V. O. Key’s proposition that one-party politics in the American states has been destructive of both the dominant and minor parties in such systems fits California’s political experience very nicely. From 1893 to 1932 California Republicans captured almost all statewide offices and they maintained huge legislative majorities. Furthermore, both parties entered the 1930’s with little institutionalized capacity for performing the basic nominating and campaigning functions. It appears, therefore, that the notorious weakness of political parties in California could be accounted for in terms of Key’s theories of the debilitating impact of one-party politics. Understandably, however, this line of speculation raises questions in the minds of those students of California politics who are aware of the several studies that particularly credit crossfiling for the weakness of California parties at mid-century. Consequently, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate the relationship between intensity of interparty competition and crossfiling in California politics during the first half of this century. In establishing this relationship, this study first shows that crossfiling did not become a general practice until after the end of California’s one-party era (1893-1932). The analysis then goes on to demonstrate that, during the one-party 1920’s, crossfiling occurred more often in the relatively competitive areas of the state than in the most profoundly one-party areas. Finally, a deviant case analysis develops the correspondence between the incidence of successful crossfiling (winning both parties’ primaries) and the relative competitiveness of types of offices.

Seventy-three years ago pioneer American medievalist Dana Carlton Munro (1911: 504) delivered a paper in Philadelphia to the American Philosophical Society entitled “The Cost of Living in the Twelfth Century.” He threw down the gauntlet by concluding that

This article takes up this challenge with new material on the cost of living in Italy in the twelfth century.

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

In 1986, 585 out of 5,686 members of the Association of American Geographers declared their allegiance to the Historical Geography Specialty Group; among 50 AAG specialty groups, the historical geographers ranked 7th. Yet one prominent human geographer regards historical geography as “overdetermined,” an “empty concept” conveying “few (if any) significant analytical distinctions” (Dear 1988: 270). Dear’s argument is that, by definition, all geography should be historical, since “the central object in human geography is to understand the simultaneity of time and space in structuring social process.” So the only subdisciplines of human geography which have any intellectual coherence are those focused on distinct processes—political, economic, social. To me, even this distinction is unrealistic and impracticable for research purposes. But Dear does not go so far as to argue that historical geography or other “overdetermined,” “multidimensional,” or “peripheral” subdisciplines are wrong, merely that they are incidental to geography’s “intellectual identity.”

Three Declining Plateaus of population growth provide an empirical framework for American social history (Nugent, 1981). After a pre-history, self-sustaining demographic regimes appeared in the form of a frontier-rural mode of life common to most Americans by about 1720 and remained unchallenged until the mid-nineteenth century. From the 1860s to the 1920s, the frontier-rural mode continued to exhibit considerable strength but in rapidly contracting areas of the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Columbia Plateau. During that period of fifty years, however, the second plateau was increasingly supplanted by the metropolitan (or urban-industrial) mode of life. After 1920, by demographic measures, the frontier-rural mode of life had been replaced virtually everywhere by the metropolitan one familiar to Americans ever since.

Thirty years ago Frank Tannenbaum in Slave and Citizen first catalogued the many occasions for the manumission of slaves in Latin America. He indicated that baptism was an important occasion of manumission. Any slave owner, motivated by generosity and religious sentiment or a minimal payment made by the parent or godparent of the child, could free his slave at baptism. Tannenbaum cited this as one of many instances where Catholic practice and ritual effected a more humane and hopeful existence for the slave in Latin America, denied to slaves held in Protestant colonies.

The results of recent investigations of slave manumission in Brazil, however, have challenged the idea that slaves were frequently manumitted. Kátia M. Queirós Mattoso and Mary Karasch, in studies of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, found that only a small percentage of those who were freed were children. In addition, it was revealed that few infant slaves were freed at baptism. Stuart Schwartz found that for colonial Bahia “there is no evidence [in notarial records] that large numbers of children were given their liberty at the baptismal font.” Arnold Kessler discovered that baptism was the occasion of manumission of only fourteen children, representing 2 percent of his sample of manumitted slaves (libertos) in nineteenth-century Bahia. For the small coastal town of Paraty in southern Brazil there was a similar pattern. Of the 325 slaves whose freedom was recorded in the notarial archive between 1789 and 1822 only six slaves, or 1.8 percent of the total sample, were infants freed at baptism.

In recent articles Bourke and DeBats (1978, 1980) have made a number of interesting points, which are of immediate concern to the study of electoral mobilization and participation over time. They have pointed to the existence of a number of poll lists recording individual votes after 1820 in what they term viva voce states (1980:232ff). These lists certainly must attract the attention of anybody concerned with the empirical study of political development in the United States and elsewhere in the nineteenth century. Some of these lists have been known for quite a while, and some of them have also been used in various studies mentioned by Bourke and DeBats. Nevertheless, much tedious work remains to be done before all of these poll lists can be utilized and before they can be made available to the scientific community.

