This article explores the early modern understanding of the gut-mind relationship through a study of the beliefs and practices surrounding the hellebore plant in seventeenth-century England. Hellebore has been strongly associated with mental illness for most of recorded European history, and it is only during the past two centuries that it has lost this association. Taking a phenomenological approach

This article argues that the radical religious movements emerging during the English Revolution were indebted to a wider range of influences than is commonly assumed. This overarching argument is advanced through a close examination of a specific religious rite practiced by English General Baptists during the 1640s and 1650s: during this period, many General Baptists began to lay hands upon newly baptized

Following several attempts to fashion a broad-based national church from the Church of England by reforming the Act of Uniformity (1662), the failed Comprehension Bill that accompanied the Toleration Act (1689) was the final such proposal tabled in Parliament. Although historians have examined moments when comprehension reappeared in eighteenth-century confessional discourse, less attention has been

This paper discusses how to successfully digitize large-scale historical micro-data by augmenting optical character recognition (OCR) engines with pre- and post-processing methods. Although OCR software has improved dramatically in recent years due to improvements in machine learning, off-the-shelf OCR applications still present high error rates which limit their applications for accurate extraction

Historical city directories are rich sources of micro-geographic data. They provide information on the location of households and firms and their occupations and industries, respectively. We develop a generic algorithmic work flow that converts scans of them into geo- and status-referenced household-level data sets. Applying the work flow to our case study, the Berlin 1880 directory, adds idiosyncratic

Researchers use microdata to study the economic development of the United States and the causal effects of historical policies. Much of this research focuses on county- and state-level patterns and policies because comprehensive sub-county data is not consistently available. We describe a new method that geocodes and standardizes the towns and cities of residence for individuals and households in decennial

The demographic and epidemiological transitions of the past 200 years are well documented at an aggregate level. Understanding differences in individual and group risks for mortality during these transitions requires linkage between demographic data and detailed individual cause of death information. This paper describes the digitization of almost 185,000 causes of death for Ohio to supplement demographic

Democratic support for measures to combat climate change has been increasing throughout Europe across the political spectrum, among liberals, social democrats and confessional parties alike.1 Acknowledging heightened environmental concerns among voters, most European governments have set up generous subsidies for windmills, solar panels and electric cars in order to stimulate decarbonization.2 Yet

Taking an analysis of relevant statements and campaigns of the right-wing extremist group ‘Identitarian Movement’ in German-speaking countries as a starting point, this article will reconstruct the...

This article demonstrates how anti-gender discourse – originating in the Vatican and spreading through ultra-conservative networks such as the World Congress of Families – draws on traditions of co...

Methods for linking individuals across historical data sets, typically in combination with AI based transcription models, are developing rapidly. Perhaps the single most important identifier for linking is personal names. However, personal names are prone to enumeration and transcription errors and although modern linking methods are designed to handle such challenges, these sources of errors are critical

How did the 1918 influenza pandemic affect female labor force participation in India over the short run and the medium run? We use an event-study approach at the district level and four waves of decadal census data in order to answer this question. We find that districts most adversely affected by influenza mortality saw a temporary increase in female labor force participation in 1921, an increase

How have health and social mortality risks changed over time? Evidence from pre-1945 cohorts is spare, mostly from the United States, and evidence is mixed on long-term changes in the risk of being overweight. We develop a dataset of men entering the NZ army in the two world wars, with objectively measured height and weight, and socioeconomic status in early adulthood. Our sample includes significant

Persecution, pogroms, and genocide have plagued humanity for centuries, costing millions of lives and haunting survivors. Economists and economic historians have recently made new contributions to the understanding of these phenomena. We provide a novel conceptual framework which highlights the inter-relationship between the intensity of persecution and migration patterns across dozens of historical

Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, originally a metalworker and trade union activist, was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, leading the largest country of Latin America, with more than 212 million people. In 2020, social and labour historian John D. French, with a long career devoted to Brazilian labour history, published the much acclaimed biography Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker

This comment discusses three topics. First, John French's biography of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is located in the broader trajectory of the production of biographical narratives of activists under the auspices of the historiography of the labour movement. Second, French's daring gesture of comparing the trajectories of Lula and August Bebel, who lived in such different contexts, and the impact of

Lula and His Politics of Cunning explores the origin, roots, and evolution of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's vision, discourse, and practice of leadership as a process of becoming. This commentary invites historians of labor movements and the left to think beyond their geographical and chronological specializations. It argues that there is much to gain from thinking globally if we wish to achieve meaningful

In this paper, I consider John French's biography, Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil (2020). French discusses his methodology, which he characterizes as “a social biographical approach”. I argue that this methodology is already in historians’ toolkit. Historians writing biography seem to start with first premises rather than building on what went before. I thus

There were times – not so long ago – when it seemed that historical processes could be dissected as though human action did not matter. Those times have changed. Nowadays, scholarly biography is enjoying broad interest, also among social historians, as is shown in this issue of the IRSH, in which John D. French explains how biography can contribute to a better understanding of global labour history

