Three Declining Plateaus of population growth provide an empirical framework for American social history (Nugent, 1981). After a pre-history, self-sustaining demographic regimes appeared in the form of a frontier-rural mode of life common to most Americans by about 1720 and remained unchallenged until the mid-nineteenth century. From the 1860s to the 1920s, the frontier-rural mode continued to exhibit considerable strength but in rapidly contracting areas of the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Columbia Plateau. During that period of fifty years, however, the second plateau was increasingly supplanted by the metropolitan (or urban-industrial) mode of life. After 1920, by demographic measures, the frontier-rural mode of life had been replaced virtually everywhere by the metropolitan one familiar to Americans ever since.

It is revealing and important to preface this paper by noting the fact that a paper of this sort could hardly have been written as recently as 15 years ago. In sociology at large, historical methods and approaches were quite uncommon from the 1940s through the early 1970s. Further, mainstream American sociology organizations have distinguished themselves worldwide by their neglect of matters rural and agricultural. In part, this is because American rural sociologists have had their own professional association, the Rural Sociological Society, since 1937. There has accordingly been a fairly substantial separation and division of labor between “general” and rural sociology/sociologists, with “non-rural” sociologists having their major allegiance to the American Sociological Association (ASA) and regional disciplinary groups, while rural sociologists have had their closest identification with the Rural Sociological Society. Further, in American rural sociology prior to the late 1970s and 1980s, there had never been a major tradition of work along the lines of “historical sociology” as the notion is commonly understood today.

The creation of legal parameters to structure social relations is a basic feature of modern capitalist society. Law plays a major role in shaping the institutional setting within which conflicts arise, develop, and reach their resolution. Likewise, legislative solutions to pressing social conflicts create new possibilities and strategies for social change. The struggles between capitalists and the working class that have historically marked capitalist economic development constitute a central arena for the legislative restructuring of social relations. Yet, few have systematically studied the role of law in shaping the development of capital-labor relations (for some important exceptions, see Steinberg, 1982; Tomlins, 1985). In this paper, we explore the legal structuring of American working-class militancy in the twentieth century, a prominent dimension of capital-labor relations, but one for which the legislative underpinnings remain unclear.

Although most Italian and Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States during the same turn-of-the-century period, the occupational trajectories of their descendants have been very different. Many writers have emphasized that Jews brought with them urban-industrial experience, entrepreneurial skills, a determination to settle in America, and a reverence for education (Joseph, 1969, orig. 1914; Glazer, 1958). Italians were more often peasants or farm laborers, though their familiarity with commerce and the crafts should not be underestimated (Briggs, 1978; Gabaccia, 1984). Some have also argued that familism and disdain for education further delayed Italian participation in the upgrading of the American occupational structure (Covello, 1972; Child, 1970).

Psychologists tell us that everyone is a bit neurotic. Academics may be a bit more neurotic than most people. When our work is going well, we get suspicious or at the very least we get anxious, always looking for new heights to scale. Part of the recent intellectual turbulence in the field of social history and in my own field of labor history, I would argue, is self-induced. We did not have enough problems, stuffing the lives of thousands of discrete individuals into our codebooks, reading everything that has ever been written about the work habits of iron moulders, plotting on maps the locations of saloons and cafes in relation to immigrant workers’ homes and then trying to make some sense out of all that. What we needed was a crisis. Like all good scholarly crises, what the crisis in social history is depends upon whom you ask, but if nothing else, the phenomenon gives us all just what we needed—something new to worry about.

In June of 1948, during the peak period of strike activity in the United States in the past fifty years, Philip Murray, President of the CIO, the most successful militant labor organization of the twentieth century, published an article giving his views on labor organization, democracy, and “our American system.” He argued that “if we pull together . . . we shall surmount the present crisis.” He felt confident about his prediction because, he said, “We have no classes in this country; that’s why the Marxist theory of class struggle has gained so few adherents. We’re all workers here. And in the final analysis the interests of farmers, factory hands, business and professional people, and white-collar toilers prove to be the same” (Murray, 1948; quoted in Lipsitz, 1981: 143).

