Author: Adam Slez

One of the things that I love about historical political economy is the variety of methods that are brought to bear on historical materials. This includes quantitative methods such as regression. The emergence of quantitative history as a recognizable practice was due in no small part to the new political history movement of the 1960s, … Continue reading Quantitative History, Spatial Heterogeneity, and the Problem of Generalization

As I discuss in my book, The Making of the Populist Movement, the rise of the Populist movement in the American West during the late nineteenth century is commonly described as a response to economic hardship at the hands of railroads and grain elevator companies who worked together to dictate the terms according to which … Continue reading Location, Location, Location

It has been more than a decade since the Supreme Court ruled on the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which upheld the principle that independent campaign financing is protected as a form of free speech.  As Temple law professor David Kairys describes, what made the decision so contentious was that not only … Continue reading The Small World of Corporations and the Corporate Elite in American History

In my last post, I discussed how John Mohr used network analysis to reveal the cultural logic of welfare provision in New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This time around, I want to talk about how we can use these same tools to help us think about markets and the … Continue reading The Market Network in the American West

One of the things that makes me so happy about having joined the Broadstreet crew is how often my fellow contributors write about topics that I—the lone sociologist of the bunch—get really excited about.  The obvious examples here are space and networks, which have been my main focus over my last couple of posts.  For … Continue reading History, Culture, and the Measuring of Meaning Structures

I owe our readers an apology.  I clearly wasn’t thinking about election-related burnout when I picked November 11, 2020 to write a follow-up post on the relationship between presidential voting in 2016 and the legacy of slavery in the American South.  If you can forgive me, I would like to share some more results from … Continue reading The Boundary Problem Revisited

Following up on the discussion in my previous entries, this week’s post focuses on what do when working with spatial data where the boundaries of the units change over time.  This is a familiar problem for those of doing quantitative history.  In the absence of the type of individual-level data that has become commonplace in … Continue reading Using Network Analysis to Identify Common Geographies