Wages, benefits, and workers’ rights in the American South lagged behind the national average throughout the New Deal era even after southern states industrialized after the Second World War. This article deepens arguments about a distinctive regional variety of capitalism. It emphasizes how the institutions that define rights and authority over such economic decisions as what kind of jobs to create and how industries should compete constitute the industrial order. The article focuses on the Texas apparel industry and shows that low labor standards were an outcome of choices made by business owners and managers who claimed, and were given, the authority to carry out their visions of economic development. In contrast to previous explanations that have focused on labor exploitation and resistance, I address alternative ways to organize work and market products and the influence of choices from these alternatives on the development of distinctive labor-management relations. The apparel industry developed an efficient form of production that took advantage of an oligarchic political order whose institutional features dated to an earlier era.

This research explains why Mexico's 1968 student movement ended in the massacre of hundreds of students, while the peasant revolts that followed won land reform from the state. I argue that because Mexico's presidents managed each movement with both repression and concessions, other factors beyond the state's political opportunity structure explain these sharply contrasting social movement outcomes. The evidence strongly suggests that while Mexico's version of authoritarianism increased the odds of repression, each movement's levels of organization, disruption, and framing strategies determined the forms and degree of state violence. The analysis shows how politically salient frames may decrease the odds of repression or increase the odds of political alliances with state elites. It follows that political opportunities are more dynamic and dialogically emergent than previously theorized.

Like other voluntary associations, fraternities such as the Orange Order underpin political cleavages. The membership dynamics behind such associations are less clear. Rival theories attribute membership fluctuations alternatively to changes in social capital, economic structure, culture, or events. This article uses a pooled time-series cross sectional model to evaluate competing hypotheses for the period since 1860. Results suggest that membership was linked to longer-term shifts in ethnic boundaries rather than structural or social capital variables, with events playing an intermediate role. Scottish Protestant mobilization against Catholics was less important than Irish Protestant ethnicity, but both were key. Finally, the order has been numerically weaker than many believe; hence its inability—even during the apex of its influence—to shape Tory policy.

This study uses geographic information systems (GIS) to measure the incidence and track the spread of the influenza pandemic of 1918 in Hartford, Connecticut. The data for the study are based on the death certificates of individuals who lived in Hartford and died from the disease, digitized maps of Hartford for the period circa 1918, and two supplemental random samples of the 1920 U.S. census schedules. The findings suggest that, instead of viewing the epidemic as a solitary event, one can better understand it as a set of somewhat discrete events or “mini-epidemics” occurring within the confines of one city. These mini-epidemics affected various subgroups in the population differently in terms of the timing of the onset, the duration, and the lethality of the disease. The major point of differentiation of these subgroups was ethnicity, which overlapped with geography.

The powerful personalities of Thomas Jefferson and Napoléon dominate Louisiana Purchase narratives. Such a focus obscures the important institutional, electoral, and partisan dynamics that help explain the transfer of Louisiana to the United States. This article offers new insight into relationships between the Federalists and the Republicans as well as the institutional relationship between Congress and the president. During the purchase, both political parties at times sacrificed the consistency of their issue positions on the altar of electoral politics. The politicians’ actions were based not only on their personalities and partisan affiliations but also on their institutional contexts. By additionally considering the partisan and institutional dynamics of the early 1800s, this article provides a more complete understanding of the Louisiana Purchase.