Rather, this analysis has found that the region was also subject to the same long-term social and demographic changes sweeping the rest of the country during this period.

I contend that we should remake conceptions of power and politics, taking off from the project of remaking “modernity.” Here, I perform a similar move for “power and politics,” core concepts for history and the human sciences, building on the foundational work of the 1970s and 1980s and bringing in key elements of institutionalist and culturalist critiques. The theories of the early days of social science history were usually materialist, and the character of state policies and political structures was understood to reflect the “balance of class forces,” interests to flow from class position, and power to work in a juridical vein, as “power over.” By the 1980s these common understandings were widely criticized. There were new emphases on the multiplicity of identities and structures of inequality, new questions about the adequacy of materialist accounts of politics. Dissatisfactions were also stimulated by “real-world” developments. However, we see a parting of the ways when it came to addressing these new political conditions and analytic challenges. Moves to “bring the state and other political institutions back in” have been focused on politics, while the scholars taking the various cultural turns have focused on power. The conceptualizations of power and politics have been sundered along with the scholarly communities deploying them. I address both communities and argue for new ways of understanding power and politics emerging from renewed encounters between institutionalist and culturalist analyses. Such encounters and the conceptual work that they will produce can help us reforge a productive alliance between history and the social sciences.

Ernest George Ravenstein’s influential “laws of migration” argued that short-distance and within-country moves were typically dominated by women. We use census microdata to take a fresh look at the relationship between gender and internal migration in late nineteenth-century Europe and North America. We argue that there was a significant flaw in Ravenstein’s key finding on gender and that this flaw has implications for more recent scholarship of the long-term “feminization of migration.” The apparent overrepresentation of women among internal migrants was due not to their higher propensity to move but to the much higher rate at which male migrants left the population, through either death or emigration. Men were just as likely to make internal moves as women were; the difference was that men did not remain in the population to be counted when the decennial census was conducted. Like Ravenstein’s “laws of migration,” this article relies primarily on data from the 1881 census of England and Wales. Whereas Ravenstein’s work was constrained by the contents of tables published by the UK Census Office in the 1880s, we are able to ask new questions by analyzing individual-level data files recently made available by the North Atlantic Population Project.

Research on political violence occurs in waves, generally corresponding to the successive swells of violence that in many ways define modern society. Critically, this violence is characterized as much by diversity as by uniformity. As each new spate in research on political violence has shown us, rarely can we generalize about either the aims or the repertoires of action of the purveyors of violence. Some similar mechanisms are in play, however, as violence develops from political conflicts between states and their opponents.

This suggestion comes from social movement studies, whose influence is increasing in the analysis of political violence. These studies developed especially from a critique of ‘terrorism studies,’ which emerged within security studies as a branch of international relations and have traditionally been more oriented toward developing antiterrorist policies than toward a social scientific understanding of political violence.

The disastrous prediction of an Alf Landon victory in the 1936 presidential election by the Literary Digest poll is a landmark event in the history of American survey research in general and polling in particular. It marks both the demise of the straw poll, of which the Digest was the most conspicuous and well-regarded example, and the rise to prominence of the self-proclaimed “scientific” poll. Why did the Digest poll fail so miserably? One view has come to prevail over the years: because the Digest selected its sample primarily from telephone books and car registration lists and since these contained, at the time, mostly well-to-do folks who would vote Republican, it is no wonder the magazine mistakenly predicted a Republican win. This “conventional explanation” has found its way into countless publications (scholarly and in the press) and college courses. It has been used to illustrate the disastrous effects of a poorly designed poll. But is it correct? Empirical evidence, in the form of a 1937 Gallup poll, shows that this “conventional explanation” is wrong, because voters with telephones and cars backed Franklin D. Roosevelt and because it was those who failed to participate in the poll (overwhelmingly supporters of Roosevelt) who were mainly responsible for the faulty prediction.

For historians, questions about what to call particular eras and how to conceptualize the temporal dynamics of change become particularly acute as we take on revisionist projects, such as writing and teaching feminist history, examining chronologically “deep” history, or placing history in a material as well as a social environment and in a global perspective. Temporal frameworks influence historical research even when it is located within a very limited time frame; temporalities and periodizations operate more explicitly in the teaching of survey courses. The particular periodization problems we focus on here emerged from teaching premodern world history with a focus on family and household dynamics. In trying to connect research on the domestic group as a site of world history with a historical narrative that begins with the emergence of human society and draws on evidence from around the globe, we were struck again and again by the problematic perspectives embedded in conventional periodizations. New directions in archaeological scholarship offer global historians insights and approaches with which to inform their temporal frameworks.