John D. French's stimulating article, which explores the scope for comparing working-class leaders across time and space, is considered in this contribution by reference to my biography of August Bebel and with a particular focus on the following topics: a) historical actors as shaped by their own particular time and place; b) the importance of personal relationships and networks in making people who

The Classical Gold Standard period, with high capital mobility and fixed-exchange rates, is usually seen as the extreme case of international constraints on monetary policy. Contrary to this view, we show how central bank balance sheets offset the effects of international shocks on domestic interest rates. In contrast, in the United States, a gold standard country without a central bank, the reaction

Heightened awareness and alarmism about climate change have prompted politicians, public intellectuals and scholars alike to reconsider the political values, structures and institutions with which to confront it. A number of recurring directions of thought and experiment may be distinguished. For one, ecological authoritarianism – the strand of thought that proposes to abolish or suspend democracy

When did overseas trade start to matter for living standards? Traditional real-wage indices suggest that living standards in Europe stagnated before 1800. In this paper, we argue that welfare may have actually risen substantially, but surreptitiously, because of an influx of new goods. Colonial “luxuries” such as tea, coffee, and sugar became highly coveted. Together with more simple household staples

Abstract Demography, the social science of population studies, has changed dramatically over the past forty years, responding to a dual crisis of funding and moral legitimacy that hit the field in the mid-1970s. This article uses structural topic modeling in conjunction with the Oral History Project of the Population Association of America (PAA) to examine how demography survived the crisis. It finds

This article explores gender and the far-right in the United States with specific attention to female actors and gendered ideologies in the realms of culture and media. By focusing on several femal...

We describe a deep learning method to read hand-written records from the 16th century. The method consists of a combination of a segmentation module and a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) module. The transformer-based HTR module exploits both language and image features in reading, classifying and extracting the position of each word on the page. The method is demonstrated on a unique historical

We develop a methodology for converting card index archival records into usable data frames for statistical and textual analyses. Leveraging machine learning and natural-language processing tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS), we overcome hurdles associated with character recognition, inconsistent data reporting, column misalignment, and irregular naming. In this article, we detail the step-by-step

Fascination – even nostalgia – for the post-war years, which is widespread in scholarship and the public sphere in Western Europe, makes the era a key reference point in efforts to understand the development of politics and society since 1945. In scholarship, the period's resonance is readily apparent in the sparkling superlatives that have been used to describe it. In his seminal history of the short

Amid the many discussions of how environmentalism and democratic politics might intersect, perhaps the greatest challenge for historians has come from the simultaneously emergent and epochal shift into the Anthropocene. This is because the Anthropocene signals a world ‘after nature’, but that means at least two things. First, that human beings have become geological agents, and that we have become

U.S. military production during World War II increased at an impressive rate and led to large declines in unit costs. However, the literature has focused on elucidating detailed mechanisms behind this relationship, using small datasets on specific products. Here we take a step back and, looking at an unprecedently large collection of data, we show that both exogenous technological progress and endogenous

Contemporary reactions to neofascist movements for the most part focus on national contexts, and frequently pursue a simplistic argument about a dangerous ‘repetition of history’. Warning that historical fascism might rise again like a revenant, commentators miss the fundamentally altered strategies of fascist actors in the era of digital communication and agitation. Introducing the critical term reflexive

The article examines the far-right idea of a Jewish-led ‘conspiracy of homosexualisation’ between the 1970s and the late 1990s. To this end, it primarily scrutinizes the monthly magazine Instauration, edited by Wilmot Robertson. Embedded in a broader narrative that claimed that a Jewish-led regime of ‘liberal-minority racism’ would discriminate against white people in general and White men in particular

Since the 1980s, feminist scholars have explored the dynamic linkages between nationalism and gender. Case studies have shown representations of women as reproducers, transmitters of culturally sanctioned behaviour, signifiers of ethnic groups and markers of national identity and honour. The emergence of social media created a new digital arena for the circulation of tropes related to gender and nationalism

Disputes over whether the Scientific Revolution contributed to the Industrial Revolution begin with the common assumption that natural philosophers and artisans formed distinct groups. In reality, these groups merged together through a diverse group of applied mathematics teachers, textbook writers, and instrument makers catering to a market ranging from navigators and surveyors to bookkeepers. Besides

This special issue explores the entangled history of contemporary far-right nationalism and gender. Seven case studies apply a distinct historical perspective and analyse gender as a meta-language ...

This research examines whether an alternative exchange rate policy could have mitigated Germany’s recession from April 1930 to May 1932, when Heinrich Brüning was Reichskanzler of the Weimar Republic. Using an open-economy dynamic model as our analytical framework, we examine the arguments against adopting the devaluation policy. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that a widely held belief—that floating

In the early twentieth century, the Bata company became one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the world, and an emblematic icon of family capitalism. This paper presents an overview of the social welfare system developed by the firm, first in its hometown of Zlín (Moravia) and then in more than thirty company towns founded in Czechoslovakia, Europe, and other continents from the 1920s to the 1950s

This paper contributes to the debate on Europe's modern economic growth using the statistical concept of long-range dependence. Different regimes, defined as periods between two successive endogenously estimated structural shocks, matched episodes of pandemics and war. The most persistent shocks occurred at the time of the Black Death and the twentieth century's world wars. Our findings confirm that

This paper analyzes the politicization of the environment in the late Soviet Union based on a new perception of the interconnection between the human being and the ‘rest’ of nature. On the basis of...

