Louise Tilly is noteworthy as an historian, a mentor, and a distiller of feminist thought. Her work covers a variety of fields. In the field of labor history she produced an important study of political contention in Italy, Politics and Class in Milan, 1881–1901, and, along with Charles and Richard Tilly, a widely influential study of collective action, The Rebellious Century (Tilly 1994; Tilly et al. 1975). Her most influential work is in the arena of women's and family history, most notably Women, Work, and Family, a product of her collaboration with Joan Scott (Tilly and Scott 1978). She was also a member of the Panel on Women's Work and Technology of the National Research Council, which produced a signal study of the evolution of women's white collar work and its prospects, Computer Chips and Paper Clips: Technology and Women's Employment, and she possessed a keen interest in the intersection between demographic and family history as shown in her coedited collection on European fertility decline (Gillis et al. 1992; National Research Council 1986). Before illness forced her to cease work, she was moving into global history where her most important contribution was her presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA) that outlined a distinctive and original approach to world history (Tilly 1994).

The relationship between economic performance and wealth inequality at a regional level is examined using county-level wealth for Ontario in 1892 and 1902. The results find that after controlling for confounding factors, declining wealth inequality was generally accompanied by slower economic performance as measured by changes in wealth levels and manufacturing output over time. This suggests that a more egalitarian wealth distribution came perhaps at the price of less robust economic performance.

Historians have often portrayed American Indian populations as relatively homogeneous. Notorious in this regard is the genre of formulaic tribal histories, in which individuals or subgroups are scarcely seen and amorphous tribes merely react to U.S. policy directives and agents’ actions (Clifton 1979; Iverson 1984). When internal differences are noted, they tend to be lumped into dichotomized categories, with little attention given to their composition or to the historical processes from which they arose. Hence the literature is replete with references to traditionalists and progressives, Christians and pagans, and mixed bloods and full bloods, to name only a few. But history does not unfold in fixed oppositional stages, and dichotomizing these terms, even if they were employed by historical participants themselves, reveals little about social processes. They indicate, instead, a recognition that intratribal heterogeneity was increasing, perhaps in patterned ways (Clifton 1989).

Explanations of the gender pay gap and related labor market segregation remain fiercely debated. On the one side are those economic historians who take a primarily neoclassical view, in which competition among workers and employers eliminates wage differences that do not reflect productivity and occupational segregation that is not the outcome of choice. Persistent discrimination must reflect anticompetitive institutions, for instance, trade unions. A corollary of the neoclassical perspective is that markets are liberating, freeing agents, including women, from cultural stereotypes and ensuring that they get paid what they are worth, although of course this need not imply wage equality if there are gender differences in productivity. On the other side are those cultural historians who interpret wage differences as reflecting custom and, as far as women are concerned, the cultural deprecation of women's work, while occupational segregation represents gender stereotypes of fit work for women. In this view, socially and culturally constructed gender identities can influence market outcomes, producing discrimination in wages and work that persists even in the face of competitive forces.

Over the last twenty years political scientists and sociologists concerned primarily with western European developments since 1945 have attempted to define corporatism as an ideal model for use in analyzing this region's political economies. Several influential American historians in recent years have also employed the concept of corporatism in examining the development of the modern American political economy. Although these historians have not ignored the contemporary European-oriented social science literature, the relationship between the work of historians describing the evolution of America's political economy and the theoretical literature based primarily on more recent European experiences and European concerns remains problematic.

Contemporary Denver is a metropolis shaped in the automobile age. When the Denver Planning Commission first warned about the “sinister disease” of decentralization in 1941 and reported “startling evidences of the flight of Denver residents across the corporate boundaries,” 72.4 percent of the population of the five-county Denver area lived within the city itself (Table 1). Thirty-five years later, metropolitan area population had more than tripled, but suburban growth had cut Denver’s share of the total to 35.8 percent. The suburban counties of Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder and Jefferson accounted for one third of all Coloradans, and local residents ranked surburban sprawl as one of three major problems of the metropolitan area.

Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this article presents a systematic comparison of differences in the institutional success of sociology in 25 European countries during the academic expansion from 1945 until the late 1960s. Combining context-sensitive national histories of sociology, concept formation, and formal analyses of necessary and sufficient conditions, the article searches for historical explanations for both successful and inhibited processes of the institutionalization of sociology. Concretely, it assesses the interplay of political regime types, the continuous presence of sociological prewar traditions, political Catholicism, and the effects of sociological communities in neighboring countries and how their various combinations are related to more or less well-established sociologies. The results can help explain adversary effects under democratic conditions as well as supportive factors under nondemocratic conditions.

