The title of this presidential address reflects the happy conjunction of my particular interest in social networks and the network structure of the Social Science History Association. My talk will be brief, because I want to reserve most of this “presidential picnic” for the panel that the program chair, Donna Gabaccia, organized. Last year's president, Eric Monkkonen (1994: 166), in his history of the institution of the SSHA, called our meetings “a venue for scholars from different disciplines to learn to talk to one another.” That we have this annual opportunity for conversations is due to the work of our networks that organize the sessions that attract us to the meetings; to program chairs—this year, Donna—who create a program from these sessions; and to our executive director, Erik Austin, whose ability and diligence keeps the organization going from year to year.

The revivalism connected with what we now call the Second Great Awakening was well established on the American landscape by the 1830s. Having observed the impact of camp meetings and itinerant preachers, particularly in the Far West, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that, “Here and there, in the midst of American Society, you meet with men, full of a fanatical and almost wild enthusiasm” (1847: 142). Yet Tocqueville's discomfort with frontier revivalism was hardly universal. By the late 1820s, many Americans recognized the recruiting success of western Baptists, Methodists, and Christians, and young men like Charles Finney modified their camp-meeting techniques for use in eastern churches. Although his methods shocked many hard-core Calvinists, Finney's New Measures soon overwhelmed the quiet, traditionalist revivalism of Nathaniel Taylor, Asahel Nettleton, and Lyman Beecher. As Finney and his associates gained wider acceptance throughout the nation, they also moved the Second Great Awakening from its formative stage, described by Nathan Hatch (1989), to a mainstream stage described by William McLoughlin (1978), Paul Johnson (1979), and numerous other historians (e.g., Ryan 1983, Roth 1987, C. Johnson 1989).

Early in 1944 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified Local 22 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) as the bargaining agent for manufacturing workers at the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The local was built and largely sustained by the collective actions of African Americans, especially women, who quickly made it the primary institutional locus advancing the racial aspirations of Winston-Salem's black working class. Operating the largest tobacco manufacturing facility in the world and employing a workforce of 12,000, none unionized (Tilley 1948, 1985), RJR vigorously fought the local from its inception.

Before the 1940s Puerto Rico was an obscure possession for most American social scientists, as indeed it was for most United States citizens. Conquered in the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico was overshadowed in the American consciousness by its more tumultuous neighbor Cuba. To be sure, by the 1930s, there were sparks of interest among foundation staffs, New Dealers, and radicals in the plight of the Puerto Rican poor. Yet on the whole the island continued to merit only cursory attention.

There are three sources of information about undercounts in nineteenth-century U.S. censuses: demographic analyses of net undercounts by age, sex, and race at the national level; record-linkage studies of gross undercounts for local communities; and contemporary testimony of the types and bases of underenumeration. This article reviews the strengths and limitations of each of these sources, assesses the extent of their agreement, and discusses the bases of their disagreement.

Recent major works on long-term racial inequality in the labor market revolve around competing hypotheses concerning the importance of human capital factors (Smith and Welch 1989) and government policy (Donohue and Heckman 1991) in promoting black advance. There is, however, another line of thinking which emphasizes the importance of experimentation and “demand-side learning”: employers’ gaining access to accurate information about the abilities of black workers and adjusting their beliefs in accordance with this information.

Over the last twenty years political scientists and sociologists concerned primarily with western European developments since 1945 have attempted to define corporatism as an ideal model for use in analyzing this region's political economies. Several influential American historians in recent years have also employed the concept of corporatism in examining the development of the modern American political economy. Although these historians have not ignored the contemporary European-oriented social science literature, the relationship between the work of historians describing the evolution of America's political economy and the theoretical literature based primarily on more recent European experiences and European concerns remains problematic.

The primary reasons for understanding homicide in the past are the same as for the present, and in fact most present studies use some comparisons over time. Because homicide varies across time and over political territories, we know that it is not an invariant human phenomenon. For social historians, homicide is also important because in both coroners and newspaper accounts we catch fascinating snatches of everyday life. Through its incidence and the records generated around the events we are able to explore otherwise hard-to-see aspects of our past.

