This article describes household activity in 13 Indigenous communities in Alaska around 1940. Alaska is too often ignored in discussions of Indigenous economic development. Our focus contributes to a greater understanding of economic development among Indigenous communities in the region and provides an important counterpoint to Indigenous economies in the contiguous United States where agency was more limited. Certainly in 1940, Alaskan Indigenous communities were less constrained relative to many Indigenous communities in the contiguous United States. Using novel household survey data from the late 1930s that provide highly detailed demographic and economic information (assets, income, household production, and liabilities) for each Indigenous household in these villages, we get a comprehensive picture of Indigenous economic well-being at the end of the Great Depression. In particular, we document the interplay of traditional Indigenous economic activity, or the bush economy, with market opportunities. One important feature of these villages is that half were reindeer owning, which allows us to compare reindeer-owning villages and households to non-reindeer owning. Our analysis of the data shows little differences between any of the villages. Perhaps most importantly, these surveys show that Native households were robustly using both traditional and market sectors and, in 1940, none were insolvent, bankrupt, or indebted.

In the US, scholars have long argued that white people across class lines share a taken for granted interest in property. Yet in the antebellum period, as land was concentrated in the hands of a few slaveholders, southern nonslaveholding white people were largely unable to partake in land ownership. Only after the Civil War did many more white people benefit from “whiteness as property,“ in part through homesteading (free land), a policy strongly pushed for by antislavery elites – who argued for, in addition to freedom from slavery, white people’s inherent interests in property. How do we explain what changed, and the specific ideology – that white people have an interest in property – which helped shape this policy? Using the case of the Homestead Act of 1862, I argue that antislavery elites articulated a property interest in whiteness. The Homestead Act is an example of struggles to articulate poor southern white peoples’s ideal relationship to landed property, according to antislavery conceptions of middle-class farming and agrarian capitalism. I show articulation processes, as antislavery figures responded to white poverty in the South, resulting in arguments for free land for white people. I also show a shift in rhetoric among antislavery Republicans in the late 1850s and early 1860s, in which they expanded their framing of homesteading to include an emphasis on bringing poor white people into modernity and civilization compatible with the politics of scientific agriculture. This article complicates accounts of whiteness as property by tracing historically specific ideologies of whiteness and land in the south in the antebellum period.

The analytical framework, “policy innovation through bureaucratic reorganization,” elucidates how the policy implementation process can be restructured to affect its outputs. Three steps from the framework are applied to the case of Republican officeholders between 1906 and 1913, who centralized their control over immigration, by adding naturalization and enforcement in the new Bureau of Immigration & Naturalization. The Roosevelt and Taft administrations used budgeting, staffing, and infrastructure to regulate immigration and naturalization laws, pivoting between easing and tightening them (resource adjustment). The shifts responded to coalitions for and against immigration (coalition management). Until the Bureau became obsolete and was reconfigured (system redesign). Although immigration was open in the Progressive Era, this study reveals how Republicans managed inflows with mixed results, leading to the structural foundation for the restrictive laws that followed. This furthers the immigration history and political control literatures as they emphasize policymaking through legislative and procedural, not structural, means.

The transformation in the purposes, instruments, and conditions for the deployment of coercion was a central aspect of the modernization of Western European states during the long nineteenth century. Nowhere is this transformation as evident as in the emergence and diffusion of public, specialized, and professional police forces at the time. In this article, we employ automated text analysis to explore legislative debates on policing in the United Kingdom from 1803 to 1945. We identify three distinct periods in which policing was highly salient in Parliament, each of them related to more general processes driving the modernization of the British state. The first period (1830s–1850s) was marked by the institutionalization of modern police forces and their spread across Great Britain. The second period (1880s–1890s) was dominated by Irish MPs denouncing police abuses against their constituents. The third period (1900s–1940s) was characterized by discussions around working conditions for the police in the context of mounting social pressures and war-related police activities. Whereas the first and third periods have attracted much scholarly interest as they culminated in concrete police reforms, the second period has not been as central to historical research on the British police. We show, however, that policing became a major issue in the legislative agenda of the 1880s and 1890s, as it highlighted the tensions within a modernizing British state, torn between the professionalization of domestic police forces under control of local authorities and the persistence of imperial practices in its colonial territories.

