Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Journals
  3. Social Science History
  4. Volume 6
Journal Home
Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Publication date:

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×
< Back to all issues

Volume 6 - Spring 1982

Contents

Page 2 of 2

Book Review

Comment and Debate

  • The Beleaguered Myth of Antebellum Egalitarianism: Cliometrics and Surmise to the Rescue

  • Edward Pessen
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. 111-128

  • In his 1978 essay in this journal, Robert E. Gallman praised but also criticized my work on the “egalitarian myth,” arguing that it had not in fact “dealt a death blow to the ‘egalitarian hypothesis’“ (1978:194). In my response the following year, I tried to show that his criticism was based in large part on a misreading of what I had written, attributing to me “statements I had never made and viewpoints I do not hold.” He thus had created “an elaborate model to refute a point that I had not made” (1979a: 208). Although I argued that his overall criticism was invalid, primarily because it was not based on “germane historical evidence,” I closed by praising the “admirably reasoned spirit that infuses Professor Gallman’s essay,” praise I publicly repeated in the American Historical Review (1979a: 224, 1980b: 1163).

  • Professor Blumin on Age and Inequality: Antebellum America

  • Robert E. Gallman
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. 381-384

  • In his essay in this issue, Stuart Blumin attempts to sort out the debate between Edward Pessen and me. Professor Blumin begins: “Gallman advances the view that inequality between generations—the association between age and wealth—does explain nearly all of the very striking differences in personal fortune that Pessen and others have discovered.” This is not the view I had intended to advance and is certainly not a view I hold. Many factors bore on the wealth distribution of the United States in the “age of the common man.” The age structure of population surely did not account for “nearly all” of the observed wealth differences. (See, for example, my treatment of this subject— based on manuscript census data for 1860—in Davis et al., 1972: 31-32. This discussion treats the influences on wealth holding of age, sex, nativity, color, occupation, and inheritance.) How Professor Blumin came to misunderstand me so badly I cannot say, but I suspect he was misled by my ill-advised comparison of the results drawn from my model with the actual distribution of wealth in 1860 (Gallman, 1978:198).

Research Article

  • The Heights of Slaves in Trinidad

  • Gerald C. Friedman
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. 482-515

  • Early nineteenth-century Trinidad was one of the most efficient sugar producers in the British West Indies with output per slave three times as high as in Barbados and 70% higher than in Jamaica (Ward, 1978; Ragatz, 1963:332). Slave prices reflected Trinidad’s greater productivity. The Commissioners of Compensation reported in 1837 that between 1822 and 1830 the price of a Trinidad field hand was 64% greater than the price of one in Jamaica (Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, 1837–1838).

    Despite Trinidad’s natural advantages as a sugar producer, the island’s first sugar estate was established only in 1787. Spain controlled Trinidad until the British conquest in 1797 and prohibited non-Spanish settlement until 1783. The island’s population in 1783 consisted of only some one thousand Amerindians and an equal number of inhabitants of European or African descent who grew cocoa as well as subsistence crops. Rapid population growth began in 1783 when the Spanish opened the island to settlement by any Roman Catholic. French West Indian slave owners in particular took advantage of this opportunity to settle a nearly unpopulated island and brought the cultivation of sugar cane and coffee to Trinidad. The slave rebellion in Haiti sparked a still larger inflow of French planters and their slaves, and brought the slave population to over 10,000 in 1797 (Fraser, 1891; Carmichael, 1961; Anthony, 1975).

Front matter

  • SSH volume 6 issue 2 Cover and Front matter

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. f1-f4
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

Book Reviews

Front Matter

Research Article

  • The Heights of American Slaves: New Evidence on Slave Nutrition and Health

  • Robert A. Margo, Richard H. Steckel
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. 516-538

  • In recent years the nutritional adequacy of the slave diet has received increasing attention from historians. Scholars have analyzed a wide array of sources such as the manuscript censuses of agriculture and population, the ex-slave narratives, diaries, plantation account books, and agricultural and medical journals to shed new light on the quantities, varieties, and nutritional content of foods consumed by slaves (Fogel and Engerman, 1974; Owens, 1976; Sutch, 1975; Kiple and Kiple, 1977; Savitt, 1978; Crawford, 1980; Kahn, 1983). While these studies have yielded considerable information on the average quality of the slave diet in the American South or for slaves in particular localities, relatively little systematic evidence has been available to date on how the level of nutrition varied among different groups in the slave population, and over time.

  • Migration in Colonial America: Evidence from the Militia Muster Rolls

  • Georgia C. Villaflor, Kenneth L. Sokoloff
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. 539-570

  • The diversity of opinions about the extent and importance of migration during the colonial era testifies to the paucity of direct information on the subject. Beyond the desire for a purely demographic explanation of the differences in regional rates of population growth, the need for a better understanding of the changes in the supply and distribution of labor before the Industrial Revolution has spurred recent research on internal migration. Some of this work has grown out of studies of the censuses and vital records of various New England towns (such as those cited in Jones, 1981). However, although these sources testify that an individual existed in a specific place and time, and thus provide valuable indirect glimpses of migration, they rarely furnish the information necessary to locate him or her a second time—either earlier or later in the life cycle. Names appear and disappear from such lists over time, but several intervening assumptions are required before we can infer that migration was involved. Similarly, although differences in sex ratios and age distributions reflect the movement of population, they reveal little about the absolute magnitude or direction of net migration, let alone gross flows.

Back Matter

Back matter

  • SSH volume 6 issue 2 Cover and Back matter

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. b1-b3
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

Book Reviews

Front matter

  • SSH volume 6 issue 3 Cover and Front matter

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. f1-f4
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

Research Article

  • The Potential of Auxological Data for Monitoring Economic and Social Well-Being

  • J. M. Tanner
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. 571-581

  • Auxology, the study of physical growth (from auxein, to increase), has long been pressed into service as a measure of human welfare. In the sixteenth century Levinus Lemnius, doctor and later priest in the Low Countries, castigated “schoolmasters and others that take upon them to teach and boord young boyes (and) pinch their poore Pupils and Boorders by the belly, and allow them meate neither sufficient nor yet wholesome.” “Whereby it cometh to passe,” he continued,

    That in growth they seldome come to any personable stature, to the use of their full powers, to perfect strength and firmity of their members, or to any handsome feature or composition of bodily proportion: and the cause is for that in their tender and growing age, being kept under by famine and skanted of common meate and drinke, their natural moisture which requireth continuall cherishing and maintenance, was skanted and bebarred of his due nourishment and competent allowance [English translation of 1633, The Touchstone of Complexions, original 1561; see Tanner, 1981: 25].

Back matter

  • SSH volume 6 issue 3 Cover and Back matter

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. b1-b4
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

Other

Front matter

  • SSH volume 6 issue 4 Cover and Front matter

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. f1-f4
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

Back matter

  • SSH volume 6 issue 4 Cover and Back matter

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 January 2016, pp. b1-b2
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

Page 2 of 2