This article focuses on the importance of employment and educational roles for children in understanding major aspects of the American fertility transition of the late 1800s. It views the declining economic contribution of children to family income and the increased short-run costs of children from schooling as important factors in explaining variations in marital fertility among parts of the United States, and also for understanding the general downward trend of fertility in the late 1800s.

Data on children ever born from the 1910 census are used to analyze variations across states in childbearing among two cohorts of married white women. One cohort (those 70-74 years of age in 1910) did most of their childbearing in the period after the Civil War; while the younger cohort (40-44 in 1910) re-produced mainly in the period just before the turn of the century. Relationships between reproductive behavior of individual mothers and their own children’s roles will also be investigated through a sample of the 1900 manuscript census, based on a 1 in 750 household sample of the 1900 manuscript census (Graham, 1980). Special attention will be devoted to urban-rural variation in the effect of children’s activities on fertility.

History is full of reactions and revolutions from which even the scholarly world is not immune. The revision in French economic history during the last two decades affords an example of one of the most complete turnabouts in recent scholarship. In the 1940s and 1950s a number of scholars, mainly American, believed that the problem to be explained was French economic retardation in the nineteenth century. Much was written about the unenterprising character of French entrepreneurs, anticapitalist social attitudes, the persistence of the family firm and the small farm, and other sociocultural characteristics that were deemed inimical to economic growth. The Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard (1948-1958) provided inspiration for analysing French entrepreneurial failure in terms of Parsonian sociology, and the classic retardationist view of French industrial development remains enshrined in David S. Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), originally written during the 1950s for the Cambridge Economic History of Europe.

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.

Numerous studies have shown that since about 1900 the largest industrial, financial, and transportation companies have interlocked extensively through a sharing of directors and, much less often, officers (e.g., Bunting and Barbour, 1971; Bunting, 1976a, 1976b; Dooley, 1969). In fact, this interlocking has been so extensive that a virtual network exists whereby nearly any large corporation in principle is able to participate either directly or indirectly, once or twice removed, in the top-level policy deliberations of any other large concern (Mizruchi, 1982; Pennings, 1980).

Little is known about the origins of this network. Most research implicitly assumes that the network has resulted from some relatively recent decline in competition and subsequent movement toward economic concentration. This conclusion follows from the commonly accepted proposition that competition precedes monopoly in industrial development. Scherer (1979:47), an authority on modern American industrial organization, cites Marx for the essence of this notion: “‘One capitalist always kills many’ (creating) a ‘constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process.’” In less colorful but more factual terms, Burns (1936:1-42) and many others have described the “decline of competition” and the factors leading to the domination of many industries by relatively few large corporations (literature reviewed in Scherer, 1979:67-70; Blumberg, 1975:16-83).

Seventy-three years ago pioneer American medievalist Dana Carlton Munro (1911: 504) delivered a paper in Philadelphia to the American Philosophical Society entitled “The Cost of Living in the Twelfth Century.” He threw down the gauntlet by concluding that

This article takes up this challenge with new material on the cost of living in Italy in the twelfth century.

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.

Health conditions in United States cities at the turn of the twentieth century were very poor. Bleak pictures of crowded dwellings, contaminated water supplies, and filthy streets have been painted by numerous observers of urban areas at the time (Smith, 1964). While the effects of these conditions on mortality levels have not been precisely measured, urban mortality rates were consistently higher than rural mortality rates in 1900 in the United States (Condran and Crimmins, 1980). Nevertheless, considerable variation in the mortality levels of different cities also existed. Our goal in this article is to explain the variation in the mortality conditions in U.S. cities for which death registration data were collected in 1900. The analysis is done in two stages. First, the causes of death which accounted for the different mortality levels are isolated. Second, a multivariate analysis of the factors affecting the rates of occurrence of these causes of death is performed.

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.

