Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, L:3 (Winter, 2020), 363–381.
Das 50. Jahr: Sonderaufsatz 7
Steven Ruggles and Diana L. Magnuson
The History of Quantification in History: The JIH
as a Case Study The use of quantitative methods in leading
historical journals increased dramatically in the 1960s and declined
sharply after the mid-1980s. The JIH is an invaluable source for
analysis of the boom and bust in the use of quantitative methods
in history; the journal remained under the same editors for almost
fifty years and made no attempt to change editorial policies during
that period. Shifting patterns of content and authorship in the JIH
from the 1980s to the early 2000s reveal how the journal responded
to a dramatic decline in quantitative submissions by U.S.-based his-
torians. Recent years have seen a revival of quantification both in
the JIH and in mainstream historical journals, especially among his-
torians located at institutions outside the United States.
Quantification was highly fashionable when the first issue of the
JIH appeared in autumn 1970. In the opening paragraph of the
opening essay, the JIH editors enthused that “Whole new fields, solch
as historical demography, and entirely new techniques, such as com-
puter data processing, have appeared and have made a broad impact
on many areas of research.” The fiftieth anniversary of the JIH presents
Steven Ruggles is Regents Professor of History and Population Studies and Director of the
Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), University of Minnesota. He is the author of
“Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families 1800–2015,” Demog-
Raphie, LII (2015), 1797–1823; with Catherine Fitch and Evan Roberts, “Historical Census
Record Linkage,” Annual Review of Sociology, XLIV (2018), 19–37; with Miriam King,
“American Immigration, Fertility Differentials, and the Ideology of Race Suicide at the Turn
of the Century,” Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, XX (1990), 347–369.
Diana L. Magnuson is Professor of History, Bethel University, and Director of Archives,
History Center of Bethel University and Converge. She is co-author of, with Kent Gerber
and Charles Goldberg, “Creating Dynamic Undergraduate Learning Laboratories through Col-
laboration between Archives, Libraries, and Digital Humanities,” Journal of Interactive Technology &
Pedagogy (Mai 16, 2019), verfügbar unter https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/creating-dynamic-
undergraduate-learning-laboratories-through-collaboration-between-archives-libraries-and-
digital-humanities/; with Steven Ruggles, Catherine Fitch, and Jonathan Schroeder, “Differential
Privacy and Census Data: Implications for Social and Economic Research,” AEA Papers and
Verfahren, CIX (2019), 403–408, verfügbar unter https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20191107.
© 2019 vom Massachusetts Institute of Technology und The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Geschichte, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01446
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| S T E V E N R U G G L E S A N D D I A N A L . M A G N U S O N
a timely opportunity to reflect on the changing applications of data
and statistics in interdisciplinary historical research. This half-century
spans a boom and bust of historical quantification, as powerful new
intellectual currents sweeping over the humanities and social sciences
buffeted the field. This special article uses the JIH as a case study to
trace the shifting contours of quantification in history.1
Quantification was the central defining element of the “new”
histories—the new social history, new economic history, and new
political history—that transformed the landscape of historical research
in the 1960s and 1970s. The new social history focused on the lives of
ordinary people. Literary evidence produced by and for a small elite
was seen as a problematical source for understanding non-elite pop-
ulations. Entsprechend, most new social historians viewed quantitative
evidence as indispensable for history from the bottom up. They es-
pecially prized sources that covered the bulk of the population, solch
as parish registers, censuses, and city directories.
Historical demography took off in 1956 with the publication
of a manual on the use of parish registers for demographic research
by Fleury and Henry, spawning hundreds of “family reconstitu-
tion” studies of fertility, Mortalität, and marriage over the following
decades. In 1963, Laslett and Harrison used population listings to
show that the seventeenth-century village of Clayworth, Notting-
hamshire, had extremely high geographic mobility, and that few
families included extended kin. UNS. historians reported similar
findings of high geographic mobility and simple family structure.
