In his presidential address to the American Statistical Association in 1931, William Fielding Ogburn, an American sociologist important particularly in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, took as his theme the difference between statistics and art. His argument, articulated here and in a wide range of writings throughout his career, was that “statistics has been developed to give an exact picture of reality, while the picture that the artist draws is a distortion of reality” (Ogburn 1932: 1). He then went on to express his belief that emotion leads to distortion in our observations. “It is this distorting influence of emotion and wishes,” he said, “that is more responsible for bad thinking than any lack of logic” (ibid.: 4). But statistics, he believed, could ameliorate the distorting effects of emotion on our empirical observations. There was a problem, however, because “the artist in us wants understanding rather than statistics. But understanding is hardly knowledge. . . . The tests of knowledge are reliability and accuracy, not understanding” (ibid.: 5).

After the economy stabilized following World War I, the U.S. experienced a record level of residential construction. When considering housing in this period, scholars have usually focused on the sheer number of units built and perhaps on the fact that the rate of construction turned down several years before the whole economy soured. Relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which U.S. building patterns differed in the 1920s from earlier periods and what these changes can tell us about broader social trends. This article examines residential building in this period in more detail, by looking at the city of Chicago, and suggests that new patterns of housing construction may have been linked to changes in the economy as a whole.

The importance of suffrage expansion to the formation of “modern” political parties—and with them mass representative democracy as we know it today—is widely recognized. Nonetheless, most of what we know about the link between suffrage expansion and democratic politics concerns only the electoral arena. The major comparative studies of party development (Weber 1946; Duverger 1955; LaPalombara and Weiner 1966), for example, have stressed how larger electorates led to more elaborate and centralized extra-parliamentary organization, to “populist” campaigning styles, and to the promotion of socialist parties. This study concerns the legislative effects of extending the suffrage. Although we focus on nineteenth-century Britain, parts of our argument pertain to other cases.

The publication of Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987) has interested students of the expansion of governmental activity. Despite a large literature on the growth of the public sector, Crisis is one of the few book-length historical accounts of the subject for the United States (Larkey et al. 1984). In this respect, Higgs’s study resembles Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State (1982), which also examined the historical transformation of government, albeit within a limited temporal perspective (1877–1920), and which like Crisis encased the story within a distinct theoretical framework. Skowronek argued that expansion of the public sector depended on the reconstruction of national administrative capability during the Progressive era. Higgs contended that major crises in American life functioned as the catalyst of “Big Government.” Although each author emphasized different dynamics propelling growth, both held that temporally specific disjunctures in governmental history date the emergence of the modern state. Higgs and Skowronek share one other similarity: neither of them adequately integrated federalism or the states into their analyses. Omission of these critical dimensions of the American polity raises questions about the utility of their research designs and the accuracy of their conclusions.

Historical analyses of demographic phenomena from the past few decades have provided new insights requiring the reassessment of a number of traditional paradigms, such as the venerable demographic transition theory. Fertility studies have dominated this research, but there is a growing interest in the interrelationships of several demographic variables, such as family formation and infant mortality (Knodel and Hermalin 1984; Nault et al. 1990; Potter 1988a; Working Group on the Health Consequences of Contraceptive Use and Controlled Fertility 1989a, 1989b). This article falls into the latter category; in it we investigate the relationship between childbearing (fertility) and infant mortality in the Utah frontier population during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Process is a ubiquitous word in social science history. It appears dozens of times in such fundamental texts as Wallace 1969, Hershberg 1969, and Wolf 1982. Social science historians generally use it, as Berkhofer (1969: 169-87, 243-44) observes, to characterize the causes of change and persistence in human communities as organic or mechanical phenomena that are intelligible, general, systematic, repetitive, orderly, and similar in sequence. The concept of process is pivotal to our understanding of the daily flux of human interaction, the workings of institutions, the character of collective action, and the course of social evolution (Turner 1977; Wallace 1970: 165-206).

