Analysis of the Republican Party popular vote in Georgia county congressional elections of 1876 suggests that Charles Tilly's (1978) model of interest-based collective action would be useful if embedded in the dynamic model of political processes and mechanisms that Tilly (2007) proposes. Specifically, class (petit bourgeois), status (black), and party (liberal Republican) interests explain 25 percent of the variance in the election returns. Adding a racial-change variable increases the explained variance to 32 percent but fails to distinguish the yeoman and freedman constituencies and the process through which the Democratic Redeemers divided and conquered the opposition in the process of “de-democratization” (ibid.). By embedding the structural analysis in the analysis of process (quantitatively and qualitatively), we can appreciate how yeoman and freedman constituencies experienced contract/convict labor differently and expressed opposition to Redeemers in qualitatively different ways, ultimately facilitating divide-and-conquer efforts.

We quantify the increasing use of complex mathematics and show that the increase is unique to economics in the social sciences. Donald F. Gordon hypothesized that mathematics in economics would most likely be useful in manipulating long chains of relationships, precisely in the instances where the theory was least likely to be valid. Time bedevils long chains of economic reasoning, because the ceteris paribus assumption requires the stability of all links. We find that the rate of hypothesis testing in articles citing mathematically complex articles is less than 2 percent and summarize a variety of tests and other evidence that supports Gordon’s hypothesis. A major factor in the rise in mathematical complexity may be the decline in comments, replies, and rejoinders debating earlier publications; the decline has been rapid, as editors have become increasingly “hostile” toward perspectives other than the ones they have previously published. We conclude by emphasizing that (1) prominent journals in economics are devoting more space to mathematically complex articles despite their inconsequential operational harvest; (2) the “appropriate” balance between mathematical complexity and operationalism, as well as the relative merits of “stylized facts” versus observational reality, should be considered in editorial decision making; and, finally, (3) the academic debate that addresses empirical replication and verification, the appropriateness of model formulation, and the crucial matters of history and circumstance, which are the measures of all research in the social sciences, is vital.

The existence of revolutionary waves is a well-known feature of history. This study contends that revolutionary waves are best understood as systemic phenomena occurring during periods of rapid world-cultural expansion. Rapid expansion and deeper penetration of cultural linkages is theorized to generate contradiction between idealized models and local political practices, empower oppositions, and fracture elites, resulting in waves of revolution. The theoretical logic is illustrated with the example of the Atlantic Revolutions. Multivariate analyses examine the correspondence among a new indicator of world culture, additional systemic processes, and revolutionary waves across five centuries of European history. Results suggest that the occurrence of revolutionary waves is positively associated with relatively rapid world-cultural growth and hegemonic decline, as indicated by periods of hegemonic warfare.

The title of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in 2007 was “History and the Social Sciences: Taking Stock and Moving Ahead.” David I. Kertzer (2007), the president of the association at that time, explained that the focus of the conference was to determine “how far we have come in social science history” and to isolate “the most promising avenues for research.” The following essays were presented at the presidential session, titled “The Past, Present, and Future of Economics for History.” The presenters put forward a number of provocative arguments before a fully engaged audience, whose numbers spilled into the hallway of Chicago's Palmer House. While the authors were all economists by training and by department affiliation, there was an intense interdisciplinary exchange between audience members and the panelists. The session, in short, was a huge success in generating a range of ideas about the future of economics for history.

Since the emergence of distinctive social science disciplines in American universities in the late nineteenth century, there have been recurring tensions over whether history should be practiced within or pursued separately from particular social science disciplines. This study considers this issue for the case of economic history in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. Economic history was active as an inter-disciplinary field throughout the twentieth century, and it had a substantial presence throughout the twentieth century at Chicago, in one of the world’s leading economics departments. This study focuses on how economic historians and economists at Chicago have conceived of the relationship between economic history and economics over the past century. It argues that a key set of tensions has been, on the one hand, developing a conception of the economy that is subject to historical forces yet, on the other hand, allowing adequate scope for employing the tools of economics.