Those Native American tribes which did not disappear or disintegrate as a result of their contact with Western invaders are currently undergoing the demographic transition. Like most of the world’s pre-industrial peoples they have experienced a dramatic fall in their traditionally high death rates followed by an accelerated period of population growth. The degree to which traditional fertility patterns have responded to these changes has proved to be somewhat easier to determine in the case of select Native American groups than it often is in other parts of the world because most tribes are small, geographically concentrated, and encapsulated in an advanced bureaucratic state. But the relative ease with which contemporary demographic change can be observed and analyzed, is not paralleled by a similar situation with respect to the earlier stages of the demographic transition. Little is known about the demographic situation prevailing among most tribal groups in the early stages of demographic transition when mortality rates began a sustained decline (generally the 1930s). Next to nothing is known about overall tribal mortality and fertility patterns in the decades immediately preceding the formal onset of the transition. Hence it is not presently possible to explore the extent to which traditional demographic differences between tribal groups have been and may still be influencing present differences in demographic response patterns.

The rivalry between France and Germany was one of the most important themes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history. It was at the heart of the alliance system of this period and helped to produce that most horrible conflict, World War I. Understanding the causes and nature of Franco-German hostility would help to explain the war’s outbreak. A study of this hostility might also be a way of testing some of the theories of conflict recently developed by scholars from several disciplines but rarely applied by historians in their work. I shall discuss here several models of international conflict and show how one of them, relating images of national strength to diplomatic attitudes, can increase our insight into the formation of French hostility between 1871 and 1914.

Thirty years ago Frank Tannenbaum in Slave and Citizen first catalogued the many occasions for the manumission of slaves in Latin America. He indicated that baptism was an important occasion of manumission. Any slave owner, motivated by generosity and religious sentiment or a minimal payment made by the parent or godparent of the child, could free his slave at baptism. Tannenbaum cited this as one of many instances where Catholic practice and ritual effected a more humane and hopeful existence for the slave in Latin America, denied to slaves held in Protestant colonies.

The results of recent investigations of slave manumission in Brazil, however, have challenged the idea that slaves were frequently manumitted. Kátia M. Queirós Mattoso and Mary Karasch, in studies of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, found that only a small percentage of those who were freed were children. In addition, it was revealed that few infant slaves were freed at baptism. Stuart Schwartz found that for colonial Bahia “there is no evidence [in notarial records] that large numbers of children were given their liberty at the baptismal font.” Arnold Kessler discovered that baptism was the occasion of manumission of only fourteen children, representing 2 percent of his sample of manumitted slaves (libertos) in nineteenth-century Bahia. For the small coastal town of Paraty in southern Brazil there was a similar pattern. Of the 325 slaves whose freedom was recorded in the notarial archive between 1789 and 1822 only six slaves, or 1.8 percent of the total sample, were infants freed at baptism.

Ralph Hall Brown played a critical role in the development of historical geography as a recognized and respectable sub-field within the discipline of geography. He was not the first American geographer to be concerned with the geography of the past, but his work on American historical geography became the model for research methodology and standards and the source of themes and emphases found in subsequent writings by other historical geographers. In order to understand Brown’s achievement his work must be placed in the general context of geography—it was and is a discipline usually more concerned with the contemporary than the past—and against the character of historical work by earlier or contemporary geographers. As a geographer Brown was not solitary in his appreciation of a historical viewpoint. The uniqueness was rather his approach to the geographical past that earned for him the status as a major innovator. In this article I shall offer speculations on Brown’s emergence as a historical geographer, on the characteristics of his approach to historical geography, and on the enduring qualities of his two books.

In a deservedly much-quoted phrase, Edward Thompson set out in The Making of the English Working Class “to rescue the poor stockinger, the ‘obsolete* hand-loom weaver, the ‘Utopian* artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” It is no criticism of that great, rugged, sprawling, big-hearted book to say that what the English working class most needs to be rescued from is the enormous condescension of middle-class intellectuals. Ever since Marx and Engels, if not indeed James Mill and Andrew Ure, English working people have not, at least until very recently, been allowed to have their own history but have had it imposed upon them from above by self-appointed champions and apologists from the “higher” classes.

Thompson himself is something of an exception, more an old fashioned independent country gentleman than a middle-class intellectual, living in a mansion in Worcestershire and exhibiting in his concern for the long dead poor the traditional paternalism which he decries in the eighteenth-century squire.