This special section of Social Science History launches a series of five articles illustrative of what we believe is an eclectic center in the development of historical studies of institutions and policies, often termed the “new institutionalism.” The new institutionalism emerged in the early 1980s in reaction to “a long season in which social forces and processes were the predominant topics of study” (Orren and Skowronek 1986). While the precise role of institutions varies according to the practitioner, hallmarks of the new institutionalism include a portrayal of institutions as semiautonomous actors; a contextualization of institutions within sociohistorical processes (and vice versa); a recognition of inefficiency, contingency, and accident in history; and a recognition of the relative autonomy of ideas and symbolic action in historical development (March and Olsen 1984, 1989; Krasner 1984; Smith 1988; Katznelson 1992). As is expected of new paradigms, the entry of the new institutionalism into the intellectual community has been marked by an array of polemics against its predecessors, “old” schools defined by “old institutionalism,” behaviorism, and structural functionalism. It has also generated a wave of spirited counterattacks (Mitchell 1991; Bendix et al. 1992; Ethington and McDonagh forthcoming).

Virtually all previous empirical studies analyzing the characteristics of European immigrants to the United States during the nineteenth century examine a single country. These studies provide a vast array of information on some or all of the following: the immigrants’ ages, their occupations, whether they traveled singly or within a group, the size of the traveling groups, the number of their children, and the gender breakdown, along with other characteristics. As a result of this empirical work, our knowledge concerning who immigrated to the United States during the nineteenth century is much clearer than it was 30 years ago. Since this body of work is specific to individual countries and based on a variety of data sources, however, it is difficult to compare the characteristics of the immigrants from the various source countries.

The introduction of the Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR) in 1930 remains one of the most important events in the history of criminal statistics in the United States. Based on local police reports, it is the oldest extant national crime data system in the United States, with the possible exception of prison statistics. It continues to be a vitally important data system because of its extensive use by scholars, social critics, governmental organizations and the media, and as such it has made a major contribution to our understanding of crime in the United States in the last half century. The UCR has also had its share of controversy, involving not only scientific issues of validity and reliability, but the possibility of covert agendas on the part of the police and the FBI to foster an image of effective law enforcement. Despite its importance and controversial nature there is no single objective and definitive written history documenting the beginnings of the UCR. That which exists tends to be brief and superficial, and at times even ideologically biased (Leonard 1954; Maltz 1977; Sherman et al. 1982; Thompson 1968; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation 1940).

In many slave societies manumission coexisted with perpetual bondage, often featured by self-purchase by slave artisans, a practice that some societies monitored through recognition of the slave's legal personality as a contracting party. Manumission played a comparatively minor role in shaping North American slavery, with debatable exceptions in the mid-Atlantic region; historians of slavery there have portrayed manumitters as individuals of conscience and/or economic maximizers seeking profitable exits from a locally declining labor institution. This contrast was first noted by Frank Tannenbaum, who characterized slavery in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America as milder than in British America, and targeted differences in religion and in the European history of slavery of each society as key explanatory factors.

Henry Adams (1918:7) once described nineteenth-century Massachusetts party politics as the “systematic organization of hatreds.” At first glance, his observation appears to be true for the early twentieth century as well, especially for Boston, where Brahmin reformers battled Irish bosses in an apparent reprise of a half-century-old conflict. But a closer examination reveals that while ethnic hatreds grew stronger in the city's twentieth-century public life, Progressive reform weakened partisan organization. In fact, political modernization produced tribal politics; such was Progressivism's ironic legacy in Boston. When the city's politics shifted from contests between grassroots parties to battles over shaping public opinion, ethnicity replaced partisanship as the primary source of local political identification. Conflict between Yankee and Irish now defined the city's public life as never before.

