This article, which deals with the Saami’s experience with smallpox in the three northern Swedish parishes of Jokkmokk, Gällivare, and Enontekis during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, focuses on these epidemiologic questions: (1) Why were the Saami—a native people living in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia—not affected by smallpox until this period? (2) What happened once smallpox was introduced into the area? (3) Did the Saami’s experience with smallpox differ from that of the rest of the Swedish population? (4) If so, what were the most important differences? (5) And how are they to be explained? Finding the answers to these questions requires considering whether smallpox inevitably resulted from the number of susceptible people and whether the disease affected other aspects of demography besides mortality (Figure 1).

The history of health has increasingly attracted attention from both economic and demographic historians. This interest is reflected in a growing body of empirical data on mortality trends for western Europe and North America dating from before the eighteenth century. The decline in historical mortality, a central concern in this work, has been recognized as primarily attributable to falling death rates from infectious disease, and this development requires interpretation that addresses two factors: changes in levels of exposure to infection and changing levels of human resistance to infectious disease.

Establishing an occupational pension plan became fashionable for large North American firms around the beginning of the twentieth century, and railways were pioneers in this trend. By the end of World War I the characteristics of many of the firms, and of their workforces, had changed considerably, but pension plan rules typically remained broadly constant until the 1930s. Despite unchanged rules, the kinds of workers pensioned, the average value of pensions, and the probability that retiring workers would receive a pension may have altered. Little is known about Canadian pension plans and less about the characteristics of workers pensioned. This article uses employee records from the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), one of Canada’s largest employers and one of the first to establish a pension plan, to examine older workers’ employment patterns and the probabilities they have of being pensioned.

The extraordinarily productive corn and wheat belts were settled a generation before modern Middle America blossomed. The story of rural Middle America, especially in the decades following the Civil War, is the story of the men and women who settled the region and stayed. In politics the Middle American community looked to long-term residents for a definition of its best interests (Winkle 1988; Curti 1959). In agricultural matters the community looked to long-term residents for a definition of the model farm.

How did a person become a heretic in the Middle Ages? Then, once the person was affiliated with a heretical group, how was the affiliation sustained? What social processes and mechanisms were involved that forged bonds among heretics strong enough, in some cases, for them to choose death rather than return to the bosom of the Church? Two competing accounts of what attracted people to medieval heresies have marked the extremes in historical explanations (Russell 1963): one is a materialist account elucidated by Marxist historians; the other one focuses on ideal factors, as proposed by the eminent historian Herbert Grundmann.