Robert Allen characterized the region of Strasbourg in France in the period before 1789 as exceptionally poor. New evidence suggests, however, that Allen underestimated wage levels because of a failure to include payments in-kind and to clarify the differences between skilled and unskilled workers. Moreover, his wages came from a region that is wider than Strasbourg per se. The use of wage data for the agricultural sector that were higher in nominal terms than Allen’s, with reference to regions like Paris and southern England, elevates the economic standing of Strasbourg and, by extension, that of France.

Economic development in the Polish city of Lodz was a function of both geography and institutions. Neither geographical nor institutional factors, if taken separately, was a sufficient condition for long-term development. Although the economic achievements of Lodz depended on environmental factors throughout the entire period before World War I, dynamic progress there had to await the establishment of a beneficial institutional background—a change from wool to cotton production, the abolition of a custom’s border, and the construction of a railway system—in the nineteenth century.

A new data set provides vital information about the world’s political institutions, from 1789 on a monthly and yearly basis and from 1600 on a yearly basis. The yearly data set from 1600 has more than 90,000 country–year observations, and the monthly data set from 1789 more than 600,000 observations—by far the most comprehensive to date, offering several advantages over other available ones. The data set aggregates specific attributes to create nominal and ordinal rankings of political regimes on a scale of 1 to 1,000. In addition to supporting a rigorous classification of democratic and nondemocratic regimes, it allows researchers to trace institutional variations and to explore alternative ways of aggregating political institutions. As a research instrument, the MaxRange data set permits historically minded scholars to address a number of issues related to the dynamics of political institutions in an unprecedented manner.

During World War II, the Soviet media depicted children suffering as well as children actively participating in the war effort and mothers making sacrifices for them. Such mixed messages served clear political purposes, publicizing Nazi atrocities while deflecting attention from the Soviet state’s failure to protect its children. Historians have tended to approach such images and stories within a framework of trauma that validates stories of children’s suffering, despite their political purposes, while also discounting wartime accounts and postwar (and post-Soviet) reminiscences that highlight children’s strength and recovery. The concept of resilience, as developed in psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology, however, allows historians to understand such material as authentic and vital components of survivors’ understandings and memories of the war.

Philippe Aries' hypothesis that parental indifference is inversely related to infant and child survival has proved to be particularly influential during the last four decades. Aries uses Montaigne's apparent indifference to the deaths of his own infant children as an example to support his case. But it can be argued on the basis of firmer supporting evidence not only that Montaigne was a caring father but also that infant and childhood mortality were not universally high in modern Europe.

Progressive-era activists claimed that poverty led to broken homes: Impoverished parents—particularly single mothers—were compelled to place children in the care of relatives or institutions. The 1910 census asked all ever-married women how many of their children were alive on the census date. Many women had “missing” children; they reported having more than were living with them. Nearly 25 percent of white single mothers and more than 30 percent of African-American single mothers under age thirty-five had missing children, many of them likely in substitute care. Sizable fractions of young African-American married mothers and remarried mothers of both races also had missing children. The data indicate that placing children in substitute care was associated with limited household resources but was also related to the migration patterns of the period.

The capture-recapture method, which ecologists, demographers, and social scientists utilize to estimate the size of contemporary populations that cannot be subjected to conventional enumeration or census-taking procedures, has never been applied to the study of a historical population. Using it to uncover the size and characteristics of the colonial American community in London finds regional variations in the demographic patterns of provincial Americans who traveled to London during the late colonial period, challenging the presumption of a common colonial reaction to metropolitan culture on the eve of American independence.