This presidential address discusses the developing body of research on the quality and idiosyncrasies of historical data, focusing in particular on historical census microdata. I argue that greater attention to source criticism as a genuine subfield of social science history is essential for four reasons: to fully benefit from the expansion of big historical data, to imagine new ways to analyze historical data beyond the intentions of creators, to share insights with a wider range of scholars, and to contribute nuanced perspectives on historical data to public debates surrounding the use of these sources. I contend that historians outside social science history are vastly underestimating the creativity that is happening in our field. I also argue that social science historians are underestimating how important our work is to informing public discourse.

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.

Historical and criminological studies of female participation in gangs and organized crime have tended to focus on mixed-sex, male-dominated groups. This article offers an examination of the “Forty Elephants” gang, an all-female criminal group that operated in twentieth-century Britain. Drawing on digitized newspaper sources, the study uses social network analysis (SNA) to trace structural shifts across two periods associated with different leaders of the gang. The findings reveal a shift from a relatively centralized network in the gang’s earlier years to a looser, more diffuse structure in the later period, with influence spread across multiple figures rather than concentrated in a single, dominant leader. These structural changes are contextualized within broader historical developments, including internal gang conflict, law enforcement attention, criminal justice responses, and shifts in offending methods. By combining quantitative SNA with qualitative historical analysis, the article demonstrates how digital methods can reveal overlooked patterns of female collaboration and co-offending. In doing so, it challenges stereotypes of women as marginal offenders and provides a methodological model for applying network analysis to historical crime research, where such methods remain underused.

This article interrogates the formation of a national political consensus around coal in the United States. In the postwar era, the domestic future of coal was seriously challenged by the oil, gas, and nuclear alternatives. In less than two decades, however, coal mining shifted from being one of multiple energy options to being a national political project tied to regional development and energy sovereignty. Why did this shift occur? Using archival data, I argue that it was not primarily a response to market forces or corporate pressures but was furthered through the work of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). In the years following its inception in 1965, the agency articulated the coal consensus as both a solution to the problem of Appalachian underdevelopment and to the looming energy crisis. In doing so, it brought together the interests of regional, federal, and corporate actors around this consequential project. In this article, I delineate a pathway through which bureaucratic agencies can play a decisive role in the formation of political ideas and advance our understanding of the conditions that make energy transitions possible.

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.

Richard Nixon won a narrow popular and electoral vote victory in 1968. This article investigates whether newspaper endorsements, which heavily favored Nixon, were pivotal in his victory. Utilizing the shift in endorsements between 1964 and 1968, we find a sizable endorsement effect. This estimated effect was large enough to be pivotal: eliminating Nixon’s endorsement advantage would have deprived him of an Electoral College victory, resulting in a contingent election. Alternatively, if newspapers had endorsed his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, at the same rates they endorsed Johnson in 1964, Humphrey would have won the Electoral College.

Why did almost every Latin American state embrace the norm of Indigenous constitutional inclusion over the past five decades? Established sociological answers focus on the spread of global norms or on bottom-up pressure from social movements. However, these accounts are incomplete, overlooking the core political logic within the state that drives Indigenous inclusion – namely, legitimacy. In this article, I present a historical analysis of every instance of constitutional Indigenous inclusion in Latin America between 1970 and 2023, documenting significant variation in the timing (chronology) of norm adoption. In addition, I introduce a novel index of inclusion, shedding light on another significant source of variation: the degree of inclusion. Using comparative-historical analysis, I argue that these sources of variation largely reflect instances of legitimacy deficits: situations in which governments face pressure to demonstrate their legitimacy to specific legitimacy audiences. The cases analyzed show that policymakers enacted inclusionary policies in order to bolster state legitimacy in the eyes of domestic or international audiences and that domestic stakeholders generally achieved stronger forms of inclusion than international actors. Indigenous groups usually gained much less when governments pursued reforms mainly in order to appease eternal audiences.

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.

How do state actors interpret and share information? Theories of the state have long recognized the role of legibility – the modes and practices by which states render society and nature knowable through intervention and information collection – in constructing and maintaining state power. Yet, research has only begun to explore the processes by which information is created and diffused within state administrations. Drawing upon theories of agency relations in states, this article explores how administrators’ communicative practices shape knowledge and legibility. Through examining memos, legislative studies, and draft legislation for decrees recognizing water rights in the French Protectorate in Morocco, I identify a set of common patterns in the construction of bureaucratic information as it moves from street-level administrators to central officials. In analyzing these patterns, I demonstrate how administrators’ obligations and their understandings of the state’s political projects determined not only how French officials collected information, but what they communicated to others. As information moved across administrative levels, officials iteratively changed information. Joining critiques and extensions of legibility theory that emphasize the role of non-state actors in the construction of state knowledge, I argue that we must also attend to intra-state dynamics. In tracing communication and information, I demonstrate that information is iteratively constructed by state agents according to their administrative position and transformed by its particular bureaucratic routes. Modeling legibility and the development of state knowledge requires attending to administrators’ agency, their relationships with each other, and their understanding of the state’s goals.

How did Protestant female missionaries influence women’s political participation in colonial Korea? Under Joseon Confucian norms, women were excluded from education and public life. The first Western female missionary arrived in 1885 and trained Korean “Bible women,” creating spaces for women’s education and organization during colonial rule (1910–1945). While existing research examines missionary effects on education and fertility, impacts on political participation remain unexplored. Using historical mission records and data on independence activists, I find that greater exposure to female missionaries led to greater female political activism. Gender-specific ordinary least squares analysis reveals that female missionary exposure strongly predicts women’s activism, whereas it has no effect on men. To strengthen causal identification, I employ missionary children as an instrumental variable. Mechanisms operate through female role models and informal networks, including Bible classes and home visits. These findings provide the first systematic evidence linking Protestant missions to women’s political empowerment before suffrage, with effects persisting in female political representation after 1945.

