In his 1978 Presidential Address to this Association, Allan Bogue urged us to direct our attention to problems associated with the use and development of computer-readable source material (Bogue, 1979). My remarks are in a similar vein. They are limited, however, to only one of the categories of source material that Bogue discussed: information that is originally recorded and stored in computer-readable form. In this area problems have become substantially larger and more pressing than they seemed in 1978, although possible means to their amelioration are now also becoming more apparent. The problems concern, in the first place, the rapidly growing volume of potential source material that is recorded and stored in computer-readable form; and, in the second place, the danger that much of this material will not be preserved or that it will be preserved only in forms that sacrifice its central and crucial advantage of manipulability.

The historical study of imprisonment touches on various issues of a wider, theoretical significance. A major and ongoing discussion in social science concerns the nature of historical change. Authors writing from a structuralist or systems approach tend to emphasize rapid change followed by long periods of continuity. Opposed to this is a more developmental or longitudinal approach stressing long-term processes. Both approaches are represented in the historiography about imprisonment. They may be identified as modernization-oriented and process-oriented, respectively.

Several recent studies of the emergence of prisons in Europe and America dealt with the first half of the nineteenth century (see especially Rothman, 1971; Foucault, 1975; Ignatieff, 1978). These studies suggested that confinement was a relatively new phenomenon in that period.

That Stephan Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress is widely regarded as a classic is clear from the very fact that a symposium of this type is being held. Nor is the book’s reputation unwarranted. Thernstrom (1964: 1) himself wrote that “one of the most glaring gaps in our knowledge of 19th century America is the absence of reliable information about the social mobility of its population, particularly at the lower and middle levels of society.” Thanks to his study of Newburyport and the many studies of other communities that his research has helped inspire, that gap in our knowledge has been narrowed and we are all the wiser. Before Thernstrom, American historians were prone to speak of large-scale upward mobility on the basis of a handful of success stories. He showed us a better way.

Some scholars, and they include admirers of Thernstrom’s work, have recently questioned both the importance of social mobility and the extent to which it influenced the minds of working people (Henretta, 1977; Katz, 1975; and Dawley, 1976). Their argument is interesting but highly conjectural. Most of us continue to believe, and rightly so, that research such as Thernstrom’s has significantly illuminated nineteenth-century American society.

The discipline of political science deliberately abandoned history sixty years ago. In a quest for a true “science” of politics, it turned to physics and especially psychology for models of what a science ought to be like (Jensen, 1969). Rigor in defining and measuring variables and in the statement of theories and testing of hypotheses was sought, plus a method that could predict, and thus control, the future. History seemed unnecessary, for the terrible cataclysm of the Great War seemed to have erased or smothered the impact of the past. It would take political scientists a half century to rediscover history, and the goal of this paper is to examine the route of one of their most important explorers of the past, Walter Dean Burnham.

It was evident from the very beginning of the colonization of the Americas that the West African had experienced a biological past which differed in significant ways from that of other peoples. For in that beginning, dead Indians began accumulating “in heaps, like bedbugs” as they succumbed to diseases that accompanied the Spanish Conquistadores and their animals from Iberia. But the black slaves who accompanied them as well, did not die, or rather, the Spaniards temporized, “if we did not hang a Negro, he would never die.” In addition to this immunologic hardiness, the black was physically sturdier. Common wisdom had it that he could do the work of four Indians.

My Copy of Poverty and Progress provides shocking evidence that we have moved far enough along in time to have the necessary perspective: the price on the jacket of this Harvard University Press original edition—hardcover—reads $5.95. There is similarly little doubt about the judgment of time, for I think there would be general agreement with the assessment offered by Michael Katz (1982) several years ago that “in the last two decades there have been two landmark books in the history of social structure, one each for Britain and the United States. Both reflect not only the talents of the author but the national/intellectual contexts as well. For Britain the book is E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class [1964]; for America it is Stephan Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress [1964].”

