Claims that today’s digital technologies are unprecedented in their effect on society are founded on a weak understanding of the roles played by pre-digital technologies. Although the landline phone was the most ubiquitous American technology of the twentieth century, and an important influence on social and political life, it has received little attention in most fields of scholarship. But widespread use of the landline telephone is key to explaining how activists in the U.S. Central America movement of the 1980s sustained their commitment and sense of community. Telephony’s emotional and sensory qualities, underpinned by the powers of the human voice, were significant factors in the Central America movement’s longevity and potency. Communications technology had a profound influence on the character and results of protest movements well before the digital age.

Newly available paleoclimate data and a re-evaluation of the historical and archaeological evidence regarding the Uyghur Empire (744–840)—one of several nomadic empires to emerge on the Inner Asian steppe—suggests that the assumption of a direct causal link between drought and the stability of nomadic societies is not always justified. The fact that a severe drought lasting nearly seven decades did not cause the Uyghur Empire to collapse, to wage war, or to disintegrate gives rise to speculations about which of its characteristics enabled it to withstand unfavorable climatic conditions and environmental change. More broadly, it raises questions about the complex suite of strategies and responses that may have been available to steppe societies in the face of environmental stress.

Mexican parish registers provide a rich trove of data for analyzing trends in mortality and fertility and changes to indigenous family structures. Surnames are links between different times in the past, as well as to geographical areas. Surname meanings can be clues to ancient social systems and religious values. Attention to the use of gender-differentiated surnames and the practice underlying intergenerational surname transmission offers a new approach to the study of kinship and family organization among both precolonial and colonial Tarascans, leading to a deeper understanding of the meanings behind these surnames. Moreover, differing degrees of native surname retention could well be helpful in charting rates of cultural change in various places.

Bread was a basic food staple as well as a marker of status in medieval societies. A study of Byzantine and Islamic textual sources combined with an archaeological scientific study of teeth remains from four excavated sites in modern Turkey demonstrates that literary stereotypes about access to high-quality bread may have held in densely populated urban settlements but not in society on a wider scale. Peasants, the lowest social group, also had access to high-quality bread. In regions inhabited by diverse groups, differences in food consumption did not depend on religion or culture.

Rococo art and Enlightenment science, both of which flourished in Paris from 1710 to 1740, appear to have embodied two different sets of values. But the stylistic differences between them dissolve in their common concern with making and manipulating substances. Scientists at the Paris Academy of Science, especially René Réaumur and Charles Dufay, experimented on many of the same substances that artists used, often exploiting the same properties. Studying style and substance together brings out the connections between art and science and shows the value of respecting these two disciplines when writing their history.

The use of longitudinal data from the criminal records of a sample of 6,042 female prisoners in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Victoria reveals limitations in the traditional method of examining criminality within specific offense categories. Investigations devoted exclusively to particular categories of women’s offenses potentially obscures the extent to which women resorted to multiple forms of offending. Such versatile activity challenges conceptions of women as predominantly petty offenders by suggesting that some women were arrested for minor offenses because of their engagement in more serious crimes and their participation in criminal sub-cultures.

Pre-industrial apprenticeship is often considered more stable than its nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts, apparently because of the more durable relationships between masters and apprentices. Nevertheless, recent studies have suggested that many of those who started apprenticeships did not finish them. New evidence about more than 7,000 contracts across several cities in three countries finds that, for a number of reasons, a substantial minority of youths entering apprenticeship contracts failed to complete them. By allowing premature exits, cities and guilds sustained labor markets by lowering the risks of entering long training contracts. Training flexibility was a pragmatic response to labor-market tensions.

Corpus linguistics enables the analysis of patterns in large bodies of written material. The use of this approach to trace discourses about infant mortality in all of the text published by four newspapers in England and Wales between 1870 and 1900 detects systematic variations in views about infant welfare by locality. It also reveals some of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in interrogating digitized text with linguistic tools in historical research.

A population’s average stature reflects its cumulative net nutrition and provides important insight when more traditional measures for economic well-being are scarce or unreliable. Heights on the U.S. Central Plains did not exhibit the antebellum paradox instantiated in the eastern urban areas; they increased markedly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, becoming the tallest in the world. Whites were taller than blacks on the Central Plains where slavery was not the primary source of labor, but whites were also taller than blacks in the American South where it was. Immigrants from industrialized Europe were shorter than black and white Americans but taller than Latin Americans and Asians.

The genealogy of the Andong Gwon-ssi in the Seongwha period—the oldest extant genealogy in Korean history—offers a unique opportunity to explore political changes and gain insight into the formation of inner circles in Korea during the thirteenth to fifteenth century. Social-network analysis of the marriage networks within this genealogy reveals that for elite families in medieval Korea, marital strategy was as important as ancestry to the maintenance of social/political status.

