The title of this presidential address reflects the happy conjunction of my particular interest in social networks and the network structure of the Social Science History Association. My talk will be brief, because I want to reserve most of this “presidential picnic” for the panel that the program chair, Donna Gabaccia, organized. Last year's president, Eric Monkkonen (1994: 166), in his history of the institution of the SSHA, called our meetings “a venue for scholars from different disciplines to learn to talk to one another.” That we have this annual opportunity for conversations is due to the work of our networks that organize the sessions that attract us to the meetings; to program chairs—this year, Donna—who create a program from these sessions; and to our executive director, Erik Austin, whose ability and diligence keeps the organization going from year to year.

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.

In many slave societies manumission coexisted with perpetual bondage, often featured by self-purchase by slave artisans, a practice that some societies monitored through recognition of the slave's legal personality as a contracting party. Manumission played a comparatively minor role in shaping North American slavery, with debatable exceptions in the mid-Atlantic region; historians of slavery there have portrayed manumitters as individuals of conscience and/or economic maximizers seeking profitable exits from a locally declining labor institution. This contrast was first noted by Frank Tannenbaum, who characterized slavery in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America as milder than in British America, and targeted differences in religion and in the European history of slavery of each society as key explanatory factors.

The structure of the extended family is often described as a strategy for coping with poverty, unemployment, or migration (Agresti 1979). Whether extended kin relations are thought to be short-term and calculative (Anderson 1971) or bound by ties of reciprocity (Hareven 1982), the extended household itself is assumed to be adaptive to the material conditions under which working-class families live. This characterization is supported by studies of the present-day poor (Angel and Tienda 1982; Stack 1974; Stern 1993). Although Ruggles (1987) questions the importance of economic motives for nineteenth-century extended families, he suggests that by the early twentieth century there is evidence that extended households were increasingly strategic.

Over the past several decades, the demographic transition from high to low levels of both fertility and mortality has received much attention from scholars. Demographers have been interested in whether the change that has occurred in the developed parts of the world will be repeated elsewhere, while historians have used population changes as a means of exploring broader questions in social history. The interest, however, has not been evenly divided, with fertility declines receiving far more attention than improvements in mortality. This is especially true of American history.