Over the past 15 years, my scholarship has been devoted to understanding the patterns, the possibilities, and the impossibilities of politics and social policy in the United States. In this essay, therefore, I have decided to use historical evidence to address current public and scholarly debates about civic engagement in American democracy. As I hope to remind us all, social science historians can speak clearly to contemporary public concerns. We may be able to introduce some better evidence and more sophisticated explanations into ongoing debates.

In October 1952, during a famine in northern Namibia, an Ovambo woman named Helvi Kondombolo filed a complaint with colonial officials, stating that her son, a contract laborer, had been living in the southern part of the colony for eight years and that she wanted him either sent back to the Ovamboland reserve or persuaded to send her money to buy food. Her complaint is unique in that the laborer in question was Sam Nujoma, now president of Namibia. And yet she was only one of dozens of women who filed similar complaints against men between 1948 and 1954 (National Archives of Namibia [NAN], Native Affairs Ovamboland [NAO] 93 and 94, file 42/2). In colonial southern Africa, European officials and African men often collaborated in efforts to control African women. These complaints represent a rare case in which European officials and African women collaborated to control African men.

This article, which deals with the Saami’s experience with smallpox in the three northern Swedish parishes of Jokkmokk, Gällivare, and Enontekis during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, focuses on these epidemiologic questions: (1) Why were the Saami—a native people living in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia—not affected by smallpox until this period? (2) What happened once smallpox was introduced into the area? (3) Did the Saami’s experience with smallpox differ from that of the rest of the Swedish population? (4) If so, what were the most important differences? (5) And how are they to be explained? Finding the answers to these questions requires considering whether smallpox inevitably resulted from the number of susceptible people and whether the disease affected other aspects of demography besides mortality (Figure 1).

In recent years, as social scientists questioned the intellectual boundaries set by customary perceptions of criminality, their discourse expanded to incorporate more than purely legalistic definitions of crime. In addition to conventional street crimes, some scholars began examining both interpersonal and collective actions and behaviors that were once considered to be outside the scope of commonly accepted definitions of criminality. For example, criminologists now study crime categorized as occupational (Albanese 1987; Cressey 1953; Green 1990; Hollinger and Clark 1983; Horning 1979; Nettler 1974; Tracy and Fox 1989), environmental (Block and Bernard 1988; Brady 1987; Stone 1987; Tallmer 1987), political (Barak 1994; Block 1989; Block and Chambliss 1981; Chambliss 1993; Quinney 1970; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1970; Tunnell 1993; Turk 1969), and corporate (Clinard and Yeager 1980; Clinard et al. 1979; Coleman 1994; Reiman 1979; Sutherland 1949), using methodology and terminology once reserved for predatory street crime. This trend can be traced to the pioneering work of Thorsten Sellin (1938) and Edwin Sutherland (1940, 1949), who argued for broader, more inclusive definitions of criminality and less conventional approaches to the study of crime.

Despite decades of research, demographic historians are still uncertain about mortality trends and determinants in early New England. Although researchers agree that New England mortality was low relative to other regions of early America in the seventeenth century, they disagree about the direction of mortality trends over the course of the eighteenth century. Community-based reconstitution studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s at first seemed to provide strong evidence of a decline in adult life expectancy (Greven 1970; Norton 1971; Vinovskis 1972; D. S. Smith 1973). More recent studies, however, contradict the assessment of deteriorating health conditions in eighteenth-century New England. Family-based genealogical studies document a substantial long-term increase in adult male life expectancy over the course of the century, although the increase was followed by a slight decline in the early part of the nineteenth century (Fogel 1986; Kasakoff and Adams 1995).

One-fourth of all workers in southern cotton mills in 1899 were under 16 years of age. Why did so many children work in cotton mills and other factories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Many millworkers believed that “if the employers would give their hands better wages, . . . the help could then support themselves better and be able to school their children” (North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics 1892:172). As it was, “at the present rate of wages paid, large families are compelled to put all their children in the mills in order to support the family” (ibid.: 287). Child labor would be reduced or eliminated if parents could “demand wages sufficient to keep [their children in school] and take care of the family without the help of the little ones” (ibid.: 351). Turn-of-the-century labor reformers agreed that low wages forced many families to send their children to work. Alexander McKelway (1913), for example, southern secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, called low cotton mill wages “our modern feudalism,” while Edith Abbott (1908: 36) suggested that child labor was the result of an “insufficiency of the man’s wages.”

