In post-World War II agricultural research, a new perspective on “peasant society” developed. This approach is still vigorous today and implies that peasant society—defined by subsistence production, the safety-first principle, and a stable village system with moral obligations—leads to conservative behavior toward change. It also assumes that only external forces can tear down the system and force peasants into markets. However, many researchers throughout Europe have challenged these opinions of peasant mentality and peasant behavior. This study investigates five parishes in southern Sweden (Scania) to analyze the behavior of peasants during the agricultural transformation (c. 1750–1850). Important organizational and institutional changes, such as enclosures, the emergence of a formal credit market, and the growing land market, are analyzed. Results reveal that some peasants actively participated in the agricultural transformation in a number of ways and that peasant farmers in Scania did not demonstrate a conservative attitude toward change.

Between 1910 and 1940 the Angel Island Immigration Station was the primary port of entry for Asians into the United States, the place of enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other anti-Asian immigration policies. Even in the absence of substantiating data, it is frequently asserted that almost all entering Chinese were detained at Angel Island and that they were detained for weeks, months, even years. This article presents the first empirical evidence on how long people arriving at San Francisco were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station. The use of newly discovered data on passengers of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (PMSS) for the period 1913-19 adds an empirical basis to our understanding of how immigration laws were administered in classifying and detaining aliens seeking to enter the United States, which arrivals were detained at Angel Island, and for how long. Results show that many Chinese were not detained at all; there was great variation in length of detention for Chinese who were detained; only some of this variation can be explained by the type of “exempt” status claimed for admission under the Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese arrivals had an even higher incidence of detention; and many detainees were either non-Asian, had come on ships from Central or South America, or were not “immigrants” at all.

Wages, benefits, and workers’ rights in the American South lagged behind the national average throughout the New Deal era even after southern states industrialized after the Second World War. This article deepens arguments about a distinctive regional variety of capitalism. It emphasizes how the institutions that define rights and authority over such economic decisions as what kind of jobs to create and how industries should compete constitute the industrial order. The article focuses on the Texas apparel industry and shows that low labor standards were an outcome of choices made by business owners and managers who claimed, and were given, the authority to carry out their visions of economic development. In contrast to previous explanations that have focused on labor exploitation and resistance, I address alternative ways to organize work and market products and the influence of choices from these alternatives on the development of distinctive labor-management relations. The apparel industry developed an efficient form of production that took advantage of an oligarchic political order whose institutional features dated to an earlier era.

According to David Mayhew (2002: 58-59, 35), “Neither statistics nor stories bear out the canonical realignments calendar of 1860, 1896, and 1932,” and “no certifiable electoral realignment has occurred since 1932.” This study examines the national division of the U.S. presidential vote and House of Representatives seats from 1868 to 2004 to determine whether realignments occurred in 1896, 1932, and 1968 and whether other elections might be better designated as realignments. The analysis demonstrates the onset of realignments in the 1894-96 and 1930-32 elections and a staggered realignment in recent decades. Republicans registered significant durable gains in presidential voting starting in 1968 and in congressional elections in 1994. The analysis also finds evidence of a realignment favoring the Democrats in 1874-76.

This article uses a unique data set from 1957 to examine the racial gap in health insurance coverage and the extent to which that gap influenced racial differences in health care spending. Results indicate that black households in 1957 were statistically significantly less likely to purchase health insurance than white households, even after controlling for differences in income, years of schooling, age, family size, marital status, and other personal and job-related characteristics. Findings in the article also provide weak support for the hypothesis that a racial gap in health insurance coverage contributed to racial differences in health care spending between blacks and whites; even after controlling for differences in income, education, and other characteristics, racial differences in medical expenditures were smaller for insured than for uninsured families, although the result is not statistically significant.

The proportion of men aged 65 and older who are willing and able to work declined steadily over the twentieth century. The major factors in the rise of retirement appear to be the increased availability of pensions and the shift out of farming occupations; however, most research on this issue has focused only on the experience of northern men. This article uses data from records of the Georgia Confederate pension program to investigate the effects of pension and occupation on the southern retirement decision in the early twentieth century. An analysis of Union veterans living in the South suggests that regional factors like farm residence had a larger impact on retirement behavior than military pensions. As in the North, increases in wealth, especially among farmers, were associated with a higher probability of retirement.

