Drawing on primary sources from the Nixon Presidential Materials and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), this article examines HUD's attempts during the Nixon era to implement “pro-integrative” policies and the White House response to these efforts. Specifically, this article provides an explanation for why President Richard Nixon elected to dismantle residential integration initiatives while allowing similar policies in employment and education to proceed with some force. In contrast to existing work arguing that Nixon's civil rights positions were designed to maximize political payoffs, I contend that Nixon's strategies are more accurately characterized as blame avoidance. Whenever possible, Nixon attempted to shift the onus of political responsibility for controversial civil rights decisions onto other political actors. This argument is clarified by a second primary theoretical point, which argues that institutional vulnerability increases the likelihood of presidential attacks. In the case examined here, HUD's distinctive institutional weakness—shaped by its conflicting missions and unwieldy structure, and laid bare by scandals in the Federal Housing Administration—gave the president a relatively low-risk political opportunity to dismantle civil rights efforts, a chance he did not have in the areas of education and employment.

The theme of this year’s meeting, “International Perspectives on Social Science History,” rises out of two realities. The first is the recognized international character of phenomena under study, such as fertility decline, political contention, family strategies in response to changing conditions, gendered work, migration, labor, and policing. The second is the way in which the Social Science History Association (SSHA) operates across borders and among scholars in the Americas, Europe, and Asia to investigate common scholarly problems. The attention of migration scholars is now focused on global movements of people and international migrations, particularly immigration. The politics and policies of receiving newcomers are very important now–in the Americas and in Europe. The SSHA is giving its attention to the old and new international immigrants to the United States, as in last year’s session on Nancy Foner’s fine book on New York, From Ellis Island to JFK (2000), and the presidential address by Caroline Brettell (2002) on the quantitative and qualitative methods by which we can understand human movement.

There has long been agreement among scholars that the French National Convention can be usefully divided into three political categories, the Mountain, the Plain, and the Gironde, yet there has been much less agreement about the size and composition of these categories. In order to test existing categories of classification, especially those of Patrick (1969, 1972) and Lewis-Beck et al. (1988), this article examines a neglected body of data, the anti-inviolability opinions produced during King Louis XVI's trial, and uses them as an opinion poll with which to examine the political identity of a cross-section of deputies in the National Convention in the winter of 1792-93.

In a span of thirty years, from 1832 to 1862, American abolitionists were able to reverse public opinion in the North on the question of slavery.Despite the dramatic political shift, the emergent hostility to “slave power” did not lead to an embrace of racial equality. Abolitionists, in the face of America’s long history of racism, sought to link opposition to slavery with a call for civil rights. For black abolitionists, this was not only a strategic problem, it was a matter of self-definition. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the meanings of liberty, labor, and independence were the basis of contentious republican politics. Black abolitionists used this rhetorical raw material to fashion “fighting words” with which to generate solidarity and deliver their moral claims to the nation. This research employs an innovative strategy for the analysis of the discursive field, in an exploratory content analysis of five black newspapers in antebellum New York State. Computerized content analysis coded for themes, rhetoric, and ideology in a sample of more than 36,000 words of newspaper text. Although the discourse of black abolitionism is a social critique, it also contains a positive assertion of what free blacks would become. As important as the theme of “slavery” was to the discourse, so too were “colored” and “brotherhood.” This analysis consistently showed the key features of political antislavery argumentation to be most common in the Douglass newspapers (the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper).

The United States is a country in which the working classes are not well organized to participate in politics and the workplace. Four theoretical approaches encompass most explanations. They are culture and identity theories, convergence theories, centerperiphery theories, and institutional theories. Focusing on one specific case, the state of Texas, this article suggests that each approach can contribute to a political construction approach to the labor field that can better explain the patterns of organization. In Texas today working-class participation is very low, but 30 years ago union membership and voting were increasing; 100 years ago Texas was a fount of populism. A focus on the specific historical contexts of labor-management relations enables us to penetrate the contemporary post-facto image of Texas as one member of a category of conservative or nonunion states in contrast to liberal or union-friendly states. That binary image elides the actual more complex and diverse histories of labor struggles that constitute each side of this symbolic opposition. This article demonstrates that there is a real problem to investigate and suggests how we should think about it. What will become clear is that Texas is not exceptional when it comes to the status of workers in the polity. The specific historical pathways to the present suggest the significance of political struggles and ideological debate for the creation of a working class with influence and power.

Historical mortality analysis is often confounded by changing disease environments, diagnostic criteria, and terminology. Recorded causes of death are shaped by these local and historical contexts. We analyze changing literal causes of death during the shift from miasmatic to germ theories of disease using death records from two Massachusetts towns for selected years spanning 1850 to 1912. This analysis demonstrates that (1) International Classification of Diseases (ICD) classifications are more stable, yet potentially less informative, than the literal causes recorded in death accounts, (2) recorded causes of death often include additional qualifications and elaborations beyond basic literal causes of death, and the use of such qualifiers rose dramatically during the late nineteenth century, (3) social biases are clearly evident in the extent to which causes of death were further described or qualified, and (4) the additional descriptive qualification of deaths during this period of often ambiguous historical causes of death can potentially aid in efforts to classify causes of death and derive robust estimates of cause-specific mortality trends.