It is thus appropriate that we honor Stephan Thernstrom on the twentieth anniversary of a slim volume on a small city, which made a disproportionately big bang. We know he understands that to the extent that our honorific twenty-one gun salute may occasionally seem to be aimed not over but at him, this is only to keep him from feeling uncomfortably like the guest at his own funeral eulogies. Whatever the mix of criticism and praise, however, I suspect that he will be amused: all of this solemn discussion devoted to what was initially only a doctoral thesis which Professor Thernstrom, if he was anything like most of us, may have had to struggle, from time to time, to take altogether seriously.

It has now been over twenty years since The American Political Science Review published “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe” by Walter Dean Burnham (1965). This remarkably rich work is at once a study of historical variations in citizen electoral behavior, of the partisan realignment of 1896 and the realignment process in general, and of the connections between voter behavior and the patterns of American politics and public policy. It also raises fundamental epistemological issues about the relationship of micro-level and macro-level phenomena in politics—especially the inherent limitations of single-shot public opinion surveys or of a focus on a single political period in understanding the full range of possibilities for citizen involvement in a democratic political order. Unlike many scholarly works which rise meteor-like to prominence then rapidly vanish, “Changing Shape” remains at least as influential today as it was twenty years ago.

In the nineteenth century, annual reports of European military medical authorities usually carried some such title as “The Health of the Army at Home and Abroad.” Though historians have recently studied the health of slaves in transit and the demographic patterns of slave populations in the New World, they have not paid much attention to these military data. For the West Indies they begin in 1803, for West Africa in 1810. After 1819, it is possible to trace the disease patterns of West Indian and West African populations in the last decades of the slave trade and on into the early twentieth century. These records help to show what happened epidemiologically to populations of African descent that crossed the Atlantic in both directions.

In recent years, American society has engaged in what is frequently described as a “sexual revolution” involving significant changes in relationships between men and women. As a result of extensive social surveys, we know that both specific behaviors and the prevailing ideology regarding appropriate standards of behavior have been subject to rapid change. In the past two decades, rates of sexual intercourse and intimacy have increased (Hunt, 1974; Westoff, 1974), use of effective contraception has become widespread, and it is increasingly accepted that a physical and emotional attraction between members of the opposite sex might lead to a sexual relationship. In short, participation in sexual activity has come to be seen as a natural outgrowth of the enjoyment of sex.

Anyone who has tried to teach undergraduates about the election of 1896 should instinctively appreciate Walter Dean Burnham’s enormous contribution in making sense of that election and its aftermath. Waged between two rather uninteresting men over issues that defy easy understanding, the presidential contest of 1896 hardly stacks up with those of 1860 and 1932 as “critical” in the casual sense of the term. Perhaps if William Jennings Bryan had defeated William McKinley, or, better still, if the glamorous Theodore Roosevelt had been the victorious Republican candidate, or, best of all, if Roosevelt had won and immediately started a major war, the election of 1896 would more readily appear to have been the transforming event that modern scholars contend it was. But, alas, McKinley won, waited over a year before reluctantly waging even a minor war, and proved unwilling to make any significant departures in domestic policy. Compared to the election of Abraham Lincoln or that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the contest of 1896 appears trivial. Who can blame undergraduates for yawning over the “Battle of the Standards”?

This paper examines the changing nature of the female labor force in Ireland and the United States. Data from the two countries are used to illustrate both similarities and variations in the Western experience of women during the period of rapid change in work and family life since the late nineteenth century.

A central facet of how Western families have been transformed during the past century has involved the increased participation of women in the paid labor force, and in the most recent decades, a dramatic rise in the labor force participation of married women. In his classic work, World Revolution and Family Patterns, Goode suggests that the increase in female participation in the non-agricultural labor force was clearly evident in Western countries but was not dramatic during the first half of this century (1963: 59-60). Since 1950, however, increases in the economic activity of women have occurred throughout the West. For example, using data from Scandinavian countries, Haavio-Mannila and Kari (1980) document the increased economic activity of women throughout this century, the transformation of the economies of Scandinavia from an agricultural to an industrial base, and the rapid increase in labor force participation of married women since 1950.

