Abstract Data constraints determine the scope of historical research. The gradual digitalization of large sources has increased the number of approaches that can be applied to comprehend the past. Here, we show an example of how trade data can shed new light to better understand growth patterns of Latin America at the end of nineteenth century. Latin American exports during the First Globalization

Abstract This paper uses interdisciplinary methods to investigate responses to the Little Ice Age in regions where livestock farming was dominant, a neglected subject due to the scarcity of detailed written records regarding pastoral land use. It argues that landscape-level histories which include pollen evidence and archaeology can address this challenge and reveal local processes of climate adaptation

Abstract Data acquisition forms the primary step in all empirical research. The availability of data directly impacts the quality and extent of conclusions and insights. In particular, larger and more detailed datasets provide convincing answers even to complex research questions. The main problem is that large and detailed usually imply costly and difficult, especially when the data medium is paper

Abstract This study presents the first sectorally disaggregated estimates of the industrial output growth for Turkey between World War I and II. These estimates indicate that at the aggregate level the existing official index overestimates the output growth. Secondly, the sectoral disaggregation shows that the industrial growth was balanced, as both textiles and food-processing branches, which comprised

Abstract This article presents a modular, multidisciplinary methodology for tracing how different communities in the deeper past adapted their behaviors and shaped their environments to address the health risks they faced, a process also known as “healthscaping.” Historians have made major strides in reconstructing preventative health programs across the pre- or non-industrial world, thereby challenging

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

Abstract Employing a deep mapping approach we aim to increase our understanding of the social, spatial, and temporal relationships children shared with the industrial city as it grew and evolved. In this paper, we spatialize and record-link numerous local and national datasets on environments and children including the complete count IPUMS historical census data to study the lives of schoolchildren

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

Abstract We provide a detailed case study showing how social network analysis allows scholars to detect an event affecting the entire historical network under consideration and identify the responsible actors. We study the middle 13th century in Czech lands, where a rigid political structure of noble families surrounding the monarchs led to the uprising of part of the nobility. Having collected data

Abstract Drawing conceptual boundaries is one of the defining features of constitution-making processes. These historically situated operations of boundary making are central to the definition of what counts as “constitutional” in a political community. In this article, we study the operations of conceptual delimitation performed by the Constitutional Commission (1973–1978) that drafted the 1980 Chilean

Abstract The TOFLIT18 project documents French bilateral international trade flows from the 1710s to the 1820s. This article presents the TOFLIT18 dataset and its exploration tool (the “datascape”). We make four contributions: first, we discuss the institutional framework in which the sources were produced; second, we present our method to standardize the collected data and reduce the variety of commodity

Abstract Based on the life course perspective, this work adopts a sequence analysis approach to examine internal migrant trajectories and their interdependencies with life course factors. The analyses are based on longitudinal data from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands. The internal migrant trajectories of Dutch cohorts born between 1850 and 1922 are followed from birth until age fifty. Two

Abstract The topic of “missing girls” in historical Europe has not only been mostly neglected, but previous research addressing this issue usually took the available information too lightly, either rejecting or accepting the claims that there was discrimination against female children, without assessing the possibility that the observed child sex ratios could be attributable to chance, mortality differentials

Abstract A lack of regional data on the occupational structure in England and Wales during the interwar years has so far prevented extensive study of this time period. In the current paper, we fill this gap by reconstructing the occupational structure at the district level, based on a recently-digitized register for 1939 and by linking this dataset with the population censuses of 1911 and 1921. The

Abstract In the United States, recent studies have demonstrated weight gain over Thanksgiving contributing to a significant portion of annual national weight gain. Understanding the social context of how Thanksgiving celebrations were perceived is critical for preventing and reducing excess weight during this time. Energy intake from present-day data was back-calculated from body weight data collected

Abstract Since the cliometric revolution, the future of economic history has been discussed in relation to its supposedly increasing integration with economics and other disciplines. Any well-grounded argument in this regard would require a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the scientific production of economic historians in recent decades. This article provides a systematic method for collecting

