In this article we use network theory to explain the adoption of the Protestant Reformation. We use new historical data on the connections between Hansa towns that allow us to conduct the first social network study of the Protestant Reformation. Based on an analysis of cities in central and Western Europe between 1517 and 1530, we find evidence for diffusion through both simple and complex contagion. Our operationalization of network data based on medieval Hansa Diets points to the complex association between tie weights (i.e., the strength of ties) and numbers of ties in network diffusion. Using optimal tuning parameters for simple adoption models, we show that a combination of strong ties and weak ties fostered Protestant adoption in northern cities.

This study proposes a conceptualization of the industrial revolution in England in terms of the interaction of demographic and economic processes linked by the nutritional status of the population. By the eighteenth century the English economy had reached an important conjuncture. It had a larger accumulation of capital, and a larger urban sector capable of expanding commerce and production, than ever before. In addition, the population was well nourished by preindustrial standards and was about to benefit from the propitious harvest conditions of the 1730s and to procreate at a rate unsurpassed within recent memory (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Population growth accelerated and had a market-expanding effect in a Boserupian fashion, triggering the industrial revolution; the roots of this transformation, however, extended back into the Middle Ages (Jones 1981; Boserup 1981). Thus the factors that have been regarded as crucial in unleashing the industrial revolution, such as the rise in the rate of saving, are less important within the framework presented here than the acceleration in the growth of a well-nourished population in a relatively developed economy.

Since the publication in 1936 of Blake McKelvey’s American Prisons (1972), social historians have developed a sizeable body of work that traces, and in some cases tries to explain, the evolution of U.S. penal institutions. These studies are important for what they tell us about perceptions of social problems in the past. They also have policy implications, indicating the historical roots of current dilemmas and alternative approaches to penal problems. Nearly all of these studies are limited, however, by their blindness to gender differences between prisons for men and women. Written mainly by men, prison histories have focused nearly exclusively on male prisoners. Perhaps their authors would argue that this bias is natural and insignificant since over time the vast majority of prisoners have been male. But by overlooking the variable of gender, prison historians have ignored an important influence on the nature and development of penal institutions.

Although “excess” weight today is usually associated with poor health, nineteenth-century classifications present an interesting historical puzzle: Physician concern with “corpulence,” on the one hand, was balanced by praise for “plumpness,” on the other. This is quite different from contemporary understandings of weight, where the focus is overwhelmingly on overweight and obesity. Through an analysis of nineteenth-century medical, health reform, and popular journals, I find that there was concern with weight on both ends of the spectrum—thin bodies and fat bodies were potential states of health, as well as illness, through the categories of plumpness, corpulence, leanness, and gauntness. In this way, body weight held multiple symbolic positions up until the early twentieth century when plumpness receded as a category of health. Such findings problematize the standard historical narrative of valued-to-stigmatized fatness, and suggest that the symbolic position held by body weight constitutes a more complicated phenomenon than previously believed.

Strikes have always held great fascination for historians of the working class. Collective work stoppages tear the tissue of “normal life,” and in doing so they provide historians with revealing glimpses of class relations and attitudes, which arise from but are disguised by the daily production and distribution of commodities. Because strikers have disobeyed social norms, which reflect capitalist ways of making and acquiring things and which are enforced by socially legitimized economic and legal sanctions, they must reorder relationships among themselves in accordance with their own social code and apply their own group sanctions to its violators.

In recent years many studies of strikes have analyzed particular episodes in detail, in an effort to shed light on the social relations of some epoch through local history (Gutman, 1963; Zeigler, 1977; Ham-mett, 1975; Cumbler, 1974). An older tradition, running from Dacus through Brecher, examined a series of strikes in order to derive political lessons from them (how to dampen or fan the flames of discontent) [Dacus, 1877; Brecher, 1972; Crook, 1931].

Assessment of the extent of civilian casualties during times of conflict presents significant challenges in data collection, quantitative methods, interpretation, and presentation. In this article, we briefly consider the motivation and use of casualty accounting and review historical approaches to these questions with illustrative comments on the US Civil War, World War I, World War II, and other conflicts. We provide an overview of several accounting methodologies including excess mortality, epidemiologic surveys, direct and indirect counts, multiple list estimation, and crowdsourcing. We reflect on the evolution toward modern approaches to casualty assessments, permitted by both a deeper understanding of human rights and by contemporaneous technological advances in data collection techniques. Our goal is to introduce several areas of research that deserve attention from social science historians and statisticians.

During the months immediately preceding California’s June 1978 primary election, Proposition 13, the fractious property tax ballot measure, received a dizzying amount of media attention. Newspaper columnists from California and around the country swapped partisan barbs, debating ad infinitum the initiative’s merits and faults. In public forums, political scientists and economists calculated and recalculated the measure’s possible effects and unintended consequences. Heated letters to the editor and sharp-edged political cartoons saturated the editorial pages of local newspapers. Opinion polls registered the public’s sentiment toward the measure on a weekly basis. Shrill advertisements touting either the necessity or the destructiveness of the proposition interrupted regularly scheduled television and radio programs. Indefatigable Howard Jarvis, the monomaniacal, septuagenarian leader of the tax limitation movement, was seemingly everywhere. By election day, the proponents and opponents of Prop 13 had spent over $2 million each on the measure (CFPPC 1988).

