Women played a vital role in British industrialization. However, studies of women’s work are often hindered by data limitation. The British censuses provide an unparalleled opportunity to study women’s work and its impact systematically. However, the reliability of the census recording of female employment is still under debate. This articles aims to contribute to this ongoing debate by examining a particular census recording concerning married women who were supposedly working with their husbands, that is “occupation’s wife.” By analyzing a new source of big data, namely 100 percent sample of Census Enumerators’ Books and published census reports, this article shows that the recording of “occupation’s wife” was not informative about the level of married women’s labor in the form of working together with their husbands in the same trade. Given the important fact that married women recorded as “occupation’s wife” constituted the largest group of married women with any occupational titles in the censuses, the results presented in this article suggest a reassessment of some of the empirical foundations in the studies of married women’s work.

Historians and social scientists routinely, and inevitably, rely on sources that are unrepresentative of the past. The articles in this special issue of the journal illustrate the widespread prevalence of selection bias in historical sources, and the ways in which historians negotiate this challenge to reach useful conclusions from valuable, if imperfect sources.

My presidential address identifies the pathways to disadvantage that complicate our understanding of purposive action. The article explains that (1) first, deception can deepen inequality; (2) disadvantages can emerge in midcourse, as new and unanticipated distributions of resources, sanctions, and opportunities unfold during the course of action; (3) the rules targeting one area of social life can disadvantage groups of people in other areas; and (4) disadvantaging policies can emerge through isomorphism (isomorphic disadvantage), sometimes by virtue of what other policy commissions across the globe are doing about the same social problem. Finally, (5) when there is an unlucky turn of events that leads to a deepening of disadvantage, its consequences depend on more than mere chance to make those disadvantages durable. My article concludes with a brief discussion of the implications for reparations and repair. While these pathways may not be exhaustive, they systematize the sociological intuition that things are not as they appear. And although my discussion of repair is brief, it gestures toward the possibilities that the past offers for understanding the process and the rules of remedy.

In 1945, a vast range of US civic organizations and other groups were mobilized into a state-sanctioned campaign on behalf of a new international governance structure: the United Nations. This was a novel collaboration, one that demonstrated the State Department’s acknowledgment of the value of civic activity and organized interests to securing foreign policy goals and that positioned US groups to assert an independent role in shaping the formal institutions of the United Nations. While scholars of American political development (APD) have tentatively embraced the notion that international institutions matter to American politics, past research on mid-twentieth century interests, conventionally focused on domestic business and trade associations, has underappreciated how and why the United Nations marked an important movement for interest development. Of particular significance, US voluntary and civic organizations were instrumental in securing a role for nongovernmental organizations in the UN Economic and Security Council, thereby further linking American and international politics and reshaping state-society relationships. In brief, this article argues that the State Department’s campaign to mobilize public support around the United Nations, as well as the creation of the United Nations, generated new incentives for the maintenance and mobilization of existing groups and subsidized the formation of new groups.

The Great Migration from the South and the rise of racial residential segregation strongly shaped the twentieth-century experience of African Americans. Yet, little attention has been devoted to how the two phenomena were linked, especially with respect to the individual experiences of the migrants. We address this gap by using novel data that links individual records from the complete-count 1940 Census to those in the 2000 Census long form, in conjunction with information about the level of racial residential segregation in metropolitan areas in 1940 and 2000. We first consider whether migrants from the South and their children experienced higher or lower levels of segregation in 1940 relative to their counterparts who were born in the North or who remained in the South. Next, we extend our analysis to second-generation Great Migration migrants and their segregation outcomes by observing their location in 2000. Additionally, we assess whether second-generation migrants experience larger decreases in their exposure to segregation as their socioeconomic status increases relative to their southern and/or northern stayer counterparts. Our study significantly advances our understanding of the Great Migration and the “segregated century.”

The Nazi ghetto system was one of the principal vehicles for the persecution of Jewish and other peoples in German-occupied Europe in World War II. Transport and confinement—twin pillars of the ghetto system—were intrinsically geographical matters that operated on scales from the international to the local and that shaped the demographic and epidemiological character of ghettos across Eastern Europe. This article uses geographical techniques of map-based visualization and spatial analysis to portray the demographic and epidemic history of the Nazi “model” camp-ghetto at Theresienstadt (Terezín) in the former German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1941–45. Our study reconstructs the space-time pattern and demographic structure of transports of Jewish prisoners to the ghetto and their association with substantial outbreaks of communicable diseases in the ghetto. The study highlights the importance of a geographical approach to an understanding of the demographic and public health impacts of both the Holocaust and other genocidal events.

