Despite the emergence of social science history, the profession remains organized around the study of periods in the history of societies. Departments of history still structure their curricula mainly along national and temporal lines, and the same principle of socialization thereby defines most academic positions (Darnton, 1980). To judge by the sessions of the annual meetings of the Social Science History Association (SSHA), those sympathetic with that orientation focus on topics, approaches, and methodologies. Only one association network, that for the study of Asia, mentions a locale in its title, and none specifies a particular time period. This article will examine the findings and implications of social science history for one well-established national/period field, that of early American history.

Whence and whither family history? In his bibliographic and programmatic essay, Hobsbawm (1971) did not mention family history as a subfield of what was then the relatively “new” social history. The closest he came was “demography and kinship.” In 1980, by which time social history was definitely mature, and according to some critics, even in decline, the proceedings of a conference on history in the 1980s included a 37-page essay by Stone (1981b; see also Stone, 1981a, 1978) on family history. Several bellwethers of the change may be noted in passing. One year after the 1968 conference for which Hobsbawm's comments were originally prepared, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population held a meeting whose subject—the comparative history of household and family—went beyond strictly demographic history. In 1972, a family history newsletter was launched by Professor Tamara Hareven, in cooperation with the Newberry Library in Chicago; a special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History on “The History of the Family” appeared in 1971; a special issue of Annales: Economies, Societes et Civilisations devoted to “Famille et Societé” was published in 1972. By the time the Journal of Family History, edited by Hareven, began publication in 1976, two more special issues on family history of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History were required reading for those calling themselves social historians.

No matter how one measures its commitment to public education, the S outh in 1890 lagged far behind the rest of the nation. Twenty years later, southern public schools were still characterized by relative backwardness, but the preceding two decades had seen impressive expansion in absolute terms. Among the salient features of this transformation were sharply increased per pupil expenditures, school terms, and enrollment rates; greater provision of normal schools and related institutions; and high rates of investment in school capital. State legislatures increased their appropriations, limitations on local taxes were abolished, and the number of counties and school districts voting to increase school expenditures skyrocketed.

Migration research has long recognized and effectively documented the significance of demographic and economic variables in affecting the propensity for individuals to migrate. The decision to move is often seen as a function of age, family status, length of residence, and economic circumstance. In addition, there is the assumption that relative location in kinship networks is significant in that the idea to migrate is implanted or resisted as a function of personal and associative links within the community. This latter process, however, is more difficult to document. As a consequence, most studies can only infer its operation and its relationship to other variables.

A major problem in demonstrating the influence of kinship networks is that the pattern of associations between households in any sizable population is exceedingly difficult to unravel and define. This is especially true of historical studies. While detailed information frequently exists for some households in a given population, it rarely exists for all.

One of the more debilitating digressions in the evolution of the scientific enterprise is the controversy over the relative importance of models and data. Time and again, in every discipline from archaeology to zoology, the issue has reappeared with sufficient force to engage scholarly attention and to generate reams of rhetoric. In the social sciences, as in the biological and physical sciences, we have expended considerable energies on the data versus model (some would say “theory”) emphasis, usually to the detriment of scientific advancement.

Modernization theory provides a successful conceptual model in gerontology for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it establishes an integrative framework for those who focus on cross-cultural and historical patterns of aging in comparative contexts. In addition, together with the age-stratification model (Riley, Johnson, and Foner, 1972), it has fostered a movement away from an emphasis on individualistic, psychological explanations of adjustment and adaptation toward a more macrolevel orientation. As a consequence, research in aging has gradually become more attuned to the importance of structural arrangements and their impact on the roles and statuses accorded the elderly. The purpose of this article is to expand further the focus on societal factors and to suggest a needed redirection of our research interests.

Among the various facets of the new public history movement, applied history holds particular interest for social science historians. Public history generally involves the effort to use historical work for nonacademic audiences; it thus embraces historical museum work, aspects of archive preservation, and media presentations for general audiences. All these are admirable goals, not of course novel, but receiving new and explicit attention in a variety of recent programs, and in the Public History Association. Applied history, though part of public history in its broadest sense, has a more specific mission (one must note that some of the presentation training programs in public history are labeled “applied,” a terminological confusion that one hopes can be remedied). Applied historians seek directly to integrate certain kinds of historical research with the process of policy research, in both public and private sectors. Applied historians do this research themselves, most typically on a contract basis from academic sanctuaries but potentially as policy researchers independent of a direct academic base. They are also involved in training graduate students in this research mode, and in several cases have also mounted undergraduate courses or programs in the genre.

Historians and historical economists have made much progress during the past half century in reconstructing long-term patterns of economic growth. The development of national income accounting techniques provided measures of gross national product and gross national product per capita in both constant and current dollars for the United States and various other countries that extend back to the first half of the nineteenth century. By providing information on the overall performance of the economy and on the performance of its principal industrial sectors and geographic regions, these measures have succinctly characterized the pattern of economic change in the United States, England, France, and several other European nations for periods of up to a century and a half. They have provided a scale against which such developments as urbanization, technological change, and the impact of various governmental policies can be judged. The new information has often led to important reinterpretations of major historical eras. The discovery that the rate of growth of manufacturing declined during the Civil War decade, for example, led to a searching reexamination of the thesis that the Civil War gave an unprecedented impetus to the industrialization of the United States. The disaggregation of the national accounts to the state level produced the unanticipated finding that during the twenty years leading up to the Civil War the South grew at least as rapidly as the North.