By the end of the nineteenth century most of the economically advanced European nations had adopted some form of public social insurance. In the world’s richest nation, however, widows and the aged, sick, and injured received little support from the state. Without the help of the state, how did American workers and their families survive in the face of sickness, accidents, old age, or the death of the primary earner? The traditional answer is that they survived rather badly, if at all. Social reformers of the early twentieth century and most modern historians argue that voluntarism was a failure, that it was not suited to the needs of an increasingly industrialized, urbanized populace.

The modern state arose in Western Europe and was transplanted to European settler colonies. The question about why Western Europe developed high-capacity states bound by the rule of law remains a core concern of modern social science. Prior scholarship dealing with this issue has generally favored different variants of a war-and-state-making perspective. However, generalized geopolitical pressure does little to explain why the modern state arose in Europe and not in other historical multistate systems. This article argues that the European outcome was conditional on the prior existence of “medieval communalism,” that is, on strong norms and institutions of communal representation, based on units such as parishes and towns. It was due to these initial conditions that geopolitical pressure facilitated not only a strengthening of state capacity but also the development of checks on state power in the form of the rule of law. This argument is first theorized and then illustrated empirically using a number of examples from both within and beyond Europe. Against this backdrop, the implications for present-day state building are briefly discussed.

No matter how one measures its commitment to public education, the S outh in 1890 lagged far behind the rest of the nation. Twenty years later, southern public schools were still characterized by relative backwardness, but the preceding two decades had seen impressive expansion in absolute terms. Among the salient features of this transformation were sharply increased per pupil expenditures, school terms, and enrollment rates; greater provision of normal schools and related institutions; and high rates of investment in school capital. State legislatures increased their appropriations, limitations on local taxes were abolished, and the number of counties and school districts voting to increase school expenditures skyrocketed.

This article aims to clarify the scope of questions about religion in population censuses, and attempts to explain why such questions were included or left out of censuses taken in different nations and periods. The quantitative aspect is a fundamental question for students of religion interested in knowing where it is possible to rely on statistics about the size of confessional groups and their basic characteristics. A common use of the census in connection with religion has been to create aggregates about the size of different congregations by nation, and to cross-tabulate this with other variables such as gender, occupations, ethnicity, or regions. Enumerations with questions about religion were performed in many countries from the mid-nineteenth century, but questions about religious affiliation never entered the US censuses, and were left out of most censuses in many other countries as is indicated in the map in figure 1. We shall try to clarify how pressure was put on statistical bureaus, parliaments, and governments to promote or hinder the inclusion of questions about religion.

This article advances an analytic framework for studying climate knowledge, arguing that the dynamics of how scientists construct the category of climate articulate with practices of government by a process I theorize as “meteorological government.” Using diverse primary print sources, analysis in the present article employs this theorization to reconstruct elements of US statecraft in the period from 1800 to 1850 by tracing the governmental significance of meteorological statistics, military-medical meteorology, and what I term “racial climatology.” Historical analysis shows how these components of climate knowledge were coproduced with state efforts to evaluate, calculate, and monitor (1) the military body in a context of bureaucratization of the US Army; (2) western territories in a context of territorial acquisition and providential nationalism; and (3) a stratified population “legible” by biological understandings of racial hierarchy. The analytic framework I employ draws from and informs existing literature, which challenges assumptions that the dynamics of climate knowledge can be separated from developments in social power. I conclude by discussing the implications of the analysis for how we understand science-state coproduction, both in the case of US meteorology throughout the 1800–50 period and for climate knowledge and the state in other contexts and in recent decades.

Work-life balance, or the reconciliation of work and family, has been discussed recently as a “new social risk” in comparative research on the welfare state. According to this discussion, the social security systems of traditional welfare states were built after World War II in order to protect (male) breadwinners against the “old social risks” such as the loss of income due to old age, sickness, accident, or unemployment. Scholars have argued, however, that these postwar policies have been inadequate for dealing with the new types of risks that resulted from complex changes in employment practices and family life. This article reflects critically upon the conceptualization of work-life balance as a new social risk by focusing on one of the Nordic countries, which have come to be known for their policies that combine (female) parenthood and paid work. In particular, it analyzes the problematization and governance of work-family reconciliation in twentieth-century Finland. Overall, the article argues that social scientific knowledge played a key role in the ways in which work-life balance was rendered intelligible and manageable as a social policy issue.

The belief that the social class position an individual inherits at birth is not itself a prime determinant of subsequent personal achievement is a cherished part of American democratic tradition. Social historians attempting to measure whether the mobility opportunities so eagerly sought by immigrants were in fact realized have looked at the occupations of immigrant men and their sons. Evidence from such diverse areas as Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New York City indicates that at the turn of the century many men did experience upward occupational mobility; some groups, notably blacks, did not fare as well as did white immigrants, and not all white immigrants experienced the same rates of occupational improvement (Bodnar et al. 1982; Lieberson 1980; Model 1988; Thernstrom 1964, 1973; Zunz 1982). This essay turns to the first decade of the twentieth century to explore some of the factors contributing to socioeconomic mobility.