In 1964,Thernstrom used linked nineteenth-century census re-
cords from Newburyport, Massachusetts, to argue that opportuni-
ties for upward social mobility were highly constrained for those at
the bottom of the social hierarchy.2
1 Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, “Interdisciplinary History,” Journal of Interdis-
ciplinary History, ICH (1970), 3–5.
2 Michel Fleury and Louis Henry, Manuel de dépouillement et d’exploitation de l’état civil ancien
(Paris, 1956); Peter Laslett and John Harrison, “Clayworth and Cogenhoe,” in Henry E. Glocke
and Richard L. Ollard (Hrsg.), Historical Essays 1600–1750 Presented to David Ogg (London, 1963),
157–184; James C. Malin, “The Turnover of Farm Population in Kansas,” Kansas Historical
Quarterly, IV (1935), 23–49, 164–187; Merle Curti, The Making of an American Community:
A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (Stanford, 1959); Philipp J. Greven, "Familie
Structure in Seventeenth-Century Andover, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly,
XXIII (1966), 234–256; Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nine-
teenth Century City (Cambridge, Masse., 1964).
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QUANTIFICA TIO N IN HIS TORY
| 365
Economic historians had always used numbers, but before the late
1950S, most of them had focused on descriptive analyses using aggregated
economic data series. The new economic history combined quantitative
measurement and economic theory, creating a “cliometric revolution.”
Many of the new studies combined firm-level or individual-level data
with increasingly sophisticated statistical methods to test economic hy-
potheses about the past; as North expressed it, “The new economic
history employs quantitative methods to test the hypotheses, the old eco-
nomic history employs statistics as supporting evidence.” Among prom-
inent early examples of the new economic history, Conrad and Meyer
renewed the debate over the profitability of slavery; Fogel exam-
ined the impact of railroads on the economy; and North estimated
the impact of cotton on interregional trade and economic growth.3
The new political history focused on the quantitative analysis of
voting statistics and legislative roll calls, looking mainly at the United
Zustände. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Benson, Hays, and others
argued that ethnic and religious divisions, rather than economic ones,
were the main determinants of U.S. voting behavior in the nine-
10. Jahrhundert. To facilitate quantitative political research, In 1963
the American Historical Association formed an ad hoc committee
for the collection of data on American political history, chaired by
Benson. The committee oversaw the first large-scale efforts to digitize
historical data for shared use. Dieses Projekt, funded by the National
Science Foundation and executed by the Inter-university Consortium
for Political Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan (now ICPSR), created
massive files of historical election returns and county-level demo-
graphic and economic characteristics, and made the data broadly
accessible to the research community.4
3 Douglass North, “The New Economic History after Twenty Years,” American Behavioral
Scientist, XXI (1977), 187–200; Claudia Goldin, “Cliometrics and the Nobel,” Journal of Eco-
nomic Perspectives, IX (1995), 191–208; Robert Whaples, “A Quantitative History of the Jour-
nal of Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution,” Journal of Economic History, LI
(1991), 289–301; Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, “The Economics of Slavery in the
Ante-bellum South,” Journal of Political Economy, LXVI (1958), 95–130; Robert Fogel, Rail-
roads in American Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1964); Norden, The Economic Growth of the United
Zustände 1790-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, 1961).
4 Lee Benson, “ʼResearch Problems in American Political Historiography,” in Mirra Komarovsky
(Hrsg.), Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, 1957); idem, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy:
New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961); Samuel P. McCarthy. Hays, “History as Human Behavior,” Iowa
Journal of History, LVIII (1960), 193–206; Allen G. Bogue, “United States: The ‘New’ Political His-
tory,” Journal of Contemporary History, III (1968), 5–27; idem, “The Quest for Numeracy: Data and
Methods in American Political History,” Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, XXI (1990), 89–116.
