Historical analyses of demographic phenomena from the past few decades have provided new insights requiring the reassessment of a number of traditional paradigms, such as the venerable demographic transition theory. Fertility studies have dominated this research, but there is a growing interest in the interrelationships of several demographic variables, such as family formation and infant mortality (Knodel and Hermalin 1984; Nault et al. 1990; Potter 1988a; Working Group on the Health Consequences of Contraceptive Use and Controlled Fertility 1989a, 1989b). This article falls into the latter category; in it we investigate the relationship between childbearing (fertility) and infant mortality in the Utah frontier population during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, farmers in extreme southern Illinois, along with farmers throughout the state and region, organized politically and economically. The first big upsurge of organization was in 1873 with the organization of farmers’ clubs and granges of the Patrons of Husbandry. In Union County, Illinois, all sectors of the local society appear to have been swept up in the tide of discontent, although a close analysis of those active in the movement and the associations that succeeded it indicates that the movement gave voice and organized expression to a specific class. To use McNall’s (1988) analysis of the later populist movement, the agrarian movement of the mid-1870s was an incipient “class movement,” although it failed to articulate a program that effectively welded farmers into a unit that could contend for political power, even as it provided a vehicle for elite farmers to transform preexisting economic relationships. “A class movement,” McNall (ibid.: 5) writes, “is one in which the participants are involved in a struggle over the very definition of their political, economic, and ideological interests. All class movements have at their core an economic dimension and, like class relationships, are about relationships of power.” The organizations formed in the populist era, he argues, were attempts by farmers to create a “class in and for itself” (ibid.: 12).

The last decade of the nineteenth century was a time of great national crisis, surpassed in severity only by the depression of the 1930s. Unemployment in manufacturing and transportation rose to nearly 17% in 1894. More banks failed in the 1890s than in any other economic crisis in American history except the one that began in 1929, and over 159 railroads, capitalized at more than $2.5 billion, were forced into receivership. Farm prices plunged, and farm spokesmen bitterly complained about the disastrous effects of the long-term deflation of currency, discrimination by railroad monopolies, and high interest rates (Douglas 1930: 440; Fels 1959: 159–219; Hoffman 1956; Steeples 1965).

The pre-world war I period decisively structured modern class relations in Europe and the United States. Farmers, the largest population group, greatly influenced the development of capitalism and states. Scholars have demonstrated farmers’ significance in particular areas (e.g., Blackbourn in Germany and Esping-Andersen in Scandinavia), but there has been little comparative analysis. Farmer politics, and thus modern class relations in general, have been inadequately theorized. Most existing work on agrarian classes has also been economistic, neglecting politics. We fill the gaps by analyzing agrarian politics in the United States, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.

Understanding the policy relevance of parties in the states has not been easy. Key (1949: 309–12) argued that parties that differed should pursue and enact different public policies. Studies have found sigificant differences between legislative parties (Jewell 1955; LeBlanc 1969). Indices of interparty competition have been constructed and their impact assessed on the assumption that high competition has a clear impact on policy. The results, however, have not supported that assumption. Interparty competition has generally shown little relationship to public policy levels (Dawson and Robinson 1963; Dye 1966; Tucker 1982; Garand 1988: 844).

This article explores the role of social narratives in working-class formation. The primary goal of this exercise is to generate concepts for the comparative analysis of working-class identities and practices. My thesis is that more successful cases of working-class formation involve the elaboration of coherent narratives about individual and collective history, stories that are coordinated with one another and that are organized around the category of social class. In such narratives, events are selected for inclusion due to their relevance to social class, or they are excluded or deemphasized because of their irrelevance to class, and events are interpreted, emplotted, and evaluated in a way that emphasizes class rather than other possible constructs. By contrast, working-class formation is less pronounced where individual and collective narratives are based on alternative, nonclass forms of identity, such as nationality, gender, ethnicity, and race. Working-class formation is also weaker where individual narratives are asynchronous, where the individual and collective levels are not coordinated with one another, or where identities fail to attain narrative coherence.

Historical social science—which I understand to be analysis of change over time that is informed by the theories, methods, and questions of the social sciences—has in the past 25 or 30 years established itself as an important area of interdisciplinary study. It emerged at a point in time when, in the United States at least, several of the social science disciplines were dominated by positivist epistemologies and models drawn from the natural sciences. In practice, much of what has been understood as social science history has centered on the recovery and analysis of largely quantifiable sources that allowed the writing of the collective biography of large populations—the ordinary people arguably under-or unrepresented in classic historical accounts of previous eras. Drawing upon social-scientific traditions provided concepts and methodologies for analyzing processes that encompassed everyone, rather than merely the events dominated by an elite, and for studying relatively anonymous collectivities rather than merely the “great men.”