When it emerged as a discipline a century ago, the historical and comparative description of political institutions dominated political science. The self-consciously rigorous analysis of behavior inspired by psychology and the physical sciences began to displace historical analysis in the 1920s. By the 1950s and 1960s the behavioral revolution came to dominate the discipline’s research agendas. Leading practitioners acknowledged that the discipline’s tone was predominantly ahistorical.

The history of the family lacks a history. Sociologists and historians rarely cite interpretative literature written before the last third of the twentieth century. Curiously, at least for the discipline of history, recent scholars have seemingly regarded older perceptions as relics of a prescientific past.

This foray into intellectual history will demonstrate that ignoring the history of this field also distorts it. My case study considers what is widely regarded as the largest revision in thinking about the history of the family—the complete overthrow of what William J. Goode, the sociologist most credited with its rejection, has derisively called (1970: 6) “the classical family of Western nostalgia.” Kertzer and Hogan (1988: 84) have aptly summarized the chief elements of the interpretation overturned by the revisionists: “Until recently, the popular image of Western family history pictured people as living in large extended family units that had multiple functions. With the advent of industrialization, it was thought, this system was transformed into one characterized by small, nuclear family units having more specialized functions.”

The first issue I wish to discuss is a distinction, familiar in the economics literature, between the study of equilibrium conditions and the analysis of the path by which this equilibrium is achieved. The study of equilibrium conditions tells us where under certain specified (and unspecified) assumptions the system will end up. It does not specify either the path taken to equilibrium, or how long a time must pass before the new equilibrium is achieved. This may remind some of Chicken Little, whose repeated assertions that the sky is falling still left that event’s timing somewhat uncertain. But often the length of this lag till the sky falls is of particular interest for political and other studies of the historical process, since it is crucial to know when the equilibrium is achieved and also how this length of time might itself influence the eventual equilibrium. It may be interesting for some questions of historical analysis or applied economic theory when we accept that something is “condemned to . . .” or that “it will eventually . . .”, but it is no clear that such statements should be regarded as historically or economically relevant or interesting in all cases.

The market imperative—that is, the need to institute market mechanisms as solutions for a variety of social problems—seems to dominate current political debate in Latin America. Administrations as diverse as those of Collor de Mello, Fujimori, Menen, and Salinas de Gortari have been implementing economic reforms based on neoconservative principles. Privatization of public enterprises, national economies opened to foreign competition, the freeing of financial markets, and the compliance with International Monetary Fund (IMF) guidelines are now accepted goals among parties and leaders that, just a decade ago, contributed to building interventionist, redistributionist, and developmentalist coalitions. Broad segments of the political class now believe that only the wholesome implementation of free-market principles can lift Latin America from its decade-old crisis. Among the left, this apparent hegemony of market ideology has engendered confusion and pessimism. The heritage of authoritarian regimes, the protracted regional economic crisis, and, more recently, the revolutions of Eastern and Central Europe seem to have defeated the viability of alternative discourses about the crisis and its solutions.

Walter Dean Burnham (1965, 1970) demonstrated that non-voting and various measures of aggregate electoral instability increased between 1900 and the late 1920s, declined somewhat during the New Deal and its aftermath, and increased thereafter. To Burnham, the behavior of these measures implied a similar evolution in the partisan strength of the electorate since individuals without strong partisan ties are characterized by lower levels of turnout and more inconsistent turnout and partisan choices, both over time for the same office and across different offices in the same year. In short, he argued that the entire twentieth century, save for the New Deal, was marked by an “onward march of party decomposition.”

Mutual aid societies represent intentional institutionalized cooperation. Groups of individuals pool their resources to provide risk protection and social benefits for themselves in what are usually inhospitable settings. Such organizations are clearly adaptive at the group level. However, their development and maintenance require considerable investment of time and financial resources that could be applied to more individualistic ends. What incentives encourage individuals to assume leadership responsibilities in such organizations? And by what means are free riders prevented from negating the organizations’ efforts by sinking the system?

Height at young and adult ages reflects the cumulative nutritional experience of the individual both during the growth years and during the fetal period. Hence, mean height in a population is not only an indicator of economic fortune but also a predictor of morbidity and mortality (Waaler 1984; Barker et al. 1990; Fogel, Haines, et al. 1991; Costa 1993). Economic historians have been able to use time series of heights to describe trends in economic well-being and in mortality (Fogel, Engerman, and Trussell 1982; Margo and Steckel 1982; Fogel 1986; Brinkman et al. 1988; Floud et al. 1990). Cross-sectional analyses of the determinants of heights have provided clues to changes in morbidity and mortality trends. Investigations of heights have taken advantage of the significant quantities of military records that are available. The data obtained from military muster rolls for the United States consist of name, age, height, occupation, place and date of enlistment, and place of birth.

When African-American workers broke labor strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were acting in opposition to established social norms concerning race, class, community, and the state. Imagine platoons of African-American men who ordinarily lacked protection of their most basic civil rights escorted by police into a hostile European-American community to take the jobs of European-American workers who were expressing their working-class consciousness through a labor union that excluded their fellow African-American workers. Scholars have interpreted African-American strikebreaking as an example of the ethnic stratification characteristic of the American working class (Bonacich 1976; Gutman 1962, 1987; Foner and Lewis 1979, 1980; Spero and Harris 1931). What was its political-economic context? That is the central question of this essay.

Population has always been recognized as a fundamental resource of the state. In nineteenth-century Europe, however, the relationship between population—a body of people capable of working, fighting, growing, or moving collectively—and the state underwent a significant transformation as national governments found it increasingly more important to know their populations quantitatively. Satisfaction of this need required the creation of national institutions to carry out censuses and monitor the vital statistics and migratory movements of population.

