It is a truism that the personal is political: State power and other forms of publicly constituted power can penetrate interpersonal intimacy. Feminists and other scholars have criticized the notion that “private” and “public” spheres can be separated; they have asserted that the processes and experiences of the home and family are indissolubly linked with those of the state and the institutions of politics.

“There are billions of potential conflicts in any modern society, but only a few become significant,” E. E. Schattschneider (1960: 66) pointed out many years ago. Accordingly, the most important political struggles are not issue conflicts but issue-cleavage conflicts, “arguments about what the argument is about” (ibid.: 70–71). The definition of alternatives, from a Schattschneiderian perspective, is the primal act of politics. If the sine qua non of a political party is the selection of leaders, then the quintessential act of a political system is the selection and framing of issues, which is to say, “the domination and subordination of conflicts” (ibid.: 66).

In March 1900, William Edward Burghart Du Bois addressed the third annual meeting of the American Negro Academy on “the present outlook for the dark races of mankind.” He cautioned, though

Recent research has considerably increased our understanding of the factors associated with the American epidemiological transition in the late nineteenth century. However, uncertainty remains regarding the impact on mortality of specific changes ancillary to urbanization and industrialization in American cities and towns. The broad objective of the Connecticut Valley Historical Demography Project is to examine changing relationships between socioeconomic status, the rise of new urban-industrial communities, and cause-specific mortality trends during the rapid development of New England manufacturing. To address these issues, the present analysis examines two emergent urban centers in Massachusetts, adopting a micro-demographic approach to explore late-nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century determinants of mortality.

The Spanish transition to democracy after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975 is heralded as the “very model” of successful transition from authoritarianism to democracy (Gunther 1992), the epitome of “transition through transaction” (Share 1986, 1987). Spain is proclaimed “the country to be studied” (Przeworski 1986: 61) for good cause. Despite a long history of political turmoil, a notoriously brutal civil war, and nearly 40 years of dictatorship, Spain transformed itself into a democracy “from the inside out” using a remarkably quiescent process of reform called, significantly, the “strategy of consensus” (Carr and Fusi 1979; Payne 1985).

This group of essays came out of an attempt to address the “usually unasked,” “bound to embarrass” question that Eric Monkkonen raised in his 1994 presidential address to the Social Science History Association. As both the social sciences and history have been reshaped in recent years by intellectual tendencies variously labeled “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,” or the “linguistic turn,” the never especially clear relationship between the social sciences and history has grown even more muddy. The essays that follow are drawn from two sessions of the 1998 annual program of the Social Science History Association. The sessions brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines and cohorts who held divergent ideas about the links between social science and history and different substantive agendas for explaining historical change. A mix of essays that highlight new methodologies for analyzing the past and pieces that offer explanations or remedies, the articles printed here point to some of the central issues in the debate about what social science history might mean today.

By our late-twentieth-century experience, survival of an economy seems critically dependent on well-established rights to private property and a return to labor that rewards greater effort. But that need not be so. History provides examples of microsocialist economies that, internally at least, did not use prices to allocate resources, allowed for little private property for participants, and provided a constant return to labor independent of effort. Some of these economies may even be termed “successful,” if success is taken to mean survival over several generations (Roehl 1972). If these communities survived despite their lacking the conditions generally thought necessary for success, a question worth asking is how this occurred, for we can then shed some light on what really is necessary for economic survival. The role of time is critical here, for even if the microsocialist economies examined in this article eventually became the merest shadow of their former selves, the fact that they did flourish for so long makes them a valuable counterexample and, hence, a phenomenon in need of explanation.