The structure of the extended family is often described as a strategy for coping with poverty, unemployment, or migration (Agresti 1979). Whether extended kin relations are thought to be short-term and calculative (Anderson 1971) or bound by ties of reciprocity (Hareven 1982), the extended household itself is assumed to be adaptive to the material conditions under which working-class families live. This characterization is supported by studies of the present-day poor (Angel and Tienda 1982; Stack 1974; Stern 1993). Although Ruggles (1987) questions the importance of economic motives for nineteenth-century extended families, he suggests that by the early twentieth century there is evidence that extended households were increasingly strategic.

In the late nineteenth century, as today, Milan stood at the center of Italy's most advanced economic developments, and served in effect as the financial capital of the country. Well before industrialization had taken hold in most of the Italian peninsula, Milan's industry—tied to developments further north in Europe—was sprouting. Moreover, as the three articles that follow clearly show, Milan—rather than the Italian capital, Rome—was at the heart of many modern political developments in Italy.

The determination of anthropometric historians to unearth the broad patterns of human biological well-being is now too well known to need reiteration. From Richard Steckel's exploratory essays, which could be taken as the launching manifesto of the discipline, to the most recent publications, many hundreds of thousands of records from nearly all continents of the globe have been examined (Mascie-Taylor 1991; Steckel 1979). All of this effort notwithstanding, we are still in the initial phases of this research program, with many important features of the agenda remaining unsettled (Floud, Wachter, and Gregory 1990; Fogel 1993; Komlos 1989; Mokyr and O'Grada 1988). One such question is related to the most startling discovery to date, namely, that as part of its adaptability to its socioeconomic environment, human physical stature has undergone cyclical fluctuations during the course of the last quarter of a millennium (Fogel 1986; Komlos 1987,1994a, 1994b; Nicholas and Oxley 1993).

The New Deal marked a critical conjuncture of civil rights and welfare policy in American political development. During the Progressive Era, civil rights policy and social policy developed independently and often antithetically. While the American state expanded its reach in economic regulation and social welfare, laying the institutional and intellectual groundwork for the New Deal, policies aimed at protecting the rights of minorities progressed barely at all (McDonagh 1993). But with the Great Depression, the welfare and civil rights agendas came together powerfully. For African Americans, who had already been relegated to the bottom of the political economy, the Depression created even more desperate conditions, and issues of economic opportunity and relief became paramount. The African American political community pursued an agenda that linked advances in civil rights to expansions of the state's role in social welfare (Hamilton and Hamilton 1992).

Until recently material factors had usually been regarded as the most important forces behind the great mortality decline in Western Europe during the last two centuries. Today, the discussion among historical demographers is much more diversified. Greater consideration is given to other factors than was previously. Predominant in several recent summaries is the argument that there was not one single cause of the mortality decline everywhere and in every age group (Brändstrom 1993; Health Transition Review 1991: 1-2; Mercer 1990; Schofield, et al., 1991; Sundin 1992a). One factor which has gained recognition especially in urban areas is the efforts by local and national agencies to improve hygienic conditions (Riley 1987). Cultural determinants of health have also received increased attention both in articles and monographs, especially in relation to mortality among infants and children (Johansson 1991; Preston and Haines 1991).

Andrea Costa, a contemporary observer and sometime participant in Italian socialist politics, spoke in 1886 in defense of the Lombardy-based Partito operaio, whose leaders had been arrested and its newspaper muzzled. He offered a classic Marxist interpretation of the party's emergence as a “natural product of… our economic and social conditions … the concentration of the means of production in few hands, distancing the worker more and more from his tools … and likewise a product of our political conditions … electoral reform, by means of which the working class … can affirm itself as a class apart.” Further, this party had been founded in Milan, “where modern industry has penetrated more than elsewhere,” and closely following the expansion of the suffrage in 1881 (Italy 1886: 419).

Over the past several decades, the demographic transition from high to low levels of both fertility and mortality has received much attention from scholars. Demographers have been interested in whether the change that has occurred in the developed parts of the world will be repeated elsewhere, while historians have used population changes as a means of exploring broader questions in social history. The interest, however, has not been evenly divided, with fertility declines receiving far more attention than improvements in mortality. This is especially true of American history.