Literacy underwent revolutionary growth in northwestern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This revolution coincided with other dramatic changes in European society, such as the industrial, demographic, agricultural, political, and religious revolutions (Deane 1969: 20–84). While the relationships between literacy and these other revolutions are not fully understood, their association is apparent and many potential influences exist (Cipolla 1969; Cremin 1970; Graff 1981: 232–60; 1987a, 1987b; Jensen 1986: 114–28; Maynes 1985: 117–31; Mitch 1984, 1988; Sanderson 1983; West 1978). The transplantation of European society across the Atlantic brought the literacy revolution to the American periphery. While numerous studies have shown that colonial America participated in this expansion of literacy, the common longitudinal patterns of literacy growth across the various regions and populations of colonial America have received less attention.

The French settlers who peopled Quebec during the seventeenth century were, by and large, detached individuals without kin in the New World. Of the 5,007 permanent settlers, only 661 (13%) had relations beyond the nuclear family amongst other settlers (Guillemette and Légáré 1989: Table 8). These figures suggest that for the majority of settlers kinship was not an important factor in the decision to migrate to New France.

Few today dwell on the significance of republican institutions. In the nineteenth century, however, republicanism was a revolutionary ideology proclaiming the right of all people as citizens to control their lives. While associated with universal suffrage, republicanism was not yet confined to a narrow political sphere, and many still sought to extend its values to economic affairs. They questioned whether citizens empowered to decide political questions should not also make economic decisions that affected their lives, and they warned that governments resting on free citizenship were threatened by concentrations of wealth giving some a disproportionate voice in society’s economic life. What sort of republic, one asked, could survive burdened with “this strange paradox of man split in two . . . subject in the workshop, king in the city”? (Diligent 1910: 5)

The battle between narrative history and social scientific history, which has broken out again in the pages of the American Historical Review, is a new battle of ancients and moderns. Like many battles of the books, it is deeply foolish and tends to bring the reading of books into disrepute.

It is the old battle of the sciences against art, poetry, and the humanities, refought in history as analysis against narrative, model against story, number against word. The official battle was joined in the seventeenth century. Plato banished poets from the Republic, of course, but his notion that science and poetry are adversaries was not taken up in the ancient world. Plato himself wrote poetic prose, Lucretius a few centuries later presented an atomistic physics in poetry, and down to Galileo and beyond the dialogue served science as much as it served comedy and tragedy.

This article began with a puzzle. In our book Domestic Revolutions, Steven Mintz and I took as one of our major themes the rich ethnic variety among American families. Indeed, we argued that there is no such thing as the American family. Yet as we moved forward in time, the theme of ethnic variation became submerged in discussions of class and racial variation. To some extent, our discussion mirrored the historical and sociological literature. But the slipperiness of ethnic variation in contemporary families may also reflect something about the nature of contemporary ethnicity.

The period of greatest socialist strength in the United States, the second decade of the twentieth century, coincided with the final decade of a great wave of immigration. This phenomenon has attracted the attention both of scholars seeking to understand the basis of support for the American Socialist party and of those seeking to address the more general question of the sources of immigrant radicalism (Bodnar 1985; Lipset 1977). Both perspectives pose a basic empirical question: What role did ethnicity play in support for the Socialist party, or, more specifically, which immigrant groups supported the party and which groups opposed it?

The attempt to answer this question has spawned a vast scholarship on the part of historians and social scientists, but a definitive answer remains elusive. Part of the reason for this is that we lack sufficiently detailed and disaggregated data on the political orientations and activities of immigrants themselves. The smallest units of electoral return are at the ward or county level, and information at this aggregate level can never allow us to draw conclusions about individual behavior with any certainty. But it also seems to be the case that the analysis of currently available data has not been taken as far as possible. Previous research has explored the relationship between ethnicity and socialism by examining particular immigrant groups in individual states, cities, or towns (e.g., Critchlow 1986; Gorenstein 1961; Leinenweber 1981; Lorence 1982; Miller 1975; Wolfle and Hodge 1983). Such case studies provide invaluable accounts of the diversity of immigrant politics, but they do not provide a reliable basis for generalization. In this article we take a step back from the wealth of illustrative analysis and try to gain a broader, more systematic, overview of immigrant support for socialism across a wide range of contexts by examining voting among eight immigrant groups—Germans, English, Finns, Irish, Italians, Norwegians, Russians, and Swedes—in the presidential elections of 1912 and 1920, elections in which the American Socialist party received its highest levels of support.