During the months immediately preceding California’s June 1978 primary election, Proposition 13, the fractious property tax ballot measure, received a dizzying amount of media attention. Newspaper columnists from California and around the country swapped partisan barbs, debating ad infinitum the initiative’s merits and faults. In public forums, political scientists and economists calculated and recalculated the measure’s possible effects and unintended consequences. Heated letters to the editor and sharp-edged political cartoons saturated the editorial pages of local newspapers. Opinion polls registered the public’s sentiment toward the measure on a weekly basis. Shrill advertisements touting either the necessity or the destructiveness of the proposition interrupted regularly scheduled television and radio programs. Indefatigable Howard Jarvis, the monomaniacal, septuagenarian leader of the tax limitation movement, was seemingly everywhere. By election day, the proponents and opponents of Prop 13 had spent over $2 million each on the measure (CFPPC 1988).

The Civil War was the bloodiest event in American history. For every 10,000 persons, 182 died during the war. Wartime mortality was especially severe for young men; about 8% of all white males between the ages 13 and 43 died (Vinovskis 1990). Among those who survived the war, many were disabled due to wartime injuries. According to the estimate of Claudia Goldin and Frank Lewis (1975), human losses account for 37% and 28% of the direct costs of the Civil War for the North and the South, respectively.

A question of perennial interest to social historians is the degree to which mortality during the war varied across economic classes (Murdock 1964; Hess 1981; Lavine 1981; Riggs 1982; Rorabaugh 1986; Kemp 1990; Geary 1991). Starkly put, the question reduces to this: Was the Civil War a poor man’s fight? In a recent study, Maris Vinovskis (1990) suggested that the answer to the question is yes. Vinovskis found that recruits from disadvantaged backgrounds were more likely to die or to be wounded than servicemen who had higher-ranking jobs or greater wealth, presumably because they were more susceptible to disease or were sent on more dangerous missions. However, he didn’t provide evidence of how the socioeconomic backgrounds of recruits affected their susceptibility to disease and military missions. Moreover, since his study was based on a relatively small sample composed of recruits who resided in a single town, it is unclear whether the results could be generalized for Union army recruits at large.

The capacity of political parties to adapt to rapid political change has received little attention. The literature on parties usually studies political organizations from either a sociological perspective, as if they are automatically transformed by socioeconomic changes, or a rational choice perspective, as if they optimally adapt themselves to environmental changes. Neither approach pays sufficient attention to parties’ internal decision making and its effect on their capacity to innovate. This article compares the Parti radical (French Radical Party, Radicals) with the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party, DDP) and the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party, DVP) during the interwar period to demonstrate how electoral mechanisms can systematically account for their different innovative capacities.

When one is asked to speak on the past, present, and future of social science history, one is less overwhelmed by the size of the task than confused by its indexicality. Whose definition of social science history? Which past? Or, put another way, whose past? Indeed, which and whose present? Moreover, should the task be taken as one of description, prescription, or analysis? Many of us might agree on, say, a descriptive analysis of the past of the Social Science History Association. But about the past of social science history as a general rather than purely associational phenomenon, we might differ considerably. The problem of description versus prescription only increases this obscurity.

By the close of the nineteenth century, Hawai‘i had become a newly annexed territory of the United States and was tightly controlled by a cohesive oligarchy of haole sugar capitalists. The “enormous concentration of wealth and power” held by the Big Five sugar factors of Honolulu up until statehood was unparalleled elsewhere in the United States (Cooper and Daws 1985: 3–4). In contrast, native Hawai‘ians and immigrants recruited from China, Portugal, Japan, and the Philippines—in successive and overlapping waves—endured the low wages and poor working and living conditions characteristic of other agricultural export regions.

Let me begin with a simple theme, repentance, and a simple message: repent from complacency in the practice and defense of social science history (SSH). I say this because I do not see social science historians meeting three major challenges that must be overcome if the larger, collective enterprise is to survive with the same vitality it had a decade ago. Those challenges are, first, to bring social theory forcefully back into historical research; second, to take formal methods to a new, higher level; and, third, to seek to train the next generation of social science historians in the theory and methods they will need in the next century.

