This presidential address discusses the developing body of research on the quality and idiosyncrasies of historical data, focusing in particular on historical census microdata. I argue that greater attention to source criticism as a genuine subfield of social science history is essential for four reasons: to fully benefit from the expansion of big historical data, to imagine new ways to analyze historical data beyond the intentions of creators, to share insights with a wider range of scholars, and to contribute nuanced perspectives on historical data to public debates surrounding the use of these sources. I contend that historians outside social science history are vastly underestimating the creativity that is happening in our field. I also argue that social science historians are underestimating how important our work is to informing public discourse.

Richard Nixon won a narrow popular and electoral vote victory in 1968. This article investigates whether newspaper endorsements, which heavily favored Nixon, were pivotal in his victory. Utilizing the shift in endorsements between 1964 and 1968, we find a sizable endorsement effect. This estimated effect was large enough to be pivotal: eliminating Nixon’s endorsement advantage would have deprived him of an Electoral College victory, resulting in a contingent election. Alternatively, if newspapers had endorsed his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, at the same rates they endorsed Johnson in 1964, Humphrey would have won the Electoral College.

How do state actors interpret and share information? Theories of the state have long recognized the role of legibility – the modes and practices by which states render society and nature knowable through intervention and information collection – in constructing and maintaining state power. Yet, research has only begun to explore the processes by which information is created and diffused within state administrations. Drawing upon theories of agency relations in states, this article explores how administrators’ communicative practices shape knowledge and legibility. Through examining memos, legislative studies, and draft legislation for decrees recognizing water rights in the French Protectorate in Morocco, I identify a set of common patterns in the construction of bureaucratic information as it moves from street-level administrators to central officials. In analyzing these patterns, I demonstrate how administrators’ obligations and their understandings of the state’s political projects determined not only how French officials collected information, but what they communicated to others. As information moved across administrative levels, officials iteratively changed information. Joining critiques and extensions of legibility theory that emphasize the role of non-state actors in the construction of state knowledge, I argue that we must also attend to intra-state dynamics. In tracing communication and information, I demonstrate that information is iteratively constructed by state agents according to their administrative position and transformed by its particular bureaucratic routes. Modeling legibility and the development of state knowledge requires attending to administrators’ agency, their relationships with each other, and their understanding of the state’s goals.

The challenge of addressing contentious and repressive histories in authoritarian regimes that have undergone post-totalitarian transitions presents precious opportunities for historical justice, as the representation of history and the production of historiography are decentralized from the central state. Using the production of Chinese local gazetteers in post-Mao China as a case and drawing upon a combination of historiographical, archival, and field methods, we investigate three critical negotiation fields where gazetteer compilers, who also held government ranks, interacted with central leaders and other local bureaucracies to exert discretionary control over local historical production within their jurisdictions. This decentralized negotiation over historiography illuminates the intricate interplay between ideology, agency, and tradition in the production process of the Chinese county gazetteers, offering nuanced insights into modern Chinese history and the complexities of historiographical writing under authoritarian governance. Overall, our article shows that knowledge production under authoritarian rule is more interactive and horizontal than thought, and that historiographical writing can adapt to and challenge authority in pursuit of historical justice.

This article investigates how early modern migrants articulated identification with their host society in the context of the late eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, a period preceding modern nationalism. Drawing on a unique dataset derived from the Prize Papers – a collection of testimonies from captured sailors interrogated by British Admiralty courts – we analyze migrants’ declarations of sovereign allegiance. We assess how factors such as duration of residence, local citizenship (poorterschap), occupational rank, and marital status influenced migrants’ identification with their adopted polity. Using logistic regression, we find that civic institutional embeddedness, reflected in city citizenship, and occupational rank, especially among ship captains, significantly predicted identification with the Dutch Republic. In contrast, duration of residence and marital status had weak and statistically insignificant effects. Our findings highlight that pre-national forms of identification were deeply embedded in civic and institutional contexts rather than simply reflecting modern nationalist sentiments. By combining quantitative analysis with targeted archival research into individual biographies, this study demonstrates the complex interplay between institutional opportunities and personal networks in shaping migrants’ allegiances, thereby offering a nuanced historical perspective relevant to contemporary debates on civic integration.

