The claim that contemporary historical scholarship has ignored the twentieth-century U.S. Congress is a great understatement. During the past two decades, most social and cultural historians minimized the study of government institutions, policy makers, and policies. They characterized these aspects of American history as elitist, irrelevant, and even illegitimate (Leff 1995; Leuchtenburg 1986).The ultimate villain in this scholarly narrative was Congress, considered to be an insulated haven for white male elites who sub-vert the democratic process in favor of vested interest groups.When Congress appeared in a few academic books, it was treated as an archaic institution that functions as either a road block or a rubber stamp to proposals that emanate from the executive branch or from mass social movements.Those interested in the modern history of Congress can turn only to the work of journalists such as John Jacobs (1995) and Richard Cohen (1999) who rely on political biography in attempts to understand the institution’s past.

This special issue on the working classes and urban public space presents readers with an opportunity to view new scholarship at the intersection of urban and working-class history and to explore the spatial dimensions of class, race, and gender analysis. The authors of the essays present us with important case studies of how the working classes in Latin America, Europe, and the United States defined, contested, and occupied public spaces, urban terrain designated for common or public transportation, communication, and economic exchange uses. In doing so, they define and implement the concepts of public space and the public sphere from a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, including those of urban sociology and cultural analysis. In all of the essays, public space has both political and rhetorical dimensions. Further, the essays analyze how working-classmen and women claimed these spaces–markets, streets, public squares, and churches–for their own use and how they defended this class terrain politically through public protest and debate.

Many geographers have argued for the need to incorporate change over time into their analyses (see, for example, Haggett 1965; Hägerstrand 1970; Thrift 1977;Marsh et al. 1988); however, changes to administrative boundaries often mean that demographic statistics collected at two different dates cannot be directly compared. This has made it very difficult to study longitudinal change without resorting to undesirable levels of aggregation, typically to county level in Britain or state level in the United States. This article describes a technique that makes significant advances toward eliminating this problem: a researcher using this technique can compare statistics by standardizing all relevant data on a single set of administrative units. My article builds on the work of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project (Gregory and Southall 1998) and uses net migration as an example.The geographical information system (GIS) is not yet complete, so the article focuses on the methodological issues. These issues could be applied to a wide range of problems in historical geography. More broadly, it is hoped that the article will give some idea of the potential for using GIS to analyze spatially referenced data in the context of social science history.

For the residents of the former model town of Pullman, Illinois, 1994 was an important year. In May, 100 years earlier, a strike had broken out that pitted workers at the Pullman Car Works against George M. Pullman and the company that bore his name. Before the strike finally collapsed in August, it shutdown railroad traffic across much of America, brought federal troops into Chicago and cities as far away as Los Angeles, and led to the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs, the president of the American Railway Union (ARU). It also brought to a close the long-standing debate on the most famous of the company’s social experiments: the model town located on Chicago’s far south side. Since 1880, George Pullman had trumpeted the architecturally and socially crafted town and life inside it as solutions for the problems of urban, industrial America, and large numbers of observers had concurred with that evaluation (Wright 1884; Smith 1995: 177–270; Reiff and Hirsch 1989: 104–6). For almost as long, its critics had excoriated the town as representing the worst excesses of a capitalist society where one man and his company could dominate every aspect of a worker’s life in their dual roles as landlord and employer (Ely 1885; Carwardine 1973 [1894]).

Once upon a time, historians and political scientists expended a great deal of effort in tracing the complex development of the United States Congress in the twentieth century—a time, especially from the 1930s onward, during which Congress faced a remarkable expansion in government activity as a surge of new concerns, foreign and domestic, and, as a result, an unprecedented load of business, all but overwhelmed the institution. During this same time, Congress’s role within the American political system has been Social Science transformed in the face of the rise of the imperial presidency, the Supreme Court’s insistence on changing rules of representation, and the consequent shift in the institution’s makeup and internal power structure. Finally, public perceptions of Congress, increasingly negative as they have become, have had some significant impact on the transformation of Congress within the American political system as well (Sundquist 1981; Harris 1993; Rieselbach 1994).

