This article challenges the conventional view of veterans’ politics in the United States as an “iron triangle” or a “subgovernment,” terms that connote a low-profile field dominated by a small number of elite actors operating consensually behind closed doors. It shows instead that veterans’ affairs were at the center of a heated national debate to which both grassroots activists and national leaders contributed as part of a larger social movement, as demonstrated by the controversy over the First Hoover Commission. Created by Congress in 1947 to find ways to make the executive branch more efficient, the commission’s proposals to reform veterans’ affairs were all defeated by the countercampaign of the largest and most influential veterans’ group of the era, the American Legion. Former soldiers were not alone (they benefited from the assistance of key state actors such as the heads of the Veterans Administration and of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs) but their mobilization proved decisive. This episode shows that even veterans of World War II, traditionally seen as the most deserving cohort of former soldiers in US history (the “Greatest Generation”), had to organize to defend their benefits against attacks. The privileged position of veterans in the US welfare state is therefore less the result of their exalted cultural status (as is often presumed) than of their ability to mobilize politically and to override the preferences of significant numbers of public and private actors—just like any other group making claims on the state.

Conscription records are considered to be the best sources for studying heights over cohorts. This article discusses the various steps and selection mechanisms involved in the conscription system of the Netherlands, which was more or less similar to the systems found in other European countries. Starting with a birth cohort of 4,436 boys, we run a series of regressions on the likelihood to be registered at all and to have one’s height recorded. We discuss the effects of cohort attrition through mortality and migration, and explore familial, social, and religious reasons for evading registration and (medical) examination. We find various kinds of selections, but their effects on the distribution and averages of heights are limited. Thus, heights culled from conscripts records are indeed an excellent indicator of a cohort’s biological standard of living. However, researchers focusing on social variation in height need to be aware of the unequal opportunities to evade registration and measurement.

Covert political organizing is a vital means by which subordinate groups express grievances against authorities or elites. This article develops an understanding of the process of covert organizing to show how the selection of an organizational structure is a strategic decision. Using original, archival data from the Mattachine Society, a homosexual organization founded in 1950, and the affiliated Mattachine Foundation, I show how the structure of the organizations enabled leaders to segment their audiences and adapt to challenges from outside and inside the group. In particular, I use the concept of a loosely coupled system, emphasizing relations between organizations, to show how organizations can work with varying degrees of discretion. Moreover, building off analytically similar cases in the literature, I demonstrate that a loosely coupled system enables both organizational flexibility and covert political action.

This article offers the first multivariate regression study of international migration in early modern Europe. Using unique eighteenth-century data about maritime workers, we created a data set of migration flows among European countries to examine the role of factors related to geography, population, language, the market, and chain migration in explaining the migration of these workers across countries. We show that among all factors considered in our multivariate analysis, the geographical characteristics of the destination countries, size of port towns, and past migrations are among the most robust and quantitatively the most important factors influencing cross-country migration flows.

Recent research has ignited a debate in social science history over whether and how to draw conclusions for whole populations from sources that describe only select subsets of these populations. The idiosyncratic availability and survival of historical sources create a threat of sample-selection bias—an error that arises when there are systematic differences between the observed sample and the population of interest. This danger is common in studying trends in health as measured by average stature—scholars can often observe these trends only for soldiers and other similar groups; but whether these patterns are representative of those of the broader population is unclear. This article illustrates what simple patterns in a potentially selected sample can be used to recognize the presence of sample-selection bias in a source, and to understand how such bias might affect conclusions drawn from this source. Applying this intuition to the use of military data to describe stature in the antebellum United States, I present several simple empirical exercises based on these patterns. Finally, I use the results of these exercises to describe how sample-selection bias might affect the use of these data in testing for differences in average stature between the Northeast and the Midwest.

There is substantial debate over the colonial origins of divergence within the Americas. In this debate, the French Empire has been largely ignored even though, until 1760, it included Canada. This article uses recent empirical advances in our knowledge of the colonial Canadian economy to introduce the role of French institutions—most notably the institution of seigneurial tenure—into the debate on the colonial origins of divergence. It argues that the institution of seigneurial tenure in Canada when it was under French rule (up to 1760) had predatory features that help to explain why Canada was the poorest of the North American colonies.