Relations between workers and managers underwent a profound transformation in the early years of the twentieth century. Employers began a systematic attempt to control production and rationalize shop floor processes through technological innovation, subdivision of tasks, and the scientific management (or Taylorism) movement. A concern for a tractable labor force compelled the development of the profession of personnel management and “corporate welfare” work on the part of employers. The all-round skilled craftsman, trained by a union apprenticeship and able to work in any area of the trade without management instruction and supervision, was replaced by the semiskilled machine operative trained by the company to work on a few tasks using modified and specialized machinery. On the other side, craftsmen accustomed to autonomy in their work and governed by a collective ethic felt their organized power threatened by this management offensive that debased skill, imposed new forms of discipline, and promoted individualism and competition. Craftsmen challenged management's encroachment upon the shop floor through militant union action, but in doing so they were forced, by the “dilution” of their trade (the British term for the destruction of skilled jobs), to rethink their traditional reliance on exclusive craft knowledge. The key to any new strategy was the ability of craftsmen to transcend old craft lines, join with the less skilled workers whose jobs were created by management reorganization, and formulate new demands. The World War I years and the production crisis produced by the war saw the permanent institutionalization of the “new factory system” in the United States and elsewhere. The metal trades were the industrial sector most affected by management reorganization, and during the war years this sector was the most strike-prone (Nelson, 1975; Taylor, 1967; Braverman, 1974; Montgomery, 1974, 1976; Nadworny, 1955; Hinton, 1973; Bing, 1921).

In the last two decades historians have begun to examine the political role and importance of religion. Many have concluded that religion provided a broad social perspective and served as the main basis for partisan identification and political activity (as summarized in Swierenga, 1971; McSeveney, 1973; VanderMeer, 1977; Silbey et al., 1978: 253-56). This position has by no means been universally accepted. Some of the criticism involves how the strength of that relationship has been evaluated and measured (Bogue et al., 1977; Wright, 1973; McCormick, 1974; Kousser, 1976). Other objections, focusing particularly on use of the pietist-liturgical (or ritualist) typology to analyze the late nineteenth century (notably Jensen, 1971; Kleppner, 1970), concern a prior and more significant problem: providing a consistent and coherent explanation of why religion was politically important (McCormick, 1974; Wright, 1973). It is argued that the pietist-liturgical typology cannot account for the opposition by some pietists to using government to enforce behavioral standards. The typology also fails to explain why the liturgical perspective was politically salient except when under pietist attack. Finally, there is the paradoxical situation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which pietist churches were becoming less pietistic—adopting more elaborate worship services and deemphasizing revivalism—but at the same time were increasing and winning their demands for government regulation of morality. Taken as a whole, these criticisms suggest a fundamental weakness in the pietist-liturgical typology and indicate the need to reexamine the entire question of how religion has related to politics.

Since the publication of V.O. Key’s seminal article, “A Theory of Critical Elections,” numerous scholars have worked to add theoretical depth and analytical sophistication to the study of critical elections. On the latter count, efforts have been ambitious and illuminating; on the former they largely have not. Typologies of elections and descriptions of electoral change have emerged from empirical analyses of aggregate vote data. A variety of techniques ranging from straight forwara t-tests to correlation matrices to a particularly rich analysis of variance approach have been employed to uncover patterns of electoral change. But while a good deal of descriptive, analytical headway has been made, the development of a theory of electoral change has lagged behind.

What theoretical overtures have been made, generally regard critical elections both as the products of prolonged malfunctions in the political system and as the means by which the system begins to correct these malfunctions. According to this view, American electoral politics follows a cyclic dynamic. Critical elections mark the beginnings and the ends of adjoining periods (i.e., party systems) in a repeating cycle of stability, disequilibrium, and adjustment.

The first issue I wish to discuss is a distinction, familiar in the economics literature, between the study of equilibrium conditions and the analysis of the path by which this equilibrium is achieved. The study of equilibrium conditions tells us where under certain specified (and unspecified) assumptions the system will end up. It does not specify either the path taken to equilibrium, or how long a time must pass before the new equilibrium is achieved. This may remind some of Chicken Little, whose repeated assertions that the sky is falling still left that event’s timing somewhat uncertain. But often the length of this lag till the sky falls is of particular interest for political and other studies of the historical process, since it is crucial to know when the equilibrium is achieved and also how this length of time might itself influence the eventual equilibrium. It may be interesting for some questions of historical analysis or applied economic theory when we accept that something is “condemned to . . .” or that “it will eventually . . .”, but it is no clear that such statements should be regarded as historically or economically relevant or interesting in all cases.

Wheat market integration between the US and the UK before the “first era of globalization” (in the second half of the nineteenth century) was frequently interrupted by policy and “exogenous” events such as wars. This paper adds Canada to this story by looking at trade and price data, as well as contemporary debates. This allows us to triangulate the role of policy and wars, since Canada as a small open economy was part of the British Empire. We find that, despite its privileged access to British markets, Canada faced similar barriers to the US, suggesting that membership of the British Empire provided only a modest benefit to trade. We also describe the limitations she faced accessing the US market, in particular after American independence.