Britain has been a model of political stability for so long that thinking of it as anything but that is difficult. The familiar image of Edwardian England is that of an Indian summer spent with a jovial uncle. This was a system, however, that was in crisis and was recognized by its contemporaries as being so. Regardless of whether the challenges of the Irish question, labor unrest, and suffragette militancy were connected or merely coincidential (see Pelling, 1968: 147-164), all three shared the common characteristic of extra-parliamentary activism and of violent—either actual or anticipated—methods. Furthermore, the system also was burdened with other contentious issues, as “politics after 1901 were increasingly dominated by controversies about matters which most Victorians had regarded as settled and closed to discussion” (Read, 1972: 16-17). If ever a governmental system suffered from an overload of simultaneous demands from a multiplicity of pressing and intractable problems, this was it. Contrary to what sometimes has been supposed, Britain’s political elite did not regard the approaching international hostilities as providing a means of alleviating these burdens by welding the country together with patriotic fervor. Instead they feared that war would be the final blow undermining the governments’s authority and, perhaps, producing civil war (French, 1982: 85-95).

Our knowledge of economic progress for early Ohioans is limited because it is so difficult to trace successfully given individuals from year to year, let alone from decade to decade. If we start with the names of a dozen men, we often lose the genealogical trail of half of them before the search has progressed more than a few years. That is why we should welcome any solid evidence of tracings for any large subset of Ohio’s population, as presented on its tax duplicate for given years. Such evidence can teach us a great deal about the number of propertyholders who remained in Ohio over a period of of time, how many moved on, how many died, and something about their material progress.

Over a period of many years, Dr. Gerald Petty of Columbus has recorded information on taxpayers in Ohio and has provided me with punched cards and computer tapes for all taxpayers on the Ohio tax duplicates for the years 1810 and 1825. These duplicates are township and county lists of the names of taxpayers, details of their properties, and their tax assessments. These data describe 4.3 million acres in 1810 and 14.7 million in 1825, a sizable leap in development for this frontier state; by the time of its first federal census of agriculture in 1850, Ohio had recorded 18.0 million acres. In the 15-year period between 1810 and 1825, the number of propertyholders grew from 14,098 to 51,506. The purpose of this article is to report how many from the original group could be found among the latter number, and to say something about material progress in those cases where names could be matched. This study provides some fundamental knowledge about the early economic development as well as the levels of wealth inequality in Ohio.

Many social scientists have documented that the American corporate capitalist class is highly organized and cohesive, both in terms of formal structural characteristics (Domhoff, 1967; Useem, 1979; Scott, 1979) and informal social patterns (Baltzell, 1964; Domhoff, 1974; Mills, 1956). One of the major structural features integrating corporate capitalists is interlocking directorates, which have been shown to form a single, continuous, cohesive network (Sonquist and Koenig, 1975; Allen, 1974; Mariolis, 1975; Mizruchi, 1982; Pennings, 1980; Scott, 1979; Fennema and Schijf, 1978).

In this article, we analyze the male-female earnings differential in the single most important sector of female employment, clerical and office work, for the period running from the 1880s to the 1970s. Clerical occupations currently provide jobs for one-third of all females engaged in market employment. Our analysis reveals that intraoccupational earnings differences between the sexes rather than differences in occupational structure have been the major factors underlying the male-female earnings gap in the clerical sector. This finding represents a major break with the conclusion reached in many earlier studies where researchers have argued that sex differences in occupational structure account for most of the sex differential in earnings (Cohen, 1971; Fuchs, 1971; Kreps, 1971; Sawhill, 1971). The empirical evidence presented here also suggests that the sex differential in earnings levels in the major clerical occupations has shown no substantial narrowing in recent decades. This result is surprising given the changing social climate of the post-World War II period. In recent decades we have seen a sharp upsurge in activity by feminist groups, pathbreaking civil rights legislation, increasing female labor force participation, increasing female career orientation, changes in sex roles, and other significant social changes. The results in this article suggest that up to now these social changes have not had a significant impact on the male-female earnings gap in the clerical sector.

