Mortality Trends in Massachusetts Before 1860

The debate over whether turn-of-the-century immigrants were influenced more by their cultural heritage or by their socioeconomic circumstances when deciding to send their children either to school or to work, serves to illustrate the interplay between theory and evidence in the research process. The authors examine how ethnicity, the local economy, and the family economy affected children's participation in school and work. Using cost-of-living data from 1888-1890, they find that the effects of ethnicity on children's school participation were attenuated by local and family economy factors, and in some cases ethnic group coefficients no longer differed significantly from those of Yankees. The significant effects of ethnicity on children's work participation, however, persisted even when local and family economy factors were taken into consideration.     

American Historical Demography: A Review Essay

Abstract

American historians of modern art routinely assume that after World War II New York replaced Paris as the center of the western art world. An analysis of the illustrations in French textbooks shows that French art scholars disagree: they rate Jean Dubuffet as the most important painter of the era, ahead of Jackson Pollock, and they consider Yves Klein's anthropometries of 1960 as the greatest contribution of a single year, in front of Andy Warhol's innovations in Pop Art. Yet the French texts also show that the French artists' practices and conceptions of art paralleled those of the Americans. Thus, whereas French and American scholars disagree over the relative importance of their nations' artists, there is no disagreement that the most important art of the 1950s was produced by experimental seekers, and that of the 1960s by conceptual finders.