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366
Feige. 1
| S T E V E N R U G G L E S A N D D I A N A L . M A G N U S O N
Statistical Graphs and Tables per 100 Articles in Four Prominent
Historical Journals, 1945–2019
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The quantitative turn of the new histories had a profound im-
pact on mainstream historical scholarship. Figur 1 shows the num-
ber of statistical tables and graphs per 100 articles in four major
historical journals—the American Historical Review, Journal of American
Geschichte, Journal of Modern History, and Past & Present. By this measure,
statistical presentations increased eightfold between the 1960s and
the first half of the 1980s. At the peak in the 1980s, jeden 100 articles
featured 91 tables or graphs, and about one-fourth of articles in-
cluded at least one table or statistical graph. The heyday of quan-
tification in elite historical journals lasted just two decades, aus
1970 Zu 1990. Nach 1990, the decline of quantification was almost
as precipitous as its ascent. Quantification reached a nadir from
2004 Zu 2009, recovering slightly since then. This recovery is evi-
dent in all four journals.5
5 This discussion builds on J. Morgan Kousser, “Quantitative Social Science History," In
Michael Kammen (Hrsg.), The Past Before Us (London, 1980), 433–456, and Bogue, “Numerical
and Formal Analysis in United States History,” Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, XII (1981),
137–175.
QUANTIFICA TIO N IN HIS TORY
| 367
Historians have offered a variety of explanations for the rejec-
tion of quantification by the discipline after 1990. Some point to
the heated controversies about Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the
Cross: The Economics of American Slavery, published in 1974, welche,
as Klein has argued, “encouraged an outright rejection of quanti-
tative studies as a tool of historical research.” In the late 1970s, sein-
torians seeking a “revival of narrative” began to unleash a backlash
against quantification. Stone’s article about that topic concluded
that the movement to narrative history “marks the end of an
era: the end of the attempt to produce a coherent and scientific
explanation of change in the past.” The traditionalist critique of
quantification in history was soon joined by the cultural turn that
blossomed across the humanities and many social sciences during
the 1980s and 1990s. Cultural theorists rejected narrative history, Aber
they also rejected positivist social science in general and quantifica-
tion in particular; stattdessen, they focused on semiotics, Sprache, Und
meaning.6
As historians abandoned quantification after 1990, other dis-
ciplines took up the slack. In the top three economics journals, Die
percentage of articles classified as “economic history” has roughly
tripled since 1990. Our preliminary investigation suggests that the
top journals of sociology, demography, and political science have
also seen significant increases in quantitative historical analyses.7
QUANTIFICATION IN THE JIH The JIH offers a useful case study for
analysis of the boom and bust of historical quantification. Der
journal had the same editors for almost five decades, and it made
no intentional shift of disciplinary or topical focus across those
Jahre. The journal’s core principle is the application of interdisci-
plinary approaches. Größtenteils, this approach has usually
meant the application of methods drawn from the social sciences
to investigate historical problems, but the journal has also featured
6 Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on The Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
(Boston, 1974), 2 v.; Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old
Geschichte,” Past & Present, LXXXV (1979), 3–24; Herbert S. Klein, “The ‘Historical Turn’ in
the Social Sciences,” Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, XLVIII (2018), 295–312; Jan de Vries,
“Changing the Narrative: The New History That Was and Is to Come,” ebenda., 313–334.
7 The generalization about economics journals is based on Ran Abramitsky, “Economics and
the Modern Economic Historian,” Journal of Economic History, LXXV (2015), 1240–1251. Ruggles
and Magnuson are currently analyzing leading journals for quantitative historical analyses in the
disciplines of political science, Soziologie, and demography, as well as economics.
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Feige. 2
| S T E V E N R U G G L E S A N D D I A N A L . M A G N U S O N
Statistical Graphs and Tables per 100 articles in the JIH from
1970–2018
work using methods from the natural sciences or the humanities.
According to managing editor Edward Freedman, the main crite-
rion is that “we donʼt accept narrative history of any kind (be it
literary, intellectual, religious, cultural, usw.) or history that strikes
as too arcane or specialized to have any appeal to our readership.”
