Suchergebnisse

This article advocates for broadening social science history to include an even larger horizon, to reach a new level of understanding of human society in the past. It builds on and shares insights from 20 years of research that integrates environmental knowledge and environmental science into a history of social change, while trying to understand in detail how people changed the environment. The focus of the research is the demographic, social, agricultural, and environmental history of the US Great Plains, from the 1870s to the end of the twentieth century. Beyond supporting the argument for a broader interdisciplinary vision of history, the article shows how the Great Plains environment was changed by human action, and the ways that the environment shaped human behavior in turn. The history of the plains shows that the impact of human action on the land was dramatic and unmistakable. People radically changed land cover, but their actions were only one factor in causing events like the Dust Bowl, and only one part of the measurable increase in greenhouse gases. At the same time, the environment also constrained and shaped human behavior, even though it had less to do with family organization than broad trends in social change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The environment's most dramatic contribution was to spur out-migration in the 1930s when drought caused widespread agricultural failure, further confirmation of the importance of going beyond purely social factors to understand how people lived in the past.

This article examines the relationship between nuptiality and industrial development in five parishes in eastern Belgium, between the mid-seventeenth century and 1790. The first sections discuss the protoindustrialization hypothesis as established by Mendels and others, and relate the industrial development of the Verviers region. The main sections of the article compare a series of mean marriage ages for women to various measures of economic conditions. The results show no significant relationship, contradicting some parts of the hypothesis. Then the article attempts to replicate Mendels's analysis more closely, by using annual changes in the number of marriages as a proxy for the crude marriage rate. While there were some relationships, they were not as expected. The conclusions to the article call for reexamination of the protoindustralization hypothesis, because of the difficulty we have had replicating some parts of it.

Between 1880 and 2000, the percentage of married men 60 and older living only with their wives in empty nest households rose from 19 percent to 78 percent. Data drawn from the US census show that more than half of this transformation occurred in the 30‐year period from 1940 to 1970, bookended by moderate increases between 1880 and 1940 and very modest increases after 1970. Two literatures have presented demographic, cultural, and economic explanations for the decline in elderly co‐residence with their children, but none adequately accounts for a sharp change in the mid‐twentieth century. Both aggregate comparisons and multivariate analysis of factors influencing the living arrangements of elderly men suggest that economic advances for all age groups in the critical 30‐year period, along with trends in fertility and immigration, best explain the three‐stage shift that made the empty nest the dominant household form for older men by the beginning of the twenty‐first century.