Using a newly developed geographic information system transportation database, we study the impact of gaining access to rail transportation on changes in population density and the rate of urbanization between 1850 and 1860 in the American Midwest. Differences-in-differences and instrumental variable analysis of a balanced panel of 278 counties reveals only a small positive effect of rail access on population density but a large positive impact on urbanization as measured by the fraction of people living in incorporated areas of 2,500 or more. Our estimates imply that one-half or more of the growth in urbanization in the Midwest in the late antebellum period may be attributable to the spread of the rail network.

In Ruling Oneself Out Ivan Ermakoff (2008) addresses the puzzle of what amounts to collective political suicide: why would any constitutional body pass legislation that in effect cedes all its power to another entity—an autocrat? Constitutional rule rules itself out, closing off any pathway back to constitutional rule. Ermakoff explores this unusual but not unique development in two cases of the utmost significance for World War II: the March 1933 decision by the German Reichstag to give power to Adolf Hitler to modify the Weimer constitution without further recourse to parliament, and the French National Assembly’s decision in Vichy in July 1940 to transfer all state powers to Marshall Philippe Pétain.

Ermakoff has woven a fabric of many threads—some historical, some methodological, some theoretical—drawn together in complex patterns. His analysis begins by artfully turning what in many books would be a historiographical review of previous work into a deep and thorough consideration of three alternative explanations of abdication.

Charles Tilly was born in 1929, a year worryingly echoed in contemporary events. For all of his adult life, he studied the causes, patterns, cycles, changes, and continuities of such events. He focused most on social movements that responded to them and sometimes shaped them and on the states that often drove them and sometimes managed them. He studied the ways that states and others sought to coerce ordinary people and the ways that ordinary people mobilized to try to control their own lives and public affairs. He studied how capital and inequality figured in both the coercion and the struggles. And he studied how we study history, social structure, social action, and social change.

Tilly was among the most distinguished of contemporary social scientists. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is proud, accordingly, to award him its highest honor, the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. The prize isnamed after another of the greatest figures of our era. Hirschman is one of the formative influences on the economics of development, a key researcher in Latin American studies, and a remarkable intellectual historian and social theorist

Recent studies of the gender gap in politics tend to focus on candidate choice rather than registration and turnout. This shift in focus away from gender inequality in political participation may be due to the finding in several studies of U.S. voting behavior since 1980 that differences in rates of registration and voting between men and women are modest and not statistically significant after controlling for traditional predictors of participation. However, we argue that researchers have overlooked the substantial gender gap in registration and voting in the South. While the gender gap in participation virtually disappeared outside the South by the 1950s, substantial gender differences in rates of voter registration and turnout remained in the South throughout the 1950s and 1960s. We test several explanations for the persistence of the gender gap in registration and voting in the South in the 1950s and 1960s and why it began to decline in the 1970s. These explanations include female labor force participation, resources, mobilization, and political engagement. Using American National Election Studies data for every presidential election year from 1956 to 1980, we employ heteroscedastic probit models within a cross-classified multilevel age-period-cohort framework to examine the declining gender gap in voter registration and turnout in the South. The results indicate that the decline of the gender gap is due to converging rates of political engagement and employment for women and men in the South during this time period. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications.

This article examines the public sphere in early-twentieth-century America via a study of Charles Richmond Henderson, Chicago reformer and sociology professor. It discusses Henderson’s broad visibility, from religious and university venues, through the club and voluntary association world, and into the professions and government. It examines the relations between this archipelago of reform venues and the intimate sphere of family and religion as well as the separation of the world of Protestant reform from both the Catholic and the immigrant publics. Finally, it examines Henderson’s own experience of his public role, showing how his religious understanding yoked objectivity and advocacy into a single concept of reform knowledge-driven reform.

The Canadian-American borderlands have been configured and reconfigured by dynamic flows of trade, investment, migration, family connection, cooperation, and community across the border. One can view this and other borderlands as a dynamic spatiotemporal network with flows, gateways, corridors, and places or as a matrix: a complex web of interactions and dependencies that can in many places at different times be seen to be embedded in unequal economic relations. This article focuses specifically on migration flows in the Canadian-American borderlands during the turn-of-the-twentieth-century period. Flows of people during this period integrated communities on both sides of the border, but such movements varied among the regions that make up the borderland zone. The article uses Canadian and American border-crossing records to show that Canada-U.S. migration must be viewed in relation to patterns of regional transborder development.