This article uses online genealogy data from the United States over the nineteenth century to estimate period and cohort-based sex differences in longevity. Following previous work, we find a longevity reversal in the mid-nineteenth century that expanded rapidly for at least a half-century. For measures of conditional survival past childbearing age, females enjoyed a longevity advantage for the whole century. Unlike most mortality databases of this period, genealogical data allow analysis of spatial patterns and the impacts of fertility on longevity. Our results suggest very limited evidence of spatial (state) variation in these patterns. We do, however, find evidence that the associations between fertility and longevity partially explain the trends.

This article presents new estimates of the material living standards among the rural population in southern Sweden from the 1670s up to 1865. The development of rural consumer patterns over the period is analyzed using a newly constructed database of 1665 probate inventories from three benchmark periods. It finds that that all rural households, no matter their socioeconomic status, diversified their composition of movable goods during the eighteenth century with a special focus toward increased comfort rather than household reproduction. The most visible change was an increase and diversification of cooking- and dining-ware, the furniture necessary to store and use these, as well as greatly expanded personal wardrobes. The consumer goods and behaviors adopted by the peasants and rural laborers during the eighteenth century correspond partly to the consumer revolution spreading through Europe during the period and suggest the development of a distinctly rural consumer culture. This development coincided with a diversification of rural household production, which would have given households an extra source of income, increased their reliance on interregional markets for household reproduction, and integrated the south-Swedish countryside into the wider European market from which the new consumer goods and habits associated with the consumer revolution could be introduced.

Nearly all US Black children born before 1910 were born in the American South. We use a mixed-methods design to examine Black children’s survival disadvantage over the twentieth century’s turn under the rising regime of Jim Crow. We focus on 1910 Arkansas, taking advantage of within-state heterogeneity in agriculture (plantation vs. subsistence farming), disease environments, and geographic racial concentration (macro-segregation). This one-state focus allows purposive sampling of Works Progress Administration and Behind the Veil oral interviews of Arkansan Black Americans who were born or lived under the state’s Jim Crow regime. We also use the 1910 complete-count Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) linked to US Decennial and 1916 Plantation Censuses to examine race-related differences in child mortality rates among ever-married, parous Arkansas women (n=234,811). Count regression models find the Black-White child mortality gap widest among Arkansas mothers economically tied to plantation vs. subsistence agriculture; exposed to worse health environments; living in tenant farm vs. owned-farm households; and with limited individual resources such as literacy. Oral accounts illustrate how Black children’s lives reflected contextual, living standard, psychosocial, and other health risks associated with the racialized policies and practices of the Jim Crow South; they capture otherwise hidden historical processes that linked the era’s institutional racism and child mortality.

Social scientists have long been interested in elite cohesion in American society, recognizing its potential implications for democracy and governance. While empirical research has focused on corporate elites and, in particular, on cohesion derived from shared board memberships, cohesion among those in the highest positions in the American state and historical change in that cohesion have been little studied. Drawing on a novel dataset of the career histories of 2,221 people who were appointed to these elite positions between 1898 and 1998, I examine whether administrative elites, prior to their elite appointment, attended the same educational institutions or worked in the same agencies of the federal government at the same time. I find evidence of increasing elite cohesion during the twentieth century. Educational cohesion increases significantly in the three decades following the World War II and then declines slightly toward the end of the century. This increase goes hand in hand with a change from college to graduate education as the primary site generating educational cohesion. Federal government workplace cohesion increases markedly in the 1930s and 1940s and then remains high. As people are appointed to different organizations within the American state, their educational and workplace connections create inter-agency networks that, it is expected, facilitate mutual understanding and coordination and thus help integrate the American administrative state.

Due to the scarcity of data, the demographic regime of pre-plague England is poorly understood. In this article, we review the existing literature to estimate the mean age at first marriage for women (at 24) and men (at 27), the remaining life expectancy at first marriage for men (at 25 years), the mean household size (at 5.8), and marital fertility around 1300. Based on these values, we develop a macrosimulation that creates a consistent image of English demography at its medieval population peak that reflects a Western European marriage pattern with a relatively very high share of celibates.