This article addresses three critiques that pull at the loose ends of Logics of History, revealing weaknesses and bringing new theoretical resources to problems raised by but not satisfactorily resolved in the book. Each critic suggests reformulations of my claims about how structures, events, and social transformations should be theorized: George Steinmetz from wide-ranging and theoretically eclectic perspectives, Dylan Riley from a broadly Marxist standpoint, and David Pedersen from a perspective that is predominantly Peircian. While agreeing with aspects of their critiques, I also reaffirm certain features of my own arguments.

How does the logic of language combine with the logic of labor to explain historical change? This article suggests that William H. Sewell Jr.'s work can be divided into three periods, each characterized by a different answer to this question. In the work of the early cultural turn, labor and language codetermine historical change; in that of the high cultural turn, the logic of language becomes dominant; and in that of the postcultural turn, labor returns to a more central position. The article argues that these shifts result from tensions in Sewell's account of historical change and suggests a comparison with Jürgen Habermas's account of work and interaction.

This article presents a history of medicine from the patient's viewpoint. Using archival materials from the Takinogawa Health Survey, conducted in Tokyo in 1938, the article examines differences in self-reported morbidity according to patients' ages and genders. It also examines differences in their choices of treatment according to income. The article proposes to understand these differences with reference to sociocultural, biological, and economic factors.

This article takes up a central theme in William H. Sewell Jr.'s Logics of History, the relationship between relatively durable structures or systems and the more fleeting and contingent moments of their formation, their reproduction, and occasionally their radical altering. The article seeks to highlight how this tension between generals and particulars lies at the heart of the theoretical and disciplinary divisions that Sewell's book seeks to overcome. Arguing that Sewell's partial reliance on a framework inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure is inadequate for the goals of the book, the article points out that an alternative approach derived from the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce is more in keeping with Sewell's objectives.

Historically, public health workers, physicians, and reformers have used the infant mortality rate as an indicator of the goodness of a society—its general welfare, the justness of its political system, the efficacy of its public works, the benevolence of its powerful; a high rate of death among the very young was an index of a community's shame. These views of the infant mortality rate as reflecting general characteristics of a society were widely displayed in the second half of the nineteenth century even as most disease entities were becoming more narrowly defined and ordinarily linked not to the nature of society or individual predisposition but to specific pathological organisms. Using Philadelphia as a case study, we examine the history of the infant mortality rate from 1870 through 1920, both the technical aspects of its calculation and its use as an indicator of broad societal problems and a catalyst for policy. Our emphasis is not on explaining the trends in the death rates of the very young but on the uses and meanings given to the infant mortality rate during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century specifically as they related to three efforts to lower infant death rates—removing infants from the city, improving the supply of milk, and establishing child hygiene programs.

This essay surveys the contributions of William H. Sewell Jr.'sLogics of History and concludes that the book sketches a compelling agenda for an integrated historical social science. The author first summarizes Sewell's ontological and epistemological claims concerning social structure and event, history and temporality, and sociohistorical causality. The author then discusses five main areas in which ambiguities in Sewell's approach might be clarified or his arguments pushed farther. These concern (1) the relationship between historical event and traumatic event; (2) the idea of the unprecedented event or “antistructure”; (3) the theory of semiosis underlying Sewell's notion of a multiplicity of structures; and (4) the compatibilities and differences between the concepts of structure and mechanism(here the author argues that social structures are the distinctive “mechanisms” of the human or social sciences). Finally, (5) Sewell's call for “a more robust sense of the social” in historical writing locates the “social” mainly at the level of the metafield of power, or what regulation theory calls the mode of regulation; the author suggests a possible integration of this society-level concept with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of semiautonomous fields.