Bodenhorn et al. (2017) have sparked considerable controversy by arguing that the fall in adult stature observed in military samples in the United States and Britain during industrialization was a figment of selection on unobservables in the samples. While subsequent papers have questioned the extent of the bias (Komlos and A’Hearn 2019; Zimran 2019), there is renewed concern about selection bias in historical anthropometric datasets. Therefore, this article extends Bodenhorn et al.’s discussion of selection bias on unobservables to sources of children’s growth, specifically focusing on biases that could distort the age pattern of growth. Understanding how the growth pattern of children has changed is important because these changes underpinned the secular increase in adult stature and are related to child stunting observed in developing countries today. However, there are significant sources of unobserved selection in historical datasets containing children’s and adolescents’ height and weight. This article highlights, among others, three common sources of bias: (1) positive selection of children into secondary school in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (2) distorted height by age profiles created by age thresholds for enlistment in the military; and (3) changing institutional ecology that determines to which institutions children are sent. Accounting for these biases adjusts the literature in two ways: evidence of a strong pubertal growth spurt in the nineteenth century is weaker than formerly acknowledged and some long-run analyses of changes in children’s growth are too biased to be informative, especially for Japan.

Finance is often considered a constraining or compelling force in war. This article examines an alternative role of finance in war, asserting that investors can inform states about adversarial intentions and resolve under certain conditions. This signaling mechanism can reduce information asymmetry between states and decrease the probability of conflict. In the context of these theoretical expectations, I examine the case of Austria and the Rothschild Bank in the nineteenth century. I find that instead of being a constraining force on Austrian foreign policy, the Rothschilds helped inform Austria and other European powers during interstate crises. The information provided by the Rothschilds helped Europe avert war in several cases during the nineteenth century.

The “panoptic” powers characteristic of nineteenth-century criminal justice systems created prison sources that are increasingly used to study past populations. Each step of the criminal process has its own selection logic, leading to a predominance of unskilled and low-skilled men and women in prison samples. There are also crucial differences between the profiles of single and repeat offenders. This article employs a sample of more than 27,000 individual admissions to Belgian prisons in the nineteenth century to explore these trends in greater depth. Recidivists form a specific subset of the prison population. Detailed comparisons of recidivists and nonrecidivists are therefore useful as they help to understand the selection mechanisms inherent in prison data. Male recidivists were predominately low-waged workers incarcerated for minor acts of violence or misconduct classified as disturbances of the peace. Female recidivists were disproportionately low-skilled workers arrested for beggary and sex work. Recidivists also differed in their stature. Male recidivists in Belgian prisons were shorter than the average prisoner. By contrast, female recidivists were taller than one-time offenders. These height differences have important implications for our understanding of well-being in the past.

In comparative-historical analysis, countries are always different places before critical junctures set them on divergent pathways. By comparing the legacies of politicized ethnic diversity for the construction of state infrastructural power in Latin America and Southeast Asia, we elaborate the methodological and substantive importance of these “critical antecedents.” The critical antecedent in each region was the inheritance at independence of a sharp indigenous cleavage. This indigenous inheritance shaped threat perceptions and state-society coalitions in both regions in similarly powerful path-dependent ways—yet in intriguingly divergent directions. A salient indigenous cleavage hindered but did not preclude state building in nineteenth-century Peru, while fostering but not predestining state building in post–World War II Malaysia. Divergent levels of postcolonial state infrastructural power thus exhibit deep if indirect foundations in the identity cleavages inherited from preindependence eras. This cross-region comparative exploration highlights the analytical leverage gained from systematically incorporating preexisting cross-case differences into critical juncture accounts.

The societal integration of immigrants is a great concern in many of today’s Western societies, and has been so for a long time. Whether we look at Europe in 2015 or the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, large flows of immigrants pose challenges to receiving societies. While much research has focused on the socioeconomic integration of immigrants there has been less interest in their demographic integration, even though this can tell us as much about the way immigrants fare in their new home country. In this article we study the disparities in infant and child mortality across nativity groups and generations, using new, high-density census data. In addition to describing differentials and trends in child mortality among 14 immigrant groups relative to the native-born white population of native parentage, we focus special attention on the association between child mortality, immigrant assimilation, and the community-level context of where immigrants lived. Our findings indicate substantial nativity differences in child mortality, but also that factors related to the societal integration of immigrants explains a substantial part of these differentials. Our results also point to the importance of spatial patterns and contextual variables in understanding nativity differentials in child mortality.

