Abstract: This article examines the 522 most important composers in the last 800 years, as identified by Charles Murray (2003), in terms of their birth location and migration It also examines detailed patterns of migration and tendencies to cluster in certain cities for those composers born between 1750 and 1899 This information is compiled from the large, Grove Music Online (2009) encyclopedia There is also some discussion of the biases evident in choosing “significant” composers The data show a marked level of migration of important composers going back many centuries suggesting that the phenomenon of globalization had impacted on composers many centuries before its effects were more widespread The data also show a marked level of clustering in certain cities

Abstract: Many previous investigations have relied on entries in encyclopedias or similar sources (e.g., Who's Who) to quantify eminence and achievement. The premises in these earlier studies have been that eminence is a function of reputation and that reputation is accurately captured by encyclopedias and the like. In this article, the authors examine reputational changes from era to era. They expected that a comparison of encyclopedias from different eras would show significant changes, with some eminent persons having reputations (or at least biographical entries) that increase, some having reputations that decrease, and others having stable reputations. Can such change (or stability) be reliably assessed and predicted? To address these questions, encyclopedia entry length from 1911 was compared to encyclopedia entry length from 2002, using 1,004 individuals selected in a previous biographical study. Regression analysis indicates that biographical entries did in fact change significantly. The authors al...

Abstract: In this article, the authors examine the growth of secondary school attainment in the United States between 1940 and 1980, exploring several different conceptual frames of reference. Using state-level data, the authors identify a diffusion model of educational expansion using a fixed-effects panel regression approach. This method is used to analyze change over time, with particular attention to evaluating nonlinear processes of growth. The authors consider the effect of a number of correlates on changing patterns of enrollment in the postwar era. Regional differences in attainment diminished during each decade, and a limited number of social and economic developments appear to have influenced rising enrollment, although most attainment growth appears to have been linked to a self-generating process of diffusion.

Abstract: In their exploration of an alternative approach to large historical databases, the authors aim to bridge the gap between the anticipations regarding Web-based collaborative work and the prevailing practices and academic culture in social and economic history. Until now, the collaboratory model has been derived from examples in the natural sciences. Moreover, publications on collaboratories in the social sciences and humanities revolved primarily around the potential of this model and were rarely based on actual research practices. In this article, the authors report on practices, risks, and opportunities of collaboratories in the field of social and economic history. The collaboratory model is a feasible alternative for the creation of large historical databases, but the practical challenges of such an enterprise are greater than generally assumed. In the concluding section, the authors formulate a number of guidelines for scholars interested in setting up collaboratories.

Abstract: The historical causes of landscape degradation in tropical highland central Mexico remain poorly understood. Scholarly contention exists over the landscape effects of livestock introduced during the sixteenth century. In this article, the author considers the methodology of using land grant documents to assess livestock's environmental impact during the early colonial period (1521–1620 CE). The investigation focuses on the southeastern Valle del Mezquital as a case study by which to reconsider the methodologies of previous scholars. The author then presents a spatial reconstruction of sheep ranching in the case study area. This reconstruction indicates that the majority of sheep ranches occupied mountainous zones where indigenous agriculture would have been absent. This suggests that sheep overstocking likely instigated soil erosion in the higher elevations whereas agricultural terrace abandonment triggered soil erosion in the lowlands, which together resulted in landscape-wide environmental degr...

Abstract: Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke is an ambitious book about the history of world trade during the millennium 1000–2000 AD. The intent of the authors is to overcome the twin tyrannies of time and space that have limited earlier authors. The book is comprehensive in covering nearly all the regions of the earth for a thousand years. A theme of the book (contained in the title borrowed from Jacob Viner) is that the history of trade has been characterized by the interaction of economic forces and political and military forces. Although the book deals with many topics, it is primarily a history of trade, rather than a general economic history or a history of economic growth. The authors are prolific scholars in the fields of international trade and economic history, and they incorporate material from a vast scholarly literature. It is an economic history of trade, but it is clearly written in a style than makes it accessible to noneconomists. I am not aware of a better trade history for the period.

Abstract: In this article, the author presents a strategy for designing relational databases with the program FileMaker Pro (FileMaker) to study the histories of individuals and organizations. The approach facilitates efficiency in inputting data and flexibility for constructing statistical analyses from the raw data. The key feature of the strategy is to define the basic unit of observation in the database in terms of an agent, an event, and a date. Given that programs such as FileMaker can easily sort data by agent and date, once one structures the data correctly, he or she can construct well-ordered event histories for agents, even if the researcher enters the data in an unordered fashion. By using events that happened to an agent at a particular time as the basic unit of observation, one maintains maximum flexibility to do statistical analysis that aggregates basic data in different ways. This article illustrates the power of the approach by outlining ways to analyze changes in geographic distances bet...