From the outset, most JIH authors were historians, but a substan-
tial minority was spread across a wide variety of other disciplines. A
close look at the shifting content, methodology, and authorship of
JIH articles can lend insight into broader intellectual currents of the
past half-century.8
Figur 2 shows the number of graphs and tables per 100 arti-
cles for the JIH. Unsurprisingly, the levels are much higher for the
JIH than for the mainstream journals shown in Figure 1, reichend
aus 200 Zu 400 graphs and tables for every 100 articles. The JIH
shows a modest increase in quantification between the 1970s and
the 1980s, but after the 1980s, it diverged dramatically from the
8 Managing Editor Freedman indicates that he was unaware of any conscious efforts to shift
the topical focus of the journal at any point in the past. “Nothing like that ever crossed my
Weg, though I had a sense that certain trends were occurring beyond any deliberate encour-
agement from us.” Personal communication, Februar 15, 2019. Freedman’s comments on
the JIH criteria for accepting submissions for publication were quoted in Maartin Draper,
“Journal of Interdisciplinary History: A Journal Review, 2006–2010,” available at https://
www.rug.nl/let/education/master/rema/mhir/journal-interdisciplinary-history-draper.pdf.
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QUANTIFICA TIO N IN HIS TORY
| 369
Feige. 3 Average Number of Research Papers per Year in the JIH from
1970–2018
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trend shown in Figure 1. Instead of the sharp decline in quantifi-
cation seen in the mainstream journals, the frequency of graphs
and tables in the JIH held steady through the 1990s and 2000s.
In the 2010s, the JIH saw a substantial increase in quantitative dis-
plays; they now stand at the highest levels in the history of the
journal.
Despite the stability in the ratio of graphs and tables to articles
between the 1980s and the 2000s, the absolute number of articles
making use of quantitative analysis declined steeply. We define
quantitative articles as those with at least one statistical graph or
table. In den 1980er Jahren, the JIH published an average of 15.2 quantita-
tive articles per year; the number fell to just 7.1 in the period from
2000 Zu 2009. The reason is simple: The journal dramatically re-
duced the number of research papers published in this period,
from an average of 23.0 per year in the 1980s to just 12.8 per year
in the 2000s. These changes are shown in Figure 3.
The overall number of pages in the journal did not change
appreciably, but the content moved away from original research
toward review essays and book reviews. At the low point in the
early 2000s, most issues had just one or two research papers. Das
apparently was not an intentional policy. Editor Robert Rotberg
and Managing Editor Freedman concur that the journal made no
370
| S T E V E N R U G G L E S A N D D I A N A L . M A G N U S O N
Feige. 4 Average Number of Quantitative Articles per Year in the JIH
from 1970–2019, by Leading Author’s Discipline and
Nationality
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deliberate attempt to reduce the pages available to publish research.
Rotberg and Freedman agree that the most plausible explanation for
the decline was “a lack of good or appropriate submissions.”9
Why did the number of submissions decline? Figur 4 breaks
down the published quantitative articles by discipline and institu-
tional location (nationality) of the first-named author. U.S.-based
Historiker, shown in blue, accounted for almost two-thirds of the
quantitative articles in the 1970s, averaging 8.2 quantitative articles
per year. The U.S. representation dropped precipitously in the fol-
lowing decades, to a low point of just 1.5 articles per year in the
2000S. The decrease in quantitative publications by U.S. Historiker
can account for the entire decline in quantitative publications in
the JIH between the 1970s and the 2000s, Und 88 Prozent der
decline in the total number of research articles published.
Since the 2000s, the number of quantitative articles in the JIH
has jumped sharply, nearly attaining the level of the 1970s. Little of
this increase, Jedoch, can be ascribed to U.S.-based historians.
9 Freedman, Persönliche Kommunikation, Februar, 12, 2019; Rotberg, personal communica-
tion, Februar, 12, 2019.
| 371
QUANTIFICA TIO N IN HIS TORY
Stattdessen, it reflects a major expansion in articles from historians
based in other countries, primarily Europe, in combination with
a steady growth in the number of articles from other disciplines.
