The past, once considered the exclusive domain of historians and antiquarians, has increasingly been embraced by anthropologists. Today, it is difficult to find a major anthropological study that does not claim to offer a diachronic, processual, historical analysis. In examining 10 years of historical anthropological writing, I cover three broad topics in this essay. First, I explain the emergence of a more historical anthropology as a widespread response to a crisis in the conceptualization of culture. Second, I argue that while there are certain identifiable themes that cut across this literature, in general, it reflects long-standing topical interests within anthropology; I review this literature according to these topics rather than divide it into interpretive or cultural studies versus studies of political economy. Third, I try to assess this body of work critically. I concentrate here on anthropological history as both research and textual practice, as well as briefly examine anthropological uses of the concepts of time, colonialism, and structure and agency.

The modernization/development process, both historically in Europe and in developing nations of the twentieth century, has involved the transformation of the labor force from one primarily engaged in agricultural pursuits to one largely involved in secondary- and tertiary-sector activities. This change has often been brought about in stages, beginning with the introduction of nonagricultural work in rural areas—proto-industrialization—as a supplement to industrial development in urban locations, concomitant with or followed by massive migration of the rural population into cities. Proto-industrialization may have been a response to population pressure, serving as a means to provide work for the surplus rural labor force when cultivable land became overtaxed and as a way for households to gain much-needed additional income during periods of agricultural shortfall.

We seem, as social science historians, to have become increasingly interested in the way that we present our evidence or tell our story or narrative. Donald McCloskey’s address last year cajoled us, or perhaps exhorted us, not to separate the scientific from the humanistic approach to writing history. As he pointed out, metaphor even creeps into economics, which is, by its earliest accounts, a dismal science. Metaphor influences the way one argues even with numbers (McCloskey 1990). I share his interest in rhetoric and add an interest in narrative.

In 1895, Fayette County, West Virginia, a leading coal county in the southern West Virginia coal fields, experienced widespread strikes by miners. The strikes were remarkable because, in an American industry known for violent labor relations and intensive union organizing since the appearance of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania before 1880, this was the first major strike in southern West Virginia. We might attempt to understand the role of law and public authority in these strikes in terms of legal repression by means of the labor injunction, labor conspiracy laws, and strikebreaking by the police and military. But none of these occurred in Fayette in 1895, though the later history of labor conflict in West Virginia is replete with all of them. In another way, however, the legal events accompanying these strikes are far more remarkable and challenge us to examine more subtle connections between class conflict and law.

Historians generally agree that crime, especially serious violence and disorder in America’s urban areas, increased during the first half of the nineteenth century, then leveled off, and eventually declined to the end of the century (Ferdinand 1978, 1980; Lane 1968,1979; Warner 1968). The need to improve institutions of control seemed apparent to many city dwellers in the early part of the century. Their responses, which remain part of our criminal justice system, included urban policing, large-scale penitentiaries, and specialized facilities, such as houses of refuge and reform schools for juvenile offenders. While the story of these urban developments has been well told previously (for example, Barnes 1927; Lane 1967; Rothman 1971; Platt 1969; Johnson 1978; Schneider 1980; Monkkonen 1981; Harring 1983), comparatively little is known about crime and control in peripheral communities, even though less than one-tenth of the American population was urban in 1820 and only one-quarter in 1860.

The study of urban systems has generated a considerable volume of work designed to allow one both to categorize urban areas at a point in time and to describe their development through time. This has resulted in the examination of the growth of individual cities, their phases of development, and the relationship between cities and their hinterlands or regions. The study of urban areas and urban systems from so many different perspectives is a measure of the complexity of the forces that operate on the development of an urban area. This article attempts to examine one particular force operating on one particular city in an attempt to get a clearer picture of its development during its formative years.

Edward Jarvis’s (1971 [1855]) study of insanity in 1854 Massachusetts still receives attention as an exemplary study of mental disorder. It is cited as the first American study of the “true” prevalence of mental illness in a general population (Dohrenwend 1975), the first American study to show that social standing (pauperism) was related to mental illness (ibid.), and the first American study to show that a substantial number of ill people were not receiving “professional” help (ibid.; Fox 1984). Likewise, Jarvis’s focus on social causation—social factors cause mental disorder, versus social selection, according to which mental disorder impairs social functioning and achievement—identified an important issue that still receives attention in the mental health literature (Dohrenwend 1975; Fox 1990; Turner and Wagenfeld 1967; Wheaton 1978).

