In recent years, as social scientists questioned the intellectual boundaries set by customary perceptions of criminality, their discourse expanded to incorporate more than purely legalistic definitions of crime. In addition to conventional street crimes, some scholars began examining both interpersonal and collective actions and behaviors that were once considered to be outside the scope of commonly accepted definitions of criminality. For example, criminologists now study crime categorized as occupational (Albanese 1987; Cressey 1953; Green 1990; Hollinger and Clark 1983; Horning 1979; Nettler 1974; Tracy and Fox 1989), environmental (Block and Bernard 1988; Brady 1987; Stone 1987; Tallmer 1987), political (Barak 1994; Block 1989; Block and Chambliss 1981; Chambliss 1993; Quinney 1970; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1970; Tunnell 1993; Turk 1969), and corporate (Clinard and Yeager 1980; Clinard et al. 1979; Coleman 1994; Reiman 1979; Sutherland 1949), using methodology and terminology once reserved for predatory street crime. This trend can be traced to the pioneering work of Thorsten Sellin (1938) and Edwin Sutherland (1940, 1949), who argued for broader, more inclusive definitions of criminality and less conventional approaches to the study of crime.

Efforts to improve public health and sanitation began in China well before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Between 1911 and 1931, the Chinese-run North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service carried out a range of public health activities in northeast China, successfully fighting not only plague but a variety of other epidemic infectious diseases, such as, for example, cholera. At the same time, there were local efforts to improve health, mainly in urban areas, by establishing medical colleges and hospitals, improving infrastructure, promulgating hygiene regulations, making vaccinations available, and carrying out educational campaigns. In Beijing, the subject of this study, the sewage system was renovated, the water supply was improved, and a variety of initiatives were undertaken to improve sanitation and public health. During the 1930s, the Nationalist government established a Ministry of Health and formulated a comprehensive national health policy focusing on rural areas. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Communists instituted a wide range of public health measures in the rural areas they controlled.

When an unprecedented and unanticipated downturn strikes a community, resources from disparate sources combine to aid those harmed by the distress. Today as in the past, public and private sources coordinate relief efforts, and the persistence of distress beyond that which had been anticipated and provided for by insurance brings in resources from outside the community. However, it is possible to crowd out a resource when the efforts of one source decrease the efforts of another. Modern research documents public welfare crowding out private charity (see, for example, Abrams and Schmitz 1978), and this also occurred in the past. Exploring this kind of concern, the present article highlights aspects of income assistance that played a role during the Lancashire cotton famine (1861-65).

At the beginning of the Civil War, few suspected how brutal and bloody the conflict would prove to be. During the first months of the war, thousands of men and boys from North Carolina rushed to enlist. As deaths from disease and battle mounted dramatically, soldiers who had agreed to serve for one, two, or three years found themselves legally compelled to stay even after their enlistment was up, and those who had stayed home enlisted reluctantly under the threat of the draft (Wright 1978). Detained in the Confederate army often by threat of imprisonment or even death (ibid.), obliged to fight for a cause that appeared increasingly to be contrary to their own interests (Bardolph 1964), watching as the wealthy plantation owners resigned their commissions and bowed out (Tatum 1934), thousands of soldiers took up one strategy of resistance to the war: desertion. Of the 120,000 North Carolinians who enlisted to fight in the Confederate army, an estimated 12,000 deserted before the war was over. This study will test the hypothesis that desertion was a form of resistance to the war by a relatively powerless group, the small farmers. The central focus of this article will be the predictors of desertion. Of the estimated 10% of the Confederate soldiers from North Carolina who deserted from the army, the majority were small-scale farmers who had long opposed the wealthy elites on a variety of issues.