By the end of the 19th century, shifts in forest property rights and associated forest uses by rural communities in Europe had affected both rural livelihood conditions and ecological functioning o...

To analyze large, digitized corpora, we introduce the new approach of “structural reading”, which combines the abstraction of distant reading with the nuance of close reading. We do so by developin...

In this article, we discuss the sources employed and the methodological choices that entailed assembling a novel, individual-level, large panel dataset containing an incredible wealth of data for a...

This article presents the findings of an experiment in the use of Artificial Intelligence text generation processes to convert historical ‘big data’ into narrative text. Using an extensive collecti...

One of the main challenges facing our society is to decouple levels of well-being from environmental impacts, particularly greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe). Historical knowledge can provide crucial ...

Question 20 on the 1870 US Census asked respondents if they had been denied the right to vote. The Census Office told Congress in 1871 that 40,800 men answered yes to the question. The Minnesota Po...

Venality was the French system of sales of public positions called offices. It was a stable and central institution within the French Old Regime. Though widely studied by historians, the topic lack...

In applied historical research, geographic units often differ in level of aggregation across datasets. One solution is to use crosswalks that associate factors located within one geographic unit to...

Using 1.6 m marriages, 1837–1939, and a genealogy of 428,000 people 1600–2022, we estimate three new occupational status indices for England 1800–1939. The first, CCC-HISCO, re-estimates the HISCAM...

Semantically enriched historical newspapers offer a multitude of opportunities for data-driven exploration and analysis. In this paper we introduce the impresso interface which integrates several t...

Using both “off the shelf” remote sensing software, machine learning and computational algorithms, this article details a new methodology to extract building and urban footprints from historical ma...

The importance of international timber trade in The United States forest transition is poorly understood. Here, we synthesize a variety of historical sources to establish a consistent socio-metabol...

Between 1850 and 1926 Ontario’s capital city, Toronto, grew from a small colonial port to one of the largest cities on the Great Lakes. In this article we introduce a rich time series dataset of sh...

Automated census linkage algorithms have become popular for generating longitudinal data on social mobility, especially for immigrants and their children. But what if these algorithms are particula...

This paper introduces four new intergenerational and multigenerational datasets which follow both sons and daughters and which can be used to study the persistence of longevity, socioeconomic statu...

Published in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History (Vol. 56, No. 3, 2023)

Despite significant research on the techniques of repression employed by medieval inquisitors against religious dissidents, the case-level influences on the penances they meted out are understood o...

Published in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History (Vol. 56, No. 3, 2023)

Published in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History (Ahead of Print, 2023)

For centuries, the Catholic Church demanded that baptisms take place in the hours immediately after birth. This custom began to lose importance in the last decade of the nineteenth century, which i...

The lack of long-term assessment of the administrative divisions of Galicia, a former part of the Austrian monarchy, has so far been a serious obstacle in the mapping and spatial analyses of archiv...

This paper describes the creation of the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-Database (LIFE-M), a new data resource linking vital records and decennial censuses for millions of ...

Abstract Quantile regression and quantile treatment effect methods are powerful econometric tools for considering economic impacts of events or variables of interest beyond the mean. The use of quantile methods allows for an examination of impacts of some independent variable over the entire distribution of continuous dependent variables. Measurement in many quantitative settings in economic history

Abstract This study investigates the main features of collected disability statistics for the censuses in Sweden, 1860–1930, when the disability prevalence rose from four to 21 individuals per thousand of the population. We use qualitative methods to analyze the means of collecting, categorizing, and defining disability, while quantitative methods help us calculate the prevalence by disability type

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