Image: book burning by National Socialist paramilitaries, 1933 Image: Ukraine peasants fleeing famine Image: street battle, Spanish Civil War Arthur Koestler was an articulate witness of the atrocities of the twentieth century; and much of what he witnessed was terrible. Reading his books gives one an intense and personal vision of fascism, dictatorship, mass murder, …
What cities have in common
Images: Beijing (1900), Mexico City (2000), London (1600), Chicago (1930) The "city" is a pretty heterogeneous category, encompassing human places that differ greatly with each other and possess a great deal of internal social heterogeneity as well. Size, population structure, economic or industrial specialization, forms of governance, and habitation and transportation structure all vary enormously …
China’s agricultural history
Consider the discipline of the agricultural history of China. The following represent a sampling of research problems concerning the social and economic history of rural China in recent research: What were the patterns of population growth, growth of cultivated land, and growth of net output, in traditional China? (Perkins 1973) What was the distribution of …
Longue durée
Image: Making dikes on the Yellow River Many historical changes take place on a human scale -- the Great Depression came and went within the lived experience of many millions of people, and they were able to tell comprehensible narratives of the beginning, middle, and end. Likewise with periods of political transition and upheaval -- …
The Franco-Prussian War
The rapid, bloody, and total defeat of the French army by the Prussian army in 1870-71 was an enormous and unexpected shock to France and to Europe. Since the Napoleonic Wars it was taken as given that France's armies were powerful, well-equipped, and well generaled. But the Prussian army quickly defeated French armies across eastern …
eighteen forty-eight
The revolutions of 1848 were the stage upon which the "spectre haunting Europe" danced. Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Alexandre Herzen, Alexis de Tocqueville, and numerous other critical observers of Europe's trajectory looked at 1848 as a moment of continent-wide social and political revolution. Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution is a very interesting effort to …
Marx and the Taipings
It is interesting to observe how Europe's greatest revolutionary, Karl Marx (1818-1883), thought about China's greatest revolution in the nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). We might imagine that this relentless advocate for underclass interests might have cheered for the poor peasants of the Taiping Heavenly Army. But this was not the case. Marx wrote …
Modernism and social life
painting: Georges Braque, Woman with a Guitar (1913) Image: Mexico City slum Modernity is remarkably hard to define or capture. We might try this ostensive definition: it is the culture, mental framework, and social reality of the world created by the industrial revolution, mass society, urban life, and mass literacy and communication. It is the …
France as a "nation"
source: Emmanuel Todd, The Making of Modern France: Politics, Ideology and Culture (Blackwell, 1991) Is France one nation? What makes it so? And what are the large socio-cultural factors that led to modern France? These are the questions that Emmanuel Todd raises in The Making of Modern France: Ideology, Politics and Culture. Todd is one …
Historical populations
Historical demography concerns itself with two families of questions -- factual description of population behavior and explanation of the patterns that are observed. On the descriptive side, historical demographers are concerned with estimating the absolute population size of a group or region -- Tuscany in 1400, New England in 1700, the Anasazi in 1000. And …
Understanding Society 