This article explores the intellectual and institutional contexts of the seminal ideas about the American research university expressed in Clark Kerr’s book The Uses of the University (1963). In particular, it suggests how Kerr’s relationship to the administrative science movement, an important thread of postwar American social science, shaped his concept of the university. It focuses special attention on an important yet little-known 1957 speech in which Kerr suggested that the university’s purpose was increasingly to “administer the present.” The article concludes by showing how the development of the University of California’s new campus at Irvine in the 1960s reflected his ideas about relating social science theory to administering the present.

From the early 1800s through the 1920s the image of the ideal domestic servant varied dramatically—native white women, European immigrant women, and black women. However, at all times the racial/ethnic identity of the domestic servant played a critical role. The transition from the casualness of “help” to the formality of the “domestic servant” relationship marked the historical moment in which a subordinate racial identity became a precondition of servanthood. The semantic change from help or hired girl to domestic servant reflected a more fundamental change in the nature, organization, and expectation of the work role. Using a comparative-historical approach, we provide a sociological analysis of how shifting labor patterns and societal demands led to the decline of help, the rise of domestic service, and the centrality of a racialized identity to the performance of household work during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The connection between political radicalization and political violence is often thought to follow “organic stages.” That is, radicalization is considered to be a progression leading to violence, after which time radicalization and violence evolve together dialectically. This ideal-typical process does correspond to historical evidence, and this article presents such evidence from the political contention in Palestine during the Mandate period. However, other historical evidence points to deviations from this ideal type. Evidence from political contention in pre-1921 Ireland and in pre-1960 Cyprus suggests two forms of such deviations. Irish history suggests that violence may be effectively introduced by political forces that at an earlier stage had not been part of the process of political contention at large; Cypriot history suggests that violence may be introduced through forces that were autonomous from the ongoing process of political contention even though organizationally part of it. The historical comparison at hand, furthermore, points to the increased role of historical contingency in the instances where the relation between political radicalization and political violence deviates from the ideal-typical form.

This article analyzes the interaction between theories of radicalization and state responses to militancy in India. Focusing on the interpretation of the increased frequency of terrorist attacks in Indian metropolises in the last decade, the article examines the narratives surrounding those classified as terrorists in the context of rising Muslim militancy in the country. Different state agencies operate with different theories about the links between processes of radicalization and terrorist violence. The scenarios of radicalization underlying legislative efforts to prevent terrorism, the construction of motives by the police, and the interpretation of violence by the judiciary all rely on assumptions about radicalization and violence. Such narratives are used to explain terrorism both to security agencies and to the public; they inform the categories and scenarios of prevention. Prevention relies on detection of future deeds, planning, intentions, and even potential intentions. “Detection” of potential intentions relies on assumptions about specific dispositions. Identification of such dispositions in turn relies on the context-specific theories of the causes of militancy. These determine what “characteristics” of individuals or groups indicate potential threats and form the basis for their categorization as “potentially dangerous.” The article explores the cultural contexts of theories of radicalization, focusing on how they are framed by societal understandings of the causes of deviance and the relation between the individual and society emerging in contemporary India. It examines the shift in the perception of threat and the categories of “dangerous others” from a focus on role to a focus on ascriptive identity.

Political boundaries are the criterion scholars use most often to define American suburbs; a problematic approach when applied to the late nineteenth century. Annexation distended the boundaries of nineteenth-century cities so far as to obscure broad swaths of suburban and rural districts within their limits. The absence of a literature about these “suburbs in the city” is problematic, because it encourages historical researchers to consider newly annexed territory as urban equivalents of older city districts. This article argues that under the generally accepted definition of suburb, the condition of nineteenth-century urban overbounding obstructs a full appreciation of the historical breadth, ubiquity, and composition of working-class residence outside the urban core. Analysis of the socioeconomic characteristics of regions with suburban population densities within the 1880 city limits of Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Newark, New Jersey; and St. Louis, Missouri, indicate that researchers have underestimated the degree and diversity of blue-collar suburbanization during this period.