The meeting between the left and ecology was belated, shocked and temporally differentiated. There were three different kinds of behaviours towards ecology, those exhibited by the opponents, the fo...

This paper focuses on Italian libertarian and anti-authoritarian environmentalism, embodied at the political level by the Radical Party and by a small organization linked to it, the Amici della Ter...

In looking at the ways in which the relationship between environmental matters and the political developed and changed in West Germany during the long 1970s, this article re-interprets the ‘ecologi...

The Warsaw positivists, one of Poland’s most influential intellectual collectives, emerged in the 1860s with an ambitious plan to strengthen the Polish nation. The self-proclaimed progressives, ena...

The transatlantic religious networks promoted by Americans after World War I not only delivered human and financial resources but they also brought about significant changes in religious and politi...

This article discusses the mobilization and demobilization of anarchist workers during the Barcelona May days of 1937. Using recently published and primary research, it analyses how and why these e...

This article analyses responses to the typhus epidemic in German-occupied Poland during the First World War. The German conquest of the Kingdom of Poland in 1915 not only instated a new political r...

Historiography on environmentalism has been growing significantly for the last two decades and is now considered a separate and consolidated discipline in the context of European studies and global history. Usually, scholars agree that though it was almost absent from any post-World War II European political discourse or electoral manifesto, and not even mentioned in the United Nations Charter, human

The dramatic decrease in international trade costs in the second half of the nineteenth century led to a global trade boom. In this paper, we examine the consequences of greater openness to international trade for regional economic activity in a small, open economy during the first era of globalization. Specifically, we provide a quantitative assessment of the role that exposure to globalization played

Abstract not available

We study the decisions of state-chartered banks to join the Fed in its first decade. Ours is the first study to combine state regulatory environment characteristics and individual bank characteristics to explain Fed membership choice. Regulatory environments that reduced the benefit of discount window access or increased the regulatory cost of joining the Fed led to fewer banks joining. Individual

During the nineteenth century, U.S. manufacturers shifted away from the “hand labor” mode of production, characteristic of artisan shops, to “machine labor,” which was increasingly concentrated in steam-powered factories. This transition fundamentally changed production tasks, jobs, and job requirements. This paper uses digitized data on these two production modes from an 1899 U.S. Commissioner of

Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? At first glance, with its rising levels of population and per capita income, it seems Russia was in a transition away from Malthusian equilibrium. However, the joint increase in population and per capita income could also have been the result of Russia’s high land-to-labor ratio. Which of the two is it? Such a problem is a frequent one in economic

Dorothy Cobble's magnificent, sweeping saga of the 100 plus year struggle for “full rights feminism” introduces us to myriad activists who sought common ground in the expansion of civil, political, economic and social rights as the key for raising the standard for working women, and by extension for all of humanity. However, as Cobble notes, some full-rights activists did not measure up to the potential

Cobble's study of American social democratic feminism is a fascinating narrative of the lives of women who crossed the boundaries of class, race and nation-states to build a better world. Her chronological account of the careers and activism of these women is not only a major contribution to the history of feminism but also a significant addition to the study of social democracy worldwide.

This introduction to the review dossier on Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality, introduces the major themes of the work in light of Cobble's earlier interventions in gendering labor history and focus on laborite activist women here called “full rights feminists”. It asks the contributors to expand on and decenter the transnational and global

In 2018, the International Labour Organization published a study about the critical role of paid and unpaid care work for the health of society, the economy, and the planet and about the ways that care work is sustained through the super-exploitation of women, particularly migrant women and racially and ethnically marginalized women. Dorothy Sue Cobble's sweeping, carefully researched, and beautifully

Abstract In this article, the authors attempt to advance discussions of mercantile concentration in British North America in the eighteenth century by employing two measurement tools common in the field of industrial organization-concentration ratios and the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index (HHI)—to measure and analyze concentration levels in Charleston, South Carolina between 1735 and 1775. These tools

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a handful of societies began creating and enforcing impersonal rules, rules that treat everyone the same, on a broad scale. The existing institutional literatures, while appreciating the importance of impersonal rules for the rule of law, have not understood how they contribute to economic and political development through rules that are enforced but not followed:

The introduction outlines content and scope of this special issue on "Housing, Hiding and the Holocaust". It points out that during World War II-ccupation accommodation became a scarce commodity, with collapsing housing markets. As a consequence, in those places where the German army (and navy) was stationed, direct contact between the occupiers and the occupied couldn't be avoided. Worst hit by housing

As elsewhere in Poland, the German occupation deeply disrupted the relations and social dynamics between the non-Jewish population and the Jews in Tarnów from the very first day. Investigating housing, property and the urban space in a society under occupation, in a Kräftefeld dominated by the German occupiers, offers new insights into this relationship. It traces the notions of an ethnically encoded