In an era of extreme specialization among American historians, it is rare for a monograph to have had the major impact of Poverty and Progress. While there have been previous studies of social mobility, American ethnic groups, and urban communities, Thernstrom’s study was pathbreaking in his use of research techniques and interpretation, and it established a major agenda for the “New Social History.” The questions he raised and his success in writing history “from the bottom up” captured the imagination of the new generation of historians who attended graduate school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His ability to explore the experience of the inarticulate working class drew the attention of radical or New Left historians who were seeking to write a different type of labor history that focused less on unions and more on working-class culture, as well as of the traditionally oriented consensus historians who wanted to expand the horizons of social and cultural history to encompass the experiences of the greatest numbers of Americans. Thernstrom’s impact on the latest cohort of historians was felt in their methodology and their studies of ethnic subcommunities, working-class culture, and geographic and social mobility.

Lead contact and lead poisoning have received scant attention in discussions of early West Indian societies but are potentially important issues in considering the health and medical problems of blacks. Although our discussion focuses on Barbados, the West Indian historical literature strongly suggests that our general findings are applicable to other Caribbean areas and have implications for understanding some of the disabilities of early white populations as well. In this paper we also seek to illustrate how bioanthropological and chemical analyses of slave skeletal remains and historical data can complement one another in defining and investigating various dimensions of slave life.

It is a rare author, I suspect, who is capable of assessing the impact and influence of his own work with any insight. I do not pretend to be one of them. I cannot venture an opinion as to how well these three interesting papers succeed in illuminating that question. While reading them I felt like Huck and Tom hiding away in the church gallery to hear the eulogy at their own funeral. The minister:

1. Was there any such thing as the “System of 1896”—or indeed any other “system” in American political history, for that matter? Professor McCormick’s paper suggests that he would clearly answer this question in the affirmative. For essentially he argues not that no such system existed, but that much too heavy an interpretative burden in my analyses has been placed on 1896 itself. I am sure that, so far as this is concerned, Professor McCormick is right. Yet there do seem undercurrents in this friendly critique of the broader doubt as to whether there is any substantiality at all to the model which I first attempted to sketch out quite a few years ago. On any one of a variety of specific details, I would have to plead, if not guilty, then at least nolo contendere. Yes, I undoubtedly placed too great a burden on 1896 itself, which inevitably should and does create scholarly doubts. Yes, the original sketch which attempted to link elite motivation with underlying power structure and those with electoral politics in and after the 1890s was painted in very vivid colors indeed. This may tell a dramatic story, but it may assume a greater conspiratorial intentionality and future-prediction on the part of elites than was actually there. But once we deal with issues such as these, is there anything left? Professor McCormick, a friendly critic, seems to think there is, but undercurrents of doubt remain.

Mortality rates in early childhood are widely regarded as a sensitive index of the health and living standards of a population (United Nations, 1973: 138-139; Williamson, 1981; Haines, 1985). The debate over the health and treatment of American slaves has led scholars to investigate various data and methods to construct these measures. Early work based on plantation records placed the infant mortality rate (the proportion of live births that die within one year of birth) at 152.6 per thousand (Postell, 1951: 158). Using census data and indirect techniques, estimates of the infant mortality rate climbed from 182.7 per thousand by Evans (1962: 212) to 274 to 302 per thousand by Farley (1970: 33) and 246 to 275 per thousand by Eblen (1972; 1974). Recent work based on height data and indirect techniques places the infant mortality rate in the neighborhood of 350 per thousand and total losses before the end of the first year (stillbirths plus infant deaths) at nearly 50% (Steckel, 1986a). Thus, measurements over the past four decades have gravitated toward the judgment of southern planter Thomas Afflick (1851: 435) who wrote, “Of those born, one half die under one year.”

Recent studies in social history suggest that the practice of female infanticide was widespread in early medieval society. While much of the work on female infanticide is sound, particularly the anthropological studies which observed the practice first hand, the interpretations of historical data are much less certain. In particular, data from the ninth-century French monastic tax rolls known as the Carolingian polyptychs are assumed to reflect female infanticide (Coleman, 1971; 1974; 1976; de Mause, 1974; Guttentag and Secord, 1983). The data recorded on the Polyptychs are biased in a manner reflecting the Church’s teachings and social functions, giving the impression of a skewed sex ratio favoring males in this population. Anthropological studies lead us to doubt that female infanticide was practiced to the extent suggested by the sex ratio on the polyptychs.