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Sometime during the mid-1910s, African Americans, until then almost exclusively concentrated in the Southern United States, began a mass exodus. Pushed out by poverty, oppressive Jim Crow laws, violence and disenfranchisement, Southern Blacks sought a better life in growing cities of the Northeast and Midwest. There, the booming war industry was in need of labor, … Continue reading The Great Northward Migration and Social Transformation, Part I

The Covid-19 pandemic is poised to kill people on a global scale not witnessed since the 1918 influenza pandemic. Because the influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 in the United States, it stands out among scholars as a uniquely catastrophic event. But less well-known is that the typical rate of death from infectious disease among urban nonwhites in the early twentieth century was just as catastrophic -- even in non-pandemic years.

As someone who does historical research, I think the most common question I get is “Where can I find historical data on X?”  Now, this is actually a very intelligent question (although unfortunately I don’t always know the answer). While some locations of historical data are obvious, especially if it’s a matter of public record, … Continue reading Finding Historical Data I

In my last post I discussed the role that culture plays in historical political economy. We can view culture as the lens through which one (or a society) views the world. This means that cultural forces can be a particularly potent means of locking a society into a “bad equilibrium.” It is not just that … Continue reading From Trust to Kin: The Long Shadow of Culture

by Tracy Dennison and Scott Gehlbach   Scott: Tracy, this is the first post at Broadstreet for both of us. Welcome! Tracy: And welcome to you! It feels a bit like cheating to make the first post a shared effort, but it’s very much in the interdisciplinary spirit of the blog itself. Scott: A historian … Continue reading An Interdisciplinary Conversation

A question scholars of historical political economy frequently get from those outside the field is why we need historical studies to answer questions that could also be addressed in modern contexts. One is justified to ask this, as many of us are not historians, but social scientists employing history to draw generalizable conclusions about human … Continue reading The 1920s and H1B visas

The boll weevil infestation, as Blind Willie McTell sang, would leave farmers without enough money to pay their drug store bills, buy gasoline or meals, but it also reshaped the economy and institutions of the cotton South. When I teach economic history to undergraduate students, I start with a celebration of the exciting, surprising, and … Continue reading The Ballad of the Boll Weevil