The English Agricultural Revolution began during a period of climate change in which temperatures decreased significantly. Lower temperatures meant less bacterial activity, a slower release of mineral nitrogen into cultivated soils, and a shorter growing season for crops—a combination that tended to diminish yields. The English farmers reacted by increasing the flow of organic matter and manure into the soil, thus mitigating the negative effect of the colder temperatures to some extent. When the temperatures rose again, the faster mineralization of soil organic matter led to bountiful yields that encouraged English farmers to continue with these innovative strategies. The upshot is that the English agricultural revolution was more a discovery than an invention, that the English agricultural revolution was more a discovery than an invention, induced by a combination of climate challenges, social and institutional settings, and market incentives.

A close analysis and interpretation of the last will and testament of a grain merchant written in 1616 Kazimierz Dolny, Poland, sheds light on the process by which possessions were bequeathed and assigned meaning. Material goods were deeply embedded in human relationships and heavily invested with religious importance, especially concerning the attainment of salvation. Testaments disclose ideas about ownership, the built environment as a site of exchange, and the power that goods could accumulate over time. In revealing the significance of material culture during the early modern era, they yield crucial insights about the interconnection between society, culture, and economy.

Approaches from social history, medical anthropology, and the history of the emotions can aid in the understanding of sick and physically impaired children as they appeared in the miracle stories of medieval England. An analysis of the medical and religious meanings attached to bodily defects in the Middle Ages discovers that hagiographers harnessed the emotions evoked by childhood illness to create a distinctly Christian concept of childhood imperfection.

Despite recent research about the link between social capital and economic growth, the degree to which social norms influenced the first phase of Italy’s regional economic divergence remains largely unexplored. A methodology based on a multifaceted definition of social capital, employing data about charity, mutual aid, and crime permits estimates of the differences in the strength of trust and cooperative norms across Italy’s provinces at ten-year intervals between 1871 and 1911. Further analysis of trust and cooperative norms via regression models of conditional convergence in industrial value added per capita shows that, although regional disparities in social capital were large during the late nineteenth century, they are not strongly correlated with industrial growth. Instead, the evidence indicates that human capital, innovation, and formal institutions were far more instrumental in determining the economic fortunes of Italy’s provinces before the World War I.

Analysis of the stature and body mass of men from the Kingdom of Poland who were drafted into the 1913/14 Russian army finds that Christians and Jews born in Warsaw were taller than their counterparts from small towns and villages. However, conscripts from Warsaw had less body mass than did conscripts from rural regions; the body mass index ( bmi ) of a significant proportion of the Warsaw contingent indicates nutritional deficiency. The difference in stature between inhabitants of Warsaw and those of the provinces is attributable to the dietary advantages of the urban environment. The higher bmi of the conscripts from the provinces derived from their greater muscle mass, achieved through the hard labor typical of rural environments. Young males in Warsaw tended to economize on food to spend more on the amusements typical of urban environments, not usually conducive to muscular development.

The Don Army Territory in southern Russia from 1867 to 1916 offers a unique opportunity to follow mortality variations across religious denominations (Orthodox, Old Believers and Coreligionists, Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Armenian-Gregorians, Buddhists, and Muslims) in a context of severe climatic conditions, urbanization, economic mutations, and improvements in hygiene and medicine. Denominational groups were differentiated by ways of life, residential segmentation, hygiene practices, and medical knowledge. The most educated and urban denominations had the lowest mortality. Religions determined mortality patterns, doing duty for nonexistent or scarce physicians among the Orthodox, laying down rules of hygiene, and promoting doctrine on fertility and child care.

Despite a consensus about the main factors influencing economic mobility in Indonesia, such as labor-market opportunities and childhood circumstances, virtually nothing is known about how these factors increased economic standing in the colonial and postcolonial periods. The use of height data as a proxy for people’s economic situation, however, finds that whereas ethnicity was a strong predictor of economic status before Indonesia’s Independence, education assumed that role after 1946.

Current scholarship reinforces the notion that by the early modern period, plague had become largely an urban concern in northwestern Europe. However, a data set comprised of burial information from the seventeenth-century Low Countries suggests that plague’s impact on the countryside was far more severe and pervasive than heretofore supposed.

Between 1687 and 1702, the Euphrates River changed course and jeopardized the stability of the eastern Ottoman Empire when a large segment of it changed course. The abrupt channel shift became entangled in a complex web of troubles (climatic, epidemiological, political, and financial) that reinforced each other and left behind a profoundly altered ecological and political landscape in a rural region southwest of Baghdad. It facilitated the fall of a traditional center of power in the region and accelerated the rise of the Khaza’il tribe.

Accounts from victims and observers, including new research in the U.S. National Archives and the Bavarian National Archives, suggest that American soldiers committed crimes against persons—especially rape and various forms of assault—and against property in Europe after World War II more often than statistics about charges and prosecutions at the time indicated. More importantly, previously unexamined statistical summaries of crimes committed by American troops, as recorded by the U.S. Provost Marshal, provide unprecedented quantitative information about these crimes in the European Theater of Operations (eto) during the first postwar year, May 1945 to June 1946. The absolute number of crimes decreased as the number of troops declined, but the rate of crime (number per 10,000 troops) increased during the same period.