Often treated as a unified concept with a single definition, the presidential mandate actually encompasses multiple definitions, each connected to distinct ideas about democracy and presidential leadership. This article looks at how and when modern presidents have used mandate rhetoric and seeks to explain changes in presidential mandate-claiming patterns. Using an original dataset of 1,467 presidential communications from 1933 through 2009, I find that after 1969 presidents became more likely to use election results to justify their actions. However, they also became less likely to emphasize the magnitude of the election result, focusing their mandate rhetoric instead on campaign promises and distinctions between candidates and parties. Evidence suggests that this shift is the result of a combination of several factors: changes to the presidential nomination system, polarized party politics, and an overall decline in presidential approval ratings. Based on this research, I conclude that ideas about the presidential mandate are closely connected with the political conditions and challenges facing presidents. As the place of the presidency has shifted in American politics, the ways in which presidents interpret and communicate about elections have also changed.

This article examines the evolution of the novel in the United States using a remarkable new source, the Ngram database. This database, which spans several centuries, draws on the 15 million books that Google has scanned. It allows researchers to look at year-to-year fluctuations in the use of particular words. Using one of the available filters, the article is based on English-language books published in the United States between 1800 and 2008. But making sense of these data requires a framework. That framework is provided by the four periods that emerge from much recent writing on the novel. Four epochs—the sentimental era (1789–1860), the genteel era (1860–1915), the modern era (1915–60), and the postmodern era (1960–)—define the evolution of the novel and, more broadly, changes in American society and values. The article argues that a study of key words drawn from the Ngram database confirms the existence of these periods and deepens our understanding of them.

I discuss the references in Nature and Power to imperial China, especially its thorough discussion of key issues in China's environmental history, but I point out several limitations. Joachim Radkau says little about the role of local elites in agrarian policy, the impact of central Eurasian conquest on imperial regimes' attitudes toward the land, and the impact of global trade on the empire in the preindustrial age. The second part of the article discusses the important strategic and environmental role of trades in fur, tea, and fish from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries.

After two centuries of demographic change, societies of European origin face a new reality of aging populations and heightened competition for resources between young and old. Research on the history of the family adds important perspectives on our current problems. In northwestern Europe, transfers of resources to the young and old were constrained by an unusual marriage and household formation system. The transition to small families increased downward intergenerational transfers (parents to children), and compensating upward transfers now take place outside the family. The growing independence of the elderly in the twentieth century is based on earlier investments in children. The members of each generation profit from the investments their parents make in them and the investments they make in the children of others.

Nature and Power is to be understood not only as human power against nature but also as power by nature in the sense of Michel Foucault's biopouvoir (biopower) or Francis Bacon's “Naturae non imperator nisi parendo” (Only by obeying nature may we dominate nature). The fragile human attempts to get power over nature and by nature have a long history, reaching back over millennia until prehistoric times, and much of world history may be explained in part by the unstable relationship between humans and nature. The environmental approach offers a fresh look at global history. The great change that has happened in modern times seems to have been described best by Karl Polanyi (1944) in his Great Transformation, which also refers to a revolution in the human relation to nature. There are primeval symbioses of humans and nature that are the basis of environmental history until modern time. A global history of the environment may be written for a long time along the three great commons of history: woodlands, water, and pasture. The dark tune of Garrett Hardin's (1968) “Tragedy of the Commons,” to be sure, does not dominate the whole melody of environmental history. There is also a lot of historical evidence for Elinor Ostrom's rehabilitation of the commons. But it is better to be cautious with dogmatic theories and sweeping judgments. In modern times Hardin may be right, at least in this or that regard. Ostrom's concept applies only to local, not to global commons. The underlying philosophy of Nature and Power is neither optimism nor pessimism but possibilism.

Despite growing reliance on census data for historical research in the United States, there has been little systematic evaluation of census quality. This article relies on back-projection methods, new estimates of nineteenth-century mortality, and the 1850–1940 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) samples to estimate age- and sex-specific net census underenumeration of the native-born white population in the United States in the 1850–1930 censuses. National and section of birth estimates are constructed. In general, the results suggest slightly higher net undercounts for native-born white males relative to native-born white females, slightly higher net undercounts in the South, and a modest trend toward greater census coverage over time. A few censuses stand out as anomalous. The 1870 census suffered a higher net rate of omission than any other census. The net undercount was especially high in the South, probably reflecting the unsettled conditions in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The net undercount was not nearly as great as nineteenth-century observers speculated and subsequent historians have long believed, however. The 1880 census appears to have achieved the most complete coverage of the native-born white population before 1940.