In the five centuries since Gutenberg introduced printing with movable type, Western society has been thoroughly infused by print culture.This culture, a complex mosaic of numerous factors, has recently become the focus of extensive historical research.The history of print culture, frequently referred to as the “history of the book,” concerns those aspects of a society that relate to the production, distribution, and reception of printed materials, whether canonical works of literature or ephemeral items such as newspapers and handbills. Authorship, publishing, regulation, bookselling, libraries, and reading are some of the aspects examined. Because print culture permeates all of society, the study of its history has captured the interest of a wide range of researchers: an array of historians of various types and periods (e.g., social, labor, cultural, and legal historians; historians of religion and ideas; and historians of science and technology), literary scholars (of various periods and genres), sociologists, information scientists and librarians, geographers, and bibliographers, among others. As might be expected, scholars of this diversity bring a wide breadth of perspectives to the subject.

The history of the city in twentieth-century Latin America can be seen as a long contest over the exercise of urban public space. While the nature of this space is often less physical than it is social and situational, the struggle between different elements of the city to manipulate its politics and control its daily life has often been violent, leaving deep imprints in the collective memories of places as culturally and physically diverse as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Havana, Bogotá, and Rio de Janeiro.

If approached from the perspective of contested space, the urban milieu offers an intriguing site for the historian interestedin exploring changing relations of power, class conflict, opposing visions of the future, breakdowns of social order, gendered spaces, health and disease, visual culture, spectacle and symbolic codes, and ultimately, the creation of community. Yet until the 1980s, most Latin American historians who were interestedin these themes confined their studies to the countryside. As late as 1975, Jorge Hardoy (1975:44) could write that “the urban history of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth is virtually unknown, in spite of the extremely rich material left to us by innumerable travelers, scientists, and men of state.” While historians and social scientists working from the 1950s through much of the 1970s delineated the complex relations between peasant villages and national states, the ideologies of rural rebellion, and the sources of identity and community in a countryside transformed by the demands of export capital, cities in twentieth-century Latin America were accorded secondary treatment, sometimes at the level of popular anecdotal narratives.

The growth of administrative government in the United States since the turn of this century has meant the gradual rise of statutory enactments as a (if not the) primary source of law. Despite the burgeoning importance of the work of legislatures, legal scholars were relatively slow to devote deserved attention to statutes and the bodies that enacted them.The familiar rhythm of the common law continued to draw the bulk of theoretical analysis.

Any lingering concern about the relative neglect of statutes and legislative bodies may now be put aside. The last two decades have seen a remarkable collaboration among scholars in the disciplines of law, economics, and political science concerning how we can better understand what motivates legislatures and how we should interpret their work product.1 This attention to statutes and the legislative process has caused scholars to engage in a great amount of congressional historiography, as they test their theories against legislative and political practice. Historians are noticeably absent from this interdisciplinary collaboration, a state of affairs this roundtable is designed to address. Everyone, it seems, is doing congressional historiography—everyone, that is, except the historians.

The politics of public space are often conceptualized in terms of social geography. Scholars have shown how the crowd’s invasion of municipal spaces, the transgression of local ethnic boundaries, or the rituals of particular street festivals have structured political protest. Public space can also be discussed in more general terms. Space has always served as a means of pressuring state or local authority, an arena in which subaltern groups—women, workers, sansculottes— expressed and enforced their moral economies. By the nineteenth century, these immemorial uses of public space had undergone significant change. In many cases, riots and charivari were complemented by soldierly public marches, quiet meetings, and well-disciplined strikes.This respectable use of public space was linked to subaltern groups’ increasing exploitation of a new form of political authority: that of public opinion and public debate, the realm of the “bourgeois public sphere.”

We welcome the animated debate raised by Analytic Narratives concerning social scientific methods and the scope of rational choice. Advocates of mathematical and rational models have long claimed they have much to tell us about situations where behavior can be quantified or where the situation under study recurs many times. However, it was thought impermissible for rational choice theories (and rational choice) to venture into the analysis of big events. Political scientists like Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba (1994) implicitly conceded the issue by concentrating on the problem of case selection when the number of cases is small but greater than one.We believe unique events are too important to leave aside, and we use rational choice, particularly game theory, as a means to study unique events.

Social science historians bring a wide range of topical interests and methodological skills to the investigation of historical conditions. Those with an interest in the changing distribution and locational relationships of social, demographic, economic, political, cultural, physical, and other phenomena may now be considering the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for historical analysis. As an urban form historian and mapping scientist who uses GIS to document, visualize, and interpret spatial history, I am writing this account of my development of a GIS spatial history of Tokyo with the hope that it will convey the benefits and challenges of using GIS for historical research.