Plaintiff Michael Marx, a Veterans Administration pensioner, complained on 8 December 1944 that he rented a room from defendant Mary Frances for $3.25 per week, not knowing that the World War II Office of Price Administration (OPA) had set a maximum rent of $3.00 per week on that apartment (Marx v. Frances). Marx alleged a total overpayment of $4.50 and further complained of Frances's verbal abuse and threats to evict him if he pursued this action. As a result, he claimed return of the overcharge, treble damages on the overcharge ($13.50), $5.00 for failure to provide normal services, $100 in attorney's fees, $500 for current and future doctor bills, and $5,000 for the ruining of his health.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, farmers in extreme southern Illinois, along with farmers throughout the state and region, organized politically and economically. The first big upsurge of organization was in 1873 with the organization of farmers’ clubs and granges of the Patrons of Husbandry. In Union County, Illinois, all sectors of the local society appear to have been swept up in the tide of discontent, although a close analysis of those active in the movement and the associations that succeeded it indicates that the movement gave voice and organized expression to a specific class. To use McNall’s (1988) analysis of the later populist movement, the agrarian movement of the mid-1870s was an incipient “class movement,” although it failed to articulate a program that effectively welded farmers into a unit that could contend for political power, even as it provided a vehicle for elite farmers to transform preexisting economic relationships. “A class movement,” McNall (ibid.: 5) writes, “is one in which the participants are involved in a struggle over the very definition of their political, economic, and ideological interests. All class movements have at their core an economic dimension and, like class relationships, are about relationships of power.” The organizations formed in the populist era, he argues, were attempts by farmers to create a “class in and for itself” (ibid.: 12).

Students of the welfare state have long speculated about the sequence in which welfare programs were adopted. Worker’s compensation, for example, has generally been adopted early by the various countries, while family allowances have come later. The order of these programs is important both for its inherent interest and for its bearing on theories of the welfare state.

Ballard Campbell claims to have identified “flaws in [the] analytical perspective” I employed in Crisis and Leviathan (1987). My sins of omission, he alleges, arise from concentrating on the growth of federal economic powers, thereby losing sight of the various noneconomic dimensions of government and “ignoring the reality of federalism in the United States,” especially before 1930. The upshot is “an imbalance that distorts the history of American governance.”

People in the Icelandic Sagas, and with them the narratives themselves, are impelled by powerful human passions: love, hate, pride, envy, fidelity. This is easy to see and easy to explain. In stories that are intended to captivate their audience, it is vital to spellbind listeners of both sexes and all ages with the excitement of eternal existential problems.

Yet there are other features in the sagas that modern cultural analysis has considered less dependent on the requirements of the literary genre and thus more revealing expressions of the Scandinavian mentality. These include the legalism that pervades the sagas (see, e.g., Gurevich 1985; Hastrup 1985; Byock 1988). One is struck by the extent to which people think and argue in legal terms. This applies to men in conflict, to men demonstrating their power and influence.

The last decade of the nineteenth century was a time of great national crisis, surpassed in severity only by the depression of the 1930s. Unemployment in manufacturing and transportation rose to nearly 17% in 1894. More banks failed in the 1890s than in any other economic crisis in American history except the one that began in 1929, and over 159 railroads, capitalized at more than $2.5 billion, were forced into receivership. Farm prices plunged, and farm spokesmen bitterly complained about the disastrous effects of the long-term deflation of currency, discrimination by railroad monopolies, and high interest rates (Douglas 1930: 440; Fels 1959: 159–219; Hoffman 1956; Steeples 1965).

