One of the mainstays of political sociology and political science for generationshas been debate about the conditions under which one policy regime—that is, a distinct mix of public policies—is replaced by another. For instance, a vast literature seeks to identify the factors that caused the shift from orthodox to Keynesian policy regimes in the United States and Europe after the Second World War, as well as the shift during the 1980s to more conservative neoliberal policy regimes (e.g., Campbell 1998; Gourevitch 1986; Hall 1989, 1992;Weir and Skocpol 1985). Similarly, scholars have argued about whether the process through which regime shifts occur is a slow and incremental one, driven by bureaucratic inertia, muddling through, and path-dependent constraints, or a rapid and abrupt one, sparked by cataclysmic events like war that trigger sharp breaks with past policies (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Hall 1993; Krasner 1984; Lindblom 1959; Pierson 1993, 1994). Regime shifts have also captured the imagination of historical sociologists who have recognized that history is marked by critical turning points that differentiate among relatively stable time periods and that this requires scholars to carefully identify historically specific patterns among variables (Abbott 1988, 1992, 1997; Isaac 1997).

“Give This Man Work if you would keep his wife and children alive; one child has already died from starvation,” wrote a concerned citizen to the East Side Relief Committee (Devins 1905: 322). The East Side Relief Committee was a special work-relief unit set up in 1893 by Josephine Shaw Lowell, the founder in 1882 of the Charity Organization Society (COS) of the City of New York (COSCNY) to combat the effects of the depression. That industrial depression in the early 1890s resulted in major unemployment and much suffering among the city's working class.The imperative of the letter (“Give This ManWork!”) illuminates the COS's policy toward relief before, during, and after the depression of 1893, a landmark date in social welfare history. Earlier, Lowell and the COS were best known for their concerns about the role that “indiscriminate” relief played in harming the moral character of the recipients and undermining the living standards of employed workers, not how it could be used to ameliorate joblessness. “I believe that among the many causes of poverty,” Lowell asserted in a speech, “one of the most potent is careless relief-giving, whether by what are called charitable societies, by private individuals,or from public funds” (quoted in Stewart 1974 [1911]: 216).

Chicago is amythic city. Its representation in the popular imagination is varied and has included, at various times, the attributes of a blue-collar town, a city in a garden, and a gangster's paradise. Myths of Chicago “grow abundantly between fact and emotion,” and they selectively and simultaneously evoke and defer attributes of the city. For one perduring myth, social scientists may be held largely responsible: namely, that Chicago is “one of the most planned cities of themodern era,” with a street grid, layout of buildings and waterways, and organization of its residential and commercial architecture that reveal a “geometric certainty” (Suttles 1990). The lasting scholarly fascination with Chicago's geography derives in part from the central role that social scientists played in constructing the planned city. In the 1920s,University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess worked with his colleagues in other social science disciplines to divide the city into communities and neighborhoods. This was a long and deliberate process based on large-scale “social surveys” of several thousand city inhabitants.Their work as members of the Local Community Research Committee (LCRC) produced the celebrated Chicago “community area”—that is, 75 mutually exclusive geographic areas of human settlement, each of which is portrayed as being socially and culturally distinctive.