The central interest of this article is to describe the interrelationship of fertility patterns with occupational structure for a sample of married couples in one maritime community—Nantucket, Massachusetts—over a period of nearly 200 years. Marital fertility declined substantially in Nantucket from its first white settlement in 1660 to 1850. During this time the whaling industry was undergoing intervals of expansion, prosperity, virtual destruction, and renewal, eventually failing to recover from a long decline that began in the 1840s. An explanation of the observed Falls in fertility is not possible without reference to trends in the whaling industry, as this article attempts to demonstrate.

A sustained decline in American fertility rates from at least 1800 and perhaps earlier has been documented (Coale and Zelnik, 1963; Easterlin, 1971, 1976a, 1976b; Forster and Tucker, 1972; Vinovskis, 1976; Yasuba, 1962). Causes of the decline may include the changing availability of farmland, urbanization and industrialization, literacy, and such demographic factors as a decline in mortality, changes in the sex ratio at marriageable ages, and ethnic composition. A number of researchers have even suggested that Falls in family size were at least partly due to deliberate attempts by individual couples not to exceed their desired number of children (Kantrow, 1980; Osterud and Fulton, 1976; Temkin-Greener and Swedlund, 1978; Wells, 1971). For Nantucket in particular, Byers (1982) also presented evidence for a substantial fertility decline from 1680 to 1840, claiming that his findings “demonstrate community-wide acceptance of voluntary fertility control.” The present study, in contrast, found no evidence of deliberate fertility control in Nantucket.

The period around the turn of the twentieth century has been called the “era of finance capital” in American history. It was during this period that the first of the great trusts were formed, combining in some cases hundreds of corporations into one. Investment bankers, in particular J. P. Morgan, were the major orchestrators of these schemes, but other leading financiers and industrialists were also active in controlling several corporations apiece. George F. Baker and James Stillman in banking; Edward H. Harriman, James J. Hill, and the Moore brothers in railroads; and John D. and William Rockefeller in oil and other industries were prominent among the leading capitalists of the age, and they dominated much of the business scene at that time.

One of the remarkable aspects of this period is the rare unanimity among scholars and journalists about its main characteristics. There is general agreement that financial corporations were the most powerful of the period, that a relatively small number of individuals dominated the corporate world, and that if it was ever possible to speak of a ruling class in American society, this was the period (e.g., Riesman, 1953; Bell, 1960; Parsons and Smelser, 1957).

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.

A friend and colleague of an author reviews a two-volume history. Acknowledging his relationship with the author the reviewer calls the books “excellent, full of rich new insights, sparkling with intelligence, the sentiment which underlies our empassioned love for the historian’s craft, one of the most beautiful of the discplines devoted to the study of man.” “Yet,” the reviewer continues, “it is striking that the individual is almost entirely absent…. Psychology, although not totally ignored, is always collective psychology.…Is not the author,” the review continues, “turning back to the schematic.…toward the sociological, a seductive form of the abstract?” (Febvre, 1941b: 177, 128).

Sit back and imagine the time, place, and people involved in this story: a 1980s traditional historian, perhaps a radical people’s historian, excoriating a social scientific colleague? Not at all; this is no case of contemporary backlash. The time was 1941, the review Lucien Febvre, the author Marc Bloch, the book, La société féodale.

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.

Many recent studies of interlocking directorates have paid special attention to the possible existence of interest groups or cliques within the corporate world (Allen, 1978; Dooley, 1969; Mariolis, 1977; Mintz and Schwartz, 1981a; Mizruchi, 1982b). The search for economic groupings of this type dates from the early part of the twentieth century when financial domination of industrial firms was thought to characterize American business. Bank control theory, in particular, posited the coalescence of individual companies into a number of competing groups, each organized around banking interests. Thus, Baran and Sweezy (1966: 17) define interest groups as “a number of corporations under common control, the locus of power being normally an investment or commercial bank or a great family fortune.”

Early work in this area, therefore, attempted to identify separate groups of companies organized around either family or financial interests. Rochester (1936), for example, used information on stock ownership, banking dependence, service relationships, capital investments, and joint ventures to identify many autonomous cliques headed by founding families. Sweezy (1939) used a similar set of criteria to identify eight dominant financial interest groups. Perlo (1957) replicated these results 20 years later.