There has been over the last several decades an active campaign for the use of systematic methods in historical research, particularly for the verification of contentions by the most rigorous means that our information and our analytical tools, quantitative ones when possible, can provide. It is probably correct to say that by now this battle is largely won, in principle at least. Few historians still object to formal arrangement of the evidence or to counting, even if many of them do not do things quite this way themselves. Methods that a generation ago were regarded as outrageous and on the lunatic fringe of scholarship are no longer controversial. It is true that a few diehards in the profession still protest against these innovations. On the other hand, some at the opposite end of the methodological spectrum contend that we have not gone far enough—that historical projects have not maintained acceptable technical standards and that ventures of historians into formal methods have been elementary and intellectually sloppy (Kousser, 1977). It is proper that these questions should be raised and no doubt there is room for improvement. Yet at least scholars have become aware of the value of systematic research and have begun to discuss in constructive fashion what needs to be done to make it more effective.

In the Winter 1980 special issue of Social Science History on working-class protest, James E. Cronin writes about labor insurgency during the European crisis of 1917-1920. He argues that a greater proportion of the semiskilled and unskilled workers were active in the 1917-1920 wave of insurgency than at any other time in our century. According to him, this emergent proletariat, created by rapid industrialization, constituted the very core of the insurgency. But he adds that many craftsmen, particularly in the engineering industry, were also strong supporters of the labor left (Cronin, 1980: 138-140).

The evidence is adduced from a number of European countries, but no mention is made of Scandinavia, except for one brief reference to Sweden (Cronin, 1980: 131). Actually the Scandinavian countries would seem to be relevant, and perhaps Norway more so than Sweden. In fact, the Scandinavian case has been cited by a number of authors as an illustration of the thesis that skilled workers and artisans represent the main obstacle to industrial militancy. The process of radicalism was much stronger in Norway than in either Denmark or Sweden, and it has been suggested that the pronounced differences in the economic development of the three Scandinavian countries provide an explanation. While growth of the manufacturing industry proceeded slowly and gradually in Sweden and particularly in Denmark, Norway experienced a sudden spurt of industrialization in the first two decades of this century.

One of the perplexing questions that one faces when addressing the problem of literacy and the diffusion of knowledge and culture in early nineteenth-century America relates to the factors that determined whether or not an individual participated in the cultural uplift described by so many early nineteenth-century commentators. When reformers spoke of reading as a moral imperative in consonance with a more general social and spiritual moral order, when educators described Americans as “unquestionably a reading people” or labeled the late 1820s as “emphatically the age of reading,” the questions of who were the subjects of such remarks and what socioeconomic factors determined whether or not an individual was a “participant in culture” must be raised (Welter, 1975: 254; Ohio Journal of Education, 1856: 97; Story, 1876: 419-420). These questions are part of a more basic and more complex question: What were the factors that determined the diffusion of knowledge and culture in the America of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Such a question is, of course, exceedingly complex and lends itself readily to an interdisciplinary as well as a multidisciplinary approach.

The rapid expansion of historical demography as a discipline has meant a growing number of studies of past migration (excellent examples are Tugault, 1973; Chatelain, 1976; Piore, 1979), although migration still receives considerably less attention than does fertility or mortality. The study of industrializing cities during the nineteenth century has focused interest on those patterns of migration that caused rapid urban population growth (Anderson, 1971; Anderson, 1980; Crew, 1979; Thernstrom, 1970). Most of these recent studies of internal migration are based on localized information over relatively short periods of time. They provide us with demographic data of unprecedented precision, but the local nature of such studies accentuates their dependence on currently accepted generalizations as guides in the search for and interpretation of evidence.

The reputation of the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848 has undergone a partial revision in the last few years. Its members used to be considered political novices from whom one could learn little about how to run a parliament (Huber, 1960: 613 is typical). Ziebura (1963) was perhaps the first to challenge this view. He showed that the Frankfurt Assembly was, in fact, run in a very professional way: It created sophisticated and disciplined political parties, and these parties actually exerted effective control over parliamentary business. They even joined together to form a coalition that gave reliable political support to a German provisional government. Kramer (1968), Boldt (1971), Botzenhart (1977), and Langewiesche (1978) have subsequently documented the skillful organization of these parties and their attempts to control members, to create extraparliamentary connections, and to maintain both a formal government coalition and an organized opposition. Kramer (1968: 175-178) has shown that they were particularly successful in applying party discipline to voting behavior: The results of voting could often be foretold simply from a knowledge of how the parties stood on the question at issue.