Since the late 1960s, the study of school attendance in the nineteenth century has been one of the most vigorous research interests of social historians in the field of educational history. One line of research has investigated the growth of the institution of schools, the “rise of mass schooling,” using enrollment rates as a key indicator (Field, 1976, 1979, 1980; Fishlow, 1966; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1974). Another line has been more interested in the social distribution of schooling, exploring how rates of attendance differed across time and across such social divisions as age, gender, race, class, religion, and ethnicity (Denton and George, 1974; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1980; Katz, 1972, 1975; Katz and Davey, 1978; Soltow and Stevens, 1981; Thernstrom, 1964; Troen, 1973; Vinyard, 1972).

The nineteenth century saw the beginning of large-scale migration of population from western Europe to various countries of the world. North and South America had proven hospitable in previous centuries and the southern tip of Africa presented an equable climate as well as strategic location. The islands of the southern seas reached by Cook and Van Diemen proved equally attractive if more remote. In retrospect it seems inevitable that, with the exception of South America, they were bound to be English-speaking. Even South America had its British farming colonists at one stage. In 1826 just under two hundred Highland Scots embarked for Topo in the highlands of Colombia (United Kingdom, 1827). Significantly, one hundred and two of them were under fourteen years of age.

The basis of most historical research including social science history is quite unsystematic. This characteristic results from the ways in which researchers find and choose historical sources for examination. Despite claims to be systematic, historians still tend to identify relevant evidence in impressionistic ways. Many social science histories involve the rigorous study of a source happily discovered by chance. Of course, access to the past has never been easy. Researchers have always lamented a presumed lack of “essential” records. Nonetheless, the actual ways we discover existing evidence have received little attention despite the fact that this process is fraught with difficulties and hidden dangers especially for researchers of a social scientific bent. Do not the presuppositions of social science history extend to the identification of sources? How do we know when we have all the “relevant data” for a particular project? Can systematic data analysis be justifiably built upon unsystematic identification of sources?

The historiographical hegemony of the “new” social history in recent years reflects, and undoubtedly has contributed to, the decline of scholarly interest in nineteenth-century Canadian political history. What we know now of federal and provincial parties, politics, politicians, electorates, political leadership, and parliamentary behaviour in Victorian Canada derives from the studies of a generation of scholars whose major contributions to the literature were made in the 1960s, the work of a handful of more recent commentators notwithstanding. But as Allan Bogue has observed in a study of the recent historiography of American political history, new sources, methodologies, and intellectual preoccupations have created new opportunities for the re-examination and re-interpretation of political history. He cites “middle-range” re-interpretations of local and regional political elites, based on pro-sopographical analyses, as a necessary first step toward more “behavioral” studies (Bogue, 1980: 243–245). Elsewhere, students of British political history have been much interested in the intersections of the “new” social history and political history, especially in the relationship between the structures and attitudes of local societies and the political characteristics and parliamentary behaviour of their elected representatives (Aydelotte, 1977; Moore, 1967; Clarke, 1971).

A casual observer may very well consider America’s dwellings in the period after independence as being homogeneous in character. A log cabin was a log cabin, after all, and Mount Vernon and Monticello, owned by famous leaders, were, rather, the exceptions that somehow prove the rule, or at least provide evidence that there was a second economic class consisting of only a few cases. The idea of a continuous distribution of housing values, from hovels to mansions, seems absent from a common perception of living conditions in the United States in its early, formative, years. A city’s exhibit of an original log cabin is presented as being an example of typical housing; a series of log cabins in an historical village often shows remarkable uniformity; and the Williamsburg reconstructions convey the impression that there was no significant variation in value between the homes belonging to a lawyer, a doctor, an artisan, or a day laborer. The subject of this paper is the determination of the degree of inequality in housing values that did, in fact, exist, as well as to demonstrate the shape of the configuration of those values. The data for this study are a result of the elaborate inventory of housing values which was made in the United States in 1798 for taxation purposes; almost every house in the entire country was evaluated carefully because a strongly progressive tax rate schedule was a prominent part of the law. We can determine exactly how much inequality existed by determining the numbers of houses in the various tax classes.