Fascination with elite recruitment, ideology, and political strategy in the Indian nationalist movement has given rise to a wide range of scholarly studies about these phenomena. An extraordinarily rich literature has also developed dealing with provincial political movements during both the nationalist and postindependence periods. More recently a literature concerning local, “peoples’” history has started to develop and flourish, the most influential genre being the self-styled subaltern studies (see Guha, 1984–86; also Guha, 1983). Missing in the historiography of this vast and complex region are studies of those institutions that constituted the core of successive nationalist demands made for political reform—elections and representative institutions. Our study is a preliminary venture into the world of elections to provincial legislative institutions in late colonial and early independent India. The place of elections is not only important in understanding the decolonization process in India; it is of broad comparative interest in enhancing understanding of the democratization of regimes.

Over six decades ago, A. M. Carr-Sanders first identified the dramatic shift from a population regime of high mortality and high fertility before 1750 to one of low mortality and low fertility after 1900 (Carr-Sanders, 1925). Carr-Sanders had a simple explanation for these changes. Improved sanitation and advances in medicine had lowered mortality while an increase in the standard of living had triggered a temporary increase in fertility. As technological innovations reduced the economic utility of children, however, individuals responded by limiting their fertility.

John Bodnar’s Scholarship has touched—and even helped shape—current debates in several related historical sub-disciplines, including labor history, Afro-American history, and family history. He is, of course, also a leading public historian. During a period in the historians’ craft decried for its myopic compartmentalization and narrow specialization, the connectedness of Bodnar’s work to a range of social science concerns, themes, and issues makes it especially compelling for us. Yet Professor Bodnar has forged a record of research—praiseworthy for its quality no less than for its quantity—that clearly has impressed his colleagues, inspired new graduate students, and generally enlivened the field of immigration and ethnic history. It is on that central focus of his work that I wish to dwell here.

In a 1902 North American Review article, United States Commissioner General of Immigration Terence Powderly called for stricter health controls on arriving aliens. Powderly cautioned that unless “proper precautions” were taken to detect two contagious diseases—trachoma, an eye infection, and favus, a dermatological disease of the scalp—the future American might be “hairless and sightless.” He called upon Americans to refuse to allow their country to become “the hospital of the nations of the earth” (Powderly, 1902).

Sociologists have debated extensively about the attributes and natural history of professions, roughly dividing along two lines. The taxonomic and functionalist views assume that professions rest on broad knowledge based on extensive, specialized training, usually, in the modern era, in a university setting. Because such knowledge is arcane and scarce and outsiders lack the expertise to judge it, society allows the profession to regulate itself and to monopolize services. In turn, the profession follows a service ethic rather than the profit motive. It pledges to help all in a disinterested fashion and to maintain high ethical standards among its members. Since the 1960s, the critical or power school has treated professionalism as ideology and manipulation, arguing that the extent of training and the specialized character of professional knowledge are deliberately exaggerated and mystified and that the service ethic merely disguises unjustified monopoly rewards (Saks, 1983; Wilensky, 1964; Greenwood, 1957; Friedson, 1984; Roth, 1974; Ritzer and Walczak, 1986: 59–94).

American political parties achieved their peak importance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Numerous voting studies have demonstrated the level and significance of party identification, and evaluations of legislative behavior have shown that party loyalty had a primary influence on roll call voting (Bogue, 1980; Kleppner, 1981; Thompson and Silbey, 1984). Surprisingly, other aspects of parties have received very little attention. Only a few scholars have examined the extent of party structure and activities or their connections with political culture and the broader political system (Jensen, 1969, 1971, and 1983; McGerr, 1986; Keller, 1977; Mayhew, 1986: 203–256, 308–332). Even fewer have evaluated systematically the overall patterns of committee membership and the characteristics of party leaders to determine which social and political qualities were important (Stave, 1970; Watts, 1979).