Twentieth-century American men and women were often unable to live up to or down to their own fertility ideals. In a national random sample of 11,126 ever-married men and women over the age of 44, “discrepant fertility”—the difference between ideal fertility and completed fertility—was common. This article seeks to identify the causes of such discrepancies, and findings suggest that the most important exogenous factor is “birth cohort.” Those born prior to or after the Great Depression were prone to exhibit negative discrepant fertility, having had fewer children than they thought ideal, while those born during the Depression—the parents of the baby boom—were characterized by significant positive discrepant fertility, having had more children than they thought ideal. It is argued that these cohort effects are closely related to social and economic conditions that prevailed as twentieth-century Americans came of age and assessed their professional and familial prospects.

This research explains why Mexico's 1968 student movement ended in the massacre of hundreds of students, while the peasant revolts that followed won land reform from the state. I argue that because Mexico's presidents managed each movement with both repression and concessions, other factors beyond the state's political opportunity structure explain these sharply contrasting social movement outcomes. The evidence strongly suggests that while Mexico's version of authoritarianism increased the odds of repression, each movement's levels of organization, disruption, and framing strategies determined the forms and degree of state violence. The analysis shows how politically salient frames may decrease the odds of repression or increase the odds of political alliances with state elites. It follows that political opportunities are more dynamic and dialogically emergent than previously theorized.

The origins and role of corporate landholding and land redistribution practices over arable land in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Japan have posed a quandary for scholars. The most common forms are widely seen as means to spread the impact of flooding among villagers in districts that are considered to be at great risk from flood hazards. Such conclusions are often based on individual village studies. In contrast, this study takes a regional approach and tests the validity of this relationship using geographic information systems technology experimentally. This experiment reveals a variety of anomalies that, taken together, suggest that any link between natural hazard risk and the presence or absence of redistribution practices is more subtle than typical explanations assert.

Like other voluntary associations, fraternities such as the Orange Order underpin political cleavages. The membership dynamics behind such associations are less clear. Rival theories attribute membership fluctuations alternatively to changes in social capital, economic structure, culture, or events. This article uses a pooled time-series cross sectional model to evaluate competing hypotheses for the period since 1860. Results suggest that membership was linked to longer-term shifts in ethnic boundaries rather than structural or social capital variables, with events playing an intermediate role. Scottish Protestant mobilization against Catholics was less important than Irish Protestant ethnicity, but both were key. Finally, the order has been numerically weaker than many believe; hence its inability—even during the apex of its influence—to shape Tory policy.

Health insurance with high deductibles is an important feature of the Bush administration's health savings accounts initiative. A similar type of insurance, known as major medical, was the most common type of health coverage in the United States from the 1950s through the 1970s. This article traces the history of cost sharing in health insurance from its origins in insurers' concerns about “moral hazard” to the heyday of major medical insurance to the temporary comeback of first-dollar coverage during the era of managed care. Proponents of deductibles and co-payments, today and in the past, have argued that they bring down costs by forcing consumers to make more careful health care choices. The history of major medical insurance, however, shows that high-deductible insurance failed to curb medical inflation and also hurt consumers who expected their coverage to protect their incomes from the costs of sickness and injury.

The combined influence of the Great Migration of African Americans and the civil rights movement propelled the drive for fair housing legislation, which attempted to curb overt discrimination in housing markets. This drive culminated in the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. By that time, 57 percent of the U.S. population and 41 percent of the African American population already resided in states with a fair housing law. This article uses hazard models to analyze the diffusion of state fair housing legislation and to shed new light on the combination of economic and political forces that facilitated the laws' adoption. Outside the South, states with larger union memberships, more Jewish residents, and more NAACP members passed fair housing laws sooner than others. Including controls for a variety of competing factors does not undermine the estimates, and historical accounts of the legislative campaigns support the article's interpretation.

This study uses geographic information systems (GIS) to measure the incidence and track the spread of the influenza pandemic of 1918 in Hartford, Connecticut. The data for the study are based on the death certificates of individuals who lived in Hartford and died from the disease, digitized maps of Hartford for the period circa 1918, and two supplemental random samples of the 1920 U.S. census schedules. The findings suggest that, instead of viewing the epidemic as a solitary event, one can better understand it as a set of somewhat discrete events or “mini-epidemics” occurring within the confines of one city. These mini-epidemics affected various subgroups in the population differently in terms of the timing of the onset, the duration, and the lethality of the disease. The major point of differentiation of these subgroups was ethnicity, which overlapped with geography.