One of the hallmarks of the written history of nursing is the idea that the apprenticeship system of nurses’ training, lasting from the 1870s through the 1930s, was characterized by exploitation. “Emergencies and understaffing” dictated the training of nurses, according to Susan Reverby, because “the demands of the hospital for a work force meant that pupils’ education was continually sacrificed to the exigencies of hospital work” (1987: 64–65; also see Kalisch and Kalisch 1986).

“The worker has different opinions than his employer and is naturally socialist,” Toulouse’s police commissioner asserted confidently in 1849. “I have made this observation after visiting several workshops, especially those of printers, bookbinders, hatmakers, and tailors . . . where workers speak enthusiastically of 1793 and of the need to renew the terrors of this period in order to improve the conditions of the working class” (Aminzade 1981: 95).

Sometime After 1968, analysts and participants began to speak of “new social movements” that worked outside formal institutional channels and emphasized lifestyle, ethical, or “identity” concerns rather than narrowly economic goals. A variety of examples informed the conceptualization. Alberto Melucci (1988: 247), for instance, cited feminism, the ecology movement or “greens,” the peace movement, and the youth movement. Others added the gay movement, the animal rights movement, and the antiabortion and prochoice movements. These movements were allegedly new in issues, tactics, and constituencies. Above all, they were new by contrast to the labor movement, which was the paradigmatic “old” social movement, and to Marxism and socialism, which asserted that class was the central issue in politics and that a single political economic transformation would solve the whole range of social ills. They were new even by comparison with conventional liberalism with its assumption of fixed individual identities and interests. The new social movements thus challenged the conventional division of politics into left and right and broadened the definition of politics to include issues that had been considered outside the domain of political action (Scott 1990).

The concepts of “repertoires” and “cycles” of collective action, as popularized in recent years in the works of Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, respectively, are the focal point of this essay. I explore these concepts in the context of a set of data based on 7,664 incidents of social conflict and political protest occurring in Japan during the period 1590–1877, in order to investigate their temporally and spatially comparative robustness.

Lydia J ——, daughter of a widow with five children, was admitted to the Boston Female Asylum, an orphanage run by women, in 1826, at the age of four. When she was 11 she was apprenticed to a Boston physician and his wife. On her eighteenth birthday, Lydia agreed to remain with the family as a salaried servant, but six months later she left “to learn the business of dressmaking.” Lydia’s specialized training in a needlework trade supported her until her marriage, four years later, and in all likelihood at later periods in her life.’

In 1892 fifty-five former election officials began serving prison terms at hard labor for their actions at 16 precincts during the election of 1889 in Jersey City, New Jersey. A legislative investigation had concluded that approximately 10,000 fraudulent ballots were cast that year—more than one-third of the city’s votes (Sackett 1895: 321–55; McCormick 1953: 171–73). For many observers the episode’s most remarkable feature was not the criminal behavior but the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators. Contemporary accounts of Gilded Age politics attest to electoral chicanery in virtually every state (Davenport 1881; Harris 1929: 1–20; McCook 1892; Summers 1987: 51–67; Benson 1978: 169–85). Many present-day scholars contend that electoral corruption reached its nadir in the nineteenth century.

Like american historians of the colonial period, historians of New France did not neglect, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, the problem of differentiation between the inhabitants of the New World and the metropolitans from whom they descended. It is thought that with the decline in French immigration after 1675 and the rapid Canadianization of the population, the relative isolation of the colony favored the creation of a particular type of French people, whose originality was reflected in such domains as physique, character, language, military strategy, and so forth. Was demographic behavior one of these particularities, or even oppositions, as the French officer de Bougainville noted in 1756: “It seems that we are a different nation, even an enemy” (Filteau 1978 [1937]: 252)? More specifically, how did reproductive behavior adapt to the living conditions prevalent in the St. Lawrence valley during the first century of European settlement?

Married women’s entrance into the market economy proceeded at a slow but steady pace between 1890 and 1910. That, at least, is the impression given by conventional census measures of the percentage with “gainful occupations,” which practically doubled in both the United States as a whole and in the heavily industrialized state of Massachusetts (see Table 1). This impression is misleading on at least two counts. Declines in self-reporting and enumerator bias may have overstated the increase in married women with gainful occupations. More important, dwindling opportunities for informal market activities, such as industrial homework, provision of services to boarders, and participation in a family farm or enterprise, may have countervailed increases in formal market participation. In Massachusetts, at least, married women’s specialization in non-market domestic labor probably increased.

The early economic development of regions of recent European settlement such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and Argentina was similar in that each region began by exporting products with a high natural resource content. Yet in each case the pace and character of growth and development has differed depending on the timing of the initial settlement, the nature of institutions, and the type of resource export and its market demand. The economic development of resource abundant, sparsely populated regions has been explained by what has become known as the staples approach or models of export-led development.

Central american events of recent decades show human behavior at both its most courageous and its most barbaric. The opposing phenomena of popular mobilization and state terrorism pose some of the most profound questions that can be asked by social science. How can we explain the willingness of political elites and their agents to slay thousands—tens of thousands—of their fellow human beings, even when their victims are unarmed? Conversely, how do we account for ordinary people undertaking collective action under circumstances so dangerous that even their lives are at risk?

A quick comparison of characteristic British struggles in 1758 and 1833 will show how greatly the predominant forms of popular collective action changed during the intervening 75 years. That change sets a research problem that I have been pursuing for many years: documenting, and trying to explain, changes in the ways that people act together in pursuit of shared interests—changes in repertoires of collective action. This interim report has two complementary objectives: first, to situate the evolving concept of repertoire in my own work and in recent studies of collective action; second, to illustrate its applications to the experience of Great Britain from the 1750s to the 1830s. It will do no more than hint, however, at explanations of the changes it documents.