It is doubtful that any other period of comparable length in British history witnessed as many profound changes in politics as did the first quarter of the twentieth century. To mention only some of the more important examples, voter turnout rose from about 21% to 76% of the adult population; the party system was transformed when Labour displaced the Liberals as the major party of the left; legislative power was profoundly altered by the Parliament Act of 1911 which deprived the Lords of the right to veto permanently bills passed by the Commons; the social base of parlimentary recruitment expanded to include more members from lower middle- and working-class backgrounds; the disruptive influence of Irish self-government was removed from political life; and public concern shifted from issues related to Empire and wider access to parliamentary politics to domestic matters of a distributional nature. Under the cumulative impact of these changes, particularly in the party system, British politics in essence ceased to be traditional, and became modern.

A necessary step in any assessment of early national economic growth is a characterization of market development before independence from Great Britain. Drawing up such a characterization, however, presents problems as at least two different pictures of the eighteenth-century economy are currently available. One depicts the intense involvement of early Americans in markets and overseas trade, while another equally powerful image suggests a colonial landscape of sleepy villages inhabited by farmers devoid of a profit orientation and almost entirely dependent upon their own households and neighborhood reciprocity for goods and services.

Recent statistics indicate that 72% of the elderly poor are widowed, divorced, or never-married women. The fact that many of these women are left destitute in their old age can be looked at from several perspectives. My particular interest is in how Social Security policy contributes to the potential poverty of women. The area of investigation is that of dependency—the designated category through which most women collect Social Security benefits.

To many historians, and to most of their students, the question of the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon the poor of Britain has become confused, an arcane debate of ever greater statistical complexity. This is a pity, for “the most sustained single controversy in British economic history” still has, and should have, the capacity to excite and rouse the imagination, as it did for those who began, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Condition of England debate (Mathias, 1975: vii; Taylor, 1975: xi). For Friedrich Engels, Edwin Chadwick, John Stuart Mill, or Lord Shaftesbury, and for many who as government inspectors or members of local statistical societies provided the evidence, the condition of the working classes was something tangible, to be seen in the streets of Manchester or London, demonstrated in the faces and bodies of the artisans and laborers who walked those streets and worked in the workshops and factories. The moral outrage felt by Engels, Chadwick, Shaftesbury, Barnardo, and many others in the nineteenth century came from the sight not only of squalid living conditions but of the malnourished bodies of the poor themselves.

It is wholly appropriate that this article should follow Professor Hendricks’s, for historians’ perspectives on modernization theory generally build on the insights of social scientists. Although its intellectual foundations were laid by social philosophers and critics such as Adam Smith, Malthus, and Condorcet at the end of the eighteenth century, the main lines of modernization theory were formulated in earnest after World War II by economists, political scientists, and sociologists concerned with “developing nations” outside the Western world (Levy, 1966). Historians, in contrast, only began to join serious discussions during the past fifteen years. Our involvement in gerontology—the study of old age and aging—is of even more recent vintage. Whereas social scientists were exploring the “modernization of (old) age” during the 1950s and 1960s, few social science historians or humanists have investigated how the process of modernization affected the meanings and experiences of growing old(er) over time and across geopolitical boundaries (Maddox and Wiley, 1976; Achenbaum, forthcoming).

Readers of this journal have been treated to a lively and interesting debate between Professors Robert Gallman and Edward Pessen over what seems to be emerging as an important issue in American social history—the extent to which population age structure explains observed inequalities in the distribution of wealth. The issue is significant because inequality that is attributable to differences in age does not carry the same implications as inequality attributable to any other source. If young men generally begin their careers in modest circumstances, and generally accumulate wealth as they grow older, the resulting disparities between older and younger men at any moment in time would tend to confirm rather than disprove the hypothesis of fundamental equality in society as a whole. As Gallman puts it, “I earn more income and hold more wealth than does my son. Neither of us regards this as inequitable… nor as evidence of the inegalitarian nature of American society.

Throughout the early decades of this century, reformers bemoaned the unsystematic nature of police management, reserving particular criticism for the influence of nonbureaucratic and nonmeritocratic matters on promotions. Their advocacy of greater routinization and regularity, cloaked in the rhetoric of professionalism, eventually won acceptance in formal police administration. Few proponents of change, however, measured the consequences of their efforts upon the actual careers of officers (Fosdick, 1972; Vollmer, 1972; Smith, 1940; Wilson and McLaren, 1950; Price, 1977).

The problem of explaining the process of development of the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century has been eased substantially by the appearance within the last ten years of an extraordinary collection of studies. Some of these have concen- trated on individuals, but by far the most important group of works (Amburger, 1966; Armstrong, 1959, 1973; Orlovsky, 1981; Pintner, 1970, 1975, 1980a, 1980b; Troitskii, 1974; Torke, 1967; Zaionchkovskii, 1964, 1974, 1975, 1978) has dealt with institu- tions and with groups of bureaucrats. Other interesting and helpful essays that summarize or synthesize the many individual findings have also appeared e.g., Raeff (1979), Field (1979), Orlovsky (1976).

The military records used in this article, referred to as muster rolls or descriptive lists, are predominantly from the years of the French and Indian War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783), and pertain to the soldiers of the American Colonies. Such lists were compiled for most colonial military forces, typically by individual companies or regiments, and provided the basis for distributing supplies and payments, as well as for aiding in the identification of deserters. Since there was no standard format, the information appearing in the muster rolls varies widely. Lists have been retrieved that included for each soldier some, but never all, of the following information: place of birth, age, place of residence, occupation, height, hair color, eye color, complexion, place and date of enlistment, military rank, by whom enlisted, language spoken, term of service, pay scale, and assorted remarks relevant to military service. We have also colected a sample of U.S. Army muster rolls for those recruits who enlisted during the period 1815–1820. These lists are of a similar lature to those of the earlier era, except that they are much more uniform with regard to the information included. Very few individuals under the age of 16 enlisted in the military, making it difficult to utilize these data for studying adolescent growth spurts. Accordingly, the analysis of the height-by-age data in this article will focus on the terminal heights achieved.