Like many modern historians’ concepts, the notion of political culture comes to us from the social sciences, especially anthropology and political science. One assumes that political culture is a term familiar to most readers. The term metropolitan-military complex may require some explanation. I coined the phrase some years ago when undertaking a study of San Francisco politics. At the time, the inquiry was fairly conventional. Yet as I worked through the struggles over municipal services, labor and management problems, political structure, mass transit, minorities, parties, reformers, bosses, and so forth, the role of the military loomed ever larger. The longer the military was investigated, the more important that role appeared to be. Eventually, I changed the focus of my study from politics, conventionally defined, to the relationship between cities and the military. President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the term military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address to describe an alliance among technicians, congressmen, bureaucrats, military men, and businessmen. He did not define his words rigorously, but he left the definite impression that the military-industrial complex (MIC) was national in scope and something close to a conspiracy on behalf of greater defense spending. The president also implied that the MIC had only recently appeared. Subsequent commentators on the subject have largely followed this approach, stressing the importance of conspiracy, militarism, Washington bureaucrats, big business, and big congressmen. They have also accepted the World War II or cold war origins of the alliance as well as its national scope.

To date, there has been no attempt in Ontario economic history to examine human fertility in the nineteenth century by area of the province where area is differentiated by the extent of agricultural development and the data used are at the household level. In the United States, Richard Easterlin and his colleagues (1978) used a sample of rural households from the 1860 manuscript census to look at fertility, family, and agricultural differences and similarities for old and new areas in the northern states. The present study takes the census districts of Canada West (now Ontario) in 1851, divides them into three groups by the percentage of ever-improved agricultural land, and uses a sample of farm households from the manuscript census of 1851–52 as the data set. Since the extent of agricultural development can be taken as a proxy for county wide land availability, the contribution of this study is to relate land availability at both the county and household levels to fertility in the mid-nineteenth century.

The pre-world war I period decisively structured modern class relations in Europe and the United States. Farmers, the largest population group, greatly influenced the development of capitalism and states. Scholars have demonstrated farmers’ significance in particular areas (e.g., Blackbourn in Germany and Esping-Andersen in Scandinavia), but there has been little comparative analysis. Farmer politics, and thus modern class relations in general, have been inadequately theorized. Most existing work on agrarian classes has also been economistic, neglecting politics. We fill the gaps by analyzing agrarian politics in the United States, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.

The nineteenth-century English working class bears a most peculiar burden and embodies a most peculiar paradox. Like Auden’s academic warriors who spar with “smiles and Christian names,” historians, economists, and sociologists have pushed and prodded early nineteenth-century English working people into procrustean political positions to support or disconfirm Marx’s predictions of revolutionary class conflict erupting from the contradictions of capitalism. A Manichaean concern locks the debate into an impasse. Were early nineteenth-century workers revolutionary or reformist? Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. Yet, surely it is the history of English working peoples that has suffered from this burden of praising or burying Marxism through competing interpretations of their early stories?

There is no Doubt that Sweden, at least from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, belonged to the European countries where legal control of extramarital sex was most extensive. First of all, there was a difference between Protestant and Catholic countries, not in principle but in emphasis and form. The Spanish Inquisition was, for instance, mainly interested in whether people thought that a certain behavior was a sin or not. Religious confessions proved that the sinner realized that he had done something wrong, and he could therefore be treated with a certain mildness afterwards (Benassar et al. 1979; Henningsen et al. 1986). Protestantism, at least in Sweden, tended to be more interested in people's actual behavior, usually leaving the internal spiritual life of the sinner aside. This dichotomy between thought and behavior was of course not total in practice, but it tells us something important about the difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards religious control. Religious homogeneity also explains some of the success of Swedish orthodox Protestantism in creating a system of tight control. There was no escape for dissenters except emigration, since the creed was protected by the civil state.

Thanks to recent innovations in theories and methods of political history, an enormous task lies before those wishing to approach the social-scientific goal recently desribed as “total political history.” Research and theorizing on the subjects of political culture, the autonomy of the state, language and discourse, the public sphere, and the importance of gender to political life promise to displace a long-standing interest among political historians in locating the social groups that presumably composed the “base” of historical regime and policy formation. The understanding of past politics as the epiphenomenal superstructure to an ontologically primary base of past society has been radically revised by scholarship presenting evidence of the relative autonomy of the state and of cultural structures within which both society and politics operate (Kousser 1982,1990; Skocpol 1985; McDonald 1986; Tropea 1989; Hunt 1986; Reddy 1987; Palmer 1990).