This article explores how variations in party systems shape the intensity of insurgency against national authorities in nineteenth-century Latin America. I argue that, under certain conditions, two-party systems may polarize and lead to intense insurgency because they simplify the process of blame attribution, encourage the incumbent party to exclude its opponent from power positions, and motivate leaders to emphasize extreme ideological positions. Conversely, multiparty systems may encourage flexible electoral and congressional alliances among parties, resulting in lower insurgency. I test the argument in four nineteenth-century Latin American republics with different insurgency levels. While in Colombia and Uruguay two-party systems polarized and fueled intense insurgency across the century, Chile and Costa Rica developed flexible multiparty systems that prevented polarization and favored low insurgency.

To date, there has been no attempt in Ontario economic history to examine human fertility in the nineteenth century by area of the province where area is differentiated by the extent of agricultural development and the data used are at the household level. In the United States, Richard Easterlin and his colleagues (1978) used a sample of rural households from the 1860 manuscript census to look at fertility, family, and agricultural differences and similarities for old and new areas in the northern states. The present study takes the census districts of Canada West (now Ontario) in 1851, divides them into three groups by the percentage of ever-improved agricultural land, and uses a sample of farm households from the manuscript census of 1851–52 as the data set. Since the extent of agricultural development can be taken as a proxy for county wide land availability, the contribution of this study is to relate land availability at both the county and household levels to fertility in the mid-nineteenth century.

The history of American socialism is a history of failure, unless one accepts the more charitable interpretations of Michael Harrington (1972). Why did it fail? Why, among industrial democracies in the West, is the United States exceptional for its lack of a labor party? These questions are perennial ones, yet the lines of explanation invariably curve back to one of the two distinct points-of-view. One line of explanation was framed at the beginning of this century in the now-classic volume by Werner Sombart (1906 [1976]), Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Socialism, in Sombart’s structuralist interpretation, was an incompatible philosophy in an American environment characterized by high wages, a fluid social and economic structure, and—their precondition—cheap land. Yet perversely, at the very moment when Sombart’s thesis appeared in the Archivfur Sozialwissenschaft and Sozialpolitik in 1905, socialist politics experienced a remarkable expansion in the United States—an expansion that warranted skepticism toward the structuralist interpretation.

One of the more debilitating digressions in the evolution of the scientific enterprise is the controversy over the relative importance of models and data. Time and again, in every discipline from archaeology to zoology, the issue has reappeared with sufficient force to engage scholarly attention and to generate reams of rhetoric. In the social sciences, as in the biological and physical sciences, we have expended considerable energies on the data versus model (some would say “theory”) emphasis, usually to the detriment of scientific advancement.

Few paid-up readers of this journal will deny the importance, as a historical source, of the U.S. manuscript population censuses, particularly those since 1850, which supposedly contain the names of all individuals. Since from 1965 to 1989 my work concerned primarily the four earliest such “nominal” censuses, 1850–80,1 shall restrict my remarks and estimates to them.

Some interesting research has been done, but much more cries out yet to be done, on the manuscript population census as a source, especially on its accuracy and comprehensiveness. Trudging along the road of improvement, we begin to learn that there are potholes aplenty in it, but how many, where, and, most vital of all, how deep? It is sloppy technique for historians to be less critical of the census than of other sources they employ.

In his recent essay in this journal on my writings on the “egalitarian myth,” Robert E. Gallman is kind enough to express admiration for “the scope of Pessen’s empirical undertaking, the skill and ingenuity with which he carried it out, his learning, and his grasp of his materials.” If praise from any source is sweet, praise from so admired a scholar as Professor Gallman is doubly sweet. Yet, “one may doubt,” he continues, that I have “in fact dealt a death blow to the egalitarian hypothesis.” Criticism, while not nearly so pleasing, alas, is to be expected, particularly for work such as mine that challenges a most influential, durable, and still popular thesis and challenges it on the basis of admittedly partial data. Scholarly disagreement on important issues is of course inevitable. For, as Peter M. Blau and Otis D. Duncan have observed, even collaborators in a joint study will interpret their data differently. I have taken pen in hand and availed myself of the opportunity graciously afforded me by a managing editor of Social Science History to publish my “observations on Gallman’s essay,” not because that essay criticizes my work but because a number of its references to my work are misleading and inaccurate.

