In contrast to their interest in interdisciplinary cooperation, quantitative historians have neglected the international dimension of their work. Many of the pioneers of quantitative methods in the United States (like L. Stone, C. Tilly, or W. O. Aydelotte) specialize in European history, but the bulk of quantitative work deals with American topics; or, if it ventures abroad, investigates other countries in their own national terms (Kousser, 1980). Where there is a broader awareness, scholars tend to draw upon British and, due to the acclaim of the Annales school, also on French examples; while Germany, and even more so Russia, Latin America, or the Far East, remain in the outer darkness of quantitative consciousness (Rowney and Graham, 1969, as can be contrasted with Aydelotte, 1972). Some fields like economic history (due to its strong international organization) are internationalized; but others like the “new political history” are somewhat provincial, considering that few countries developed comparable democratic institutions in the nineteenth century, thereby providing material for similar research (Temin, 1981; Bogue, 1980). In less cosmopolitan scholarly communities than the American, the situation is worse, if anything. French quantitative historians seem to have shown some interest in their British or Hispanic neighbors, but have done little international or comparative work (Bourdelais, this issue; for an exception see Graham, 1982). Similarly, German historical social scientists appear to borrow methods freely, but do not occupy themselves much with transnational concerns (Jarausch, 1978).

In his classic, Southern Politics, Key used the term “one-party factionalism” to describe the electoral politics of the South during the 1930s and 1940s: “one-party” because the Republicans offered, at best, only minimal opposition to the Democrats, and “factional” because several groups tended to vie for control of the top state offices via electoral victories in the Democratic primaries. According to Key, severe consequences accompanied one-party factionalism. In most of the southern states, primary voters could not even vote the “ins” out of office, for the competing factions were so fluid that it was never clear who, if anyone, represented the ins. The haves in southern society normally controlled government; although those in power had their differences, particularly in style, most of them agreed that the status quo needed protection. The less privileged lacked organized avenues for expressing their needs.

My purpose here is simple—if not particularly lofty. I intend to characterize in general terms the activities that we engage in when we do social science history research, to describe somewhat abstractly how we conduct inquiry in social science history. This examination of our scholarly activities is provoked by several convictions: First, the philosophy of science—even an epistemology of social science history to the extent that there is one—is by and large not helpful to the conduct of inquiry. Second, the efforts in philosophy (and elsewhere) to conceptualize the conduct of inquiry in philosophy using examples from the physical sciences seem especially inapplicable to social science history. Third, when we do become self-conscious about what we are doing, we concentrate on methods and techniques of data collection and analysis and we create the impression that our scholarly research is fully described by technical decisions and activities.

Generally uniform and high rates of school participation have become an article of faith in postwar America. But at the turn of the century there was wide variation in school enrollment practices from one part of the country to another. This article will examine the determinants of interurban differences in school participation in 1900. Recent studies of school enrollment have focused on a narrow range of cities and have emphasized the importance of family background variables on the decisions of individual children to remain in school or to drop out (Katz, 1972; Troen, 1973; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1979). Most studies have focused on the ability of children from different backgrounds to attend school. In his ground-breaking article, “Who Went to School,” Michael Katz (1972) called for more research on interurban variation in school enrollment, but few historians have considered how the social and economic environments of different cities may have conditioned decisions to go to school in the past. In their studies on youth and early industrialization, Katz and Davey (1978a and 1978b) demonstrate that school attendance dropped when industrial jobs became widely available in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, but they made little effort to identify the precise relationship between school attendance and the requirements of different sorts of jobs. Why should the advent of industralism mean lower school participation? This question will be addressed.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, major population shifts occurred throughout Western Europe, reflecting heavy international migration as well as internal movement from rural to urban places. The latter process, in particular, has been an integral part of the modernization process and was a response both to rural population pressures and to expanding opportunities in the cities. Yet the pace of urbanization was by no means uniform for different countries, in different regions of the same country, or among various subgroups within a single region or province. As a result, analyses using large geographic units or aggregated statistics may mask variations in the underlying dynamics of internal migration.

