At this meeting, we celebrate 25 years of the Social Science History Association, the SSHA.With appreciation from all of us, I acknowledge the achievements of our founders and our long-time members.We stand on their shoulders metaphorically and historically. We mark this anniversary with a plenary president's “founder’s session,” a variety of retrospective and prospective panels, and the conference theme “looking backward and looking forward.” We also commemorate more than 25 years of groundbreaking research and recognition of the presence and practice of social science historians along the hallowed halls of history and social science departments—even if it has not always been accompanied by a readywelcome orcomplete acceptance. (We mark no fewer years of controversy.)

Much has been written about boarding and lodging in late-nineteenthcentury North America. Modell and Hareven 1977 provides a benchmark study of boarding in East Coast urban centers in the United States. For Canada, Medjuck 1980; Katz 1975; Katz et al. 1982; Harney 1978; Bradbury 1984, 1993; and Harris 1992, 1994, and 1996 shed light on aspects of boarding in various Canadian urban communities from the 1850s to the 1950s. In general these studies emphasize the importance of family cycles and economic circumstance for an understanding of the boarding process (see also Robinson 1993; Shergold 1982). Some point to the similarity in social and class background of boarders and boardinghouse keepers (Harney 1978;Medjuck 1980; Modell and Hareven 1977; Harris 1992). Literature on boardinghouse keeping has focused generally, however, on the economic rather than the social or cultural importance of boarding. Even when cultural implications are explored, the unit of analysis is that of community or region or, as in the literature on the acculturation of newcomers, on sojourners and immigrants only

This article shows that late-nineteenth-century wealth inequality was associated with rising wealth levels supporting the existence of a Kuznets-type curve, but this curve is not unconditional.The tendency of wealth inequality to vary with age means that wealth inequality was also a function of the changing age composition of the population and may have been the result of portfolio allocation decisions across the life cycle. Canada's population “aged” during the late nineteenth century, with the proportion of population under age 20 dropping from 53% in 1871 to 43% by 1911. The general aging of the population could have increased inequality in both wealth and income. These results follow recent work by Jeffrey Williamson (1998), who argues that Kuznets curves are not unconditional. In other words, as the results of this article confirm, wealth inequality is the outcome of a complex economic process, not a single determinant cause.

On 6 February 1888, Mathias Busch was arrested in Chicago for the murder of his wife, Katherine. About four that afternoon, Busch, a beer peddler, walked in to the kitchen of their home, picked up a butcher knife, and, after repeatedly slashing at his wife, cut her throat. Several people were in and about the house at the time; some grabbed and restrained Busch until the police arrived.

Busch's crime made the front pages of Chicago's evening papers the day of the murder, and coverage continued until his trial in April. City papers competed to condemn both crime and criminal; one local socialist paper, the Chicago Labor Enquirer, offered the most novel interpretation of the crime, arguing that those who scabbed( as Busch apparently had in a recent strike) could be expected to murder their wives.

In her diary entry of 24 December 1862, Harriet Anne Severance, a domestic worker, detailed the activity surrounding the seasonal slaughter of hogs: “ It has been grease, grease all day, the hog is most taken care of. Henry,Meroa & I got started forMr. Henry’s this afternoon,Wells came after Henry overtook us at Uncle Chester’s, took him home with him, & Meroa and I went on had a good visit, & we have been to Mr. Child’s this evening.” While her day was unusually busy, it was not unusual in the way that it intertwined the lives of many people, men and women included.

One of the mainstays of political sociology and political science for generationshas been debate about the conditions under which one policy regime—that is, a distinct mix of public policies—is replaced by another. For instance, a vast literature seeks to identify the factors that caused the shift from orthodox to Keynesian policy regimes in the United States and Europe after the Second World War, as well as the shift during the 1980s to more conservative neoliberal policy regimes (e.g., Campbell 1998; Gourevitch 1986; Hall 1989, 1992;Weir and Skocpol 1985). Similarly, scholars have argued about whether the process through which regime shifts occur is a slow and incremental one, driven by bureaucratic inertia, muddling through, and path-dependent constraints, or a rapid and abrupt one, sparked by cataclysmic events like war that trigger sharp breaks with past policies (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Hall 1993; Krasner 1984; Lindblom 1959; Pierson 1993, 1994). Regime shifts have also captured the imagination of historical sociologists who have recognized that history is marked by critical turning points that differentiate among relatively stable time periods and that this requires scholars to carefully identify historically specific patterns among variables (Abbott 1988, 1992, 1997; Isaac 1997).