State intervention into the ownership, financing, and regulation of various industries and sectors of the capitalist economy is a phenomenon as old as capitalism itself. In the last 15 years this topic has become a focal point of vigorous interest among social scientists. Given the manifest problems to be found within current political-economic relationships, it is not surprising that a great deal of this attention has been focused on the contemporary scene. Nevertheless, a small number of works have undertaken the explanation of the historical development of state intervention. Unfortunately, the historian in search of explanatory guidance is confronted here with a series of less than comprehensive analyses which move at descriptive and explanatory cross-purposes. The first tasks of the social scientist or historian who wishes to address the development of state intervention therefore must be to classify and clarify the accounts which have been proposed.

A decade ago, Richard Hofstadter wrote that historians were approaching consensus on the political origins of the War of 1812. Blending elements of the work during the early 1960s of Norman K. Risjord, Bradford Perkins, and Roger H. Brown, Hofstadter (1969: 181) concluded that Republicans were convinced “the Republic itself and the fate of republican government had come to rest on the ability of the Republican party to take a forceful stand against foreign incursions on American rights.” Republicans, in other words, melded national with partisan goals and pursued war to save national honor and the Republican party.

Today, however, one would have to conclude that Hofstadter’s prediction was premature, based upon the spate of articles published since 1972 addressing the partisan nature of the vote for war in the House of Representatives, the role of the War Hawks in the debates and legislation of the war session, and the leadership (or lack thereof) supplied by James Madison (Hatzenbuehler, 1972b, 1976; Egan, 1974; Stagg, 1976; Hickey, 1976; Fritz, 1977; Bell, 1979).

Recapturing people's experiences as part of understanding specific social and cultural processes leads us to the art of differentiating. We need to ask by whom, when, and why certain developments are defined. All historical sources bring knowledge, often in absolute and definite terms. But sometimes sources depart from the dominant societal discourse. How is one to evaluate the explanatory value of the different sources of interpretation placed hierarchically? This article takes on the evaluation of different discourses surrounding the process defined by historical demography as “rising illegitimate fertility.” Although it will imply a reevaluation of proletarianization processes as well, the central focus will be on illegitimacy.

The ideas of socialism grew in ordinary people’s lived experience of all-encompassing markets, totalizing doctrines of individualism, the power of capitalist property over human dignity and destiny, and equations between market success and human merit. Codified into doctrine, socialism was pro-ductivist, seeing the work experience as that which determined personal identity and the shape of social collaboration. It was also class analytical, mapping the social world in terms of classes in conflict and specifying the working class as the central social actor and agent for change. Third, it was egalitarian democratic, rejecting arbitrary distinctions determining different stations in life. Finally, socialism was Utopian, revolutionary at least in aspiration if not always in deed. The capitalist order could be, and ought to be, radically transcended. Socialism, which would follow, would reappropriate control over work and its fruits by “the workers” and would facilitate full democracy, equality, and the consecration of a creative and cooperative social order.

In many Western countries, including the Netherlands, couples marrying in the interwar period experienced unprecedentedly high levels of childlessness. Only recently do we witness a return to these levels, as part and parcel of the so-called second demographic transition. Looking back on the interwar period, many scholars have attributed the decline of fertility and the increase of childlessness to rampant economic and political instability. However, contemporary social scientists ascribed the phenomenon to individualization, secularization, and the priority newlywed couples gave to a career and a luxurious lifestyle. From this perspective, childless couples in the interwar period could be seen as “pioneers” of the second demographic transition. To disentangle “traditional” and “modern” backgrounds of childlessness, we have studied the fertility histories of nearly 3,000 Dutch couples married between 1919 and 1938. Our results, in particular the strong association of childlessness with religiously mixed marriage, confirm that an important part of childlessness in the interwar period can be associated with a modern, individualized lifestyle.