Between 1915 and 1929 across North America most commercial builders ceased to erect dwellings for low- and moderate-income households. As a result, these households increasingly relied on housing units that had filtered down. This development had momentous consequences for the housing market and eventually for housing policy as well as for the character of American cities. The reasons for this change were complex. They included a rapid and then permanent increase in building costs coupled with an irregular decline in owner-building, the means by which many families had once housed themselves. Especially after 1918 there was a shift in consumer preferences away from housing and toward other consumer goods, notably automobiles. This was partly counterbalanced by a new appreciation by the middle class of the virtues of home ownership and improvement, but this preference was channeled into the development of large, planned, and well-serviced subdivisions. This type of residential development required larger amounts of capital and fostered the growth of a new financial instrument, the mortgage bond. Bonds redirected the savings of small investors that had previously financed small-scale land speculation, house building, and landlordism. In 15 years the urban housing market had been transformed, with large consequences for the lives of Americans.

The integration of women and African Americans into the politically active southern electorate in the 1960s and the 1970s was a turning point in the rise of the “New South” and essential to the establishment of a democratic political process in the region. Whereas there are numerous studies of the reenfranchisement of African Americans in the South in the literature, temporal changes in the gender gap in southern political participation have received less attention. Gender inequality in voting has historically been greatest in the South and was more resistant to change over time. This study is the first to examine the intersection of gender and racial inequality in political participation in the South over a period spanning several decades. Building on previous theories of political participation, including the civic voluntarism model and the strategic mobilization perspective, we develop and test a conceptual model based on the interplay between individual characteristics and the broader institutional context. Using data from the American National Election Studies, we examine racial differences in the gender gap in southern political participation over time using hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications for the study of gender and racial inequality in political participation.

For nearly two centuries the United States was a democracy that institutionalized in law inequality between racially defined segments of the population. This article shows that such racial closure was causally linked to the workings of a party system in which one party was organized as an interregional alliance for the principles and practices of white supremacy. It does so through a detailed analysis of three historical outcomes: (1) variation in the establishment of racial closure laws across the North during the antebellum period, (2) the elimination of racial closure laws in the North after the Civil War, and (3) the failed attempt in the postbellum South to overcome racial closure in voting. Throughout the analysis of these three outcomes, the article shows that the party model conforms to the empirical record better than three major alternatives that emphasize the causal power of public opinion (electorate model), elite bargaining and consensus (elite model), and the racial preferences of the white working class (class model).

As is perhaps suggested by its very title, Nature and Power, Joachim Radkau's important contribution to “a global history of the environment” takes as its primary axis of analysis the impact of the exercise of political authority by states on the natural world as constituted by plants, animals, soil, water, and air. The economy makes very few appearances as such. Indeed, the only index reference to things economic is a lone entry for Max Weber's Economy and Society (1922), and even there the economy is not the point of the citation. Yet economic history and environmental history share a great many common concerns, not least of which is what we might broadly call “human welfare.” My comments will explore the possible connections between Radkau's reading of our global environmental past and the broad narratives developed by economic historians to tell their version of global history.

We introduce a life course, multimethod approach to examine the living arrangements of middle-aged and older American Indian and European women living on the rugged North Dakotan settlement frontier around 1910. Our model suggests that women’s later life circumstances reflect the long arm of institutional forces and their ethnicity/nativity, which anchors resource advantages and disadvantages (access to land, rail, and markets) and confers gender socialization (norms and practices) that reproduce gendered social roles. Drawing from primary and secondary sources, we find that European and American Indian women were selectively drawn to or (re)located on frontier spaces unevenly by ethnicity/nativity via timing and place of settlement effects. Old-age living arrangements then directly reflected county of location resources and women’s own adoption of family roles and gendered life events, such as parenthood and widowhood. Overall, rather than finding homogeneous settler versus colonized identities constituted by the “otherness” of each group involved, we find great diversity within and across ethnic/nativity groups. This does not preclude grievous social and ethnic inequalities.

Radkau's ambitious volume illustrates both the opportunities and the risks offered by expansive chronological overviews. His environmental approach to global history confronts some of the challenges common to all such projects, such as the inevitable need for heavy selection. Environmental history adds both special benefits and special costs that are derived from its connection to current politics and from its distinctive subject matter.

