The GI Bill's college-attendance provisions posed an evaluation problem. How would returning veterans, most of whom were without high school diplomas, be judged fit for college? Drawing from a variety of primary source material from the years surrounding the close of World War II, we show how leaders in government, the military, and academia cooperated to produce a measure of college fitness that would deem virtually all veterans fit for college entry. We use this historical moment to develop a novel theoretical insight. Measurement is diplomatic when it facilitates transactions across institutional distinctions while recognizing and honoring those distinctions. This insight has broad utility for students of American political development.

“Civil society,” in the definition proposed in the introduction to this special issue, was not solely a product of the Enlightenment or of elite sociability. This article focuses on eighteenth-century confraternities in Paris and Milan to argue that these religious associations fostered the kinds of values and behaviors that most writers associate with the formation of civil society: cooperation, charity, a sense of responsibility, and peaceful interaction both among the members and between them and others in society. Many of them encouraged a culture of independence and a sense of rights among their members. They also offered experience of organization to a very large number of men and a smaller number of women. They thus contributed to the formation of eighteenth-century “civil society.”

Although “excess” weight today is usually associated with poor health, nineteenth-century classifications present an interesting historical puzzle: Physician concern with “corpulence,” on the one hand, was balanced by praise for “plumpness,” on the other. This is quite different from contemporary understandings of weight, where the focus is overwhelmingly on overweight and obesity. Through an analysis of nineteenth-century medical, health reform, and popular journals, I find that there was concern with weight on both ends of the spectrum—thin bodies and fat bodies were potential states of health, as well as illness, through the categories of plumpness, corpulence, leanness, and gauntness. In this way, body weight held multiple symbolic positions up until the early twentieth century when plumpness receded as a category of health. Such findings problematize the standard historical narrative of valued-to-stigmatized fatness, and suggest that the symbolic position held by body weight constitutes a more complicated phenomenon than previously believed.

Parachurch organizations are Christian, heavily evangelical Protestant, 501(c)(3) public charities focused on providing religious goods and services outside of any congregational or denominational sponsorship. The parachurch sector in the United States has been growing rapidly in recent decades, yet this growth has been highly uneven across communities. Many communities have very few parachurch organizations, while a few exhibit incredibly higher concentrations of them than would be expected based only upon their religious composition. Using IRS records, we isolate communities with the greatest concentrations of parachurch organizations, and then, drawing upon ideas developed in studies of industrial districts, we address this puzzle by exploring four of those communities, which we refer to as spiritual districts: Tulsa, Oklahoma; Nashville, Tennessee; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Washington, D.C. We utilize interviews with organizational leaders and archival records to attempt to account for the makeup of and dynamics of each of the four unique clusters of parachurch organizations, concluding with a discussion of how understanding spiritual districts can contribute to greater understanding of the phenomenon of industrial districts.

The collective polio literature of the mid-twentieth century developed a model centered on age at infection. In this model, known as the hygiene hypothesis, risk of severe polio increased with socioeconomic status (SES) because higher SES was associated with older age at infection. Rural residence was also linked to increased polio risk due to older age at infection. Crowding and larger family size were associated with earlier age at infection and thus reduced the risk of severe polio. In contrast, according to the intensive-exposure hypothesis proposed by Nielsen and colleagues (2001, 2002), exposure to the poliovirus within the home was linked to increased severity of infection, making larger family size and crowding important risk factors. Data for polio deaths in Wentworth and York counties, including the cities of Hamilton and Toronto, from 1900 to 1937 were gathered from a variety of archival sources and socioeconomic class was coded using the five-point composite score scale from Hauser (1982). The results provide support for the intensive-exposure hypothesis as an addition to the traditional polio model. Age at death increased with status score during the earlier 1900–1929 period, but not in the 1930–1937 period. The overall proportions of polio deaths in the various status scores were stable over both periods and disproportionately prevalent in status score three (skilled blue collar). This analysis of polio mortality provides a more nuanced picture of the disease and its relation to SES in a time of rapidly changing socioecological conditions.

