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 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.

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.

Moral management with its three main elements – classification of patients according to the nature of their mental disorder, elimination of mechanical restraint, and employment and occupation of patients – was the basis of mental healthcare in Britain in the nineteenth century. Despite consistent doubts about its effectiveness, moral management was implemented throughout the British West Indies following a scandal in Jamaica. Based on annual reports submitted by British West Indies colonies, we created a cross-colony time-varying dataset of mental healthcare practices and patient outcomes from 1869 to 1942 to study the implementation of moral management and its success in the West Indies. Regression analyses reveal the importance of employment, religious services, and female attendants in reducing deaths and increasing cures among patients. Physical restraint, which was still used despite being discouraged, had positive effects on survival and cures among patients.

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.