Health insurance with high deductibles is an important feature of the Bush administration's health savings accounts initiative. A similar type of insurance, known as major medical, was the most common type of health coverage in the United States from the 1950s through the 1970s. This article traces the history of cost sharing in health insurance from its origins in insurers' concerns about “moral hazard” to the heyday of major medical insurance to the temporary comeback of first-dollar coverage during the era of managed care. Proponents of deductibles and co-payments, today and in the past, have argued that they bring down costs by forcing consumers to make more careful health care choices. The history of major medical insurance, however, shows that high-deductible insurance failed to curb medical inflation and also hurt consumers who expected their coverage to protect their incomes from the costs of sickness and injury.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 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.

During the 40 years since its founding, the Social Science History Association (SSHA) and its journal have attracted many scholars to the field of social science history, stimulating many new lines of research, but it has only had limited success in developing some of the more prominent new trends in the history field. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's early presence in the journal Social Science History did not stimulate much further work on the longue durée. In environmental history, transnational history, and studies of the non-Western world, the SSHA has not led the way. The article calls on members of the SSHA to think about creative responses to these new directions of inquiry.

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.

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.

The complex relationship between the history of infectious diseases and social inequalities has recently attracted renewed attention. Smallpox has so far largely escaped this revived scholarly scrutiny, despite its century-long status as one of the deadliest and widespread of all infectious diseases. Literature has demonstrated important differences between rural and urban communities, and between cities, but has so far failed to address intra-urban disparities due to varying living conditions and disease environments. This article examines the last nationwide upsurge of smallpox in the Netherlands through the lens of Amsterdam’s 50 neighborhoods in the period 1870–72. We use a mixed methods approach combining qualitative spatial analysis and OLS regression to investigate which part of the population was affected most by this epidemic in terms of age and sex, geographic distribution across the city, and underlying sociodemographic neighborhood characteristics such as relative wealth, housing density, crude death rate, and birth rate. Our analyses reveal a significant spatial patterning of smallpox mortality that can largely be explained by the existing social environment. Lacking universal vaccination, the smallpox epidemic was not socially neutral, but laid bare some of the deep-seated social and health inequalities across the city.

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.

The pawnshop was a critical component of urban credit networks in early modern Europe, serving as a source of ready cash in an era before there was widespread access to deposit banking and formal consumer loans. This article examines the use of the pawnshop, among other financial strategies, such as shop credit and loans between kin and neighbors, by a sample of poor to middling citizen households in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. It also evaluates the multiple links between consumer behavior and the acquisition of either savings or debt. Petty credit from the pawnshop came at a high price, and its use presumed prior access to consumer goods suitable for pawning. Thus we find that the poorest households did not rely on the pawnshop as often or as extensively as their better-situated peers for whom collateral was more easily obtained. Better-situated households also enjoyed easier access to shop credit, the terms of which were more favorable for the consumer. None of these households, however, were in positions to save to the extent necessary for participation in the larger capital markets of Amsterdam and the world.

For nine weeks during the 1866 cholera epidemic, the registrar general for England and Wales published details of more than 13,000 deaths in London. Although the names of the deceased and the informant were withheld, all other information available from the death certificate was reproduced in the capital city's Weekly Returns, including registration district and subdistrict, precise address (house number and street, or institution), sex, age (sometimes down to hours for infants), occupation, cause(s) of death, and duration of final illness. Since historians’ access to original death certificates in England and Wales is restricted, this source presents an opportunity to analyze systematically the practice of cause of death certification in the middle of the nineteenth century, albeit during a period of mortality crisis. Variability of diagnostic “depth”—that is, the listing of multiple causes and duration of final illness—is considered for three major causes: cholera, diarrhea, and respiratory tuberculosis. Deaths in workhouses and general hospitals were chronically underdocumented compared to home deaths. This finding supports the notion that the institutionalization of sickness in the nineteenth century was accompanied by a loss of the “patient narrative” and also points to the entrenchment of institutional cultures of record keeping and administration.

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.

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.

Funding for schools of all kinds was largely market-based until the Civil War. Parents in New York and other northern states continued to pay tuition, or rate bills, in addition to taxes to support common schools. Previous research relied on aggregate state-level data to estimate the amount of funding from public and nonpublic sources for common schools, while existing case studies of local school practices focus exclusively on Massachusetts or on urban locations and thus on exceptions to the rule. This study looks at local practices of school funding for multiple types of schools in one unexceptional rural town in western New York from 1815 to 1850. The results reveal considerable in-state variation in the proportion of public and private funding for common schools that is otherwise obscured by state-level data. The proportion of school funds that came from tuition was much higher for rural areas than for urban areas. The article also compares tuition funding for common schools with that for other types of market-based schooling, including two local venture schools and one local academy. The results show that, although tuition prices for academies and venture schools were predictably higher than for common schools, the overall structure of school funding for rural common schools and academies was more similar than different in New York in the antebellum era.

Once upon a time, historians and political scientists expended a great deal of effort in tracing the complex development of the United States Congress in the twentieth century—a time, especially from the 1930s onward, during which Congress faced a remarkable expansion in government activity as a surge of new concerns, foreign and domestic, and, as a result, an unprecedented load of business, all but overwhelmed the institution. During this same time, Congress’s role within the American political system has been Social Science transformed in the face of the rise of the imperial presidency, the Supreme Court’s insistence on changing rules of representation, and the consequent shift in the institution’s makeup and internal power structure. Finally, public perceptions of Congress, increasingly negative as they have become, have had some significant impact on the transformation of Congress within the American political system as well (Sundquist 1981; Harris 1993; Rieselbach 1994).

In recent decades, the Swedish economy has been characterized by rather fast economic growth. At the same time, income inequality has increased substantially. In the present study, I investigated who has gained and who has been left behind during this period—how disposable personal income has changed for men and women, as well as for those in different positions in the income distribution. Register data for the total population (aged 20 to 80 years old) from 1983 to 2010 were used and three different positions in the income distribution were investigated: percentile 10, the median, and percentile 99. Five years were selected: 1983, 1991, 2000, 2006, and 2010. Each selected year represents a snapshot and describes the general trend. Results show that women in the 10th percentile have increased their income quite well, a result of increased female labor force participation during the period. This has led to a decrease of the income gap between genders within this group. But results also show a masculinization of low income and poverty, as the male incomes in this group have not increased to the same extent as for males in the other income groups. At the median, both men and women experienced a steady increase of incomes, but the gender gap for ages younger than 50 widened between 2000 and 2010. At the very top, percentile 99, the increase in disposable personal income was enormous; however, the gender gap in income did not decrease.