One of the persisting problems in the religious history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has been a question of taxonomy. Authors still puzzle over whether we should have a name for the moderate, conforming section of the Church of England, to distinguish it from those whom we call Puritans. Was there, in fact, an essential difference between those two groups? A second question is, How far to the “left” on the religious “continuum” can we go before Puritanism changes into something qualitatively different? This usually becomes the problem of whether the Quakers were the extreme fringe of Puritanism or something altogether different. This study will offer evidence, statistically expressed, that there were consistent and significant differences between these positions.

Municipal administration was changed dramatically in the United States during the Progressive Era. Most explanations of this transformation have been society centered rather than state centered. Society-centered explanations, based on such factors as social movements, ethnicity, religion, social class, occupational composition, and population size have not provided a coherent account of the range and nature of the transformations in municipal administration in the Progressive Era. For example, democracy was expanded through municipal autonomy delegated by state legislatures and contracted by limiting ward representation, business practices were copied organizationally and challenged legally, and municipal administration was decentralized in proprietary functions and centralized in bureaucracy. Most importantly, society-centered factors have not accounted for the legal shaping of the state, in particular in framing the municipality’s administration and proprietary transactions. Empirical relationships between such state-centered changes as court-mandated contract responsibilities and, for example, social class or ethnicity have not been established—nor can they be cogently argued.

The nineteenth century was a period of dramatic population growth in the United States. In 1800 scarcely five million people resided in the fifteen states. By 1900 the populace had increased fifteenfold, and settlement stretched from the Atlantic coast westward to the shores of the Pacific Ocean (Century of Population Growth, 1909).

For most of the nineteenth century, French people associated hospitals with death and destitution. These institutions served as places where the poor went to die, not to be cured. As a result, hospitals (including maternity hospitals) were shelters of last resort for the poorest classes of society. Anyone who could avoid going to one of these institutions would shun them, at all possible costs. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, with the development of anesthesia and with the implementation of antiseptic and sterilization procedures, hospitals became safer places.