In many Western countries, including the Netherlands, couples marrying in the interwar period experienced unprecedentedly high levels of childlessness. Only recently do we witness a return to these levels, as part and parcel of the so-called second demographic transition. Looking back on the interwar period, many scholars have attributed the decline of fertility and the increase of childlessness to rampant economic and political instability. However, contemporary social scientists ascribed the phenomenon to individualization, secularization, and the priority newlywed couples gave to a career and a luxurious lifestyle. From this perspective, childless couples in the interwar period could be seen as “pioneers” of the second demographic transition. To disentangle “traditional” and “modern” backgrounds of childlessness, we have studied the fertility histories of nearly 3,000 Dutch couples married between 1919 and 1938. Our results, in particular the strong association of childlessness with religiously mixed marriage, confirm that an important part of childlessness in the interwar period can be associated with a modern, individualized lifestyle.

In this article I consider the bottom-up, narrative process through which traditions are invented, using rejoneo (mounted bullfighting) as a case study. I explore the construction of rejoneo as “the newest but also the oldest” form of bullfighting. To understand this apparent contradiction, I synthesize “narratives of tradition” with Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's (1995 [1983]) “invented tradition.” In doing so, I consider rejoneo through multiple and overlapping narratives structured into historical “chapters” with common narrative elements of heroes, villains, tragic downfalls, and triumphant comebacks. These narratives are contextualized in periods of intense social, political, and economic transformation in Spain over the past three centuries. This article combines a review of the lay and expert understandings of the history of the Spanish bullfight with ethnographic fieldwork undertaken with mounted bullfighters in Andalusia from 2000 and 2001. It redresses a significant lack of attention to the mounted bullfight in relation to the footed bullfight, thereby contributing to a more comprehensive literature of bullfighting in Spain. Moreover, this article provides a model for understanding that one of the ways traditions are invented is through narratives of tradition, contextualized by the wider social, political, and economic forces emphasized by the invented traditions approach.

The theme for the 2008 Social Science History Association conference was “It’s about Time.” By surveying the program and panels on offer in Miami, the presidential address instead asked, “Is it about time?” Location and space figured more centrally than time in the titles of the conference’s many papers. Still, two conceptions of time were prominent features of the program. For some scholars, the past is like a foreign country; it can be compared to the present. For even more of the 2008 presenters, however, interest in time meant a concern with process. The analysis of time reflected on the program seemed to have developed along disciplinary lines. Historians and life-course sociologists analyzed time through narratives, time lines, or periodization. Sociologists dominated the theorization of time as sequential. Time geographers were most explicit in relating time and space, mainly in micro-level analyses. How to visualize and represent time in two dimensions remained an unsettled matter; some disciplines imagined timed processes as narrow or broad (represented along an x-axis), while others analyzed them as shallow or deep (represented along a y-axis). Scholars working with timed media, such as video, may have insights into how to overcome this representational roadblock.

This article uses geographic information systems (GIS) to explore the growth of the rail network in England and Wales in the period before World War I. It uses two major GIS databases, one containing data on the growth of the rail network, including both lines and stations, and one containing parish-level populations. The parish-level data are particularly important for two reasons: they give an unparalleled level of spatial detail, and they are interpolated onto a single set of boundaries over time, which allows direct long-term comparisons. GIS's ability to integrate data allows the article to shed new light on how quickly the railways spread into the country's population. It then explores whether gaining a station made it more likely for a parish's population growth to increase and whether gaining one early was an advantage compared to gaining one relatively late. The article explores this impact at a variety of urban levels.

At the Albert O. Hirschman Prize ceremony in October 2008, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), in cooperation with the Social Science History Association, announced the inauguration of the endowed Tilly Fund in celebration of the lifelong contributions of Charles Tilly and Louise Tilly (see www.ssrc.org/programs/tilly-fund-for-social-science-history). Charles Tilly died just a few weeks after receiving that year's Hirschman Prize.

The Tilly Fund provides travel grants to graduate students participating in meetings of the Social Science History Association and awards an annual Tilly Prize for the Best Graduate Paper in Social Science History. Funds permitting, it will also support graduate research and other activities with the goal of advancing historical social science, the interdisciplinary field to which both Charles and Louise devoted their careers.

The relationship between the development of rational public discourse and the expansion of democratic participation provides a focus for the comparative and historical analysis of the public sphere. Major scholars disagree, however, on the character of this linkage. As the contributions to this symposium demonstrate, the resulting debates have generated a rich literature in historical sociology. For Charles Tilly, public discourse and democratic participation proceeded largely in tandem, tracing out one important lineage in the history of democracy. An alternative understanding, informed by the early work of Jürgen Habermas, produces a more conflicted account of the tensions between democratic inclusion and rational deliberation. In their contributions to this symposium, Craig Calhoun and Andrew Abbott reconstruct the shifting and contested public arenas of London and Chicago. In an essay written after the original session for which my comments were crafted, Andreas Koller outlines a substantial agenda for comparative historical research on the public sphere.