In 1895, Fayette County, West Virginia, a leading coal county in the southern West Virginia coal fields, experienced widespread strikes by miners. The strikes were remarkable because, in an American industry known for violent labor relations and intensive union organizing since the appearance of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania before 1880, this was the first major strike in southern West Virginia. We might attempt to understand the role of law and public authority in these strikes in terms of legal repression by means of the labor injunction, labor conspiracy laws, and strikebreaking by the police and military. But none of these occurred in Fayette in 1895, though the later history of labor conflict in West Virginia is replete with all of them. In another way, however, the legal events accompanying these strikes are far more remarkable and challenge us to examine more subtle connections between class conflict and law.

The Canadian-American borderlands have been configured and reconfigured by dynamic flows of trade, investment, migration, family connection, cooperation, and community across the border. One can view this and other borderlands as a dynamic spatiotemporal network with flows, gateways, corridors, and places or as a matrix: a complex web of interactions and dependencies that can in many places at different times be seen to be embedded in unequal economic relations. This article focuses specifically on migration flows in the Canadian-American borderlands during the turn-of-the-twentieth-century period. Flows of people during this period integrated communities on both sides of the border, but such movements varied among the regions that make up the borderland zone. The article uses Canadian and American border-crossing records to show that Canada-U.S. migration must be viewed in relation to patterns of regional transborder development.

The agrarian populist movement of the late nineteenth century remains among the largest social movement and third-party revolts in American history. It embodied a full-scale critique and mobilization against the inequities of the Gilded Age, and its influence stretched well into the Progressive and New Deal eras. While most accounts of the movement and party’s emergence and rapid demise have centered on economic conditions and interests, we link movement and third-party emergence and failure to the institutional arena second only to partisan politics in its impact on southern society at large, namely organized religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism. This article offers the first systematic analysis of the extent to which organized religion in the South channeled the mobilization of agrarian populism. The results both support and contradict the argument that agrarian populism was rooted in organized southern religion by suggesting that evangelical Protestantism channeled the mobilization of the Farmers’ Alliance movement but not the People’s Party. While white southern evangelical religion served as a potent cultural resource and mobilizing structure for the movement, the move to partisan politics helped create a disjuncture between movement and party from which Populism never recovered.

Project RADIR (“Revolution and the Development of International Relations”), conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in the years following the Second World War, was probably the first large-scale, quantitatively-based empirical research enterprise in contemporary political science. Inspired Dy the theories of Harold D. Lasswell about world revolutionary developments in the modern era, the project was in some respects the successor to work done in wartime Washington at the Library of Congress by Lasswell’s Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications, and by the Organizations and Propaganda Analysis Section that Lasswell had helped to set up in the Special War Policies Unit of the Department of Justice. When published in the early fifties, the Hoover Studies, as they came to be called, were noted not only for their substantive findings but also for their theoretical suggestiveness and their methodological boldness of overall design. Most pre-war empirical, quantitative work in political science had been hyperfactual, but the Hoover Studies represented a genuine break with that tradition. Some early reviewers, if not ignorant of quantitative analysis, had trouble with the project’s theoretical formulations, and others were methodologically innocent.^ The methodological novelty of the Hoover Studies consisted in the demonstration that quantitative data could be generated out of the verbal contents found in newspapers and conventional biographies. Although some political scientists had made use of aggregate data reported in the Census, government budgets, legislative roll-calls and electoral statistics, the notion that one can “create” one’s own massive body of data was still relatively new at mid-century. Public opinion polls had come into existence only in the middle thirties and had yet to be exploited fully for scientific purposes. It was in this research context that the Hoover Studies were published.