A central concern of both sociological theory and historical inquiry involves the relationships between structure and function. The two foremost grand theories of the past 100 years, structural functionalism and Marxism, posit opposing answers to the question of whether structure determines function, or vice versa. Contemporary studies in fields as diverse as urban politics and organizational sociology continue to draw inspiration from this conundrum, since the “answer” has such profound implications for understanding the driving forces within society and history.

The present article follows in this tradition. An examination of the history of capital finance within transportation is used to elucidate the direction of causality in relationships between structural arrangements, such as the amount and kinds of debt used for capital investment, and functional outcomes, such as growth in new kinds of transportation services.

While families have historically provided the basis of business organization in the United States, in the late nineteenth century the development of corporations and managerial capitalism weakened their role in business, especially in management (Bell 1962; Chandler 1977; Farber 1972; Hall 1977,1988; Kanter 1978; Mills 1956; Shammas et al. 1987). Chandler (1977) has postulated a historical decline in family management, control, and decision making in firms with the growth of industrial capitalism; others have asserted a continued presence of the family in business ownership (Davis and Stern 1980; Lansberg et al. 1988).

In this issue of Social Science History we begin a special series of articles surveying the impact and use of historical research and reasoning in the other social sciences—anthropology, economics, geography, political science, and sociology. The authors of the essays have been asked to analyze their disciplines so that readers will get a sense both of major issues and research directions and of influences. In addition, they have been asked to include in their references older important works as well as more recent ones, so that those in other disciplines may use the essays as bibliographic sources. After the series is completed, we expect to publish an expanded version of it as a separate book.

There has developed recently a body of Self-reflexive literature on the methodologies and epistemological bases of social history (e.g., Zunz 1985; Lloyd 1988; Stearns 1988). Some critics have argued for a greater synthesis between social history and politics (Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1976; Eley and Nield 1980; Hochstadt 1982; Rabb 1981); others have focused more on the mode of social-historical disquisition (Stone 1979); still others have placed especial emphasis on the epistemological basis of historical explanation (Lloyd 1988; Giddens 1978; Abrams 1982). Much of the literature is programmatic. Very few of these works provide concrete examples of how their approaches can be applied. The primary purpose of this article is to furnish a case study that highlights the drawbacks to one type of social history while exemplifying the merits of another. In particular, I want to focus on the nature of the relationship between structure and human agency in social-historical explanation, using as my basis the foundling home established by the British Colonial Office on Kephallenia in 1824. Utilizing the data contained in the foundling register kept by the Greek Police Department at Argostoli over the years 1830 to 1834, I conduct statistical analyses similar to those performed by social historians working on comparable institutions elsewhere and thus place the Kephallenian case into a comparative European context.

In his 1911 film What Shall We Do with Our Old? D.W. Griffith dramatized the belief that urban, industrial America had no place for the elderly. Fired for being too slow at his work, an impoverished old man cannot buy food or medicine for his wife, who languishes in their drab, one-room apartment. Justice Benjamin Cardozo told a similar tale in upholding the constitutionality of the Social Security Act (Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 [1937]): “The number of [aged] unable to take care of themselves is growing at a threatening pace. More and more our population is becoming urban and industrial instead of rural and agricultural.” Cardozo relied on studies by the U.S. Social Security Board (1937: 3), which found that “the major part of the industrial population . . . earns scarcely enough to provide for its existence. Savings are small and generally cover little more than the cost of burial insurance.” As a result, “industrial workers in [urban] areas . . . reach old age with few resources” (ibid.: 33).

As furstenberg et al. (1979: 497) suggested over a decade ago, “The enormous promise of quantitative history can only be fulfilled when we are intimately acquainted with the limitations of our sources of information.” This collection of articles follows that suggestion by assessing the limitations of perhaps the most important source of information for social science researchers: the U.S. census. Certainly the degree of underenumeration may seriously affect research in many disciplines. For example, our estimates of migration rates might be inflated. In the process of nominal record linkage, researchers typically assume that those who are not listed in the linked census document out-migrated, when in reality many may simply have been missed by the census taker. As a result, past populations (especially in cities) may appear to have been much more mobile than they actually were. Census underenumeration might also exaggerate voter turnout. If the census in a particular community listed 1,215 eligible voters and election returns showed that 1,150 voted in an election, the voter turnout would be estimated at 95%. However, if just 10% of the eligible voters were not counted by the census taker, the estimated level of voter participation would decline to 85%. Finally, our understanding of the rural economy in the past might be affected by underenumeration. Agricultural production might be overstated if the more successful landowning farmers were more often enumerated and less productive farm tenants were missed. In short, the accuracy of the U.S. census should be a central concern to social science historians.