This article examines the first decades of the field of ethnohistory as it developed in the United States. It participated in the general rapprochement between history and anthropology of mid-twentieth-century social science. However, unlike parallel developments in Europe and in other research areas, ethnohistory specifically arose out of the study of American Indian communities in the era of the Indian Claims Commission. Thus ethnohistory developed from a pragmatic rather than a theoretical orientation, with practitioners testifying both in favor of and against claims. Methodology was flexible, with both documentary sources and ethnographic methods employed to the degree that each was feasible. One way that ethnohistory was innovative was the degree to which women played prominent roles in its development. By the end of the first decade, the field was becoming broader and more willing to engage both theoretical and ethical issues raised by the foundational work. In particular, the geographic scope began to reach well beyond North America, especially to Latin America, where archival resources and the opportunities for ethnographic research were plentiful, but also to areas such as Melanesia, where recent European contact allowed researchers to observe the early postcontact period directly and to address the associated theoretical questions with greater authority. Ethnohistory is thus an important example of a field of study that grew organically without an overarching figure or conscious plan but that nevertheless came to engage central issues in cultural and historical analysis.

The interaction of Spanish and indigenous peoples during the conquest of Mexico yielded a wide variety of actions and decisions. Native groups sometimes battled the Spanish but in other instances cooperated. The Spaniards often attacked when facing overwhelming odds but in other situations retreated with meager gains. Insight into those decisions and actions is gained by looking at human wants and preferences. The Friedman-Savage utility function is applied to specific important events of the conquest of Mexico to clarify the decision making of the participants. An interdisciplinary approach is employed in constructing the expected utility of wealth model, where the maximization of the expected utility of wealth and movement between socioeconomic classes is critically analyzed. Evidence from the Juan de Grijalva expedition, interactions with coastal villages, Hernán Cortés's approach to Tenochtitlan, and the Tlaxcalan decision to ally with the Spaniards are used to clearly illustrate the relationship between the utility of wealth and decision making. Looking through the lens of the Friedman-Savage utility function at events up to Cortés's meeting with Moteucçoma, it is clear that the utility of wealth and the unprecedented opportunities to move to a new socioeconomic class were strong factors in the decision making of the participants.

We use a historical case study of the Institut Pasteur to articulate the concept of the transformational organization in science, an organization with the capacity to make a large number of scientific breakthroughs in a short period of time. In considering the potential characteristics that explain a burst of scientific innovations, we attempt to move beyond the standard arguments in the management and organizational sociology literature that typically focus on complex research teams with cross-fertilization of ideas. Rather, we discuss the organizational characteristics that facilitate the development of these types of mechanisms. In doing so we address the dilemma faced by organizations seeking to assemble complex teams, that is, increasing cognitive distance. To illustrate the concept of a transformational organization, we explore the formative years of the Institut Pasteur, 1889–1919.

This article conducts an analysis of public meetings in Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The profound changes in frequency and character, the enormous increase of public meetings and the sharp decline in the relative frequency of violent gatherings, serve as an indicator of the expansion of the public sphere and its capacity to shape the social process. The article explains the rise of the public meeting and why it became so central to British political life during the nineteenth century through four intertwined changes: the development of British capitalism, the growing importance of Parliament, the multiplied opportunities for political entrepreneurs, and the effect of public contention itself.

During the late nineteenth century the transport revolution and growing agricultural output, especially in North America, engendered an agrarian crisis (1878–96) when intensifying international competition in foodstuffs led to dramatic price declines, particularly in wheat and other cereals. This comparative study of the process in Britain and France examines regional and local patterns of rural change in relation to the expansion of railways, the agrarian crisis, and the responses to the crisis by the governments and farmers of the two countries. Using spatial statistics and geographically weighted regression (GWR) to identify spatially varying relationships, it offers a new approach and results. Case studies of Dorset County in England and the Allier Department in France show that railways facilitated the shift from cereal production to livestock and dairy farming during the era of agrarian crisis. In Dorset the analysis using GWR provides an explanation for patterns of the agricultural depression that a pioneering article identified but could not explain and thus illustrates the promise of blending narrative and spatial history. Further, it argues that in France railway expansion and the construction of a secondary network reduced regional disparities in rail service and likely in agricultural productivity, too. More broadly, it concludes that the differing political economies of Britain and France led to different trade and railway policies during the crisis and to different agrarian outcomes in which agricultural productivity declined in Britain and improved in France.