In recent years there has been some penetrating historical writing on the pre- and early conditions of rapid industrialization in Britain and western Europe. While not establishing any exact theoretical framework, these studies affirm a number of general propositions, such as: the importance of social, including political, preconditions; the necessity of an adequate business structure; and the value of studying change more minutely to see the effect of regional as well as national differences. An overall conclusion that emerges is that rapid change to substantially higher productivity is a very complex social process in which the same conditions may operate in various areas with differing force and effects. Furthermore, it appears that no single social science provides an adequate array of questions. Studies in anthropology, economics, geography, political science, social psychology, and sociology can contribute to theory, or isolate important variables, but these must in some fashion be tested against reality over time by materials supplied chiefly by historians.

The United States with its continental differences and semi-autonomous state administrations offers excellent opportunities for both regional and comparative study. One topic that is particularly attractive, because it has been relatively neglected, is the rapid industrialization of the Delaware and Susquehanna areas—southern New Jersey, eastern Maryland, northern Delaware, and eastern Pennsylvania. This article is a brief preview of the types of research that some of us will pursue in forthcoming years. The examples cited come more from Pennsylvania than from the other states because of a larger secondary literature.

The design of an efficient sampling scheme for the study of population and space in the nineteenth century is a challenging problem for historians. To examine the relationship of social life to the general form of the city, the sample must cover the whole territory. Working on that scale however, a researcher ordinarily sacrifices detail to achieve coverage. But to examine the constraints and the routine which are part of everyday experience, the sample must provide that very detail- intensive observations of small areal sub-populations. When the researcher has that detail, he/she ordinarily sacrifices the attempt to achieve uniform coverage of the city as a whole. The two goals have seemed mutually exclusive in any single sampling design. Thus the historical study of the American city has often followed two distinct lines of approach: either gross patterns in urban land use have been investigated to understand aspects of the city’s change, its dynamics of growth, and the development of suburbanization, for example; or intensive studies of the experience of neighborhoods or single ethnic or social groups have been conducted.

Recent research in American urban history has given us a polarized view of the social order of nineteenth-century cities. At one extreme the studies of urban spatial and social mobility have revealed a restless shifting population of individuals moving through the city attached by little more than a brief term of employment. “American society…,” concluded one such mobility study, “was more like a procession than a stable social order. How did this social order cohere at all?” To a large extent the answer to this question has come from another body of studies which have reexamined a variety of institutions from police to public schools and found them to be part of a broad effort among Protestant middle-class leaders to bring control and order to this strange new urban world. The new research on mobility and social control has enlarged our understanding of American social history in many important ways, however, our emphasis on mobility and the mechanisms of coercive social control may obscure the social order that citizens of nineteenth-century communities defined for themselves.

In recent decades historians have become increasingly interested in utilizing the approaches of quantitative social sciences to aid their understanding of the past. One aspect of social life that lends itself well to quantitative study is demographic behavior and indeed historical demography has been flourishing. Although the questions posed by social historians inevitably transcend purely demographic issues, a firm knowledge of demographic conditions can be a valuable asset in the pursuit of a broader understanding of society in past times.

For the latter part of the nineteenth century, a critical period in the transformation of western European populations into modern urban-industrial societies, abundant demographic data are available in the relatively easily accessible published census and vital statistics reports. Because nineteenth-century statisticians and bureaucrats considered the urban-rural division as a fundamental and meaningful delineation of society, statistical bureaus throughout Europe tabulated a large number of statistics, including those derived from censuses and vital registration, according to some scheme of urban-rural classification and frequently provided separate tabulations for individual large cities. In addition, a number of contemporary scholars wrote articles and monographs utilizing these data. * Together these sources can be particularly useful for assessing the differences between urban and rural conditions of life at a time when cities and towns were beginning to claim an increasing share of a country’s population.

I want to take as my texts today statements made to me in correspondence and conversation by two senior quantitative historians. Each statement illustrates what I believe to be misjudgments about the proper methodological priorities for quantitative historians in America today. To spare these historians from publicity which their casual statements were not intended to invite, but mostly to protect myself against reprisal, I shall not name them here.

The first statement arose because I assigned a particular book in my American Political History course. Some of my colleagues, students, and I were critical of the methodology employed in the book, and a student suggested we might reanalyze the data, employing different techniques. The data set, however, was rather obscure and was apparently not available at any major archive. When I wrote to the author, rather brashly asking for a copy of his computer tapes, I was informed that he had “lost interest” in the project after the first year or so and discarded most of the tapes and IBM cards.

Project RADIR (“Revolution and the Development of International Relations”), conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in the years following the Second World War, was probably the first large-scale, quantitatively-based empirical research enterprise in contemporary political science. Inspired Dy the theories of Harold D. Lasswell about world revolutionary developments in the modern era, the project was in some respects the successor to work done in wartime Washington at the Library of Congress by Lasswell’s Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications, and by the Organizations and Propaganda Analysis Section that Lasswell had helped to set up in the Special War Policies Unit of the Department of Justice. When published in the early fifties, the Hoover Studies, as they came to be called, were noted not only for their substantive findings but also for their theoretical suggestiveness and their methodological boldness of overall design. Most pre-war empirical, quantitative work in political science had been hyperfactual, but the Hoover Studies represented a genuine break with that tradition. Some early reviewers, if not ignorant of quantitative analysis, had trouble with the project’s theoretical formulations, and others were methodologically innocent.^ The methodological novelty of the Hoover Studies consisted in the demonstration that quantitative data could be generated out of the verbal contents found in newspapers and conventional biographies. Although some political scientists had made use of aggregate data reported in the Census, government budgets, legislative roll-calls and electoral statistics, the notion that one can “create” one’s own massive body of data was still relatively new at mid-century. Public opinion polls had come into existence only in the middle thirties and had yet to be exploited fully for scientific purposes. It was in this research context that the Hoover Studies were published.