Non-Germans—particularly “displaced persons”—were routinely blamed for crime in occupied western Germany. The Allied and German fixation on foreign gangs, violent criminals, and organized crime syndicates is well documented in contemporary reports, observations, and the press. An abundance of such data has long shaped provocative historical narratives of foreign-perpetrated criminality ranging from extensive disorder through to near uncontrolled anarchy. Such accounts complement assertions of a broader and more generalized crime wave. Over the last 30 years, however, a literature has emerged that casts doubt on the actual extent of lawlessness during the occupation of the west and, in turn, on the level non-German participation in crime. It may be that extensive reporting of non-German criminality at the time reflected the preexisting bigotries of Germans and the Allies, which when combined with anxieties about social and societal integrity became focused on the most marginalized groups in postwar society. This process of “group criminalization” is common and can have different motivations. Regardless of its cause, it was clearly evident in postwar western Germany and we hypothesized that it should have created harsher outcomes for non-German versus German criminal defendants when facing the Allied criminal justice system, such as greater rates of conviction and harsher punishments. This hypothesis was tested using newly collected military government court data from 1945 to 1946. Contrary to expectations, we found a more subtle bias against non-Germans than expected, which we argue reveals important characteristics about the US and British military government criminal justice system.

Between 1934 and the time of the 1940 Census, the US government built and leased 30,151 units of public housing, but we know little about the residents who benefited from this housing. We use a unique methodology that compares addresses of five public housing developments to complete-count data from the 1940 Census to identify residents of public housing in New York City at the time of the census. We compare these residents to the larger pool of residents living in New York City in 1940 who were eligible to apply for the housing to assess how closely housing authorities adhered to the intent of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the Housing Act of 1937. This comparison produces a picture of whom public housing administrators considered deserving of this public benefit at the dawn of the public housing program in the United States. Results indicate a shift toward serving households with lower incomes over time. All the developments had a consistent preference for households with a “nuclear family” structure, but policies favoring racial segregation and other discretion on the part of housing authorities for tenant selection created distinct populations across housing developments. Households headed by a naturalized citizen were favored over households headed by a native-born citizen in nearly all the public housing projects. This finding suggests a more nuanced understanding of who public housing administrators considered deserving of the first public housing than archival research accounts had previously indicated.

Over the last four decades, historians and social scientists have become increasingly interested in the way in which information about stature might be used to explore the impact of environmental factors on the physical growth and well-being of past populations. A particular problem encountered by many researchers is that height data is only available for selected populations, typically military recruits or those admitted to correctional institutions. Evidence from Australian military and prison records demonstrate how the two social groups, soldiers and prisoners, differed from each other and from the wider population in terms of age, birthplace, occupation, and stature. Different patterns of observable characteristics conceal additional differences in intergenerational experience. We trace male prisoners and soldiers born between 1870 and 1899 in Tasmania to their birth records and thence to the marriages of their parents. This allows us to contrast social and occupational change from father to son for both prisoners and soldiers. We conclude that evidence arising from these institutionalized populations can be used to estimate wider societal trends, although caution needs to be exercised.

Seeking to reach the unbanked, the US Postal Savings System provided a federally insured savings alternative to traditional banks. Using novel data sets on postal deposits, demographic characteristics, and banks, we study how and by whom the system was used. We find the program was initially used by nonfarming immigrant populations for short-term saving, then as a safe haven during the Great Depression, and finally as long-term investments for the wealthy during the 1940s. Postal Savings was only a partial substitute for traditional banks, as locations with banks often still heavily used Postal Savings.

What explains mass party formation? Prevailing approaches explain party formation as a process of reflection of preexisting social constituencies, or as the consequence of the rise of the bureaucratic state and in particular the advent of universal suffrage. These approaches fail to explain why Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) emerged as a mass party in some regions but not others despite attempts to do so and similarity in conditions that have been posited as central to party formation. I put forth a novel approach that posits that parties emerge as mass organization through a process of constitution of the very social base they claim to represent, but their constitutive powers are conditioned by fundamental economic structures. Relying on agrarian censuses and archival data, I show that the PRI emerged as a mass party in areas where land privatization had been more intensive. In these areas the party during its process of formation was able to build new, and absorb existing, peasant unions and organizations and carry out strong electoral mobilization. These findings suggest that mass party formation is dependent on the destruction of “pre”-capitalist agrarian structures.