The history of health has increasingly attracted attention from both economic and demographic historians. This interest is reflected in a growing body of empirical data on mortality trends for western Europe and North America dating from before the eighteenth century. The decline in historical mortality, a central concern in this work, has been recognized as primarily attributable to falling death rates from infectious disease, and this development requires interpretation that addresses two factors: changes in levels of exposure to infection and changing levels of human resistance to infectious disease.

Efforts to improve public health and sanitation began in China well before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Between 1911 and 1931, the Chinese-run North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service carried out a range of public health activities in northeast China, successfully fighting not only plague but a variety of other epidemic infectious diseases, such as, for example, cholera. At the same time, there were local efforts to improve health, mainly in urban areas, by establishing medical colleges and hospitals, improving infrastructure, promulgating hygiene regulations, making vaccinations available, and carrying out educational campaigns. In Beijing, the subject of this study, the sewage system was renovated, the water supply was improved, and a variety of initiatives were undertaken to improve sanitation and public health. During the 1930s, the Nationalist government established a Ministry of Health and formulated a comprehensive national health policy focusing on rural areas. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Communists instituted a wide range of public health measures in the rural areas they controlled.

Establishing an occupational pension plan became fashionable for large North American firms around the beginning of the twentieth century, and railways were pioneers in this trend. By the end of World War I the characteristics of many of the firms, and of their workforces, had changed considerably, but pension plan rules typically remained broadly constant until the 1930s. Despite unchanged rules, the kinds of workers pensioned, the average value of pensions, and the probability that retiring workers would receive a pension may have altered. Little is known about Canadian pension plans and less about the characteristics of workers pensioned. This article uses employee records from the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), one of Canada’s largest employers and one of the first to establish a pension plan, to examine older workers’ employment patterns and the probabilities they have of being pensioned.

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.

The story usually goes something like this: Colonial Americans lived in a world very different from that of the generation that fought the Civil War. Locals wielded the tools of government most of the time; rarely did distant officials attempt control, and when they did they were usually roundly rebuffed. Politicians “stood” for positions of honor rather than “running” for lucrative posts. A man’s surname was a crucial determinant of his socioeconomic well-being. Artisans and yeomen deferred to gentlemen. Barter predominated as little “cash” circulated. Custom and family, not market forces, dictated the allocation of credit. Change of all types occurred slowly. By Martin Van Buren’s presidency some threescore years later, America was a very different place. Though still evolving, the United States exuded modernity, at least in its general outlines. Politicians and bureaucrats in state capitals, and even Washington, increasingly affected Americans’ everyday lives. Party politics and patronage took on increased importance as plutocrats plied for patronage posts. A man’s bank account meant more than his lineage. Gentlemen feared the artisans and yeomen they once easily ruled. Cash was abundant, and the market determined most access to credit. Societal conditions changed apace. Generally speaking, over these decades America is described as becoming less “aristocratic” and “mercantile,” or even “feudal,” and more “democratic” and “capitalist.”

When an unprecedented and unanticipated downturn strikes a community, resources from disparate sources combine to aid those harmed by the distress. Today as in the past, public and private sources coordinate relief efforts, and the persistence of distress beyond that which had been anticipated and provided for by insurance brings in resources from outside the community. However, it is possible to crowd out a resource when the efforts of one source decrease the efforts of another. Modern research documents public welfare crowding out private charity (see, for example, Abrams and Schmitz 1978), and this also occurred in the past. Exploring this kind of concern, the present article highlights aspects of income assistance that played a role during the Lancashire cotton famine (1861-65).

The extraordinarily productive corn and wheat belts were settled a generation before modern Middle America blossomed. The story of rural Middle America, especially in the decades following the Civil War, is the story of the men and women who settled the region and stayed. In politics the Middle American community looked to long-term residents for a definition of its best interests (Winkle 1988; Curti 1959). In agricultural matters the community looked to long-term residents for a definition of the model farm.