Historians have often portrayed American Indian populations as relatively homogeneous. Notorious in this regard is the genre of formulaic tribal histories, in which individuals or subgroups are scarcely seen and amorphous tribes merely react to U.S. policy directives and agents’ actions (Clifton 1979; Iverson 1984). When internal differences are noted, they tend to be lumped into dichotomized categories, with little attention given to their composition or to the historical processes from which they arose. Hence the literature is replete with references to traditionalists and progressives, Christians and pagans, and mixed bloods and full bloods, to name only a few. But history does not unfold in fixed oppositional stages, and dichotomizing these terms, even if they were employed by historical participants themselves, reveals little about social processes. They indicate, instead, a recognition that intratribal heterogeneity was increasing, perhaps in patterned ways (Clifton 1989).

Kinship ranks second only to economic factors in social-scientific attempts to explain who migrates, when they move, and where they go. A person’s household circumstances are commonly thought to influence his or her propensity to move, as is the presence of other kin in the same community. Furthermore, the existence and location of kin in other communities are commonly thought to affect both the propensity to move and the choice of destination. Much of the international migration literature, accordingly, focuses on kin chains of migration, while much of the contemporary internal migration literature focuses on rural-urban kinship ties and on the continuing importance of extended kinship ties in societies experiencing high rates of urban-bound migration.

Within the last 15 years historians, political scientists, and sociologists have played major roles as expert witnesses in southern voting-rights cases. In most of these lawsuits, black plaintiffs challenged the racially discriminatory effects of at-large elections, contests in which candidates must run citywide or countywide rather than from single-member districts. Unless a white majority casts its votes as a bloc against minority candidates, at-large elections do not have a discriminatory impact. For this reason, the court’s decision frequently turns on its assessment of the degree to which electoral patterns in the jurisdiction are polarized along racial lines. Although the expert witnesses on whom the court must rely have employed a variety of statistical methods, they increasingly have preferred a technique known as ecological regression analysis to measure the degree of racial bloc voting (Loewen 1982: 179–94; Grofman et al. 1985; Engstrom and McDonald 1985; Jacobs and O’Rourke 1986).

Once a shining light among specialties pursued under the influence of the “new” social history, urban history, after falling out of favor in recent years, is attempting a return to prominence. Having witnessed the departure from the field of prominent contributors, including Richard Sennett and Theodore Hershberg, and noting a decline in enrollment as well as participation in scholarly conferences, a group of historians has formed a new American Urban History Association, with the purpose, as Kenneth Jackson put it in his call to membership, of stimulating “interest in the study of the city in history, both in the United States and around the world.” This effort is but one part of the urban history revival. Following the demise of urban history series at Oxford University and Kennikat presses in the 1970s, new series have recently emerged, at Ohio State, Columbia, and Temple universities. A major conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr.’s (1940) groundbreaking article on urban history is slated for Chicago in 1990. These events notwithstanding, urban historians have much to do to reassert their rightful place among other specialists in American history.

A veritable boom in immigration research has taken place in the last 15 years. The purpose of this article is to provide a conceptual map, a way of presenting the issues and approaches that pertain to the topic, to guide us through the vast territory immigration research now encompasses. As this boundless growth in immigration research has occurred across the social sciences, this review of the literature is not intended to be exhaustive but merely illustrative of what sociologists, historians, and anthropologists have contributed. Since America is the quintessentially immigrant society, the focus is on American immigration, but the theoretical issues this review highlights can be applied equally well to other societies with histories of immigration and racial or ethnic relations, such as Great Britain or Brazil. Increasingly, immigration research is one of the topics where sociologists and historians meet (research on revolutions is another), although they meet in much the same fashion that one sometimes arrives at a party and is much surprised to find out who else is there. Our common research interests increasingly bring us together, although not without a fair amount of surprise and trepidation.

After decades of relative residential stability, southern blacks began migrating in striking numbers following the turn of the twentieth century. Reconstruction and Redemption saw a fair amount of short-distance movement as black tenant farmers exchanged one landlord for another in search of favorable financial arrangements. Some blacks moved across state lines, generally toward the Southwest, in pursuit of King Cotton and the livelihood it promised. However, these population movements pale in comparison with the massive migration of southern blacks during the first half of this century.

This study proposes a conceptualization of the industrial revolution in England in terms of the interaction of demographic and economic processes linked by the nutritional status of the population. By the eighteenth century the English economy had reached an important conjuncture. It had a larger accumulation of capital, and a larger urban sector capable of expanding commerce and production, than ever before. In addition, the population was well nourished by preindustrial standards and was about to benefit from the propitious harvest conditions of the 1730s and to procreate at a rate unsurpassed within recent memory (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Population growth accelerated and had a market-expanding effect in a Boserupian fashion, triggering the industrial revolution; the roots of this transformation, however, extended back into the Middle Ages (Jones 1981; Boserup 1981). Thus the factors that have been regarded as crucial in unleashing the industrial revolution, such as the rise in the rate of saving, are less important within the framework presented here than the acceleration in the growth of a well-nourished population in a relatively developed economy.

