Suchergebnisse

AbstractQuantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the "New History" that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the "cultural turn" of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

Quantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the "New History" that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the "cultural turn" of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the 21(st) century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

An explosion of new data sources describing historical family composition is opening unprecedented opportunities for discovery and analysis. The new data will allow comparative multilevel analysis of spatial patterns and will support studies of the transformation of living arrangements over the past 200 years. Using measurement methods that assess family choices at the individual level and analytic strategies that assess variations across space and time, we can dissect the decline of patriarchal family forms in the developed world and place Northwest Europe and North America in global comparative context.

This note revisits the author's June 2009 PDR article, "Reconsidering the Northwest European family system." Using an array of contemporary and historical census microdata from around the world with simple controls for agricultural employment and demographic structure, I detected no significant differences in complex family structure between nineteenth‐century Western Europe and North America and twentieth‐century developing countries. This article adds two new measures designed to detect stem families and joint families. The results suggest that Western Europeans and North Americans have had a long‐standing aversion to joint family living arrangements, and that this pattern cannot be easily ascribed to demographic and economic conditions.

During the past four decades, historians and demographers have argued that historical Northwest Europe and North America had a unique weak‐family system characterized by neolocal marriage and nuclear family structure. This analysis uses newly available micro‐data from 84 historical and contemporary censuses of 34 countries to evaluate whether the residential behavior of the aged in historical Northwest Europe and North America was truly distinctive. The results show that with simple controls for agricultural employment and demographic structure, comparable measures of the living arrangements of the aged show little systematic difference between nineteenth‐century Northwest Europe and North America and twentieth‐century developing countries. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that Northwest Europeans and North Americans had an exceptional historical pattern of preference for nuclear families.

Revisionist historians maintain that the aged in nineteenth-century America and north-western Europe usually preferred to reside alone or with only their spouse. According to this interpretation, the aged ordinarily resided with their adult children only out of necessity, especially in cases of poverty or infirmity. This article challenges that position, arguing that in mid-nineteenth-century America coresidence of the aged with their children was almost universal, and that the poor and sick aged were the group most likely to live alone. The article suggests that the decline of the multigenerational family in the twentieth century is connected to the rise of wage labour and the diminishing importance of agricultural and occupational inheritance.

The "end of welfare as we know it" in the United States was predicated on the belief that the welfare system was responsible for a dramatic upsurge of single- parent families. This article addresses the issue historically, examining the poten tial impact of interstate differences in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefit levels on family structure from 1940 to 1990. The author's results reveal that the impact of AFDC on family structure was considerably smaller in the period from 1940 to 1970 than in 1980 or 1990. It is concluded that increasing welfare benefits cannot account for a significant portion of the increase in illegitimacy, divorce, or separation in the postwar period. Nevertheless, rising benefit levels are significantly associated with changes in the living arrangements of unmarried mothers.

The U.S. Public Use Census Microdata Files as a Source for the Study of Long-Term Social Change