“Give This Man Work if you would keep his wife and children alive; one child has already died from starvation,” wrote a concerned citizen to the East Side Relief Committee (Devins 1905: 322). The East Side Relief Committee was a special work-relief unit set up in 1893 by Josephine Shaw Lowell, the founder in 1882 of the Charity Organization Society (COS) of the City of New York (COSCNY) to combat the effects of the depression. That industrial depression in the early 1890s resulted in major unemployment and much suffering among the city's working class.The imperative of the letter (“Give This ManWork!”) illuminates the COS's policy toward relief before, during, and after the depression of 1893, a landmark date in social welfare history. Earlier, Lowell and the COS were best known for their concerns about the role that “indiscriminate” relief played in harming the moral character of the recipients and undermining the living standards of employed workers, not how it could be used to ameliorate joblessness. “I believe that among the many causes of poverty,” Lowell asserted in a speech, “one of the most potent is careless relief-giving, whether by what are called charitable societies, by private individuals,or from public funds” (quoted in Stewart 1974 [1911]: 216).

This article answers Larry Gerber's (1995) challenge for a renewed appreciation of the social science literature on corporatism and state theory by explaining variations in corporatist institutions through the concept of policy legacies. To understand the variation in corporatist forms of governance, three policy areas are key: the long-standing trade policies of the England and Canada, the forms of government intervention during World War I, and prior political battles within the dairy industries. In their own unique way, these policies shaped the character of the market failure, the political capacities of farm organizations, and the institutional response that incorporated private interest groups within the formulation and implementation of public policy. By viewing the emergence of corporatist institutions in England and Canada as examples of governmental responses to economic crisis, this research on corporatism contributes to the larger theory of the determinants, as well as the effects, of the state in capitalist democracies.

The informer’s particular contribution was to pollute the public well, to poison social life in general, to destroy the very possibility of a community; for the informer operates on the principle of betrayal and a community survives on the principle of trust. (Navasky 1981)

An intervention that rewards informers creates enormous stresses within the community that it targets, forcing each of its members to choose among three possible careers or alliances: solidarity with the larger community, collaboration with other informers, and membership in neither group (this last career is reserved for informers whowork on their own).

In 1906, the Reverend Frank G. Smith, of Chicago’s Warren Avenue Congregational Church, warned that “we are in the throes of a moral spasm” (Chicago Tribune, 22 January 1906). The Reverend W. R. Leach shared this view, bemoaning that “not in twenty years as pastor in Chicago have I seen crime as it stalks to-day. It is an epidemical scourge” (Chicago Record-Herald, 26 September 1904). Another critic termed the city “Satan’s sanctum” (Curon 1899). Other commentators eschewed the language of the jeremiad but of fered similar assessments, often casting their observations in comparative and quantitative terms.

Many scholars have noted the theoretical importance of remarriage in twentieth-century American life (Burch 1995; Cherlin 1998; Furstenberg 1980; Glick 1980; Thornton 1977; Uhlenberg and Chew 1986), yet few historical studies have examined remarriage in the United States empirically. This gap in the literature is noteworthy for two reasons. First, the turn of the twentieth century seems to have marked a crossover in the remarriage transition of the United States, reflecting changes in the pool of persons eligible to remarry. This transition was characterized by decreases in remarriage resulting from declines inmortality and probability of widow(er)hood, followed by increases in remarriage resulting from higher divorce rates. The crossover in the transition was likely to have occurred when the pool of eligibles was at or near its nadir. Second, there is ongoing debate about the implications of remarriage for families and individuals (Booth and Dunn 1994), and about the impacts of remarriage on family functions (Cherlin 1978; Cherlin and Furstenberg 1994). In the light of these considerations, we believe it is important to examine remarriage and its consequences in the United States at the turn of the century so that we may better understand the ways that remarriage influences family life and shapes the life course of persons within families (see London and Elman 2001).