These papers were among those presented at a conference entitled “The Atlantic Slave Trade: Who Gained and Who Lost?” held under the auspices of the Frederick Douglass Institute of the University of Rochester in October 1988. Social Science History has been publishing some of the papers from this conference, and the full set of papers will be published as a volume by Duke University Press.

These papers were among those presented at a conference entitled “The Atlantic Slave Trade: Who Gained and Who Lost?” held under the auspices of the Frederick Douglass Institute of the University of Rochester in October 1988. Social Science History has been publishing some of the papers from this conference, and the full set of papers will be published as a volume by Duke University Press.

To the western visitor around the turn of the century, Korean women seemed the most secluded on earth. Isabella Bishop, the adventurous English traveler who visited Korea in the last years of the nineteenth century, reported that women there experienced a unique confinement: from the closing of the city gates of Seoul at dusk, all men except for the blind and officials were banished from the streets; then, and only then, in the safety of a male-free darkness, were the women at liberty to stroll and make social calls. And the higher the woman’s status, the more severe her seclusion. The queen herself conceded that she knew little of her country, having never seen the streets of Seoul by daylight. This deprivation stemmed from the peculiar practice of rigidly segregating and secluding girls when they reached the age of six (Allen 1908; Bishop 1898; Glünicke 1904; Jones 1896). The custom was observed so faithfully that Bishop, during her extensive Korean travels, never saw a girl who looked above six. The traditional Korean society therefore lacked the “brightness which girl life contributes to social existence” (Bishop 1898: 342).

My concern in this article is not with the process of industrialization in England or Great Britain, with its causes, or (with one exception) with its supposed consequences. Therefore I will not attempt to comment except in passing on the abundant and still-burgeoning literature devoted to it. Instead, my focus is on the name by which that process (or its putative beginnings) is generally but incorrectly known. As I have argued elsewhere, the term industrial revolution is a misnomer without scientific basis (Cameron 1981, 1982). It was a catchphrase popularized by a youthful, naive social reformer, not a scholar, who wanted to draw attention to the causes of what he regarded as the moral degradation of the British working classes (Toynbee 1884; on his naïveté see Kadish 1986).

Studies of the history of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa have focused on demography and within it on the number of slaves exported from Africa (Curtin 1969; Lovejoy 1982, 1983; Manning 1981). Seen from the perspective of African history, the question of the number exported is a window on larger fields of inquiry and an area open to research, but it is only a small part of the larger question of the impact of the trade on Africa. Working out a reasonable estimate of the number exported does not give us the number lost, for we can only estimate the number killed in wars and raids or the number who died while being moved toward slave markets. Even if the demographic question were the most important one, the most crucial aspect of it would not be the raw statistics of exports but the question of reproduction (Gregory and Cordell 1987). Reproduction involves a host of variables: nutrition, disease, agricultural productivity, security, political stability, and quality of life among others. Most of these are not amenable to precise answers. Furthermore, the question of reproduction leads us to the larger questions of political, social, and economic relationships. This article examines the effects of the slave trade on the institutional structure of Senegambia and the western Sudan and the reproduction of the societies involved.

These papers were among those presented at a conference entitled “The Atlantic Slave Trade: Who Gained and Who Lost?” held under the auspices of the Frederick Douglass Institute of the University of Rochester in October 1988. Social Science History has been publishing some of the papers from this conference, and the full set of papers will be published as a volume by Duke University Press.

The significance of the slave trade and slavery-related commerce—what I will call the slave(ry) trade—in contributing to the development of colonial America and the United States has been a persistent theme in the work of Afro-American scholars. Two scholars in particular should be cited in this regard. W. E. B. DuBois (1896: 27) pointed out that slave labor was not widely utilized because the climate and geography of New England precluded the extensive development of agriculture: “The significance of New England in the African slave-trade does not therefore lie in the fact that she early discountenanced the system of slavery and stopped importation; but rather in the fact that her citizens, being the traders of the New World, early took part in the carrying slave trade and furnished slaves to the other colonies.” DuBois’s account of the role of Massachusetts and of Rhode Island, which later became “the clearing house for the slave trade of other colonies,” was similar to what was popularized as the “triangular trade” thesis.