After two centuries of demographic change, societies of European origin face a new reality of aging populations and heightened competition for resources between young and old. Research on the history of the family adds important perspectives on our current problems. In northwestern Europe, transfers of resources to the young and old were constrained by an unusual marriage and household formation system. The transition to small families increased downward intergenerational transfers (parents to children), and compensating upward transfers now take place outside the family. The growing independence of the elderly in the twentieth century is based on earlier investments in children. The members of each generation profit from the investments their parents make in them and the investments they make in the children of others.

Despite growing reliance on census data for historical research in the United States, there has been little systematic evaluation of census quality. This article relies on back-projection methods, new estimates of nineteenth-century mortality, and the 1850–1940 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) samples to estimate age- and sex-specific net census underenumeration of the native-born white population in the United States in the 1850–1930 censuses. National and section of birth estimates are constructed. In general, the results suggest slightly higher net undercounts for native-born white males relative to native-born white females, slightly higher net undercounts in the South, and a modest trend toward greater census coverage over time. A few censuses stand out as anomalous. The 1870 census suffered a higher net rate of omission than any other census. The net undercount was especially high in the South, probably reflecting the unsettled conditions in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The net undercount was not nearly as great as nineteenth-century observers speculated and subsequent historians have long believed, however. The 1880 census appears to have achieved the most complete coverage of the native-born white population before 1940.

We introduce a life course, multimethod approach to examine the living arrangements of middle-aged and older American Indian and European women living on the rugged North Dakotan settlement frontier around 1910. Our model suggests that women’s later life circumstances reflect the long arm of institutional forces and their ethnicity/nativity, which anchors resource advantages and disadvantages (access to land, rail, and markets) and confers gender socialization (norms and practices) that reproduce gendered social roles. Drawing from primary and secondary sources, we find that European and American Indian women were selectively drawn to or (re)located on frontier spaces unevenly by ethnicity/nativity via timing and place of settlement effects. Old-age living arrangements then directly reflected county of location resources and women’s own adoption of family roles and gendered life events, such as parenthood and widowhood. Overall, rather than finding homogeneous settler versus colonized identities constituted by the “otherness” of each group involved, we find great diversity within and across ethnic/nativity groups. This does not preclude grievous social and ethnic inequalities.

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of classificatory struggles and sociological literature on professions’ construction of jurisdiction, this article examines the origins of the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), the dominant classification system for the US nonprofit sector. Using data drawn from archival research and secondary research, I show that the establishment of the NTEE was part of a larger symbolic struggle over the proper classification of charitable foundations. Philanthropic elites and new nonprofit scholars responded to government threats to foundations by integrating them into the newly created “nonprofit sector,” whose societal value—both philanthropic and economic—would be demonstrated through research on this sector. The NTEE was formed by nonprofit researchers to generate valid data that demonstrated the nonprofit sector’s multiple contributions to society’s well-being. Using a theoretical approach, this article extends Bourdieu’s emphasis on classificatory struggles beyond the study of the construction of the characteristics of social classes to explore contestations over the proper taxonomy of organizations and sectors in society.