Generally uniform and high rates of school participation have become an article of faith in postwar America. But at the turn of the century there was wide variation in school enrollment practices from one part of the country to another. This article will examine the determinants of interurban differences in school participation in 1900. Recent studies of school enrollment have focused on a narrow range of cities and have emphasized the importance of family background variables on the decisions of individual children to remain in school or to drop out (Katz, 1972; Troen, 1973; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1979). Most studies have focused on the ability of children from different backgrounds to attend school. In his ground-breaking article, “Who Went to School,” Michael Katz (1972) called for more research on interurban variation in school enrollment, but few historians have considered how the social and economic environments of different cities may have conditioned decisions to go to school in the past. In their studies on youth and early industrialization, Katz and Davey (1978a and 1978b) demonstrate that school attendance dropped when industrial jobs became widely available in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, but they made little effort to identify the precise relationship between school attendance and the requirements of different sorts of jobs. Why should the advent of industralism mean lower school participation? This question will be addressed.

The hell’s-fire revivalism of western New York, christened the Burned-Over District by nineteenth-century contemporaries, was a colorful and important chapter in the Second Great Awakening. The main characters—Joseph Smith, the Fox sisters, Charles Finney, and the like—led a religious rejuvenation that presumably reorganized spiritual life in the Finger Lakes vicinity between 1820 and 1850.

In attempting to understand more fully the U.S. Supreme Court’s impact on national policymaking, scholars have examined Supreme Court policymaking as part of the “relatively cohesive alliances that endure for long periods of time” (Dahl, 1957: 280). These alliances or “party systems” represent relatively distinctive patterns in the general shape of national policy (Chambers and Burnham, 1975). It is common for historians to characterize the Jacksonian party system of 1828-1860 as a period in American history when national policy was aimed at aiding agrarian interests, or the First and Second Republican party systems in the later part of the nineteenth century as periods when national policy favored the rising industrial and financial interests. The change from one party system to another is the result of a process political scientists and historians have termed “partisan realignment” (Key, 1955). Periods of realignment in American politics are marked by a rapid change in the social and political agenda, which results in a significant and durable change in the party support in the electorate as well as in a significant change in institutional roles and national policy (Burnham, 1970; Jahnige, 1971; Sundquist, 1973; Trilling and Campbell, 1980). The new party balance may give rise to a shift from the dominance of one party to another, or an entirely new party system may develop. A relationship between mass electoral behavior and public policy appears to exist during periods of partisan realignment. The elections that produce this change in the party systems are termed “critical elections.”

Although the important roles and functions of Latin American cities have received recognition and discussion in historical writing, there exist few empirically grounded and detailed investigations of individual urban centers. Thus, reviewing the nature of historical research on Latin American urbanization, Sofer and Szuchman (1979: 113, 119) noted the dearth of quantitative investigations of the social dimensions of urban existence, as well as a reliance on aggregate data as opposed to such primary documentation as manuscript census returns, notarial records, and judicial assessments. They conclude that “historians have been reticent to explore the social data in primary documentation and join them with non-quantifiable sources of information in order to reach an existential understanding of the Latin American past.” Similarly, Socolow and Johnson (1981: 51) have pointed to the need for research concentrating on the “social, economic, and physical structure of individual cities and groups of cities.”