The most plausible explanation for these developments is that
the number of high-quality quantitative submissions for U.S.-
based historians dried up after the 1980s. The decline of research
by U.S.-based historians was not, Jedoch, confined to quantita-
tive research. Figur 5 shows the disciplinary distribution for both
non-quantitative (Panel A) and quantitative (Panel B) articles pub-
lished in the JIH. In the 1970s, 61 percent of non-quantitative
articles were written by U.S.-based historians; this number de-
clined to just 19 percent in the 2010s. The shift was only slightly
greater for the quantitative articles; um 64 percent were from
U.S.-based historians in the 1970s, compared with 19 Prozent in
the 2010s. The striking decline in articles by U.S.-based historians
may be indicative of a broader rejection of interdisciplinary
approaches, not simply a rejection of quantification.10
TRENDS IN THE CHARACTERISTICS AND IMPACT OF ARTICLES IN THE
JIH Despite the dramatic change in the disciplinary affiliations
of JIH authors, the broad distribution of JIH research topics has
remained relatively stable. Figur 6 shows a classification of JIH
articles according to the three new histories (sozial, politisch, Und
wirtschaftlich). We also identify demographic/family history and
psychohistory. The rest of the social category includes urban his-
tory, social-mobility studies, Ausbildung, and labor history, sowie
as investigations of race, Geschlecht, und ethnische Zugehörigkeit. The “other” cate-
gory is a catch-all, including environmental history, cultural his-
tory (including studies of art, architecture, Literatur, und Musik),
and religion.
The top panel of Figure 6 shows the trends in the topical dis-
tribution of all JIH articles and research notes. In the 1970s, psycho-
history was a significant category, but it disappeared in the 1980s as
psychoanalytic theory fell from favor. Social history expanded in
the 1990s and 2000s; a diverse array of both qualitative and quan-
titative articles focused on poverty, Arbeit, voluntary associations,
In his JIH article, “The ‘Historical Turn,’” Klein argues that the rejection of quantitative
10
analysis by historians was followed by a “progressive distancing from the other social sciences,
even by historians trying to answer questions in economic history” (295). “The ‘Historical
Turn’,” 295.
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Feige. 5 Disciplinary Distribution of Articles and Research Notes in the
JIH (Percentages)
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Feige. 6 Topical Distribution of Articles and Research Notes in the JIH
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374
| S T E V E N R U G G L E S A N D D I A N A L . M A G N U S O N
immigration, Ausbildung, Geschlecht, and race. Studies in demography
and family history have remained stable as a percentage of JIH
articles. Politics has declined significantly, and economics has ex-
panded slightly in the last decade.
The overall distribution of topics may have changed only
modestly, but the topics of non-quantitative articles changed dra-
automatisch. Panels B and C of Figure 6 compare the topical distri-
butions of non-quantitative and quantitative articles, jeweils.
The three new histories comprised a small minority of qualitative
articles, whereas the “other” category started to dominate, ac-
counting for more than half of the material published during the
twenty-first century. Many of these articles were recruited for
publication in special issues on religion, opera, and biography.
Im Gegensatz, the distribution of quantitative articles, shown in
Panel C, continues to be dominated by articles in the traditional
new history domains, especially demography, family, and social
Geschichte. The upward bumps in the “other” category during the
1980s and the 2010s reflect two spurts of articles on environmental
Geschichte, especially climate change.
Some of the fluctuations in the characteristics of JIH articles
reflect variations in special issues. The JIH has relied heavily on
special issues, which account for 28 percent of all the articles
and research notes that it has published to date. In all periods, ar-
ticles in special issues were significantly less likely to include graphs
or tables than were regular articles and research notes, especially in
the 1990s and 2000s, when just 18 percent of articles in special is-
sues included quantitative analysis, compared with 72 percent of
regular research articles.
The quantitative methods featured in the JIH have become
much more sophisticated over the past five decades. Im
1970S, almost three-fourths of the quantitative articles used simple
descriptive statistics. As shown in Figure 7, the percentage of quan-
titative articles driven by more advanced analytic methods, wie zum Beispiel
multiple regression, increased sharply, reaching a peak from 2000
Zu 2009, Wann 57 percent of quantitative articles contained analytic
Statistiken. The slight increase in descriptive analyses in the past decade
partly reflects a spike in articles about the environment that rely
mainly on descriptive statistics.