This article conducts an analysis of public meetings in Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The profound changes in frequency and character, the enormous increase of public meetings and the sharp decline in the relative frequency of violent gatherings, serve as an indicator of the expansion of the public sphere and its capacity to shape the social process. The article explains the rise of the public meeting and why it became so central to British political life during the nineteenth century through four intertwined changes: the development of British capitalism, the growing importance of Parliament, the multiplied opportunities for political entrepreneurs, and the effect of public contention itself.

The case of the Bulgarian Esperanto movement under state socialism demonstrates a social movement can survive under authoritarianism by establishing a legitimate activist culture acceptable to the regime while pursuing its intrinsic goals. Bulgaria, a close Soviet ally, was a difficult case of movement survival. In the early years following World War II, the national Esperanto periodical Bulgara Esperantisto was a key organizing tool for the movement reporting on its activities, reaching out to potential recruits, and legitimizing the movement under the new communist-led regime. Examining the periodical’s discourse over a two-year period, I find that the movement managed to carve a space for itself in the new political context by advancing a form of what I term “nationalized cosmopolitanism.” Bulgarian Esperantists were able to maintain activist networks nationally and internationally, pursue intrinsic Esperanto goals, and sustain cosmopolitan identities under unhospitable conditions. The movement successfully legitimated itself by drawing from three cosmopolitan sources: Esperanto cosmopolitanism, communist internationalism, and Bulgarian peasant universalism. In the context of the nation-state system, invoking the nation was an effective legitimation strategy, even for a movement with cosmopolitan orientations, even under a regime justified in universal terms. Espousing pragmatism and partnerships while avoiding conflict, Bulgarian Esperantists were able to thrive under the new communist regime, recruit new members, and reconnect with the global Esperanto movement. I conclude that a legitimate activist culture can adapt to a regime’s ideology and institutional environment without necessarily being co-opted.

It was evident from the very beginning of the colonization of the Americas that the West African had experienced a biological past which differed in significant ways from that of other peoples. For in that beginning, dead Indians began accumulating “in heaps, like bedbugs” as they succumbed to diseases that accompanied the Spanish Conquistadores and their animals from Iberia. But the black slaves who accompanied them as well, did not die, or rather, the Spaniards temporized, “if we did not hang a Negro, he would never die.” In addition to this immunologic hardiness, the black was physically sturdier. Common wisdom had it that he could do the work of four Indians.

This article extends Max Weber's theory of the transformation of charisma by exploring the relationships between cults of charismatic miracle workers and the Catholic Church in early modern Europe. We show that, at least in this case, cults of miracle workers were able to preserve their charismatic character even after the death of their leader by securing recognition from the church of their leader as a saint. While the Church in general was concerned over the proliferation of magic, its attitude toward miracle workers in this period was not hostile. Instead, we show that the Church established a canonization procedure that was biased in favor of those miracle workers whose acolytes formed densely connected networks capable of harnessing local support. Rather than being inimical to each other, charismatic authorities and existing institutional structures formed symbiotic relationships. In addition to routinization and depersonalization, we suggest that charismatic authorities can also undergo a process of preservation, which depends on their ability to secure from existing institutions the resources needed to stabilize the relationships between themselves and their staffs.

R. J. Collingwood compares the historian to a detective. Both, in his opinion, are dissatisfied with what is contained in the documents and engage in a search for hidden or lost information. Both follow their intuition, guided by scientific positivist methods, and base their work on hypotheses and the strict logic of question and answer (1980: 253-269). In recent years the research laboratories of detectives and historians almost simultaneously have been replenished by quantitative methods of analysis, which substantially increased the possibility of achieving the desired goals: to find hidden information and go beyond the bounds of what is directly contained in the documents.

Internal migration remains one of the most important issues in European social history. Our entire concept of community and of social life rests on certain assumptions about residential stability, yet these assumptions have only been inadequately tested for most historical periods and in most places. We now know that previously accepted characterizations of the stable peasant community are erroneous, for numerous studies have documented the great population flux in much of western Europe in preindustrial times (Schofield, 1970; Tilly, 1978). Yet, for the most part, our ideas about life in communities of the past tend to rest on an assumption of a bedrock of residential stability to which the limited population movement is anchored.