In his presidential address to the Social Science History Association Convention in November 1981, Robert William Fogel declared sanguinely that social scientific historians had won their battle for legitimacy within the historical profession in America, and that we should now stop feeling embattled, spend less effort proselytizing, and calmly go on with our substantive work. While his statistics on the occupational advancement of social scientific historians do indicate a degree of acceptance, and while his advice to worry less and pay attention to business will be followed (as that is what nearly all of us were doing anyway), I am less optimistic than Fogel, read the employment trends differently, and see more signs of a reaction against quantitative social scientific history—or what I like to refer to as QUASSH—than he does (Kousser, 1980). Perhaps Professor Fogel and I differ only temperamentally. As a former Marxist, he still retains a bit of faith in the inevitable triumph of progressive forces; as a former Methodist, I am unable to shake off the pessimism that is the psychological residue of the doctrine of original sin. In any case, whereas Fogel seems to think that most recent criticisms of QUASSH are so obviously flawed as to require no answer, I fear that some people, especially those with substantial investments in “history-as-it-used-to-be-done,” may still be susceptible to false messiahs or, perhaps more precisely, false Jeremiahs.

The hell’s-fire revivalism of western New York, christened the Burned-Over District by nineteenth-century contemporaries, was a colorful and important chapter in the Second Great Awakening. The main characters—Joseph Smith, the Fox sisters, Charles Finney, and the like—led a religious rejuvenation that presumably reorganized spiritual life in the Finger Lakes vicinity between 1820 and 1850.

“There simply are no reliable historical statistics on church membership,” writes a prominent sociologist of religion, Glock (1959: 39), “and it is extremely doubtful that accurate statistics can be produced through manipulating the unreliable ones.” Problems have so regularly hampered the collection of religious statistics in the United States that historians as well normally hold them in disrepute (Landis, 1957). “Nothing is more elusive in church history,” Littell (1971: 36) has written, “than honest statistics.” Commager (1950: 166) goes further: “Church statistics,” he charges, “attain an unreliability that would be a penal offense in a corporation.”

It was fashionable some years ago for historians to speak of the quantitative revolution in their subject and to look forward, either with hope or with foreboding, to the day when history, like geography, sociology, and other social sciences before it, would be dominated by practitioners skilled in quantitative methods. New questions would be asked, new methods used, new sources exploited, and new discoveries made. In the process, those historians without training in quantitative methods would be swept from the battlegrounds of the subject. They would be forced to retreat either into the antiquarianism within which many quantitative historians, privately, located them or they would be forced to undergo a painful process of retooling in a struggle to avoid technological obsolescence. It was a reasonable expectation in those days that a statistical training would become as essential to a historian as a training in foreign languages or experience in burrowing for sources in the record office: As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie put it in 1968, by the 1980s “the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing” (Le Roy Ladurie, 1968). As a result, quantitative historians gathering in the early 1970s thought that the quantitative revolution would be largely complete as the world entered the 1980s.

This article examines the extent of the potential market surplus by geographic region in the northern United States from Vermont to Minnesota on the eve of the Civil War. Our interest is in measuring the extensiveness and pervasiveness of market commitment, how dependent it was upon the transport system, and at what stage in the settlement life cycle it emerged. This study is designed to complement a similar one by McInnis (1984) for the area just north of the American border, an area then known as Canada West.

In attempting to understand more fully the U.S. Supreme Court’s impact on national policymaking, scholars have examined Supreme Court policymaking as part of the “relatively cohesive alliances that endure for long periods of time” (Dahl, 1957: 280). These alliances or “party systems” represent relatively distinctive patterns in the general shape of national policy (Chambers and Burnham, 1975). It is common for historians to characterize the Jacksonian party system of 1828-1860 as a period in American history when national policy was aimed at aiding agrarian interests, or the First and Second Republican party systems in the later part of the nineteenth century as periods when national policy favored the rising industrial and financial interests. The change from one party system to another is the result of a process political scientists and historians have termed “partisan realignment” (Key, 1955). Periods of realignment in American politics are marked by a rapid change in the social and political agenda, which results in a significant and durable change in the party support in the electorate as well as in a significant change in institutional roles and national policy (Burnham, 1970; Jahnige, 1971; Sundquist, 1973; Trilling and Campbell, 1980). The new party balance may give rise to a shift from the dominance of one party to another, or an entirely new party system may develop. A relationship between mass electoral behavior and public policy appears to exist during periods of partisan realignment. The elections that produce this change in the party systems are termed “critical elections.”