By the end of the nineteenth century most of the economically advanced European nations had adopted some form of public social insurance. In the world’s richest nation, however, widows and the aged, sick, and injured received little support from the state. Without the help of the state, how did American workers and their families survive in the face of sickness, accidents, old age, or the death of the primary earner? The traditional answer is that they survived rather badly, if at all. Social reformers of the early twentieth century and most modern historians argue that voluntarism was a failure, that it was not suited to the needs of an increasingly industrialized, urbanized populace.

One might have predicted that “as sociology meets history” (Tilly 1981), there would arise a demand for synthesis, for a history-as-social-science that would combine the best of both disciplines. A few voices, chief among them the late Philip Abrams (1982), issued that call. But the synthesis has not arrived. Today the relation between history and sociology is that of parents from differing backgrounds whose adolescent children have contracted a friendship at school. There is a pleasant but empty cordiality between the elders. Although the adolescents have an acrimonious rivalry, they close ranks against parental orthodoxies of either sort. One hopes that the young people will cooperatively transform the social attitudes of their parents, but unthinking loyalties ultimately prevent this transformation. So the synthesis of history and sociology, or more broadly of history and social science, has not arrived. Today, the most synthetic call we hear is for each (sub)discipline to keep the other honest (e.g., Roy 1987b).

The articles on American domestic service that appear in this issue of Social Science History were part of a 1989 Social Science History Association Annual Meeting session. They reveal that, despite the investigations of Katzman (1978), Sutherland (1981), Dudden (1983), Glenn (1986), and others, there is still a great deal to know about domestic service in the United States. Each article offers a different perspective on transformations within domestic service in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides new information about different demographic categories of domestic servants. Taken together, they suggest creative new ways of understanding the occupation and its relationship to race, ethnicity, gender, and the industrial labor market.

Most of the information released by the Census Bureau has always consisted of summary population counts cross-tabulated by individual or family characteristics. Although these data form the basic description of the American population, they are not ideal for analytical research. The Census Bureau cannot anticipate all the needs of social scientists, so many topics are inadequately covered in the published census volumes. For historical research, the problem is especially acute, because the published data are fairly sketchy for the period before 1940. Moreover, the classifications employed by the Census Bureau have changed over time, making long-term comparisons difficult or impossible.

In a well-known paper published some years ago Donald McCloskey (1976) addressed his fellow economists on the importance of history to their discipline. He argued that greater emphasis on economic history would make for better economics and for better economists. It cannot be said that McCloskey’s arguments were taken to heart. The tendency for economists to expend their effort on (and award their honors for) the refinement of mathematical models and statistical techniques has continued unabated and perhaps has increased. This has led many scholars in related disciplines, social science historians in particular, to believe that economists are uninterested in history and unreceptive to arguments based on historical evidence.

Several hours before dawn on 5 August 1835, a Washington slave slipped into his mistress’s bedroom, axe in hand. Anna Maria Thornton awoke to see a drunken Arthur, her longtime house slave and the son of her trusted cook and maid, Maria, threatening her with, she believed, murder. Luckily for Mrs. Thornton, Maria was in the room and, “being fortunately awake, seized him & got him out” while her mistress sounded the alarm to the neighbors. Shocked and horrified, Mrs. Thornton recorded in her diary the attack and Arthur’s escape, subsequent capture, and criminal indictment (Thornton, Aug.—Oct. 1835). Some of Washington’s less reputable citizens reacted with hate and violence. In the ensuing days, out-of-work white mechanics gathered at the steps of the city hall, looking for a scapegoat for the disorder Arthur represented. On 12 August the mob turned its wrath on the vulnerable free black community. The “Snow Storm,” named for a victim of its destruction, free black Beverly Snow, was Washington’s most infamous riot. The crowd burned Snow’s restaurant, along with several other symbols of free black success (Werner 1986: 243–45; Curry 1981: 99–100).

Few paid-up readers of this journal will deny the importance, as a historical source, of the U.S. manuscript population censuses, particularly those since 1850, which supposedly contain the names of all individuals. Since from 1965 to 1989 my work concerned primarily the four earliest such “nominal” censuses, 1850–80,1 shall restrict my remarks and estimates to them.

Some interesting research has been done, but much more cries out yet to be done, on the manuscript population census as a source, especially on its accuracy and comprehensiveness. Trudging along the road of improvement, we begin to learn that there are potholes aplenty in it, but how many, where, and, most vital of all, how deep? It is sloppy technique for historians to be less critical of the census than of other sources they employ.