Historians of the American mental hospital still do not firmly grasp who mental hospital patients were. Although the field's signature debate on the nature of the mental hospital as “repressive” or “humanitarian” involves the characterization of the patients —based on their demographic traits—as victims of repression or beneficiaries of humanitarianism, there has actually not been a thorough demographic analysis of the patients. This article ascertains and examines the defining characteristics of the patient population within the context of that enduring debate. It first identifies demographic groups that were more prone to institutionalization than would have been expected from their susceptibility to insanity. They symbolized the patient population in the late nineteenth century when insanity did not necessarily result in institutionalization. This article then discovers essentially the same demographic groups ended up in mental hospitals in both the hinterland and metropolitan areas of the North from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It also finds a protective effect that marriage had against institutionalization operated in a socially conservative way. Finally, it weaves together the demographic traits of the patients deemed indicative of the mental hospital's repressiveness and the ones considered reflective of its humanitarianism into a panoptic portrayal that presents the patients as both victims and beneficiaries of the mental hospital. This article's analysis of the patients as a complex, multifaceted population helps transcend the binary framework of the debate on the nature of the mental hospital and deepen our understanding of who they were.

This article analyzes the changing age structure of Swedish and Finnish sailors for almost 200 years. We show that the proportion of the youngest men increased during the age of sail (i.e., the older technology). The average age increased significantly during the early twentieth century as steam (i.e., the newer technology) replaced sail in Nordic shipping. Thus, a technological revolution did not displace the older workers, but rather diminished the demand for the younger ones. This study shows, however, that technological changes were not the only drivers of changes in the age structure of Nordic sailors. Institutional and societal changes also played an important role, though they were at least partly coevolving with the technological changes. This study also shows that the maritime industry experienced professionalization especially during the latter part of the period.

The lynching literature often considers how the Populist Party affected lynching, yet the Southern Farmers’ Alliance—a short-lived but influential voluntary association that mobilized large numbers of white farmers—is overlooked. We argue that this is a critical oversight, as the Alliance was the origin of populism in the South. Specifically, we hypothesize that where the Alliance had more local organizations, the greater the likelihood of lynching from 1888 to 1895, the peak period of populism. To test this, we focus on two states with different experiences with the Alliance: North Carolina, in which the state’s Alliance was a strong supporter of the Populist Party, and South Carolina, where the Democrats sought to court Alliancemen and deter the creation of, and voting for, the Populist Party. Our empirical findings reveal that lynchings were more common in counties where the Farmers’ Alliance had more organizations in South Carolina, but no similar connection exists in North Carolina. These findings suggest that the Southern Farmers’ Alliance is, at times, pivotal to understanding populism’s connection to lynching in the late-nineteenth century American South.

This article answers Larry Gerber's (1995) challenge for a renewed appreciation of the social science literature on corporatism and state theory by explaining variations in corporatist institutions through the concept of policy legacies. To understand the variation in corporatist forms of governance, three policy areas are key: the long-standing trade policies of the England and Canada, the forms of government intervention during World War I, and prior political battles within the dairy industries. In their own unique way, these policies shaped the character of the market failure, the political capacities of farm organizations, and the institutional response that incorporated private interest groups within the formulation and implementation of public policy. By viewing the emergence of corporatist institutions in England and Canada as examples of governmental responses to economic crisis, this research on corporatism contributes to the larger theory of the determinants, as well as the effects, of the state in capitalist democracies.

Federal and state appellate court reporters for the 15 American slave states and the District of Columbia contain nearly 11,000 cases concerning slaves. In deciding these cases, southern judges formulated doctrines that would later become commonplace in other disputes. In fact, the common law of slavery, whether it concerned the sale, hiring, or accidental injury of a slave, looks far more like modern-day law than like antebellum law. Slave law, in many ways, helped blaze the path of American law generally.

In the United States, tax favoritism—an approach that has weakened the extractive capacity of the federal government by providing tax loopholes and preferences for taxpayers—has remained since the 1930s. It has consumed the amount of tax revenue the government can spend and therefore weakened the possibility of the redistribution of fiscal resources. It has also made the federal tax system complicated and inequitable, resulting in undermining taxpayer consent. Therefore, since the 1930s, a tax reform to create a simple, fair, and equitable federal income tax system with the capacity to raise revenue has been long overdue. Many scholars have evaluated the Tax Reform Act of 1969 (TRA69), which Richard M. Nixon signed into law on December 30, 1969, as one of the most successful steps toward accomplishing this goal. This article demonstrates that TRA69 left tax favoritism in the United States. Furthermore, it points out that TRA69 turned taxpayers against the idea of federal taxation, a shift in public perception that greatly impacted tax reform in the years to follow.