The challenge of addressing contentious and repressive histories in authoritarian regimes that have undergone post-totalitarian transitions presents precious opportunities for historical justice, as the representation of history and the production of historiography are decentralized from the central state. Using the production of Chinese local gazetteers in post-Mao China as a case and drawing upon a combination of historiographical, archival, and field methods, we investigate three critical negotiation fields where gazetteer compilers, who also held government ranks, interacted with central leaders and other local bureaucracies to exert discretionary control over local historical production within their jurisdictions. This decentralized negotiation over historiography illuminates the intricate interplay between ideology, agency, and tradition in the production process of the Chinese county gazetteers, offering nuanced insights into modern Chinese history and the complexities of historiographical writing under authoritarian governance. Overall, our article shows that knowledge production under authoritarian rule is more interactive and horizontal than thought, and that historiographical writing can adapt to and challenge authority in pursuit of historical justice.

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.

This article investigates how early modern migrants articulated identification with their host society in the context of the late eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, a period preceding modern nationalism. Drawing on a unique dataset derived from the Prize Papers – a collection of testimonies from captured sailors interrogated by British Admiralty courts – we analyze migrants’ declarations of sovereign allegiance. We assess how factors such as duration of residence, local citizenship (poorterschap), occupational rank, and marital status influenced migrants’ identification with their adopted polity. Using logistic regression, we find that civic institutional embeddedness, reflected in city citizenship, and occupational rank, especially among ship captains, significantly predicted identification with the Dutch Republic. In contrast, duration of residence and marital status had weak and statistically insignificant effects. Our findings highlight that pre-national forms of identification were deeply embedded in civic and institutional contexts rather than simply reflecting modern nationalist sentiments. By combining quantitative analysis with targeted archival research into individual biographies, this study demonstrates the complex interplay between institutional opportunities and personal networks in shaping migrants’ allegiances, thereby offering a nuanced historical perspective relevant to contemporary debates on civic integration.

Gwageo in Joseon Korea (1392–1897) was a civil service examination system rooted in meritocratic principles, selecting government officials based on Confucian scholarship. From its inception in 1393 to its abolition in 1894, a regular gwageo examination was mostly held every three years, while special examinations were held irregularly. The frequency of special examinations increased over time, and their total number eventually reached nearly three times that of the regular examinations. The sociology of education proposes that educational expansion and changes in selection rules tend to benefit the privileged more before benefiting the less privileged. Using historical records of successful civil service examination passers that are linked to information on family backgrounds, this study examines the differences in the family backgrounds of passers between regular and special examinations. The results show that the privileged, such as those with more ancestors who passed previous examinations and those who came from powerful family clans, accounted for a higher proportion in special examinations than in regular examinations. This tendency was more pronounced during periods of the Joseon Dynasty when the power of the privileged was particularly strong. These findings suggest that the privileged groups’ adaptation strategies to new and varying rules are applicable even in premodern examination systems, such as the gwageo in Joseon Korea.

This article proposes a mixed-method approach to examine historical censuses with regard to race. It does so by exploring various kinds of demographic records from nineteenth-century Buenos Aires in order to test the conventional hypothesis of a significant census underenumeration of the city’s population of African descent. Starting from the overall progression of census results, the article is divided into three parts. The first of these deals with potential under-coverage, the second with the possibility of classificatory changes, and the third with vital statistics, largely derived from parish books. With special attention to two censuses of the 1850s, it concludes that Buenos Aires’s Afro-descendant population likely did suffer serious demographic decline between 1840 and 1890.

Decolonization left the future of small, city-states uncertain. Without large domestic markets to turn to, some city-states developed financial industries. Comparing Kuwait and Singapore, I examine how these states developed their financial sectors after decades of colonial underdevelopment. While both states sought to develop international financial centers, Singapore was far more successful in doing so. Kuwait opened numerous merchant-owned, domestic commercial banks but with sluggish rates of growth, while Singapore saw the emergence of new state-run banks; the consolidation, modernization, and growth of privately owned banks; and the establishment of a rapidly growing global financial center. I identify three processes to explain this divergence: (1) the state’s ability to discipline merchant-capitalists; (2) the institutional legacies of colonialism and postcolonial maneuvering; and (3) the incorporation of transnational experts into ruling coalitions. By unearthing the mechanisms of financial development, this article contributes to sociologies of development, finance, expertise, and small states.

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.

How and why did East Asians develop their tight-knit social relationships? In answering this question, I have developed a theoretical notion, the social cage, which is a social institution that rice-farming societies have built to discourage their members from exiting. Initially, this comparative-historical study traces back to the Song Dynasty to consider two institutionally complementary revolutions as the sources of contemporary social cages in East Asia: the emergence of the wet-rice transplanting technique and the evolution of Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism (Sung Idea). Next, by comparing the Jiangnan area of Southern China, Korea, and Japan during the premodern period, this article provides antecedent, premodern footages of contemporary rice cultivation cultures and their caging institutions. The article also suggests that the social cage institutions shaped through ecology–human interactions in the premodern era persistently affect industrialization outcomes today. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings as they pertain to contemporary social theory.

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.