Sociological and social historical approaches to the study of legal transformations have traditionally been marked by a focus on external “social” factors, such as industrialization, class conflict, and social movement activity, that causally determine the form and content of law (Hurst 1956; Friedman 1973; Gordon 1975; Hagan 1980; Humphries and Greenberg 1981; Chambliss and Seidman 1982; Chambliss and Zatz 1993; Kantor and Fishback 1994). More recently, interdisciplinary scholarship on law and society has criticized this view for narrowly reducing law to formal structure—organizational procedures and textual rules—and for its image of unidirectional causation running from society to law (Gordon 1984; Harrington and Yngvesson 1990). The result of this critique has been a growth in interpretive research on law emphasizing ideological analysis of law and depicting relations between law and society as constitutive (Milner 1989: 633).

On a late winter day in the early years of this century, Alice Solenberger met an unemployed male laborer on a Chicago street. Solenberger worked for the city’s Bureau of Charities, and she recognized the “Irishman” as one of the many seasonal workers who had applied there for work during the past winter. Although the man had worked steadily from April to October on railroads and in the harvest, Solenberger recounted, he was “unusually extravagant” this particular winter and found himself broke by December. Not the type to beg, the Irishman had applied for work at the Bureau of Charities and finally found employment in the ice harvest. Surprised to see him back in the city only a few weeks later, Solenberger asked why he was not working in the ice fields. When the man replied that he did not need to work there, Solenberger assumed that he had another job and inquired about that. To this question the laborer replied, “No, I mean I’ve got money. I don’t need to work any more” (here and two subsequent paragraphs—Solenberger 1911: 141–45).

At the beginning of the Civil War, few suspected how brutal and bloody the conflict would prove to be. During the first months of the war, thousands of men and boys from North Carolina rushed to enlist. As deaths from disease and battle mounted dramatically, soldiers who had agreed to serve for one, two, or three years found themselves legally compelled to stay even after their enlistment was up, and those who had stayed home enlisted reluctantly under the threat of the draft (Wright 1978). Detained in the Confederate army often by threat of imprisonment or even death (ibid.), obliged to fight for a cause that appeared increasingly to be contrary to their own interests (Bardolph 1964), watching as the wealthy plantation owners resigned their commissions and bowed out (Tatum 1934), thousands of soldiers took up one strategy of resistance to the war: desertion. Of the 120,000 North Carolinians who enlisted to fight in the Confederate army, an estimated 12,000 deserted before the war was over. This study will test the hypothesis that desertion was a form of resistance to the war by a relatively powerless group, the small farmers. The central focus of this article will be the predictors of desertion. Of the estimated 10% of the Confederate soldiers from North Carolina who deserted from the army, the majority were small-scale farmers who had long opposed the wealthy elites on a variety of issues.

Extant literature on vocational reforms gives the impression that they, like other educational reforms, resulted from a consensus between northern industrialists and professional educators (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 1976; Cohen 1968; Cremin 1961; Cuban 1982; Fones-Wolf 1983; Kett 1982; Powers 1992; Tyack 1981 [1974]). If national educational reforms reflected national economic interests, we should expect twentieth-century federal vocational legislation to reflect the interests of an increasingly industrialized national economy. By the same token, regionally specific economic interests should find their reflection primarily in local educational practice. This view rests on the assumption that a “national economy” has existed and that federal policies have not reflected sectional economic interests. In reality, southern sectional interests have shaped a variety of economic and social policies, ranging from post-Reconstruction child labor and compulsory education laws to New Deal policies such as the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the 1935 National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, welfare policy, and the 1935 Social Security Act establishing old-age security and unemployment compensation (Alston and Ferrie 1985; Bensei 1984; Lieberman 1995; Quadagno 1988, 1994; Shulman 1991; Skocpol 1995).

How did a person become a heretic in the Middle Ages? Then, once the person was affiliated with a heretical group, how was the affiliation sustained? What social processes and mechanisms were involved that forged bonds among heretics strong enough, in some cases, for them to choose death rather than return to the bosom of the Church? Two competing accounts of what attracted people to medieval heresies have marked the extremes in historical explanations (Russell 1963): one is a materialist account elucidated by Marxist historians; the other one focuses on ideal factors, as proposed by the eminent historian Herbert Grundmann.