Spatial studies of British Victorian cities have been historically limited either in scope or specificity due to the unwieldiness of census data. However, over the last decade, the digitization of historical source material has created new possibilities for the exploration of geodemographic patterns. For the case of Manchester, the “shock city” of the British Industrial Revolution, these advancements are especially pertinent in order to settle long-standing debates as to the extent of segregation in the city. This article presents a method for the highly granular georeferencing of census data for the Manchester Township for the second half of the nineteenth century by drawing on historical material, including geographic and commercial surveys. Linking households to specific buildings presents increased possibilities for studies of heterogeneity and neighborhood patterns at a micro-scale. This approach ultimately lays the groundwork for future revisitations of nineteenth-century cities and the traditional claims that have been made around their urban dynamics.

Wages earned by men are often used as an indicator of the material standard of living (MSoL). However, this indicator relies on several assumptions when used for comparisons across time and space. Considering these assumptions will improve estimates of the MSoL from wages. One necessary assumption is that households in the compared populations relied on the primary income of the male head of household to a comparable degree. I demonstrate that the degree of reliance on the male income was closely associated with the complexity of households within the population. Nuclear households – typical of English-speaking countries – were more reliant on the male income than more complex households found elsewhere. Consequently, estimates based on male wages are less accurate for populations with complex households, likely underestimating their MSoL. While the complexity of households in historical populations is seldom known, it can be predicted using demographic and economic indicators. I conclude that populations at similar stages of industrialization and the demographic transition are the most comparable when using male wages to estimate their MSoL. Further, I use a reductive model to show that a household’s MSoL is determined by the following three factors: time spent on productive work, the market wage for men, and the female/male (F/M) wage ratio. My analysis shows that including the F/M wage ratio does not change the ranking of the MSoL based on male wages. Nonetheless, I argue that there are compelling reasons to expect the wage ratio to be a useful addition when comparing the MSoL of historical populations.

Three great waves of public anxiety about census privacy swept over the United States in the twentieth century. In 1940, 1970, and 2000, newspapers reported on fears of the public and politicians about invasive census questions. This article focuses on the second wave of privacy concerns surrounding the 1970 census, which focused on Big Brother and government overreach. The Census Bureau response stressed the confidentiality of census responses, but it failed to address the public concerns and sources of resistance to census inquiries. In addition to analyzing newspaper reports and congressional testimony, we examine individual refusals to respond to the census by members of the public and the Census Bureau’s responses to such refusals. By focusing on specific individual complaints instead of the general characterizations of concern found in newspaper coverage, we can gain a clearer understanding of the motives of the objectors.

Societal “crises” are periods of turmoil and destabilization in sociocultural, political, economic, and other systems, often accompanied by violent power struggles, and sometimes significant changes in social structure. The extensive literature analyzing societal crises has concentrated on a relatively small sample of well-known cases (such as the fall of the Roman Empire), emphasizing separate aspects of these events as potential causes or consistent effects. To investigate crises in an even-handed fashion, and to avoid the potential small-sample-size bias present in several previous studies, we have created the Crisis Database (CrisisDB). CrisisDB uniformly characterizes a sample of 168 historical cases spanning millennia — from the prehistoric to the post-industrial — and varying polity complexities in diverse global regions. It features data on factors that are identified as relevant to explaining societal crises and significant “consequences” (such as warfare or epidemics), including institutional and cultural reforms (such as constitutional changes) that might occur during and immediately following the crisis period. Here, we study some examples from the CrisisDB and demonstrate our analyses, which show that the consequences of crisis experienced in each society are highly variable. The outcomes are uncorrelated with one another and, overall, the set of consequences is largely unpredictable, leading us to conclude that there is no “typical” societal crisis of the past. We offer some alternative suggestions about the forces that might propel, or mitigate, these varying consequences, highlighting areas that would benefit from future exploration, and the need for collaborative and interdisciplinary work on the study of crises.

The 1891 International Gymnastics Festival, Sweden’s first international sports event and five years before the first modern Olympic Games, was hugely controversial. Many people argued that hosting the festival threatened the survival of Sweden’s own “Ling gymnastics” and even Swedish culture itself. These critics feared that hosting the competition, which would be shaped by outside influence, in turn would disadvantage Ling gymnastics and reduce confidence in a system that Swedes had believed to be the best in the world. The episode illustrates the complications arising from the emergence of international athletic competition and the underlying tension between nationalist and internationalist considerations.

We study electoral participation in the provinces of Chile from 1932 to 1950, a time when electoral democracy and a competitive party system coincided with the adoption of import-substitution industrialization and growing migration into urban areas. Drawing on provincial-level data, we assess the effect of institutional, economic, and sociodemographic factors on voter turnout. The enfranchisement of women for municipal elections in 1935 unexpectedly reduced participation, as few women initially joined the electoral rolls. Higher literacy levels were associated with lower turnout, challenging modernization theory expectations. Urbanization, in contrast, was positively linked to participation. Surprisingly, provinces with strong mining and manufacturing sectors did not exhibit higher turnout, suggesting limited mobilization by leftist parties and barriers faced by informal workers and recent migrants. The findings underscore that suffrage expansion alone is insufficient to increase participation without targeted mobilization efforts. The study contributes to understanding the complexities of democratization and highlights the importance of bottom-up political engagement to complement institutional reforms in expanding political inclusion.

This article considers indicators of group similarity and difference and their relation to institutional discrimination in the United States and Japan. For this inquiry, discrimination is operationalized as the extent to which exclusion or marginalization in society is determined by the embodiment of difference (in this case, the Western conception of race). I contend that belonging and race are tightly coupled within the US context because its society was founded on a racial hierarchy that subjugated all groups deemed “not white” for the direct benefit of enfranchised white males. Although some racial groups have made substantial gains, race remains highly consequential for the life outcomes of most individuals in the United States. Japan, however, has a much looser association between Western race and belonging. This is largely because ethnocultural identity, not the Western construction of race, has historically been the primary axis of discrimination in Japanese society. Although race as understood in the West is relevant for some forms of interpersonal discrimination, ethnocultural identity remains the primary determinant of belonging or exclusion in Japan.

This article examines the enduring connections between past and present in world history by analyzing recurrent social mechanisms and evolving practices that enact them. While sociology has traditionally emphasized discontinuities and social change, I argue that some foundational mechanisms persist across time and space, yet they appear under varying practices. Drawing from Charles Tilly’s framework of mechanisms and repertoires of practices, I identify six recurrent mechanisms in world-historical processes: threat attribution, group identification, subordination, affinity bridging, rebellion, and commodification. Then, I provide a broad historical narrative tracing their gradual emergence, beginning with threat attribution in early hominid evolution, group identification in the Upper Paleolithic, and subordination with the transition to agrarian civilizations. During the Axial Age, institutional entrepreneurs and their followers developed affinity bridging and rebellion, which emerged as a reaction to subordination, first manifesting through religious movements and later through secular political practices. I then combine these mechanisms to briefly discuss further historical processes, including the trajectories of Islam and Christianity, the European conquest of Hispanic America, the rise of modern society (where I discuss the intensification of commodification), and the evolving global order following World War II. This perspective views human history as structured by both continuity and change between the past and the present: while mechanisms persist and recur, they are enacted through historically specific and evolving repertoires of practices.