We can estimate the impact of different kinds of JIH articles
through an index of citations for quantitative and non-quantitative
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QUANTIFICA TIO N IN HIS TORY
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Feige. 7 Methods Used in Quantitative JIH Articles
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articles. Using citation counts in the Web of Science index, we can
calculate the number of times each article has been cited as a per-
centage of the mean citations for all articles published in the JIH
within the same decade. Daher, a citation index of 200 means that
an article had twice as many citations as the average article of its
Jahrzehnt, and a citation index of 50 means that the article had half as
many citations as the average article of that decade. Figur 8 com-
pares the citation indexes for quantitative and non-quantitative
JIH articles and research notes. In the first decade, the quantitative
articles were more often cited than the qualitative ones, but this
pattern reversed in the 1980s. The higher citation rate of qualita-
tive articles relative to quantitative ones increased further in the
2000S. As quantitative approaches lost favor among historians, rel-
ative citations of JIH quantitative research diminished.11
Closer examination of the most-cited articles from each decade
of the JIH reveals how the quantitative changes described herein
played out. Among the ten most-cited articles in the 1970s, U.S.-
based historians wrote six and U.S.-educated scholars teaching in
11 The databases of the Web of Science (a subscription service) are available at https://clarivate.
com/products/web-of-science/.
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Feige. 8
| S T E V E N R U G G L E S A N D D I A N A L . M A G N U S O N
Index of Citations for Quantitative and Non-Quantitative
Articles in the JIH
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Canada wrote two. The non-historians among the most-cited articles
of the 1970s were Gourevitch, a political scientist, who performed a
comparative analysis of the depression of 1873–1896, and Wood, ein
English professor, who wrote about women’s “fashionable diseases”
of the nineteenth century. Seven of the ten most-cited articles in-
cluded quantitative analysis; the exceptions were the Gourevitch
and Wood articles, as well as an article by Kuhn about the history
of science.12
Several of the most highly cited JIH articles of the 1970s focused
on illegitimacy and premarital sexual activity. In his controversial
article about the sexual revolution, Shorter argued that the rise of il-
legitimacy in nineteenth-century Europe reflected the sexual eman-
cipation of working-class women. Responding to Shorter in another
highly cited article, Tilly, Scott, and Cohen argued that the rising
numbers of women who had illegitimate children did not reflect
the pursuit of sexual pleasure so much as the growing exposure of
12 Peter Alexis Gourevitch, “International Trade, Domestic Coalitions, and Liberty: Com-
parative Responses to the Crisis of 1873-1896,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, VIII (1977),
281–313; Ann Douglas Wood, “‘The ‘The Fashionable Diseases’: Womenʼs Complaints and
Their Treatment in Nineteenth Century America,” ebenda., IV (1973), 25–52; Thomas S. Kuhn,
“Mathematical vs. Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science,” ebenda.,
VII (1976), 1–31.
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QUANTIFICA TIO N IN HIS TORY
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women to vulnerable circumstances and the erosion of community
and familial constraints. The single most-cited article from the 1970s
was a paper by Smith and Hindus about trends in premarital preg-
nancy over the long run (1640 Zu 1971), primarily in the United
States but with comparisons to European countries. Smith and
Hindus argued for a cycle of premarital sexual activity driven by both
cultural and structural changes.13
Among the other highly cited JIH articles of the 1970s, Tilly
wrote about food riots; Katz proposed a system of occupational
classification; Thernstrom and Knights investigated urban mobility;
and Kousser discussed ecological regression in political history.