The study of the institutional development of the U.S. House of Representatives, long a mainstay of traditional scholarship, has recently undergone a revival with the rise of rational choice approaches of interpretation. In earlier years, most research was highly formal and descriptive; the emphasis was on legislative offices and parliamentary rules. While scholars noted changes in the formal structure of the House of Representatives, their descriptions of these changes consisted mostly of anecdotal accounts in which theoretical explanations played little part. More recently, many scholars have defined institutions primarily or even solely in terms of procedural rules and, from that perspective, have focused on organizational form as an important factor in the empowerment of legislative coalitions and the expression of member preferences. However, because rules are frequently viewed as a rigid structural setting for legislative behavior, institutional change has often been downplayed as outside the scope of most research.

Research on immigrants and the eventual outcomes of immigration processes was at the very foundation of American sociology. But with the exception of a couple of studies on the Mexicans in the United States, such as Paul Taylor' (1932, 1934) monumental work on the life story of Mexican immigrant laborers in the Chicago and Calumet region during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Manuel Gamio' (1971 [1930], 1971 [1931]) anthropological studies of Mexican immigrants in the United States, and Edith Abbott' The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935 (1936), Latinos were remarkably absent from such studies. Instead, these studies focused on the European immigrant experience and the experience of black Americans as newcomers to America' cities. Scholarship on Latinos (much less by Latinos) simply did not put down roots as early as scholarship on Afro-Americans. Perhaps this was partly due to the smaller size of the population back then, coupled with its being largely immigrant—composed of people who thought they would one day return to where they came from.

The argument of this article starts with three key theoretical postulates: First, regional-scale explanation differs in important respects from either aggregate macroeconomic studies of development at the national level or microeconomic and business historical studies of individual firms. Second, neoclassical economic theory is unsuitable as a basis for the analysis of regional economic dynamics, and a different framework, called adjustment theory, should be used in its place. Third, utilization of adjustment theory in the historical geographical domain leads directly to the deployment of both the concepts and methods of geographical information science as the foundation for empirical inquiry.

Thanks in part to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, the popular reputation of Congress has recently plum meted to perhaps an all-time low.As the Senate deliberated in late January 1999, Jay Leno captured what seemed to be widespread disgust with Capitol Hill. He cracked, “We’ve reached a point where Congress does not affect anyone’s life, so we look at it as entertainment. It’s like the Jerry Springer show, except everyone has a law degree. They can’t fix health care, they can’t fix Social Security, so we look at them to provide a few laughs on a daily basis” (Providence Journal 1999).

Leno’s wisecrack adds to a long history of jokes and laments about Congress, which throughout this century has taken far more hits from the public than has the executive branch. To listen only briefly to such criticism is to hear that Congress is inefficient, unresponsive, obstructionist, irresponsible, and undemocratic in its operations. Most often we are told that Congress suffers from two related weaknesses: it rolls over to please powerful interest groups, and it cravenly dreads reprisal from constituents.

In 1908 Señora Teodora Muñoz Viuda de Trejo, with the assistance of a public scribe, wrote to the city government regarding her business selling cakes on the streets of Mexico City. An inspector for the Department of Slaughterhouses and Markets had recently told her that as a vendor of prepared food she could no longer conduct business on the streets. This directive, if carried out, would have dire consequences for Señora Muñoz Viuda de Trejo.In her fourth letter to municipal authorities she wrote, I have mailed three letters and all without a favorable outcome. Today that circumstances compel me, I have made myself vulnerable once again to scorn, but a secret voice tells me to have faith. … Señor Governor, I have been a vendor of cakes since Señor Benito Juárez governed, then Señor Lerdo de Tejada came to power; and I continued making a living without interruption after our current president rose to power. I didn’t meet with any set-backs until three years ago when they took from me three licenses with which I supported myself. … I suffer an ailment of my arms; eight months ago I lost my only daughter who supported me, and she left me with three orphaned children—you see, she was widowed. And so, finding myself in this situation I am obliged to plead to the father of us the poor, that he concede what would be for me a fortune, that I be allowed to sell my cakes, and God will compensate you for this act of nobility. Your humble servant, Teodora Muñoz Viuda de Trejo.(AHCM 1910. 1735: 777)