This article measures inequality at the provincial level in Spain for different benchmark years between 1860 and 1930. It then empirically assesses the relationship between economic growth and inequality. The results confirm that, although growing incomes did not directly contribute to reducing inequality, at least during the early stages of modern economic growth, other processes associated with economic growth such as the rural exodus to urban and industrial centers, the demographic transition, and the spread of literacy, among others, notably improved the situation of the bottom part of the population.

Sex on college campuses has fascinated scholars, reporters, and the public since the advent of coeducational higher education in the middle of the nineteenth century. But the emergence of rape on campus as a public problem is relatively recent. This article reveals the changing social constructions of campus rape as a public problem through a detailed examination of newspaper reporting on this issue as it unfolded at Columbia University and Barnard College between 1955 and 1990. Adapting Joseph R. Gusfield’s classic formulation of public problem construction, we show the ways police and other judicial and law enforcement authorities, feminists, university faculty, student groups, university administrators, and health professionals and institutions have struggled over ownership of how the problem should be defined and described, attribution of responsibility for addressing the problem, and prescriptions for what is to be done. Our findings show how beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the simultaneous swelling of the women’s liberation movement and the exponential integration of women into previously male-dominated institutions of higher education and medicine catalyzed the creation of new kinds of knowledge, institutions, and expertise to address rape and sexual violence more broadly on college campuses. New actors—feminists and health professionals—layered frames of gender and health over those of crime and punishment to fundamentally transform how we understand rape on campus, and beyond.

Linked historical records typically are unrepresentative of the population from which they are drawn even if the method of linking is restricted to time-invariant matching criteria. An example drawn from Canadian census records illustrates the nature of bias that may afflict even a carefully linked sample. The use of potentially time-varying match criteria doubles the size of a linked sample at a modest cost in terms of additional bias. This trade-off is attractive for some research purposes if care is taken in the uses to which the data are put. Reweighting to mitigate the effects of bias in visible characteristics is desirable.

The ideas and knowledge central to foreign policy are often produced within the context of organizations. How do organizations vet people and ideas for knowledge production? I use original data drawn from archives of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an organization that brought together elites with an interest in foreign policy, to examine the production of post–World War II US foreign policy knowledge. Drawing on literature about how organizations evaluate people and ideas, I assess how the CFR staff selected different foreign policy topics for their Program on Studies from 1955 to 1972. Case studies and multinomial logistic regression provide two forms of evidence: The justifications used by the CFR Program on Studies staff to select ideas and the relationship between recommendations of proposers and idea selection. I compare the effect of positive recommendations from different sources to distinguish between prioritizing quality and prestige and organizational identity on the other. Staff used the identity of the organization as a group of elites with particular expertise as a basis for making everyday decisions regarding which foreign policy knowledge would be codified in the program. In this way, the organization occupied a central position in the production of knowledge. This suggests that scholars of evaluation should attend to organization-level features in addition to individual-level characteristics. I discuss the implications for organizations and intellectual production.

In recent decades, the Swedish economy has been characterized by rather fast economic growth. At the same time, income inequality has increased substantially. In the present study, I investigated who has gained and who has been left behind during this period—how disposable personal income has changed for men and women, as well as for those in different positions in the income distribution. Register data for the total population (aged 20 to 80 years old) from 1983 to 2010 were used and three different positions in the income distribution were investigated: percentile 10, the median, and percentile 99. Five years were selected: 1983, 1991, 2000, 2006, and 2010. Each selected year represents a snapshot and describes the general trend. Results show that women in the 10th percentile have increased their income quite well, a result of increased female labor force participation during the period. This has led to a decrease of the income gap between genders within this group. But results also show a masculinization of low income and poverty, as the male incomes in this group have not increased to the same extent as for males in the other income groups. At the median, both men and women experienced a steady increase of incomes, but the gender gap for ages younger than 50 widened between 2000 and 2010. At the very top, percentile 99, the increase in disposable personal income was enormous; however, the gender gap in income did not decrease.

Historical inequality is difficult to measure, especially at the subcountry level and beyond the top income shares. This article presents new evidence on the level of inequality in Manhattan from 1880 to 1910 using housing rents. Rental prices and characteristics, including geocodable locations, were collected from newspapers and provide extensive geographic coverage of the island, relevant for the overwhelming majority of its population where renting predominated. This provides a measure of consumption inequality at the household level, which helps to develop the picture of urban inequality for this period, when income and wealth measures are scarce. For large American cities, but particularly for New York, housing made up a large share of consumption expenditure and its consumption cannot be substituted, so this is a reliable and feasible way to identify the true trends in urban inequality across space and time.