Abstract Newly available digital resources from the British census identify employers and their workforce size. However, there was a non-response rate of about 2.3% for smaller firms, rising to over 10% for firms over about 300 employees, and higher for the largest manufacturing firms. Non-responses are largely random except for different forms of business organization: significantly higher for corporates

Abstract This paper presents a probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to many sources of digitized historical records. The method links records using a two-step approach, first establishing high confidence matches among men by exploiting a comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics. The method then proceeds

Abstract This article describes a comprehensive geographic information system of Third Republic France: the TRF-GIS. It provides annual nomenclatures and shapefiles of administrative constituencies of metropolitan France from 1870 to 1940, encompassing general administrative constituencies (départements, arrondissements, cantons) as well as the most significant special administrative constituencies:

Abstract Happiness economics theorizes that economic growth is only tenuously connected to happiness. This article tests this theory on historical evidence by quantifying the trend in emotional well-being (EWB) of British men during the period of rapid industrialization between 1800 and 1900, using a digitized corpus of 19,682 pamphlets published in Britain during this period and held by JSTOR. EWB

Abstract Answering the question “how many countries are there in the world?” turns out to be more complex than it seems, as there is currently no quantitative tool dedicated to this issue. Starting from the lists of national political units created by the instigators of the Correlates of War project, we have built a dataset and visual documentation that identifies the political status, whether sovereign

Abstract Political coalitions and their interaction with the Crown were central to political dynamics in England from 1660 to 1715. This paper introduces a new database of political affiliations of Members of Parliament (MPs), compiled from contemporary parliamentary lists, from 1660 to 1690. It uses the database to construct a measure of the majority Court or Opposition coalition in the House of Commons

Abstract This paper explores the existence of distinctively Black names in the antebellum era. Building on recent research that documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan, and Parman, Explorations in Economic History 53:64–82, 2014), we analyze three distinct and novel antebellum data sources and

Abstract We apply a novel methodology to the study of the Newfoundland cod fisheries in order to determine a reasoned and acceptable chronological value series for total catch amounts in the early modern period where data are scarce. The paper focuses on the two main protagonists in the Newfoundland fisheries arena in that period: France and England. The period 1675–1790 has been selected as a viable

Abstract This article uses a novel database of Ottoman probates and examines some of the methodological difficulties that arise in very long-term analysis. Wealth statistics, spanning from 1460 to 1920 in the longest subsample, indicate approximately an inverted U-shaped pattern that may signal the limits of extensive growth. While plausible, severity of the drop on the right side of the wealth curve

Abstract We study the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC). Thousands of studies rely on disaggregated trade data, but the quality of these studies’ unit of analysis—bins of goods categories arranged in certain hierarchies—is rarely studied. It is often unclear what a product or a variety really is. Meanwhile, increasingly granular trade data from before the 1950s are lifted from the

Abstract There is a dearth of systematic information about the historical New York City housing market. We present a new sample containing rental price and characteristic data for 10,715 Manhattan units which was collected from historical newspapers for the period 1880–1910. These units were geolocated to the historical map of Manhattan Island to explore their geographic coverage, using Geographic

Abstract The digital collections of newspapers have given rise to a growing interest in studying them with computational methods. This article contributes to this discussion by presenting a method for detecting text reuse in a large corpus of digitized texts. Empirically, the article is based on the corpus of newspapers and journals from the collection of the National Library of Finland. Often, digitized

Abstract Recently, the use of word embedding models (WEM) has received ample attention in the natural language processing community. These models can capture semantic information in large corpora of text by learning distributional properties of words, that is how often particular words appear in specific contexts. Scholars have pointed out the potential of WEMs for historical research. In particular

Abstract This article presents a novel geospatial approach to reconstructing and analyzing environmental change over extensive spatial and temporal scales, even in systems such as rivers and streams that are comparatively difficult to digitize. We used a drawing tablet and stylus to digitize features found on historical Army Corps maps across the spatially extensive landscape of the Lower Wabash River’s

