Abstract 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.

Abstract This article describes household activity in 13 Indigenous communities in Alaska around 1940. Alaska is too often ignored in discussions of Indigenous economic development. Our focus contributes to a greater understanding of economic development among Indigenous communities in the region and provides an important counterpoint to Indigenous economies in the contiguous United States where agency was more limited. Certainly in 1940, Alaskan Indigenous communities were less constrained relative to many Indigenous communities in the contiguous United States. Using novel household survey data from the late 1930s that provide highly detailed demographic and economic information (assets, income, household production, and liabilities) for each Indigenous household in these villages, we get a comprehensive picture of Indigenous economic well-being at the end of the Great Depression. In particular, we document the interplay of traditional Indigenous economic activity, or the bush economy, with market opportunities. One important feature of these villages is that half were reindeer owning, which allows us to compare reindeer-owning villages and households to non-reindeer owning. Our analysis of the data shows little differences between any of the villages. Perhaps most importantly, these surveys show that Native households were robustly using both traditional and market sectors and, in 1940, none were insolvent, bankrupt, or indebted.

Abstract This article investigates tuberculosis mortality in Hermoupolis, the capital of the Greek island of Syros, during the period of continuous cause-of-death reporting from 1916 to 1940. Contemporary reports identified Greece as having one of the highest levels of tuberculosis mortality in Europe, with Hermoupolis ranking at the top within the country. In the early twentieth century, Greece launched an anti-tuberculosis campaign, primarily supported by philanthropists due to limited state intervention. The study examines the actions, if any, taken by the local authorities in Hermoupolis and analyzes mortality attributed to tuberculosis by age group and sex. The results reveal that tuberculosis mortality declined across all age groups in the 1930s, particularly among females. Deaths were concentrated in infancy, early adulthood (20–39 years), and the elderly. Clear differences in tuberculosis fatality rates among occupational classes were found, although they did not markedly differ from all-cause mortality patterns. Factors such as the lack of sanitary reforms, poor living standards, inadequate nutrition, and overcrowding could have potentially played key roles in the high tuberculosis mortality in the city. Considering the inefficacy of sanatorium treatment before the mid-1940s, it is plausible that improvements in factory working conditions and the decrease in industrial activity in the city may have contributed to the reduction in tuberculosis mortality in Hermoupolis during the 1930s.

Abstract This article analyzes the Romanian transition to communism in the late 1940s. The cultural turn in political sociology shows that state building has a strongly symbolic and performative element. Less attention has been paid to the symbolic aspects of regime change, which involves the need to not just accrue power but also diminish that of others. This article starts with a processual understanding of the state, one where a regularity such as the state needs to be validated with reference to time and space. Preexisting understandings, however, are sticky and potentially path-dependent. Regime change is therefore not simply (or always) a matter of failing to validate old understandings – but also actively elaborating and promoting their replacement. To justify regime change, Romanian communists thus worked to elaborate new historical and contextual understandings of the state, engineering a turning point that effectively established a new version of the Romanian state. Without reifying institutions, we can nonetheless make space for process itself to accumulate and (momentarily, incompletely) stabilize, such that social change is a difficult though not impossible achievement.

Abstract This article examines the evolution of the role played by the number and gender of siblings in the survival and biological well-being of individuals in rural Spain during the twentieth century. Our aim is to test how two fundamental theories – the cooperative breeding hypotheis and the resource dilution hypothesis – about how the number of siblings affect the individual come together in this area of study during a period of economic, health, and social transformation. We used a sample of 19,331 individuals born between 1900 and 1979 from 14 rural villages, for whom data on sibling count and various family and environmental variables are available. Using these data, we ran several statistical models to discover the effects of siblings on survival. In addition, we studied the long-term effect of siblings on height using height data from 2,783 male conscripts. Our results show that the number of siblings positively influenced survival, either through the cooperation of older siblings in the care of their younger brothers and sisters or through parents exhibiting higher offspring survival abilities. However, increased reproductive success may come with a disadvantage. The biological well-being, as measured by height, of male conscripts was significantly lower among individuals with more siblings in the early decades of the study. Conversely, in the later decades, the negative relationship between sibship size and height was not statistically significant when the number of living siblings was fewer than five.

Abstract What happens at the point of interchange between scholarly communities? We examine this question by investigating the case of growing ties between historical sociology and ethnography, two social scientific methods that once seemed to have little in common. Drawing on methodological writings by ethnographers and original interviews with practicing historical sociologists, we argue that these ties have been shaped by structural and methodological homologies between the two disciplines. Structurally, ethnography and historical sociology are similarly positioned in sociology more broadly, as enterprises with sometimes-tense relationships with dominant assumptions of the social sciences. Methodologically, both ethnographers and historical sociologists face the challenges of bounding the research process, navigating access to data, analyzing and retaining data while “in the field,” and overcoming cultural distance between themselves and the worlds they are studying. Taken together, these findings extend work in the sociology of science and knowledge and suggest some key conditions for intellectual efflorescence.

In George Steinmetz's Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, we find a meticulously researched and immensely detailed historical sociology text on the colonial origins of French social thought.In this review, I will discuss significant contributions that I think the book makes, before posing questions aimed not so much at critiquing the book as it stands but rather by making provocations about where sociological inquiry can build from this work toward deeper understandings of the colonial origins of French social theory and what these colonial origins mean for the development of the field.Steinmetz's wide and deep analysis of the history of colonial French sociology provides several important methodological and theoretical approaches for the historical sociology of knowledge production and the history of sociology more broadly.Choosing to focus primarily on the time period between the 1930s and mid 1960s, Steinmetz covers a deeply fraught period in French history from the Third Republic, through Vichy and Nazi-occupied France through to the Fifth republic (8).As Steinmetz notes, this was a period when decolonization especially reached greater importance in public, political, and scholarly debates (8).Steinmetz's rich archival and interview-based research examined not only the key writings of sociologists but also the developments of academic departments, the dissertations, courses, and the work of students at a variety of metropolitan French and colonial universities and colleges across Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.The detailed, informative endnotes make up almost a quarter of the total text.The reasons for this approach are theoretically and methodologically grounded.Steinmetz puts forward in the introduction a model for a Neo-Bourdieusian historical sociology of science which calls for examining thinkers and their works both individually and in relation to a series of more proximate contexts and more distanced socio-historical contexts (17).Critical to this are the fundamental analyses of the unequal

Abstract This article appraises kin availability and migration timing on French-Canadian child mortality in an early twentieth-century North American industrial city. The analysis is based on the exploitation of an original dataset constructed by linking the 1910 census data (IPUMS-Full Count) for Manchester, New Hampshire to Quebec Catholic marriage records (BALSAC) and geocoding census data at the household level (Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps). Our results suggest that the presence of maternal and paternal grandmothers in the city living in different households were associated with reduced child mortality and that French-Canadian women who arrived in the United States as children or young adults experienced higher child mortality compared to second-generation French Canadians and those who migrated at a later age.

An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.