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AbstractUntil the 19th century, the UK state stayed out of education. Only in 1833 would Parliament first pass an act that subsidized education for the poor. By 1914, 160 education acts had been passed, consolidating into the state schooling system we recognize today. This paper seeks to explain this remarkable progression. I argue that the emergence of social-knowledge institutions across the West was a powerful force of cultural construction. What I term social scientization, this process was multidimensional and translocal, entailing the elaboration, reification, and diffusion of functionalist theories of the nation-state that centered national education as means to greater cultural rationalization. Longitudinal analyses on comprehensive population data comprising over 10,100 UK parliamentary acts support the core historical insight of this piece: increasingly routine and aggressive forms of state intervention in education were the progressive instantiation of the 19th-century nation-state model, which was fundamentally epistemic in character and inextricably linked to the expansive cultural content of the ascendant social sciences.

AbstractEarly in the nineteenth century, members in the UK Parliament (MPs) hardly ever debated education. When they did, it was nearly always in the context of aid for the religious instruction of the poor. Indeed, even by 1850, nearly two decades after the first Great Reform Act (1832), the Prime Minister Lord John Russell made the case that a system of compulsory state schooling would be immoral and un-British. Yet, by the '80s, MPs debating in Westminster routinely drew connections between schooling and the most critical social issues of the day: social-class mobility and equity, child welfare, national development, emigration, and the civil service, among others. What explains the expanding, and expansive, political uses that elite policymakers put to schooling? How did schooling and education take on such an aggrandized role in society for British statesmen? To address these questions, this paper combines natural language processing techniques, semantic network, discourse, and regression analyses to read and interpret the ∼1.1 million political speeches given in the UK Houses of Parliament during the long nineteenth century (1804–1913). In contrast to explanations emphasizing the direct role that economic, social, and political development as well as conflict played in the UK state's historic expansion, this piece demonstrates how social scientization, the sweeping international epistemic movement that institutionalized and diffused functionalist social theory, created the context that made it possible for political elites to see and promote schooling as an effective policy instrument of greater cultural rationalization supporting the development of capitalist industrial society.

AbstractTraditional accounts of state expansion and of the rise of state schooling in the nineteenth century emphasize economic, political, and social development as well as conflict and domination. These accounts explain the introduction of new state structures, like ministries of education, rules of compulsion, and the general elaboration of bureaucracies. This article contributes to the historical sociological study of state expansion with specific regard to schooling by refocusing on the role that macrocultural processes of social scientization played in shaping the discursive construction and expansion of the state. Designed to analyze the 1.3 million speeches given in the UK parliament during the nineteenth century, the research reported here supports the argument that the development, professionalization, and institutionalization of the social sciences—social scientization—was a powerful force of cultural construction across the West and was positively associated with expanded notions of the state, as evidenced with the case of the United Kingdom. This article therefore not only provides an important alternative view to those who emphasize economic and social transformation but it also advances the empirical study of the powerful role that social science, as generative institution of cultural construction, played in shaping official discourses of the state—in this instance, the schooling state.

Periodization is a major element in historical interpretation. The remarkable changes in the American family since World War II are reviewed in conjunction with three principal frameworks—dichotomous, secular trend, and episodic schemes—for organizing the dimension of time in the historiography of the family. How these recent episodes relate to longer-run frameworks is explored. Metaphors or models of change in family history need to be used more consciously and explicitly.

Children need to be fed, clothed, and sheltered. Historically, an additional baby usually implied a reduction of consumption by other members of a family, a burden that was not necessarily shared equally. Social historians have ignored the issue of inequality within the family. Using the household budgets of nearly 6,000 American workers surveyed in 1889-1890, this article attempts to remedy that neglect. It analyzes the differential impact of higher fertility, measured by the number of children in the household under age five, on the consumption of husbands, wives, and siblings. In response to higher fertility, the wife rather than the husband sacrificed more. Contemporary opinion demonstrates that clothing expenditures provide a good indicator of the extent of involvement in social life beyond the household. A statistical study of expenditures for the clothes of husbands, wives, and children corroborates this interpretation and suggests that the family consumption economy could be an arena of conflict. Finally, the article explores the meanings of the improving consumption status of wives during the twentieth century.

Pour Hajnal et Laslett trois spécificités définissent le système de formation des ménages en Europe occidentale septentrionale: la fréquence des individus en service domestique, un âge moyen au mariage tardif, et la résidence neo-locale des jeunes époux. Si l'on ne considère que le critère de la résidence neo-locale, l'Amérique n'appartient pas du tout, en termes de famille et de démographie, à ce modèle occidental. La société américaine s'en écarte en deux points - par le mariage précoce et par la combinaison du travail libre et du travail servile, caractères qui sont cependant compatibles avec un modèle sous-jacent d'éeconomie malthusienne en région de frontière, où la terre est bon marché et la main d'œuvre bien payée. L'examen de ces anomalies apparentes amène à la conclusion que c'est uniquement la règie culturelle de l'établissement néo-local des nouveaux ménages qui caractérise vraiment le modèle européen nord-occidental.

A striking peculiarity of American demographic history is its compara tively early decline in fertility. Although some of the decrease before the Civil War may be attributed to later and less universal marriage, marital fertility also fell Past scholar ship on the subject has focused on alternative explanations and statistical approaches to cross-sectional variations in the child-woman ratio. After showing the inherent limita tions of this approach, particularly at the level of states, this article draws on the findings of historians of political behavior and women's activities to suggest that the understand ing of the early decline in marital fertility in the United States may be most profitably pursued through the study of the fertility behavior and values of the principal action- groups of antebellum America: religious, ethnic, and economic. Both the motivations for, and possibly the techniques of, family limitation were transmitted and sustained, this hypothesis contends, through membership and participation in these groups.