At this meeting, we celebrate 25 years of the Social Science History Association, the SSHA.With appreciation from all of us, I acknowledge the achievements of our founders and our long-time members.We stand on their shoulders metaphorically and historically. We mark this anniversary with a plenary president's “founder’s session,” a variety of retrospective and prospective panels, and the conference theme “looking backward and looking forward.” We also commemorate more than 25 years of groundbreaking research and recognition of the presence and practice of social science historians along the hallowed halls of history and social science departments—even if it has not always been accompanied by a readywelcome orcomplete acceptance. (We mark no fewer years of controversy.)

In her diary entry of 24 December 1862, Harriet Anne Severance, a domestic worker, detailed the activity surrounding the seasonal slaughter of hogs: “ It has been grease, grease all day, the hog is most taken care of. Henry,Meroa & I got started forMr. Henry’s this afternoon,Wells came after Henry overtook us at Uncle Chester’s, took him home with him, & Meroa and I went on had a good visit, & we have been to Mr. Child’s this evening.” While her day was unusually busy, it was not unusual in the way that it intertwined the lives of many people, men and women included.

The informer’s particular contribution was to pollute the public well, to poison social life in general, to destroy the very possibility of a community; for the informer operates on the principle of betrayal and a community survives on the principle of trust. (Navasky 1981)

An intervention that rewards informers creates enormous stresses within the community that it targets, forcing each of its members to choose among three possible careers or alliances: solidarity with the larger community, collaboration with other informers, and membership in neither group (this last career is reserved for informers whowork on their own).

Ansley Coale's indices of fertility are well-established measures in historical demography. Developed in the 1960s, they formed the basic analytical device for the European Fertility Project (EFP), which chartered the decline of fertility inEurope (Coale and Watkins 1986), and which has since spawned efforts to measure fertility control in more refined and rigorous ways (David et al. 1988; David and Mroz 1989a, 1989b; David and Sanderson 1988, 1990; Haines 1989; Okun 1994a, 1994b; Bean et al. 1991; Anderson and Silver 1992).