Sex preference has long been an issue in both mortality and fertility studies. In mortality studies, higher mortality rates for girls than boys have been documented in many regions of the world, especially in South Asia (Waldron 1983). These studies suggest that the patriarchal family system puts more value on male offspring than female offspring and that this valuation determines such mortality patterns (Das Gupta 1987; Levine 1987). Recent studies examining this process of discrimination have found that family composition is a major intervening mechanism (Simmons et al. 1982; Muhuri and Preston 1991). The Japanese family system is especially useful for examining these patterns. It is characterized as a stem family system, similar to other Asian countries in its patriarchal lineage but different in its possibility of female inheritance. Under a stem family system, a son typically inherits the household, but a daughter can also inherit when there are no sons. Despite the uniqueness of the Japanese family system, little attention has been paid to the mortality pattern of children in Japan relative to those in other Asian countries. Evidence is mixed regarding sex-selective practice in early modern Japan (Smith 1977; Hayami 1992; Saito 1992b).

In the grand scope of American labor history, the fight to abolish Sunday work has been left on the margins of most historical accounts of the more universal fight to shorten the workday. For good reason, some may argue. The Sunday-closing, or Sabbatarian, movement hardly seems comparable in either its scope, its effects, or its long-term significance to the eighthour movement or to an even better known Protestant reform movement: temperance. Nevertheless, the fight to abolish Sunday work represents a significant case study for exploring how cultural influences, particularly religious ones, shaped the late-nineteenth-century industrial landscape. The cultural significance of Sundays drew clergy, labor activists, and employers into a social struggle that was a simultaneous struggle over the meaning of Sundays and how best to put this meaning into industrial and legislative practice.

Between 1935 and 1940, President Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico mobilized a populist coalition in support of land reform, workers’ rights, and a more inclusive political system. For years, scholars either ignored the crucial role of the Mexican Communist Party (Partido Comunista Mexicano [PCM]) in Cardenismo, or considered it a tool used and then discarded by the emerging national state (Shulgovski 1968; Anguiano 1975; Ianni 1977). Recently, Barry Carr’s monumental study (1992) of the ambiguous relationship between the PCM and the Mexican state argued convincingly that Cárdenas relied on the party to mobilize popular forces, while never incorporating either the PCM or Communist ideology into his project. Much less is known of Mexican Communism below the national level. Its social base, and its importance on the regional and local levels, remains largely unexplored outside of a few areas (Friedrich 1986: 128; Craig 1990; Carr 1987). Although the southeastern state of Yucatán boasted one of the PCM’s largest and most active regional organizations in the 1930s, and although Yucatán served as a crucial testing ground for Cárdenas’s reforms, the Yucatecan Left and its popular base has yet to be thoroughly examined.

A fundamental characteristic of the southern United States before World War II was the separate, and lagging, economic path taken by that region relative to the rest of the nation. The South was particularly slow to advance in agricultural science and technology. Both contemporary investigators and recent scholarship have indicted southern institutions for delaying development in southern agriculture (Street 1957; Whatley 1985, 1987). Were sharecropping and tenancy, institutional arrangements that characterized the southern plantation system, responsible for retarding southern economic development? Despite the large amount of scholarly attention that has been focused on these issues, this question remains unanswered.

Although it may turn out to be otherwise, this is an early article in what is hoped to be a larger series of studies in the application of network methods to historical problems. This article explores some new solutions to old problems in historical social science and history more generally and provides some templates for thinking about an old problem in a new light. The old problem is the problem that arises when one considers how we know what historical events mean and how we can have confidence in our interpretations. For many social science historians, the problem of meaning is secondary to the problem of making causal arguments. And often the practical reality of much historical work is that more mundane problems of data and evidence often consume an unusual amount of time and energy, drawing attention away from the luxurious concerns discussed in this article — concerns with what things actually mean. Despite the recognition that the problem of meaning may not lurk around every corner for all social science historians, the goal of this article is to propose some new strategies for determining what things mean in historical context.