In our article “Alchemist’s Gold”, we tried to make three main points. First, a large number of models of individual behavior can fit observed ecological patterns, and these models entail different assumptions about the nature of the individual relationship within and across the ecological units. This topic has been most impressively developed by Gudmund Iversen (1981). Second, there is nothing in the ecological data or the various types of ecological analysis that informs the researcher about how to choose among the many dissimilar models. All the models are compatible with the ecological data, and we have no way of knowing whether a particular inference about individual behavior is quite accurate or extremely misleading. Because of the inherent ambiguity over the unobserved individual behavior within ecological units, we made a third point of recommending techniques for reducing the amount of uncertainty surrounding estimates.

This article offers a broad sketch of claims regarding the university’s public purpose in the 1960s while noting that a vision of the university as an autonomous forum for moral debate cut across the seemingly insurmountable divide between young radicals and their liberal elders. Read through the lens of educational philosophies, the era's clashes did not simply pit liberal advocates of political neutrality against radical exponents of political commitment. Rather, many radical activists—and some liberals— believed that the university should cut off many of its ties to the wider society to gain a more critical purchase on it. Indeed, critics of Clark Kerr's bureaucratic “multiversity” often hewed to a surprisingly traditional conception of higher education.

This article addresses three critiques that pull at the loose ends of Logics of History, revealing weaknesses and bringing new theoretical resources to problems raised by but not satisfactorily resolved in the book. Each critic suggests reformulations of my claims about how structures, events, and social transformations should be theorized: George Steinmetz from wide-ranging and theoretically eclectic perspectives, Dylan Riley from a broadly Marxist standpoint, and David Pedersen from a perspective that is predominantly Peircian. While agreeing with aspects of their critiques, I also reaffirm certain features of my own arguments.

The article discusses the conceptual and methodological challenges of comparative economic history, focusing on recent debates concerning alternative pathways of development in Europe and Asia, the agricultural systems of early modern England and the lower Yangzi region in China, and the historical demography of Eurasia. The article concludes that such debates support the perspective that there is substantial path dependency and contingency in economic history and that alternative development paths can be discerned across and within Europe and Asia.

Due to the central position it assigns to the longue durée, the Annales school—impetus for and crossroads of historical debate—used quantitative methods from the beginning and granted them their patents of nobility. For some decades now, it has been inconceivable for good historical research in France not to devote an important part of its efforts to the measuring of phenomena. True, the Annales school has never spoken with a single voice; the changes that have occurred in its membership and in neighboring disciplines, as well as new historical sensibilities, have modified its original characteristics. The study directed by A Burguière of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales will soon report on the content and evolution of the themes, the network of contributors, and the intellectual climate that shaped the first generation of the Annales. Therefore this article limits itself to a rapid survey of publications, followed by an examination of the distinctive traits of the quantitative dimension of French historical work, the directions for and reasons behind new research. The picture must remain somewhat general because it focuses on only three major points: the preeminence of serial history over quantitative history; the underrepresentation of international comparative works, despite the example of F. Braudel; and the development of individual-level data banks, an important source for social and serial history.

This study addresses changes in the public conversation on school desegregation since the early 1970s. It applies the concept of discursive opportunity structure to the debates on desegregation in order to illustrate how a dynamic and balanced conversation, which involved both positive and negative views on the policy, has evolved into an anemic and overly negative one. The study relies on insights from social movement research on political opportunity structures for debates on contentious issues and on interpretive framing processes. Several inferences are offered on the nature of the discursive turn in desegregation at the national level, followed by a detailed analysis of desegregation and resegregation in Cleveland from 1973 to 1998. This involves the systematic examination of local newspaper coverage and also draws on court documents, administrative student records, and census information. The findings suggest that political and social structural factors that have restricted the chances for a balanced conversation have also complicated desegregation implementation and may have undermined the policy’s intended student benefits. By the 1990s even the most dedicated advocates had withdrawn from the debate, allowing the conversation to atrophy and become dominated by critical views. As a result, public education has risked failing to address the ill effects of resegregation and to produce reforms that foster quality schools for all.

The combined influence of the Great Migration of African Americans and the civil rights movement propelled the drive for fair housing legislation, which attempted to curb overt discrimination in housing markets. This drive culminated in the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. By that time, 57 percent of the U.S. population and 41 percent of the African American population already resided in states with a fair housing law. This article uses hazard models to analyze the diffusion of state fair housing legislation and to shed new light on the combination of economic and political forces that facilitated the laws' adoption. Outside the South, states with larger union memberships, more Jewish residents, and more NAACP members passed fair housing laws sooner than others. Including controls for a variety of competing factors does not undermine the estimates, and historical accounts of the legislative campaigns support the article's interpretation.