This article proposes a methodology to address the urban evolutionary process, demonstrating how it is reflected in literature. It focuses on “literary space,” presented as a territory defined by the period setting or as evoked by the characters, which can be georeferenced and drawn on a map. It identifies the different locations of literary space in relation to urban development and the economic, political, and social context of the city. We suggest a new approach for mapping a relatively comprehensive body of literature by combining literary criticism, urban history, and geographic information systems (GIS). The home-range concept, used in animal ecology, has been adapted to reveal the size and location of literary space. This interdisciplinary methodology is applied in a case study to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels involving the city of Lisbon. The developing concepts of cumulative literary space and common literary space introduce size calculations in addition to location and structure, previously developed by other researchers. Sequential and overlapping analyses of literary space throughout time have the advantage of presenting comparable and repeatable results for other researchers using a different body of literary works or studying another city. Results show how city changes shaped perceptions of the urban space as it was lived and experienced. A small core area, correspondent to a part of the city center, persists as literary space in all the novels analyzed. Furthermore, the literary space does not match the urban evolution. There is a time lag for embedding new urbanized areas in the imagined literary scenario.

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of classificatory struggles and sociological literature on professions’ construction of jurisdiction, this article examines the origins of the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), the dominant classification system for the US nonprofit sector. Using data drawn from archival research and secondary research, I show that the establishment of the NTEE was part of a larger symbolic struggle over the proper classification of charitable foundations. Philanthropic elites and new nonprofit scholars responded to government threats to foundations by integrating them into the newly created “nonprofit sector,” whose societal value—both philanthropic and economic—would be demonstrated through research on this sector. The NTEE was formed by nonprofit researchers to generate valid data that demonstrated the nonprofit sector’s multiple contributions to society’s well-being. Using a theoretical approach, this article extends Bourdieu’s emphasis on classificatory struggles beyond the study of the construction of the characteristics of social classes to explore contestations over the proper taxonomy of organizations and sectors in society.

This contribution focuses on analyses of specific themes in the encyclopedic Nature and Power, by Joachim Radkau. The analysis is shaped by insights derived from pairing individual chapters from the book with related readings. Examples will include traumatic environmental experiences, early modern colonialism and colonial “ghost acreage,” industrialization and uses of the forest, and manipulations of the hydrologic cycle. The structure of the contribution is explicitly comparative.

Some of the most severely affected communities in the world during the 1918–19 influenza pandemic were in Labrador and Alaska. Although these two regions are on the opposite ends of North America, a cultural continuum in the Inuit populations extends throughout the North American Arctic. Both regions contain other population groups, however, and because of these similarities and differences, a comparison of their experiences during the pandemic provides new insights into how culture and environment may influence patterns of spread of infectious disease. We describe here analyses of the patterns of influenza mortality in 97 Alaska communities and 37 Labrador communities. The Alaska communities are divided into five geographic regions corresponding to recognized cultural groups in the region; the Labrador communities are separated into three regions that vary in the degree of admixture between European and indigenous (primarily Inuit) groups. In both Alaska and Labrador mortality was substantially higher than the worldwide average of 2.5–5 percent. Average mortality ranged from less than 1 percent to 38 percent at the regional level in Alaska and from 1 percent to 75 percent at the regional level in Labrador with up to 90 percent mortality in some local communities in both Alaska and Labrador. A number of factors influencing this heterogeneous experience are discussed, including the impact of weather and geography; attempts to protect communities by implementing quarantine policies; accessibility of health care; nutritional deficiencies; cultural factors, such as settlement patterns, seasonal activities, and ethnicity; and exposure to earlier outbreaks of influenza or other diseases that may have increased or lessened the impact of influenza in 1918–19.

This article examines whether published keyword indexes to 22 British poets had any measurable effect on scholarly production related to those poets, mainly using quantitative output measures, since these are all that is available. It also draws on archival information about the individual concordances and their origins. The article tests whether concordances facilitated scholarship, or were a by-product/correlative of scholarship, or were unrelated to scholarship. The preponderance of the evidence leans toward the by-product hypothesis. More important, given the centrality of keyword indexing today, the evidence is mostly inconsistent with the facilitation argument. It is most likely that concordances emerged as a by-product and adjunct to scholarship and that their main use was by undergraduates, amateurs, and others below the elite level. Implications for the present are briefly discussed.