How do economic and social position structure partisan affiliation? While neo-Durkheimian treatments of class and political behavior suggest the potential for extreme variability in the social bases of partisan affiliation, data limitations have largely restricted quantitative studies of this relationship to the postwar era. This temporal limitation restricts variation in observable social structure, thus limiting the ability of analysts to assess theoretical explanations. To address this gap, I introduce novel data on occupation and ethnicity for more than 20,000 Massachusetts state legislators in the nineteenth century. This allows me to find the “best fit” model for the social bases of party affiliation in four distinct periods in Massachusetts’ political history. I show that the Massachusetts political system transitioned from a system of occupational cleavages to proto-class cleavages between the First Party System (1795–1826) and Second Party System (1835–54). The Civil War and Reconstruction Era (1855–77) was characterized by the emergence of an ethnic cleavage, but near-modern class divisions emerged as the strongest predictors of legislators’ party affiliations for the remainder of the Third Party System (1878–93). Combined with historiographical accounts of the nineteenth century, these analyses suggest that the emergence of class politics requires intermediary organizations such as unions and professional associations, the liberalization of economic laws and regulation, and the increasingly unequal distribution of productive property.

The literature on the development of secularism in Turkey, or laiklik, often cites the national state builders’ positivist worldviews as a principal explanatory factor. Accordingly, the legal-institutional form Turkish secularism took in the 1920s and 1930s is derived, to a large extent, from the Unionists’ and Republicans’ science-driven, antireligious ideologies. Going beyond solely ideational narratives, this article places the making of secularism in Turkey in the context of the sociopolitical contention for national-capitalist state building. In so doing, the article contributes to the latest “spatiotemporal” turn in the secularization literature, characterized by an increased attention to historical critical junctures, and sensitivity to multiple secularities occurring in Western as well as non-Western geographies. Based on a bridging of the secularization scholarship with that of state formation, and building extensively on Turkish archival material, I argue that the trajectory, fluctuations, and contradictions of secularization can be closely associated with two intertwined master processes: (1) the construction of internal and external sovereign state capacity, and (2) geographically specific trajectories of class formation/dynamics. The Turkish case demonstrates that secular settlements cannot be explained away simply by reference to the guiding ideas of actors. Contentious episodes such as civil-bureaucratic conflict, war and geopolitics, and class struggles/alliances make a significant imprint on the secularizing process.

Military enlistment is highly selective for reasons of both labor demand and supply. An early-twentieth-century evolution of military technology that shifted the demand for workers of different stature illustrates the importance of labor demand beyond the commonly discussed influences originating with labor supply. English-born soldiers in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) were taller, on average, than those of World War I (1914–18), yet these differences cannot be attributed to standard of living or business cycle influences on the labor market. Rather, we argue, the mechanization and bureaucratization of warfare increased the relative value of shorter people permitting a decline in the average height of soldiers. Technological change over the period of these two wars affected labor demand in a way that must be recognized before using this evidence to test hypotheses about changes in population health.

An important hypothesis about the disease burden of air pollution is that high levels of exposure in childhood can result in a lifetime of health problems, leading to increased mortality rates at older ages. I evaluate this hypothesis using a proprietary data set—Medicare records matched to Social Security records that identify birthplace. I analyze old-age mortality among 390,000 individuals born in small cities and towns in Pennsylvania during the years 1916 through 1927. Some of these individuals were born in places with steel production, and thus likely had exposure to high levels of air pollution in childhood. These individuals have significantly higher rates of mortality post–age 65 than those born in comparable towns that did not have steel production facilities. There are three notable features of the excess mortality among those born in steel towns: (1) the relationship holds for comparisons within counties, (2) the excess mortality is higher in towns that had relatively higher levels of steel production, and (3) old-age mortality is especially high for individuals born in locations with relatively high levels of steel production and relatively low elevation—a finding consistent with the possibility that low-elevation locations were subject to atmospheric inversions that trapped air pollution. By matching the SSA/Medicare data with death certificate data, I am able to establish that the excess mortality associated with childhood exposure to air pollution is due primarily to elevated levels of cancer.