The importance of suffrage expansion to the formation of “modern” political parties—and with them mass representative democracy as we know it today—is widely recognized. Nonetheless, most of what we know about the link between suffrage expansion and democratic politics concerns only the electoral arena. The major comparative studies of party development (Weber 1946; Duverger 1955; LaPalombara and Weiner 1966), for example, have stressed how larger electorates led to more elaborate and centralized extra-parliamentary organization, to “populist” campaigning styles, and to the promotion of socialist parties. This study concerns the legislative effects of extending the suffrage. Although we focus on nineteenth-century Britain, parts of our argument pertain to other cases.

The publication of Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987) has interested students of the expansion of governmental activity. Despite a large literature on the growth of the public sector, Crisis is one of the few book-length historical accounts of the subject for the United States (Larkey et al. 1984). In this respect, Higgs’s study resembles Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State (1982), which also examined the historical transformation of government, albeit within a limited temporal perspective (1877–1920), and which like Crisis encased the story within a distinct theoretical framework. Skowronek argued that expansion of the public sector depended on the reconstruction of national administrative capability during the Progressive era. Higgs contended that major crises in American life functioned as the catalyst of “Big Government.” Although each author emphasized different dynamics propelling growth, both held that temporally specific disjunctures in governmental history date the emergence of the modern state. Higgs and Skowronek share one other similarity: neither of them adequately integrated federalism or the states into their analyses. Omission of these critical dimensions of the American polity raises questions about the utility of their research designs and the accuracy of their conclusions.

Ballard Campbell claims to have identified “flaws in [the] analytical perspective” I employed in Crisis and Leviathan (1987). My sins of omission, he alleges, arise from concentrating on the growth of federal economic powers, thereby losing sight of the various noneconomic dimensions of government and “ignoring the reality of federalism in the United States,” especially before 1930. The upshot is “an imbalance that distorts the history of American governance.”

To date, there has been no attempt in Ontario economic history to examine human fertility in the nineteenth century by area of the province where area is differentiated by the extent of agricultural development and the data used are at the household level. In the United States, Richard Easterlin and his colleagues (1978) used a sample of rural households from the 1860 manuscript census to look at fertility, family, and agricultural differences and similarities for old and new areas in the northern states. The present study takes the census districts of Canada West (now Ontario) in 1851, divides them into three groups by the percentage of ever-improved agricultural land, and uses a sample of farm households from the manuscript census of 1851–52 as the data set. Since the extent of agricultural development can be taken as a proxy for county wide land availability, the contribution of this study is to relate land availability at both the county and household levels to fertility in the mid-nineteenth century.

The nineteenth-century English working class bears a most peculiar burden and embodies a most peculiar paradox. Like Auden’s academic warriors who spar with “smiles and Christian names,” historians, economists, and sociologists have pushed and prodded early nineteenth-century English working people into procrustean political positions to support or disconfirm Marx’s predictions of revolutionary class conflict erupting from the contradictions of capitalism. A Manichaean concern locks the debate into an impasse. Were early nineteenth-century workers revolutionary or reformist? Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. Yet, surely it is the history of English working peoples that has suffered from this burden of praising or burying Marxism through competing interpretations of their early stories?

That narrative can be more than a mechanical recitation of events is epitomized in Thucydides’ challenge to historiographical paradigms current during the fifth century B.C. In his definitive history of the war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenian general in effect tells a “story” with a beginning, middle, and end. Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is anything but a neutral description of events. Instead, the collection interprets the conflict for the reader. The tale contains a discussion of the role of alternative military strategies and of the war’s wider political implications. According to Thucydides, the fractionization and polarization engendered by war as a mode of resolving political conflicts is too high a price to pay for victors and losers alike. Thucydides warns of psychic as well as material costs. Thus, the ancient political scientist tells the story of the Peloponnesian War to assert that the “sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama” (White 1987: 21).

This essay describes an oral history project that accompanied the establishment of an archive on the history of recent feminism in the region of Emilia-Romagna, Italy. The archive, which contains both written and oral historical sources, is now in existence at the library of the Bologna’s Women’s Center, the Centro di Documentazione delle Donne. Raffaella Lamberti (1989) has explained why it was politically important for the Women’s Center to establish such an archive. It should be noted that the Centro di Documentazione, since it was officially proposed in March 1982, has been a totally independent institution, although it draws financial and administrative support from the Regional Administration of Emilia-Romagna.