As any casual reader of John Bodnar’s major new synthesis, The Transplanted (1985), knows, the family is the central analytical concept in this work. Bodnar (1985: xvii) asks us to see immigrants’ adjustment to life in the United States in a new way—taking place at all “the points where immigrant families met the challenges of capitalism and modernity: the homeland, the neighborhood, the school, the workplace, the church, the family and the fraternal hall.” This represents a significant change—I would argue, an advance—over earlier studies which focused on the confrontation of ethnic groups with American society, on the interaction of modern and traditional cultures, or on the peculiarities of American class struggle (Handlin, 1951; Archdeacon, 1983; Cumbler, 1986).

By focusing on small family units and a large economic system, Bodnar is able to escape from the confines of the case history, which has dominated immigration history since the late 1960s. Furthermore, he is able to focus quite properly on the considerable fragmentation that characterized most immigrant communities in the United States. Because small groups of immigrants responded to capitalism, they inevitably made differing decisions, both socially and ideologically; they also supported leaders with fundamentally conflicting views of the best interests and futures for immigrant communities. Bodnar’s immigrants, in other words, are human beings who make history, although never under conditions which they themselves determined. Furthermore, they are not isolated economist decision makers.

The labor force behavior of older men has attracted the attention of economists, sociologists, and historians because it speaks to several concerns: the current crisis in Social Security, the origins and development of the welfare state, and the place of the aged in American history. The central issue is the decline in labor force participation among older men, a striking phenomenon of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, men past the age of 60 or 65 were quite likely to remain in the labor force. According to most historical accounts, their labor force participation declined monotonically from near 75% in 1890 to about 25% at present, a trend set in motion by cultural and economic changes which made the aged less valued by employers.

Data quality is a central analytical issue in most studies of historical populations. There is often a need for data correction as well as for a careful consideration of the sources and types of error in data collection. Cross-identification of enumerated or registered events in independent sources often can be used as a check on data quality. This study investigates data quality of two sources by their enumeration comparability and in addition discusses some of the problems with such a comparison. The two sources compared are household listings of the United States manuscript federal censuses and independently prepared maps detailing property owners and the location of their property. The method employed estimates the correspondence of listings in each source based on the other and the combined enumeration correspondence of both sources. Further, this paper examines some of the village-level demographic and economic factors which may be associated with differences in the relative completeness of these sources.

John Bodnar’s Study—which I consider “the standard survey on the history of migration to the United States, which for many years will remain unsurpassed” (Hoerder, 1987)—also merits a controversial and lively discussion. A synthesis of the immigrant experience has long been called for. Beginning in the 1960s, Rudolph J. Vecoli’s penetrating critique (1964) and Victor Greene’s detailed study of east European miners (1968) dismantled Oscar Handlin’s paradigm (1951). The two decades since the end of the old paradigm witnessed the introduction of new methods, new approaches, and a new sensitivity to the roots of the migrants in their old cultures. I will first place Bodnar’s study in the context of two other recent syntheses and then raise some conceptual questions; in a third section I will take up issues related to the culture of origin and to the role of female migrants in community formation.

In a recent article in Social Science History, Professor Alan Bogue, former president of the Association and one of its founding fathers, has reviewed the first ten years of SSHA. In it he presents from the constitution the major purpose of the Association as “improving ‘the quality of historical explanation in every manner possible, but particularly by encouraging the selective use and adaptation in historical research and teaching of relevant social science’” (Bogue, 1987: 336). In this paper, we review the first ten years of the Social Science History journal in the context of an association formed to promote social science applications to the analysis of historical data. One indicator of the success of this enterprise is the extent to which historians are applying social science methods. Another indicator is the involvement of non-historians in social science history.

During the Reagan years, the New Right has been the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention. Some have studied the secular New Right movement (Crawford, 1980); others have focused on the contributors to New Right organizations (Guth and Green, 1984a, 1984b, and 1986). Some scholars have studied the organizations of the New Right (Latus, 1983); others have examined the processes by which these New Right organizations were formed (Guth, 1983; Liebman, 1983). A good deal of work has focused on the New Christian Right. Some studies have explored the sources of support for the Christian Right in the general population (Buell and Sigelman, 1985; Wilcox, 1987a; Sigelman et al., 1987), and others have examined the activists in Christian Right organizations (Wilcox, 1987b).