How are people's political beliefs, concerns, and passions influenced within a modern mass society? There are many mechanisms, certainly: family, school, place of worship, place of work, and military service, to name several. But certainly the various channels of the media play an important role. Newspapers, television and radio, social media, and blogs have a …
Deciphering French society
Louis Maurin recently published a valuable book on contemporary French society, Déchiffrer la société française, which is intended to shed light on the social realities of France in a way that is genuinely accessible to the public. There are chapters on population, the family, schooling, immigration, unemployment, consumption, and social values, among other important topics (link). …
Historical GDP estimates for early modern China
Li Bozhong is one of China's most influential economic historians, and he is undoubtedly the most internationally connected. Much of his work in the past several decades has been devoted to constructing a detailed economic history of the lower Yangzi Delta (for example, Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850). His findings have been crucial empirical contributions to …
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France as Theodore Zeldin saw it
Histories of France have been written from many points of view. Emmanuel Todd's The Making of Modern France: Ideology, Politics and Culture (1988), Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (1976), and Robert Darnton's Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968) have all brought a distinctive perspective to their interpretations of …
CPM in West Bengal
One thing that is interesting about Indian politics is the fact that states have a great deal of autonomy, and there are parties based in various states that are distinct from both Congress and BJP. One of those parties is the Communist Party of India, which has evolved into a pro-poor, anti-capitalist electoral party that …
The standard of living across time and space
A very basic question for historians is how to measure and compare the standard of living experienced by people in different historical settings. Is it possible to arrive at credible estimates of the standard of living in the Roman Empire, medieval Burgundy, nineteenth-century Britain, and twentieth-century Illinois? Can we say with any confidence that Romans …
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Thinking cities darkly
Image: frame from West of the Tracks Cities capture much of what we mean by "modern," and have done so since Walter Benjamin's writings on Paris (link). But unlike the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, much of our imagining of cities since the early twentieth century has been dark and foreboding. A recent volume edited by Gyan …
Ngram anomalies
Now that I've played with the Google Ngrams tool a little, I continue to think it's a powerful window into a lot of interesting questions. But I also see that there are patterns that emerge that are plainly spurious, and surely do not correspond to real changes in language, culture, or collective interest over time. …
A new tool for intellectual history
Google's NGram Viewer is a really amazing new tool for researchers in literature and the humanities (link, link, link). What is perhaps not quite so evident is the power it may have for people interested in the evolution of the social science disciplines. Basically the concept is a simple one. The Google Book project has now scanned …
Hate as a social demographic
Every democracy I can think of has a meaningful (though usually small) proportion of citizens who fall on the extreme right by any standard: racist, White supremacist, hateful, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, nativist, nationalist, or violently anti-government individuals and groups. In the United States we have many, many organizations that are basically racist and potentially violent …
Understanding Society 