Although the role of strategically situated black Cincinnati as a gateway to freedom in the period before the Civil War has been well documented, the internal structure of this dynamic black urban community and its evolution within the larger urban setting has proved a more elusive subject (Woodson, 1916; Wade, 1954; Ellwein, 1964; Lammermeier, 1970; Riley, 1971; Berlin, 1976; Curry, 1981; Horton, 1984). In the antebellum period, as in our own age, residential location determined the type and quality of housing one might occupy, the employment opportunities and the public and private facilities accessible to the resident, and the overall physical, economic, political, and social setting in which urban residents lived and raised their families. Moreover, in the commercial era, before the advent of modern intraurban transport, the residential structure was the foundation upon which the entire social life and the organizational structure of urban life was built. An understanding of residential patterns, and of the location of the black community in geographic space and in the context of the evolving urban structure, is therefore a critical prerequisite to understanding what life in the antebellum black urban community was like.

On repeated occasions in the nineteenth century, Asian cholera irrupted from its traditional center in the great river basins of India and spread in pandemic waves throughout parts of Europe, North Africa, and North America. In Spain alone 600,000 deaths resulted from cholera during four great invasions (Cárdenas, 1971: 224). The United States experienced terrifying outbreaks beginning in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Rosenberg, 1962) which also touched parts of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Initially South America escaped the onslaught. Some Brazilians speculated that the intense heat of the equator, or the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, somehow offered an effective buffer to the southward spread of cholera (Rego, 1872: 84). But this “sweet illusion” was shattered in 1855. Indeed the first city in Brazil struck by Asian cholera was Belém, capital of the vast northern province of Pará located astride the equator at the mouth of the Amazon river.

The recent popularity of community studies among investigators of nineteenth-century social history in the United States owes much to convergence of interests since the early 1970s among four broad groupings of historians: labor and radical historians concerned with class-formation; historians of women and the family; immigration historians; and urban historians concerned with the transformation of spatial and social structure. Stressing the importance of the interrelationships between their subjects, historians with these interests have tended to see the community study as the best means of describing the interrelationships fully and concretely. Howard Chudacoff expressed this perception when he characterized books on the artisans of Newark and on the iron and textile workers of Troy and Cohoes as “community studies of the best type, for they combine working class history with perspectives on family, ethnicity, mobility, stratification, ideology, technology, politics, and … show the importance of interactions between place and behavior” (Chudacoff, 1979: 535).

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, affects nearly twice as many black Americans as white Americans, and with disproportionately more devastating effects. Black hypertension victims suffer kidney disease at up to eighteen times the rate of white victims, and have three to four times the fatal stroke rates (USPHS, 1980). Although no clear cause has surfaced for the overwhelming majority of hypertensive cases (Lancet, 1980; Gillum, 1979), there is mounting evidence that hypertension among blacks is related to sodium (salt) metabolism.

It has long been believed that “excess” salt consumption elevates blood pressure (Kark and Oyama, 1980: 1007-1020; Ruskin, 1956:xiii). Today it is known that a high intake of salt can result in excess sodium retention, which can influence blood plasma volume, cardiac output, vascular resistance, and blood pressure (Williams and Hopkins, 1979). Blacks, however, apparently do not consume any more salt than whites (Luft et al., 1977). But, significantly, it would seem that blacks do have a tendency to retain much more sodium “on the same salt load” than whites (Luft et al., 1977). Moreover, the volume of blood plasma in blacks may be higher than in whites (Schacter and Kuller, 1984).

In a recent article in Social Science History, Flanigan and Zingale reviewed the old problem of inferring individual relationships from aggregate data, cast doubt on Goodman’s ecological regression technique as a method of estimating such relationships, and contended that the specification analysis approach to the issue was misleading. Instead, they argued that an ad hoc procedure suggested by Shively in a 1974 article was superior to Goodman’s point estimates because it avoids dubious assumptions and forces investigators to make their premises clear. Comparing results from analyses of state-level data on major party voting in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections with figures from the Michigan surveys, they concluded, to their satisfaction at least, that the assumptions required for ecological regression were badly violated and that it was preferable in this and other cases to use the system that Shively, without making any grandiose claims for it, had originated (Flanigan and Zingale, 1985; Goodman, 1959; Hanushek et al., 1974; Shively, 1974; Langbein and Lichtman, 1978).

The First article in this issue sketched out what has been done in the recent past on various biological aspects of the history of the black in Africa and in the Americas. The articles that followed revealed in splendid fashion the quality and sophistication of studies underway today. In concluding the issue, I could not resist the temptation to discuss briefly what sorts of themes and issues I hope will be pursued tomorrow.

Central to future bio-studies of the black will be the growing realization that after stripping away those husks of scholarly posturing and platitudes that in the past have pronounced Afro-Americans and Africans a “biological elite,” the kernel of truth remaining is that they were indeed such an elite, but not necessarily for the reasons offered. Those reasons generally have focused on the shock of capture, the long and deadly march to the sea, the squalor of the baracoons on the coast, the horrors of the middle passage, and the numbing, debilitating “seasoning” procedures on the plantations of the Americas. While there is no question that the whole of this represents a selection process of sorts, it was much too random to create an instant elite, as a bomb dropped on a city does not make an elite of the survivors.

Those skeptical of ecological regression in voting behavior studies continue to suggest that problems in applying the technique severely limit its utility. But the cautionary offered in the Winter 1985 number of this journal by William H. Flanigan and Nancy H. Zingale (“Alchemist’s Gold: Inferring Individual Relationships from Aggregate Data,” Social Science History 9: 71-91) goes so far as to suggest that these problems are insurmountable—or virtually insurmountable. As a user, I was prepared to be devastated, but in fact find myself cheered (if a little puzzled).

Interested readers will recall that the centerpiece of the authors’ argument is a test involving this question: How did the voters of 1968 behave four years later in the presidential election of 1972? The test consists of comparing voters’ actual behavior, as determined by survey data, with ecological regression estimates of that same behavior. The tabulated results are alleged to be decisive in proving the authors’ point, but instead appear to prove just the opposite of what is intended, as a fresh look at the material reveals.

In our article “Alchemist’s Gold”, we tried to make three main points. First, a large number of models of individual behavior can fit observed ecological patterns, and these models entail different assumptions about the nature of the individual relationship within and across the ecological units. This topic has been most impressively developed by Gudmund Iversen (1981). Second, there is nothing in the ecological data or the various types of ecological analysis that informs the researcher about how to choose among the many dissimilar models. All the models are compatible with the ecological data, and we have no way of knowing whether a particular inference about individual behavior is quite accurate or extremely misleading. Because of the inherent ambiguity over the unobserved individual behavior within ecological units, we made a third point of recommending techniques for reducing the amount of uncertainty surrounding estimates.