Although writers like Stephenson (1979) have questioned the assumption, many historians of immigration continue to argue that geographic mobility and levels of working-class consciousness (as expressed in trade unions, strikes, or workers’ political parties) are negatively related. In so arguing, recent studies follow the work of MacDonald and MacDonald, who claim that where migration from Italy was high, labor militance was low (MacDonald, 1963, 1958; MacDonald and MacDonald, 1964). For example, Barton (1975) and Yans-McLaughlin (1977) argue that familist southern and eastern European peasants living in fluid, complex societies were most likely to emigrate to the United States, in hopes of improving their positions in their home villages. Their familism—strong solidarity within the nuclear family and concomitant competitiveness in relations with those outside the nuclear group—discouraged voluntary associations, including participation in workers’ organization both in Italy and in the United States.

Although the important roles and functions of Latin American cities have received recognition and discussion in historical writing, there exist few empirically grounded and detailed investigations of individual urban centers. Thus, reviewing the nature of historical research on Latin American urbanization, Sofer and Szuchman (1979: 113, 119) noted the dearth of quantitative investigations of the social dimensions of urban existence, as well as a reliance on aggregate data as opposed to such primary documentation as manuscript census returns, notarial records, and judicial assessments. They conclude that “historians have been reticent to explore the social data in primary documentation and join them with non-quantifiable sources of information in order to reach an existential understanding of the Latin American past.” Similarly, Socolow and Johnson (1981: 51) have pointed to the need for research concentrating on the “social, economic, and physical structure of individual cities and groups of cities.”

How do theory-oriented history and quantitative history relate to each other? According to Morgan Kousser, theory and methodology—meaning statistical and mathematical methodology for quantitative work—“are like the Emperor and his new clothes; without the one, you have an empty suit; without the other, a nude old man” (Kousser, 1977). I disagree. There is, on the one hand, quantitative historical work without much theory. On the other hand, there exists good theoretical history of a basically nonquantitative character. Whereas quantitative history can only gain by becoming more theoretical, theory orientation does not always lead to quantification.

It is now commonplace to acknowledge that self-sufficiency never really existed in North American farming. From the earliest years of settlement farmers had some degree of orientation to the market. Even on the frontiers of most recent settlement, farms generally could not be characterized as being of a wholly subsistence nature. Nor was there some mystic moment when agriculture shifted from self-sufficiency to commercialization. The real issue is the extent of commercialization at any time and place. One way of examining that is to determine the extent to which specialization and resort to the market was feasible, through assessing the magnitude of marketable surpluses. How much did farms typically produce over and above the consumption needs of their own households, and how did that vary according to circumstances?

The 1980 census was a recurring “current event,” the twentieth such census since the founding of the nation in 1789. As such, the census retained echoes of its distant past, and formed part of a tradition that provides many of the guideposts or bench marks of change. It is useful, therefore, to look at the census and census taking as historical processes that illustrate the issues that have concerned past generations of Americans as they watched the development of their population, culture, and society.

The study of the socioeconomic differentiation of urban residential patterns has occupied generations of social scientists. Sociologists, economists, and political scientists adduce a strong relationship between residential patterns and human behavior. Moreover, the residential patterns established early in the city’s development are also believed to influence the evolution of future social and spatial organization (Hurd, 1903; Hoyt, 1939; Hoover and Vernon, 1959). Economists and political scientists have been preoccupied with the rapid suburbanization of the urban population since the end of World War II and the fragmentation of the metropolitan area into independent political jurisdictions (ACIR, 1965; Margolis, 1961; Oates, 1971; Tiebout, 1956; Pack and Pack, 1978).

Due to the central position it assigns to the longue durée, the Annales school—impetus for and crossroads of historical debate—used quantitative methods from the beginning and granted them their patents of nobility. For some decades now, it has been inconceivable for good historical research in France not to devote an important part of its efforts to the measuring of phenomena. True, the Annales school has never spoken with a single voice; the changes that have occurred in its membership and in neighboring disciplines, as well as new historical sensibilities, have modified its original characteristics. The study directed by A Burguière of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales will soon report on the content and evolution of the themes, the network of contributors, and the intellectual climate that shaped the first generation of the Annales. Therefore this article limits itself to a rapid survey of publications, followed by an examination of the distinctive traits of the quantitative dimension of French historical work, the directions for and reasons behind new research. The picture must remain somewhat general because it focuses on only three major points: the preeminence of serial history over quantitative history; the underrepresentation of international comparative works, despite the example of F. Braudel; and the development of individual-level data banks, an important source for social and serial history.