In recent articles Bourke and DeBats (1978, 1980) have made a number of interesting points, which are of immediate concern to the study of electoral mobilization and participation over time. They have pointed to the existence of a number of poll lists recording individual votes after 1820 in what they term viva voce states (1980:232ff). These lists certainly must attract the attention of anybody concerned with the empirical study of political development in the United States and elsewhere in the nineteenth century. Some of these lists have been known for quite a while, and some of them have also been used in various studies mentioned by Bourke and DeBats. Nevertheless, much tedious work remains to be done before all of these poll lists can be utilized and before they can be made available to the scientific community.

The history of American socialism is a history of failure, unless one accepts the more charitable interpretations of Michael Harrington (1972). Why did it fail? Why, among industrial democracies in the West, is the United States exceptional for its lack of a labor party? These questions are perennial ones, yet the lines of explanation invariably curve back to one of the two distinct points-of-view. One line of explanation was framed at the beginning of this century in the now-classic volume by Werner Sombart (1906 [1976]), Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Socialism, in Sombart’s structuralist interpretation, was an incompatible philosophy in an American environment characterized by high wages, a fluid social and economic structure, and—their precondition—cheap land. Yet perversely, at the very moment when Sombart’s thesis appeared in the Archivfur Sozialwissenschaft and Sozialpolitik in 1905, socialist politics experienced a remarkable expansion in the United States—an expansion that warranted skepticism toward the structuralist interpretation.

Even when historians disagree profoundly over causation, periodization, and perhaps the ultimate purpose of historical inquiry, they may still be able to find common ground in the discussion of primary sources and of the appropriate methods of extracting from them accurate information about a vitally important but heretofore neglected dimension of past social life. Such an impression emerges when Heldur Palli‘s account of the historical demographic research at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR is placed in the context of Western inquiries into the history of European populations. The methodological adjustments required in the application of well-known demographic techniques to unusual data sources should be better understood when the Estonian researchers conclude their work of family reconstitution from multi-lingual evidence about a peasantry with highly unstable naming practices. Also, Coale and Anderson (1979) described how the demographic characteristics of the Baltic area (including Estonia) in the late nineteenth century distinguished it from Russia proper, thus raising the question of when, in the distant past, these characteristics first appeared and how they can be described quantitatively before the first modern Baltic census of 1881. The sources being used by Palli and his colleagues no doubt will contain at least the beginnings of a concrete answer to these questions. Furthermore, the research by Peter Laslett and others on a regionalized model of premodern European household structure has suggested that the Baltic area stands somewhere between the West—with its high proportion of simple family households—and Russia—with its impressively high incidence of multiple family structures, a proposition which the cadastral revisions and fiscal censuses of Estonia should help to refine. There are also the questions of population turnover and social mobility, to which the frequent enumerations of the Estonian population ought to bring considerable quantitative evidence illustrating Eastern European patterns. Finally, Estonian peasants, like many other peasantries in the centuries discussed by Palli, were serfs; but, unlike all but a very few peasantries elsewhere, the Estonian population continued to be precisely enumerated by state authorities even after the abolition of serfdom in 1816-1819. The availability of detailed household-level data before and after legal emancipation will be of interest to Western scholars who have had to deal with the social structural consequences of emancipatory measures among servile agricultural populations in their own societies.

The early nineteenth-century decrease in several West Indian slave populations has been a subject of intense interest among historians of the region, of slavery, and of population dynamics (Higman, 1973; Curtin, 1969). Further data on birth rates, death rates, causes of deaths, and quantity and quality of slave importation and migration will help explain the phenomenon of “natural decrease. “The slave registration records of the island of Grenada provide useful information on this piece of demographic history. The records enumerate slave births and deaths and list causes of death, signed by a physician. There are few published reports on death rates and causes of death in West Indian slave populations (Higman, 1973; Handler and Lange, 1978; Roberts, 1952). The purpose of this study is to describe the causes of death, estimate specific death rates, and construct a life-table for slaves in Grenada in 1818.

William G. Shade’s (1981) “New Political History: Some Statistical Questions Raised” has two sometimes conflicting purposes: first, to remind historians to “think statistically” and to “give more self-conscious attention to the details and logic of research design,” and second, to defend such ethnocultural historians as Ronald P. Formisano and Paul Kleppner against published criticisms. Too often confusing the former with the latter aim, Shade attains neither. His article is further compromised by distortions of other scholars’ work and neglect of relevant literature published since 1974. With Shade’s two major prescriptions—plan research carefully and use genuinely multivariate methods—we have no quarrel. Often breached in practice, these familiar commandments can never be repeated too many times. To his lack of conceptual rigor, to his employment of a series of either meaningless or misleading “tests,” and to several of his methodological dicta, we do take exception—thus the necessity for this note.