When the first misericórdia was created in 1498, Lisbon was trying to erase the wounds of the violent expulsion of the Jewish communities from the kingdom, and the confraternity was born under the concern of reuniting baptized persons who wanted to exercise charity. The misericórdias were soon to be founded all over the kingdom and its empire, acting as prebanking institutions and rivaling with local institutions like the municipality or the bishopric. Their importance was based mainly upon moral authority, as they tended to cater for most situations of poverty. Even if other local institutions practised charity, they were not generally able to attain the same scale of human or economic resources, as the misericórdias relied on the voluntary work of their members and attracted substantial postmortem donations. They responded directly to the king and were largely out of the control of competitors. By contrast, royal authority was too weak to impose an effective control; the first serious attempts to do so date from the marquis of Pombal's consulate (1750–77). In spite of misunderstandings and conflicts with the Crown, it is undeniable misericórdias gave an important contribution to the formation of local communities, participating in the dynamics between center and periphery. In spite of the variety of their geographic and demographic contexts, they could always be recognizable by central powers as abiding to the same principles. However, the elites who governed them were free to transform misericórdias into institutions capable of motivating their participation. Between obedience to the king and local management of resources, there was ample space for social action.

I first met Michael Katz on a clear, cool autumn afternoon in 1970. I was an uncertain first-year graduate student at the University of Toronto intending to complete a doctorate in British history with a project on antisocialism. Feeling confused, anxious, and unsatisfied by my courses, I began to share my concerns with fellow students. One of them, who became a lifelong friend (and editor), suggested that I contact that “young professor up the street” in history of education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education who worked in the new social history. Having read Thernstrom, Tilly, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Barrington Moore, and so forth, in a senior honors seminar, I drew up my courage and went to meet Michael.

Formalization of comparative case methodology has given the appearance of growing consensus and cross-disciplinary acceptance around a set of best practices. Yet how researchers use a method may differ widely from what methodologists believe, which is the crux of institutionalization of a method. This study examines whether comparative methodology has, in fact, institutionalized within the social sciences using evidence from the entire corpus of comparative studies of revolution published from 1970 to 2009. Content analysis of methods of case selection within the revolution subfield reveals a wide diversity of strategies with only modest methodological awareness by practitioners, a lack of consensus among which case selection strategies to use, and little convergence over time. Thus, the comparative method has not yet institutionalized in its practice. Methodological practice has implications for the coverage of cases of revolution and what is substantively known about the phenomenon.

This paper looks at the evolution of business practice of indigenous banking groups in colonial India. Specifically, it studies why in the early twentieth century, the Indian banking caste Nattukottai Chettiar moved from caste-based banking to joint stock banking. The paper argues that caste-based banking had two advantages over joint stock banking—caste-based monitoring of agents and reciprocity-based informal insurance within the caste. In the early twentieth century with the improvement of communication technology and expanding global trade, the caste banking lost both the edges. This prompted some of the caste bankers to move to joint stock banking. I provide a theoretical structure explaining the transition and provide evidence from archival and secondary sources in support of my theory.

I recently told one of my graduate students that I was contributing to the panel on which these papers are based, and he replied that reading Michael Katz's The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (2001a) led him to apply to graduate school. My story is the same. When I was deciding whether to pursue a graduate degree, Katz's Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (1975) convinced me to study the history of education. What Katz's scholarship, and later his mentorship, taught me was that one could be a historian with an eye toward justice, that one need not compartmentalize scholarly, political, and ethical commitments.

This article is devoted to the issue of operationalizing and empirically measuring the development of behavioral economics, focusing on trends in the academic literature. The main research goal is to provide a quantitative, bibliometric assessment to answer the question of whether the relative importance of behavioral economics has increased over the past decades. After an introduction and a short summary of the history of behavioral economics, several studies are laid out and evaluated. The results generally provide a quantitative confirmation of the story of a rise of behavioral economics that can be found in the literature, and add some notable additional insights.

“It is hard to capture the sense in which life in the past, especially in cities, differed from living today,” Michael B. Katz wrote in the conclusion of his first book-length work of urban history, The People of Hamilton, Canada West (Katz 1975: 311). “For the recognizable components of past urban life lull one into imagining a continuity greater than that which exists. In fundamental ways the patterns and texture of urban existence have changed.”

Michael Katz began work on social welfare during the late 1970s with a project entitled “The Casualties of Industrialization.” That project led to a series of essays, Poverty and Policy in American History (Katz 1983), and a few years later to In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (Katz 1986). His reading in twentieth-century literature for Shadow—and the ideological and policy nostrums of the Reagan administration—allowed Katz to pivot to two books that frame contemporary welfare debates in their historical context—The Undeserving Poor in 1989 and The Price of Citizenship in 2001, as well as a set of essays Improving Poor People (Katz 1995) that he published between the two.