This article proposes a mixed-method approach to examine historical censuses with regard to race. It does so by exploring various kinds of demographic records from nineteenth-century Buenos Aires in order to test the conventional hypothesis of a significant census underenumeration of the city’s population of African descent. Starting from the overall progression of census results, the article is divided into three parts. The first of these deals with potential under-coverage, the second with the possibility of classificatory changes, and the third with vital statistics, largely derived from parish books. With special attention to two censuses of the 1850s, it concludes that Buenos Aires’s Afro-descendant population likely did suffer serious demographic decline between 1840 and 1890.

Historical censuses have often served as valuable sources for understanding the past. Yet, their use as sources about women’s work has been highly debated. This article engages with the continuing debate regarding the reliability and validity of censuses by exploring significant potentials and issues of censuses’ information about women’s work. While recognizing a critical perspective on censuses’ information about women’s work, this article identifies the need for more careful and contextualized readings of censuses. To this end, it presents five novel analytical approaches that aim to enhance readings and interpretations of censuses. The approaches reveal the purposes, focuses, self-reflections, ambiguities, and evolving categorizations of censuses, respectively. Through analysis of Swedish census materials from 1910 to 1940, this article moreover demonstrates that historical census personnel engaged with women’s work in sophisticated ways and that censuses’ representations were complex. The article argues against dismissing censuses outright as a fruitful source about women’s work. Instead, it recommends leveraging their inherent qualities in new and creative ways. Though non-neutral by incorporating and disseminating ideas about gender, censuses can serve as rich historical sources about women’s work and societal roles when approached contextually in various ways. The article advocates for contextualized and historicized approaches to using census data, moving beyond simplistic labels to explore the complexities of these important historical sources.

This study examines gender bias in the investigative work of medieval inquisitors, focusing on Albert of Castellario’s trial of the Waldensians in Giaveno, Italy, in 1335. Drawing upon advancements in sociological and criminological literature, we conceptualize an inquisitorial trial as a discretionary information-gathering endeavor contingent upon the inquisitor’s judgment in deciding which leads to pursue. Employing social network analysis and survival methods, we evaluate whether Albert demonstrated gender biases in his investigative decisions, particularly regarding the weight assigned to testimonies from men versus women. Our findings demonstrate that Albert was more inclined to investigate men and prioritize their testimonies, even where similar levels of incriminating evidence were present for both genders. These results highlight the influence of societal attitudes toward gender on inquisitorial practices, on the representativeness of historical records, and on prevailing understandings of heretical groups. Furthermore, this study underscores the broader utility of our methodological framework for addressing related historical inquiries, including the political motivations behind the medieval inquisition.

Viewing the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) City Survey map of Charlotte, North Carolina, as a proxy for Depression-era redlining practices, this article explores relationships between the map’s differently graded areas and demographic and housing change from 1940 through 1960. Archival research indicates that the HOLC map’s delineation of differently graded areas reflected an established pattern of redlining in the city, a pattern subsequently reinforced by the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) underwriting activities. Using an ordinary least squares (OLS) model and hotspot analysis, we find that areas given a D-grade became relatively more populated by African-American households and households paying higher rents for housing of decreased quality, and that there was more spatial clustering of these characteristics in D-graded areas over time. Using postwar FHA Charlotte housing market analyses, we interpret our findings as indicating that the neighborhood biases of lenders, as recorded by the HOLC maps, contributed to increasing differences between neighborhoods in this period, foreshadowing the relationships that other studies have detected between HOLC map boundaries and modern-day socioeconomic and environmental disparities.

Data quality is a key input in efforts to link individuals across census records. We examine the extreme case of low data quality by identifying US census enumerators who fabricated entire families. We provide clear evidence of fake people included in the 1920 US Census for Homestead, Pennsylvania. We use the features of this case study to identify other places where information in the census may have been falsified. We develop an automated approach that identifies census sheets that have much lower match rates to other census records than would be expected, given the characteristics of the people recorded on each sheet. We perform a hand-check on the suspicious sheets using standard genealogy tools and identify at least 90 sheets where the entire census sheet appears to have been fabricated.