Abstract: Two great movie directors were both born in 1930 One of them, Jean-Luc Godard, revolutionized filmmaking during his 30s and declined in creativity thereafter In contrast, Clint Eastwood did not direct his first movie until he had passed the age of 40 and did not emerge as an important director until after he was 60 This dramatic difference in life cycles was not accidental, but was a characteristic example of a pattern that has been identified across the arts: Godard was a conceptual innovator who peaked early, whereas Eastwood was an experimental innovator who improved with experience This article examines the goals, methods, and creative life cycles of Godard, Eastwood, and eight other directors who were the most important filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Spielberg, and Francois Truffaut join Godard in the category of conceptual young geniuses, while Woody Allen, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Martin Scorsese are cla

Abstract: Both Brian Balogh’s A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America and Morton Keller’s America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History are attempts to bring some order and definition to the U.S. political past by organizing the many discrete events of our history and noting the patterns and processes that constitute periods of continuity and others that reveal moments of refocusing and redirection in “the changing shape of the American political universe” (Burnham 1965)—that compose the broad macropolitics of our history. Both volumes present revisionist arguments about the nature of the U.S. political past as they identify the distinct “regimes” (Keller) and the different “epochs” (Balogh) that constitute the years since the 1780s. These tend to be chronologically extensive, each encompassing familiar, shorter, period identifications, such as the Age of Jackson, the Gilded Age, the Progressive era, and the New Deal era. In Keller’s case, he directly challenges the current dominant understandings about U.S. political history’s distinct eras. In Balogh’s study, his focus is on the nineteenth century, but he necessarily reaches backward and forward to situate what happened and then to challenge, in his turn, the accepted notion that the United States was dominated by laissez faire outlooks and behavior throughout the nineteenth century, outlooks that only began to shift in the years after 1900. Their synthesizing efforts are not unfamiliar. Others have essayed similar efforts, looking for internal continuities, cutting points, and the appearance of a different set of charac-

Abstract: The most astonishing item in Randolph Roth's massive new book, American Homicide, is not encountered until pages 450–51. Here the reader comes across figures 9.4 and 9.5, the author's usefully tabu...

Abstract: Historians of the U.S. Congress often draw claims from interpretations of legislators’ rhetoric and the outcomes of key votes. In this article, the author tells a cautionary tale: Such strategies ignore the correspondence between roll-call voting on select issues and broader coalitional structures in Congress. He does so by examining contrary positions about a key issue during the New Deal: On the one hand, some researchers claim that reasoned congressional deliberation on the issue of administrative oversight was separate from the prevailing legislative concerns of the day. Other scholars, on the other hand, assert that the prevailing issue dimensions in Congress included administrative oversight. Using a Bayesian measurement method, Ordinary Least Squares, and probit regression, and a novel selection of roll-call data, the author tested these claims, concluding that broader coalitional structures subsumed issues of administration.

Abstract: T he Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present is a hugely ambitious book, and any reader will be awed by its breadth and depth. Do not be confused by the book’s title, because what you get is rather a sweeping and stimulating account of family life, work, consumption, and material progress in Europe and North America over the last four centuries, written from the novel vantage point of the household economy. For Jan de Vries, who has been a professor of history and economics at the University of California at Berkeley since 1973, the book also represents some sort of culmination of many years of research. In 1994, his article of a similar title appeared in the Journal of Economic History (de Vries 1994), and in 2000 the same topics were presented within the McArthur Lectures at Cambridge University before the writing of this book. The resulting product comprises six chapters that follow a chronological organization. Chapters 1–4 advance the main point of the book, namely the “Industrious Revolution,” which de Vries locates in the “long eighteenth century” (ca. 1650–1850). Then in chapter 5, he goes on to explain how this industrious revolution ended in the mid-nineteenth century and gave way to a new model of household organization called the “breadwinner-homemaker household.” In chapter 6, he explores the post–World War II developments and finds that the breadwinner model has been eroding and seems in the process of being washed away by a second industrious revolution that bears considerable resemblance to its precedent in the long eighteenth century.

Abstract: In the literature on financial crises, it has become a familiar meme to scour the history books and dig up unfortunately timed quotes on the rosiness of conditions on the eve of economic collapse. ...

Abstract: Most microlevel studies in the social sciences have focused on the impact of different measured variables. While some studies have also dealt with unobserved variation, it has usually only been controlled for to perfect the estimates of the observables. In this article, the authors applied a modified version of a recently developed method designed to quantify the effect of unobserved variation in continuous time multilevel models, called a median hazard ratio. It allows a direct comparison of the effect of unobserved heterogeneity with standard relative risks. The method is used in an analysis of infant and child mortality in southern Sweden during the period 1766–1895. The empirical findings indicate that unmeasured differences between families were more important than either socioeconomic status or gender throughout this period.