This article examines the first decades of the field of ethnohistory as it developed in the United States. It participated in the general rapprochement between history and anthropology of mid-twentieth-century social science. However, unlike parallel developments in Europe and in other research areas, ethnohistory specifically arose out of the study of American Indian communities in the era of the Indian Claims Commission. Thus ethnohistory developed from a pragmatic rather than a theoretical orientation, with practitioners testifying both in favor of and against claims. Methodology was flexible, with both documentary sources and ethnographic methods employed to the degree that each was feasible. One way that ethnohistory was innovative was the degree to which women played prominent roles in its development. By the end of the first decade, the field was becoming broader and more willing to engage both theoretical and ethical issues raised by the foundational work. In particular, the geographic scope began to reach well beyond North America, especially to Latin America, where archival resources and the opportunities for ethnographic research were plentiful, but also to areas such as Melanesia, where recent European contact allowed researchers to observe the early postcontact period directly and to address the associated theoretical questions with greater authority. Ethnohistory is thus an important example of a field of study that grew organically without an overarching figure or conscious plan but that nevertheless came to engage central issues in cultural and historical analysis.

This study provides a novel analysis of occupational stratification in Sierra Leone from a historical perspective. By employing census data for early-nineteenth-century colonial Sierra Leone, the present study offers a valuable snapshot of a colony characterized by a heterogenous population of indigenous and migratory origin. The study shows that an association between colonial group categorization and socioeconomic status existed despite the colony being of very recent foundation implying a hierarchical structure of the society. Although Europeans and “mulattoes” occupied most high-status positions, as common in the colonies, indigenous immigrants were also represented in high socioeconomic strata thanks to the opportunities stemming from long- and short-distance trading. However, later arrivals, especially liberated slaves, belonged within the lowest socioeconomic strata of the society and worked as farmers or unskilled labor, suggesting that the time component may also have influence socioeconomic opportunities.

In recent years, American society has engaged in what is frequently described as a “sexual revolution” involving significant changes in relationships between men and women. As a result of extensive social surveys, we know that both specific behaviors and the prevailing ideology regarding appropriate standards of behavior have been subject to rapid change. In the past two decades, rates of sexual intercourse and intimacy have increased (Hunt, 1974; Westoff, 1974), use of effective contraception has become widespread, and it is increasingly accepted that a physical and emotional attraction between members of the opposite sex might lead to a sexual relationship. In short, participation in sexual activity has come to be seen as a natural outgrowth of the enjoyment of sex.

Those Native American tribes which did not disappear or disintegrate as a result of their contact with Western invaders are currently undergoing the demographic transition. Like most of the world’s pre-industrial peoples they have experienced a dramatic fall in their traditionally high death rates followed by an accelerated period of population growth. The degree to which traditional fertility patterns have responded to these changes has proved to be somewhat easier to determine in the case of select Native American groups than it often is in other parts of the world because most tribes are small, geographically concentrated, and encapsulated in an advanced bureaucratic state. But the relative ease with which contemporary demographic change can be observed and analyzed, is not paralleled by a similar situation with respect to the earlier stages of the demographic transition. Little is known about the demographic situation prevailing among most tribal groups in the early stages of demographic transition when mortality rates began a sustained decline (generally the 1930s). Next to nothing is known about overall tribal mortality and fertility patterns in the decades immediately preceding the formal onset of the transition. Hence it is not presently possible to explore the extent to which traditional demographic differences between tribal groups have been and may still be influencing present differences in demographic response patterns.

In the nineteenth century, annual reports of European military medical authorities usually carried some such title as “The Health of the Army at Home and Abroad.” Though historians have recently studied the health of slaves in transit and the demographic patterns of slave populations in the New World, they have not paid much attention to these military data. For the West Indies they begin in 1803, for West Africa in 1810. After 1819, it is possible to trace the disease patterns of West Indian and West African populations in the last decades of the slave trade and on into the early twentieth century. These records help to show what happened epidemiologically to populations of African descent that crossed the Atlantic in both directions.