Even though it declined in the last decade of the twentieth century, homicide remains anAmerican problem of extraordinary importance. Yet our empirical knowledge is remarkably shortsighted. Simply put, most researchers focus on the past decade or two—usually for reasons having to do with convenience, not theory—and ignore the longer term. However, recent work has shown that past lethality is inherently recoverable, and that there is every reason to expect that comparable homicide rates across time and place should be used to set current research in context (Gurr 1981; Johnson and Monkkonen 1996; Ylkiangas forthcoming; Eisner 2000).This paper builds on some of my recent research and responds to the challenge of a recent paper by Douglas Eckberg (1998), who has shown that not only can we recover the past, but that we can even estimate missing data counts.

Ansley Coale's indices of fertility are well-established measures in historical demography. Developed in the 1960s, they formed the basic analytical device for the European Fertility Project (EFP), which chartered the decline of fertility inEurope (Coale and Watkins 1986), and which has since spawned efforts to measure fertility control in more refined and rigorous ways (David et al. 1988; David and Mroz 1989a, 1989b; David and Sanderson 1988, 1990; Haines 1989; Okun 1994a, 1994b; Bean et al. 1991; Anderson and Silver 1992).

Anyone who hopes to trace quantitative historical changes in populations faces the problem of incomplete and biased records. This is at least as much a problem for statistics of crime as for other kinds of statistics, and it plagues historical homicide research. As with other historical trends, those of homicide are derived from actual counts from some set of sources, including coroners’ records, indictments, arrests, and newspaper accounts. But what proportion of the original incidents were recorded and—if so—still exist? Adding sources usually increases the count, but how closely does it approach the true count? This cannot be known directly. One is caught between the facts that counting is the major means open to us to understand crime “as part of the sweep of history” (Monkkonen 1980: 53) and that there are gaping “holes in the historical record” that leave a large “dark figure” of crime (Lane 1992: 30).

Extramarital pregnancy and illegitimate childbearing have been interpreted by historians as well as sociologists basically in terms of deviant behavior and lack of social control (Tranter 1985; Blaikie 1995). While society has looked at procreation outside marriage as a moral lapse, social science has regarded it in terms of deviancy, as “something which interrupted the proper functioning of social processes, and revealed a failure of social control, the control of individual behavior by family and kin, by political and educational authority” (Laslett 1980a: 1–2).Within this framework, interpretations of the “illegitimacy explosion” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have almost invariably referred toweakening social control as a result of industrialization, urbanization, and migration. In the 1970s, the debate on the rise of illegitimacy was centered on Edward Shorter's contention that women's emancipation produced rising extramarital sexual activity. This article does not reopen that dispute (see Shorter 1971, 1975: 255–68; Tilly et al. 1976; Lee 1977; Fairchilds 1978; Alter 1988). Rather, it starts from the common ground underlying the different interpretations, which associates adolescent extramarital pregnancy with social isolation. Scholars have argued that migration and new living and working conditions often led to separation from the family and local community. This change would have resulted in the collapse of traditional social control, making premarital intercourse more likely.

Chicago is amythic city. Its representation in the popular imagination is varied and has included, at various times, the attributes of a blue-collar town, a city in a garden, and a gangster's paradise. Myths of Chicago “grow abundantly between fact and emotion,” and they selectively and simultaneously evoke and defer attributes of the city. For one perduring myth, social scientists may be held largely responsible: namely, that Chicago is “one of the most planned cities of themodern era,” with a street grid, layout of buildings and waterways, and organization of its residential and commercial architecture that reveal a “geometric certainty” (Suttles 1990). The lasting scholarly fascination with Chicago's geography derives in part from the central role that social scientists played in constructing the planned city. In the 1920s,University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess worked with his colleagues in other social science disciplines to divide the city into communities and neighborhoods. This was a long and deliberate process based on large-scale “social surveys” of several thousand city inhabitants.Their work as members of the Local Community Research Committee (LCRC) produced the celebrated Chicago “community area”—that is, 75 mutually exclusive geographic areas of human settlement, each of which is portrayed as being socially and culturally distinctive.