Whence and whither family history? In his bibliographic and programmatic essay, Hobsbawm (1971) did not mention family history as a subfield of what was then the relatively “new” social history. The closest he came was “demography and kinship.” In 1980, by which time social history was definitely mature, and according to some critics, even in decline, the proceedings of a conference on history in the 1980s included a 37-page essay by Stone (1981b; see also Stone, 1981a, 1978) on family history. Several bellwethers of the change may be noted in passing. One year after the 1968 conference for which Hobsbawm's comments were originally prepared, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population held a meeting whose subject—the comparative history of household and family—went beyond strictly demographic history. In 1972, a family history newsletter was launched by Professor Tamara Hareven, in cooperation with the Newberry Library in Chicago; a special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History on “The History of the Family” appeared in 1971; a special issue of Annales: Economies, Societes et Civilisations devoted to “Famille et Societé” was published in 1972. By the time the Journal of Family History, edited by Hareven, began publication in 1976, two more special issues on family history of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History were required reading for those calling themselves social historians.

One of the more debilitating digressions in the evolution of the scientific enterprise is the controversy over the relative importance of models and data. Time and again, in every discipline from archaeology to zoology, the issue has reappeared with sufficient force to engage scholarly attention and to generate reams of rhetoric. In the social sciences, as in the biological and physical sciences, we have expended considerable energies on the data versus model (some would say “theory”) emphasis, usually to the detriment of scientific advancement.

Among the various facets of the new public history movement, applied history holds particular interest for social science historians. Public history generally involves the effort to use historical work for nonacademic audiences; it thus embraces historical museum work, aspects of archive preservation, and media presentations for general audiences. All these are admirable goals, not of course novel, but receiving new and explicit attention in a variety of recent programs, and in the Public History Association. Applied history, though part of public history in its broadest sense, has a more specific mission (one must note that some of the presentation training programs in public history are labeled “applied,” a terminological confusion that one hopes can be remedied). Applied historians seek directly to integrate certain kinds of historical research with the process of policy research, in both public and private sectors. Applied historians do this research themselves, most typically on a contract basis from academic sanctuaries but potentially as policy researchers independent of a direct academic base. They are also involved in training graduate students in this research mode, and in several cases have also mounted undergraduate courses or programs in the genre.

Recent statistics indicate that 72% of the elderly poor are widowed, divorced, or never-married women. The fact that many of these women are left destitute in their old age can be looked at from several perspectives. My particular interest is in how Social Security policy contributes to the potential poverty of women. The area of investigation is that of dependency—the designated category through which most women collect Social Security benefits.

Throughout the early decades of this century, reformers bemoaned the unsystematic nature of police management, reserving particular criticism for the influence of nonbureaucratic and nonmeritocratic matters on promotions. Their advocacy of greater routinization and regularity, cloaked in the rhetoric of professionalism, eventually won acceptance in formal police administration. Few proponents of change, however, measured the consequences of their efforts upon the actual careers of officers (Fosdick, 1972; Vollmer, 1972; Smith, 1940; Wilson and McLaren, 1950; Price, 1977).