It is revealing and important to preface this paper by noting the fact that a paper of this sort could hardly have been written as recently as 15 years ago. In sociology at large, historical methods and approaches were quite uncommon from the 1940s through the early 1970s. Further, mainstream American sociology organizations have distinguished themselves worldwide by their neglect of matters rural and agricultural. In part, this is because American rural sociologists have had their own professional association, the Rural Sociological Society, since 1937. There has accordingly been a fairly substantial separation and division of labor between “general” and rural sociology/sociologists, with “non-rural” sociologists having their major allegiance to the American Sociological Association (ASA) and regional disciplinary groups, while rural sociologists have had their closest identification with the Rural Sociological Society. Further, in American rural sociology prior to the late 1970s and 1980s, there had never been a major tradition of work along the lines of “historical sociology” as the notion is commonly understood today.

Fascination with elite recruitment, ideology, and political strategy in the Indian nationalist movement has given rise to a wide range of scholarly studies about these phenomena. An extraordinarily rich literature has also developed dealing with provincial political movements during both the nationalist and postindependence periods. More recently a literature concerning local, “peoples’” history has started to develop and flourish, the most influential genre being the self-styled subaltern studies (see Guha, 1984–86; also Guha, 1983). Missing in the historiography of this vast and complex region are studies of those institutions that constituted the core of successive nationalist demands made for political reform—elections and representative institutions. Our study is a preliminary venture into the world of elections to provincial legislative institutions in late colonial and early independent India. The place of elections is not only important in understanding the decolonization process in India; it is of broad comparative interest in enhancing understanding of the democratization of regimes.

Sociologists have debated extensively about the attributes and natural history of professions, roughly dividing along two lines. The taxonomic and functionalist views assume that professions rest on broad knowledge based on extensive, specialized training, usually, in the modern era, in a university setting. Because such knowledge is arcane and scarce and outsiders lack the expertise to judge it, society allows the profession to regulate itself and to monopolize services. In turn, the profession follows a service ethic rather than the profit motive. It pledges to help all in a disinterested fashion and to maintain high ethical standards among its members. Since the 1960s, the critical or power school has treated professionalism as ideology and manipulation, arguing that the extent of training and the specialized character of professional knowledge are deliberately exaggerated and mystified and that the service ethic merely disguises unjustified monopoly rewards (Saks, 1983; Wilensky, 1964; Greenwood, 1957; Friedson, 1984; Roth, 1974; Ritzer and Walczak, 1986: 59–94).

The labor force behavior of older men has attracted the attention of economists, sociologists, and historians because it speaks to several concerns: the current crisis in Social Security, the origins and development of the welfare state, and the place of the aged in American history. The central issue is the decline in labor force participation among older men, a striking phenomenon of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, men past the age of 60 or 65 were quite likely to remain in the labor force. According to most historical accounts, their labor force participation declined monotonically from near 75% in 1890 to about 25% at present, a trend set in motion by cultural and economic changes which made the aged less valued by employers.

In a recent article in Social Science History, Professor Alan Bogue, former president of the Association and one of its founding fathers, has reviewed the first ten years of SSHA. In it he presents from the constitution the major purpose of the Association as “improving ‘the quality of historical explanation in every manner possible, but particularly by encouraging the selective use and adaptation in historical research and teaching of relevant social science’” (Bogue, 1987: 336). In this paper, we review the first ten years of the Social Science History journal in the context of an association formed to promote social science applications to the analysis of historical data. One indicator of the success of this enterprise is the extent to which historians are applying social science methods. Another indicator is the involvement of non-historians in social science history.