Abstract Seasonal components of infant probabilities of dying are disentangled from monthly death statistics by age and birth by articulating demographic equations and stochastic optimization. In the Don Army Territory, for the period 1872–1915, these components reflect respiratory diseases in autumn and spring, dehydration and waterborne diseases in summer, and cold stress in winter. During the warmer

Abstract I introduce and analyze the Mexican Border Crossing Records (MBCRs), an unexplored data source that records aliens crossing the Mexico-US land border at diverse locations from 1903 to 1955. The MBCRs identify immigrants and report rich demographic, geographic and socioeconomic information at the individual level. These micro data have the potential to support cliometric research, which is

Abstract The British census asked employers to record their workforce numbers. The responses to this instruction provide a unique resource on firm size. While the responses were digitized and included in the Individual Census Microdata (I-CeM) deposit, their format limits their utility. A further data deposit, the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs (BBCE), overcomes I-CeM’s deficiencies by infilling

Historical record linkage has responded to two large opportunities in recent years. The growth of computational power and the emergence of full count historical census data are both revolutionizing the analysis of historical population change. The increased availability of full count census data has expanded the comparative terrain for addressing multigenerational or cross-population change. The exponential

Abstract Urban agglomeration economies make cities central to theories of modern economic growth. There is historical evidence for the presence of Smithian growth and agglomeration effects in English towns c.1450-1670, but seminal assessments deny the presence of agglomeration effects and productivity gains to Early Modern English towns. This study evaluates the presence of increasing returns to scale

Abstract This article argues that the existing network of roads, arising from socially mediated human behavior, represents a well-preserved feature present across a broad region and contains latent historical information that can be retrieved using appropriate analytical techniques. It presents a method combining iterative cost path modeling and proximity analysis to reconstruct patterns of historical

Abstract Township tax lists for 1783 and 1793 are used to examine the distribution of wealth and economic mobility in York County, Pennsylvania following the Revolutionary War. Measures of inequality are inconclusive, but the typical York County household was worse off in 1793 than in 1783: median wealth fell 5 percent. The poorest households recorded an increase in assessed wealth. Over 40 percent

Abstract Articulations of discontinuity and moments of dissent have been central to critical historical work. However, such vocabularies and analyses of historical change have received less attention in the emerging field of digital methods. Digital methods based on discerning patterns have focused on continuities, while discontinuities and ruptures have been derivative of trends and patterns. By contrast

Abstract Articulations of discontinuity and moments of dissent have been central to critical historical work. However, such vocabularies and analyses of historical change have received less attention in the emerging field of digital methods. Digital methods based on discerning patterns have focused on continuities, while discontinuities and ruptures have been derivative of trends and patterns. By contrast

Abstract The peculiar operation of the 1798 federal direct tax has led scholars to question whether tax officials reported the land valuations from their districts faithfully. Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson argue that southern tax assessors systemically under reported the value of southern real estate, and they adjust their income estimates to account for the likelihood of corruption. This paper

The U.S. Census Bureau has created a set of linkable census, survey, and administrative records that provides longitudinal data on the American population across the past eight decades. While these files include modern decennial censuses, Census Bureau surveys, and administrative records files from other federal agencies, the long time span is only possible with the addition of the complete count 1940

This paper overviews the research opportunities made possible by a NIA-funded program project, Early Indicators, Intergenerational Processes, and Aging. Data collection began almost three decades ago on 40,000 soldiers from the Union Army in the US Civil War. The sample contains extensive demographic, economic, and medical data from childhood to death. In recent years, a large sample of African-American

Despite there being several estimates for famine-related deaths in the west of The Netherlands during the last stage of World War II, no such information exists for war-related excess mortality among the civilian population from other areas of the country. Previously unavailable data files from Statistics Netherlands allow researchers to estimate the number of war-related excess deaths during the last

Most quantitative research on segregation and neighborhood change in American cities prior to 1940 has utilized data published by the Census Bureau at the ward level. The transcription of census manuscripts has made it possible to aggregate individual records to a finer level, the enumeration district (ED). Advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have facilitated mapping these data, opening

New large-scale linked data are revolutionizing quantitative history and demography. This paper proposes two complementary strategies for improving inference with linked historical data: the use of validation variables to identify higher quality links and a simple, regression-based weighting procedure to increase the representativeness of custom research samples. We demonstrate the potential value

(2021). Correction. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 54, No. 1, pp. 63-63.

