History is full of reactions and revolutions from which even the scholarly world is not immune. The revision in French economic history during the last two decades affords an example of one of the most complete turnabouts in recent scholarship. In the 1940s and 1950s a number of scholars, mainly American, believed that the problem to be explained was French economic retardation in the nineteenth century. Much was written about the unenterprising character of French entrepreneurs, anticapitalist social attitudes, the persistence of the family firm and the small farm, and other sociocultural characteristics that were deemed inimical to economic growth. The Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard (1948-1958) provided inspiration for analysing French entrepreneurial failure in terms of Parsonian sociology, and the classic retardationist view of French industrial development remains enshrined in David S. Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), originally written during the 1950s for the Cambridge Economic History of Europe.

Health conditions in United States cities at the turn of the twentieth century were very poor. Bleak pictures of crowded dwellings, contaminated water supplies, and filthy streets have been painted by numerous observers of urban areas at the time (Smith, 1964). While the effects of these conditions on mortality levels have not been precisely measured, urban mortality rates were consistently higher than rural mortality rates in 1900 in the United States (Condran and Crimmins, 1980). Nevertheless, considerable variation in the mortality levels of different cities also existed. Our goal in this article is to explain the variation in the mortality conditions in U.S. cities for which death registration data were collected in 1900. The analysis is done in two stages. First, the causes of death which accounted for the different mortality levels are isolated. Second, a multivariate analysis of the factors affecting the rates of occurrence of these causes of death is performed.

Britain has been a model of political stability for so long that thinking of it as anything but that is difficult. The familiar image of Edwardian England is that of an Indian summer spent with a jovial uncle. This was a system, however, that was in crisis and was recognized by its contemporaries as being so. Regardless of whether the challenges of the Irish question, labor unrest, and suffragette militancy were connected or merely coincidential (see Pelling, 1968: 147-164), all three shared the common characteristic of extra-parliamentary activism and of violent—either actual or anticipated—methods. Furthermore, the system also was burdened with other contentious issues, as “politics after 1901 were increasingly dominated by controversies about matters which most Victorians had regarded as settled and closed to discussion” (Read, 1972: 16-17). If ever a governmental system suffered from an overload of simultaneous demands from a multiplicity of pressing and intractable problems, this was it. Contrary to what sometimes has been supposed, Britain’s political elite did not regard the approaching international hostilities as providing a means of alleviating these burdens by welding the country together with patriotic fervor. Instead they feared that war would be the final blow undermining the governments’s authority and, perhaps, producing civil war (French, 1982: 85-95).

In this article, we analyze the male-female earnings differential in the single most important sector of female employment, clerical and office work, for the period running from the 1880s to the 1970s. Clerical occupations currently provide jobs for one-third of all females engaged in market employment. Our analysis reveals that intraoccupational earnings differences between the sexes rather than differences in occupational structure have been the major factors underlying the male-female earnings gap in the clerical sector. This finding represents a major break with the conclusion reached in many earlier studies where researchers have argued that sex differences in occupational structure account for most of the sex differential in earnings (Cohen, 1971; Fuchs, 1971; Kreps, 1971; Sawhill, 1971). The empirical evidence presented here also suggests that the sex differential in earnings levels in the major clerical occupations has shown no substantial narrowing in recent decades. This result is surprising given the changing social climate of the post-World War II period. In recent decades we have seen a sharp upsurge in activity by feminist groups, pathbreaking civil rights legislation, increasing female labor force participation, increasing female career orientation, changes in sex roles, and other significant social changes. The results in this article suggest that up to now these social changes have not had a significant impact on the male-female earnings gap in the clerical sector.