According to David Mayhew (2002: 58-59, 35), “Neither statistics nor stories bear out the canonical realignments calendar of 1860, 1896, and 1932,” and “no certifiable electoral realignment has occurred since 1932.” This study examines the national division of the U.S. presidential vote and House of Representatives seats from 1868 to 2004 to determine whether realignments occurred in 1896, 1932, and 1968 and whether other elections might be better designated as realignments. The analysis demonstrates the onset of realignments in the 1894-96 and 1930-32 elections and a staggered realignment in recent decades. Republicans registered significant durable gains in presidential voting starting in 1968 and in congressional elections in 1994. The analysis also finds evidence of a realignment favoring the Democrats in 1874-76.

Studies of the history of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa have focused on demography and within it on the number of slaves exported from Africa (Curtin 1969; Lovejoy 1982, 1983; Manning 1981). Seen from the perspective of African history, the question of the number exported is a window on larger fields of inquiry and an area open to research, but it is only a small part of the larger question of the impact of the trade on Africa. Working out a reasonable estimate of the number exported does not give us the number lost, for we can only estimate the number killed in wars and raids or the number who died while being moved toward slave markets. Even if the demographic question were the most important one, the most crucial aspect of it would not be the raw statistics of exports but the question of reproduction (Gregory and Cordell 1987). Reproduction involves a host of variables: nutrition, disease, agricultural productivity, security, political stability, and quality of life among others. Most of these are not amenable to precise answers. Furthermore, the question of reproduction leads us to the larger questions of political, social, and economic relationships. This article examines the effects of the slave trade on the institutional structure of Senegambia and the western Sudan and the reproduction of the societies involved.

Using a newly developed geographic information system transportation database, we study the impact of gaining access to rail transportation on changes in population density and the rate of urbanization between 1850 and 1860 in the American Midwest. Differences-in-differences and instrumental variable analysis of a balanced panel of 278 counties reveals only a small positive effect of rail access on population density but a large positive impact on urbanization as measured by the fraction of people living in incorporated areas of 2,500 or more. Our estimates imply that one-half or more of the growth in urbanization in the Midwest in the late antebellum period may be attributable to the spread of the rail network.

This is a study of the growth and decline of cities for the purpose of identifying those events in which they significantly increased in size. Significant changes in the scale of cities are important for understanding the long-term trend toward more complex and hierarchical human societies. We report the results of an inventory of cycles, upsweeps, and collapses of settlements in five separate interpolity systems. Upsweeps are instances in which the largest settlement in a world system significantly increases in size. Collapses occur when the size of the largest settlement greatly decreases and stays down for a significant period of time rather than rebounding. We use regional interpolity systems (world systems) rather than single polities or settlements as our unit of analysis. Because the accurate designation of sweeps requires interval scale measures, we are limited to those regions and time periods for which quantitative estimates of largest settlement sizes are regularly available. We find a total of 18 upsweeps and five downsweeps, and only two instances of prolonged systemwide settlement collapse. We also investigate whether or not the rate of cycles has increased over the long run, and we find that cycles of city growth and decline have not accelerated. We also find a greater rate of urban cycles in the Western (Central) System than in the East Asian System, which supports the usual notion that the Western city system was less stable than the Eastern city system.

People in the Icelandic Sagas, and with them the narratives themselves, are impelled by powerful human passions: love, hate, pride, envy, fidelity. This is easy to see and easy to explain. In stories that are intended to captivate their audience, it is vital to spellbind listeners of both sexes and all ages with the excitement of eternal existential problems.

Yet there are other features in the sagas that modern cultural analysis has considered less dependent on the requirements of the literary genre and thus more revealing expressions of the Scandinavian mentality. These include the legalism that pervades the sagas (see, e.g., Gurevich 1985; Hastrup 1985; Byock 1988). One is struck by the extent to which people think and argue in legal terms. This applies to men in conflict, to men demonstrating their power and influence.

Historians often despair of their ability to write histories of child murder, because the crime was easy to commit and conceal. Even today, coroners can determine only in rare instances whether a deceased infant or newborn was suffocated or died of natural causes (Knight 1996: 441–44, 345–60). No reliable test can determine, once decomposition has begun, whether a deceased newborn ever took a breath; and suffocation, unlike strangulation, leaves no physical marks, unless excessive pressure is applied to the face or lips. A murderer needed but a few moments to smother a child and could claim that the child was stillborn, had been accidentally overlain, or had died from natural causes. Unwanted pregnancies could be kept from public notice with the help of family or friends, especially pregnancies that came to term in late winter or early spring, when expectant mothers could live quietly out of the public eye or stay wrapped in heavy clothing. In New England, a large proportion of suspected neonaticides—nearly a quarter—occurred in April or early May, “mud season” in the Yankee vernacular,when people emerged from their long winter “hibernation.”