Abstract We offer a new methodology for the construction of annual population stocks over the very long run. Our method does not require the assumption of a closed economy, and can be used in situations in which local annual gross flows are obtainable. Combining gross flows with intermittent census-type data, it is possible to arrive at local, regional and national population stock estimates at annual

Abstract This paper reconsiders one of historical demography’s most pertinent research problems: the fiddly concept of historical household formation systems. Using a massive repository of historical census micro-data from the North Atlantic Population Project and the Mosaic project, the four markers of Hajnal’s household formation rules were operationalized for 256 regional rural populations from

(2019). Working with the public in historical data creation. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 52, No. 3, pp. 129-131.

Abstract Crowdsourcing for research promises great rewards, but it is often hard to get the public involved in such a way that they are willing to spend their time and money on such a project. The Surinamese Slave Registers crowdsourcing project is an attempt to tackle this problem by combining a crowdfunding campaign with the recruitment of volunteers. To get the public interested, we focussed on

Abstract The cabreves are notarial documents prepared between the 13th and 19th centuries in the Catalan and Valencian regions of Spain. These historical records were published before the first cadastral maps and contain geographical information that could help spatially reconstruct historical landscapes. However, these documents have not been used to their full potential mainly because of their semi-structured

Abstract The male/female sex ratio (SR) and its age-specific patterns vary considerably across time and place. The SR generally begins male-biased at birth and becomes female-biased later in life, but this relationship should respond to historical trends and events. Temporal trends in SRs remain largely unstudied and formal demographic relationships are not well defined. We (1) define SRs in a life

Abstract Polish lands in 19th century are usually located in the economic peripheries of Europe. However there are no usable datasets of Polish GDP for this period to verify this hypothesis. The main problem is lack of reliable and comparable macroeconomic data from country divided between Russia, Austria and Prussia. The main goal of this research was to propose the method based on the urbanization

Abstract Linking individuals across historical datasets relies on information such as name and age that is both non-unique and prone to enumeration and transcription errors. These errors make it impossible to find the correct match with certainty. In the first part of the paper, we suggest a fully automated probabilistic method for linking historical datasets that enables researchers to create samples

Abstract This paper develops and utilizes novel methods that combine historical records concerning the diets of European naval mariners in the sixteenth century with modern information on the nutritional content of food. Energy, vitamin, and mineral intakes were compared to modern recommended values. Calorie provisions were sufficient and relatively constant in all Western European fleets. The absence

Abstract The reconstitution of populations through linkage of historical records is a powerful approach to generate longitudinal historical microdata resources of interest to researchers in various fields. Here we consider automated linking of the vital events recorded in the civil registers of birth, death and marriage compiled in Scotland, to bring together the various records associated with the

Abstract Building historical geographic information system (HGIS) datasets is time consuming and very expensive, especially when built at the scales that permit analysis of the lived experiences of individuals or the morphology of buildings or streets. Further, these datasets are often built exclusively in the academy, with little input from the contemporary communities they represent. In this paper

Abstract In this article, we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787–1828, a dataset of 42,354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time. By using household-level characteristics

Abstract The GB1900 project transcribed almost all text on 1:10,650 mapping covering Great Britain, published circa 1900: 2.6 million geo-referenced text strings, so possibly the largest specifically historical gazetteer. Nearly 1200 volunteers made 5.5 million transcriptions, including “confirmations.” This paper describes the project’s interaction with online volunteers and then presents their experience

Abstract Climatological data exists in historical documents, such as observatory registers, newspapers, ships’ logs and private diaries. Using present-day technologies, such as open source repositories and code mashups, and high-resolution digital scanning, software applications can be custom-designed to facilitate transcription of data that otherwise exists solely in paper format. We present a citizen