Sometime during World War I,Ned Cobb, an African American sharecropper better known to us by his pseudonym Nate Shaw, journeyed from the Tallapoosa County, Alabama, farm where he was sharecropping to Opelika, a small market town about 12 miles away, to buy cotton seed hulls for his mules,meal for his family, and shoes for his children. At Mr. Sadler’s general store, Cobb had a chilling encounter with one Henry Chase, a crippled white store clerk. Chase, resentful that Cobb had been served by one of the store's white female clerks, tried to provoke a fight with Cobb and then accused Cobb of threatening him with a pistol. Cobb wisely refused to be goaded, but he was arrested anyway when Chase brought his complaint to the sheriff. Cobb only escaped trouble with the law and more trouble with Chase and his gang because of the intercession of influential white merchants who knew Cobb from earlier business in town (Rosengarten 1974: 162–72).

Theories of strikes—or any kind of conflict—are theories of interaction. Marxists envisage class conflict as a dialectical struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Neoclassical economists imagine strikes as an unintended consequence of bargaining between rational actors.The tumult of class conflict is far removed from the quiet of rational bargaining, yet these theories are alike in this respect: strikes ensue from dyadic interaction. Adding political authorities to the dyad of workers and employers extends interaction to three sets of actors.

Many scholars have noted the theoretical importance of remarriage in twentieth-century American life (Burch 1995; Cherlin 1998; Furstenberg 1980; Glick 1980; Thornton 1977; Uhlenberg and Chew 1986), yet few historical studies have examined remarriage in the United States empirically. This gap in the literature is noteworthy for two reasons. First, the turn of the twentieth century seems to have marked a crossover in the remarriage transition of the United States, reflecting changes in the pool of persons eligible to remarry. This transition was characterized by decreases in remarriage resulting from declines in mortality and the probability of widow(er)hood, followed by increases in remarriage resulting from higher divorce rates. The crossover in the transition was likely to have occurred when the pool of eligibles was at or near its nadir. Second, there is ongoing debate about the implications of remarriage for families and individuals (Booth and Dunn 1994), and about the impacts of remarriage on family functions (Cherlin 1978; Cherlin and Furstenberg 1994). In the light of these considerations, we believe it is important to examine remarriage and its consequences in the United States at the turn of the century so that we may better understand the ways that remarriage influences family life and shapes the life course of persons within families (see London and Elman 2001).