Other than Kousser’s, none of the highly cited articles of the
1970s employed methods more sophisticated than percentages,
and most of them included just a few descriptive tables.14
Ten years later, the character of the most prominent articles
had shifted. In den 1980er Jahren, most of the highly cited articles came from
special issues; political scientists and sociologists were more frequent
contributors than were historians. Among the ten most-cited articles
in the 1980s, just four used quantitative approaches, including just
one quantitative article by a U.S. historian—Shammas’ analysis of
self-sufficiency in early America. Among the other quantitative ar-
ticles were one by Abbott, a sociologist, and Forrest, an anthropol-
ogist, that used sequence analysis to investigate Morris dances; eins
by Fogel, an economist, and nine collaborators that described the
decline in stature in America and Britain in the nineteenth century;
and one by Wrigley of the Cambridge Group for the History of
Population and Social Structure that presented an interpretation
of urbanization and agricultural change in early modern Europe.15
13 Edward Shorter, “Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe,”
ibid., II (1971), 237–272; Louise A. Tilly, Joan W. Scott and Miriam Cohen, “Womenʼs Work
and European Fertility Patterns,” ebenda., VI (1976), 447-476; Daniel Scott Smith and Michael S.
Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America 1640–1971: An Overview and Interpretation,” ebenda., V
(1975), 537-570.
14 Tilly, “The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France,” ebenda., II (1971), 23–57;
Michael B. Katz, “Occupational Classification in History,” ebenda., III (1972), 63-88; Thernstrom
and Peter R. Knights, “Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population
Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” ebenda., ICH (1970), 7–35; Kousser, “Ecological Re-
gression and the Analysis of Past Politics,” ebenda., IV (1973), 237–262.
15 Carole Shammas, “How Self-Sufficient Was Early America?” ebenda., XIII (1982), 247– 272;
Andrew Abbott and John Forrest, “Optimal Matching Methods for Historical Sequences,”
ibid., XVI (1986), 471-494; Fogel, Engerman, Roderick Floud, Gerald Friedman, Robert A.
Margo, Kenneth Sokoloff, Richard H. Steckel, T. James Trussell, Georgia Villaflor, Und
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| S T E V E N R U G G L E S A N D D I A N A L . M A G N U S O N
These patterns persisted for the next two decades. Of the ten
most-cited articles in the 1990s, five used quantitative analysis, Und
in the 2000s, four did. In these decades, economists accounted for
more than half of the most highly cited quantitative articles. Für
Beispiel, economists Goldin and Katz investigated the rise of sec-
ondary schooling in the United States; Clark assessed the returns to
capital in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Und
Bodenhorn documented the association of skin complexion with
stature among free blacks in antebellum Virginia. U.S.-based his-
torians contributed two highly cited quantitative research notes in
the 1990s, but none in the 2000s.16
The decade of the 2010s saw something of a throwback to the
patterns of the 1970s. Seven of the ten most-cited articles from the
past decade include quantitative analysis; six were written by histo-
rians, including three U.S.-based historians and three international
Historiker. A marked revival of interest in climate, a theme that
had first emerged in the 1970s, occurred, but in this period, the re-
search was often undertaken by large interdisciplinary teams. Für
Beispiel, McCormick and eleven collaborators documented climate
change during and after the Roman Empire, and Halden and four-
teen collaborators integrated documentary, archeological, pollen,
and stalagmite evidence to understand climate change in Anatolia
aus 300 Zu 1400 A.D. Most of the other top-cited quantitative
articles of the 2010s focused broadly on demographic topics, Aber
the themes were creative and diverse, using novel sources and
Methoden. Daher, Silveira and colleagues conducted a spatial analysis
of the demographic impact of railroads in Portugal, and Dewitt and
Slavin combined skeletal and documentary evidence to assess the
health impacts of the great famine in fourteenth-century England.17
Kenneth W. Wachter, “Secular Changes in American and British Stature and Nutrition,” ebenda.,
XIV (1983), 445–481; E. Anthony Wrigley, “Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England
and the Continent in the Early Modern Period,” ebenda., XV (1985), 683–728.
16 Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “Human Capital and Social Capital: The Rise of Second-
ary Schooling in America, 1910-1940,” ebenda., XXIX (1999), 683-723; Gregory Clark, “The
Political Foundations of Modern Economic Growth: England, 1540–1800,” ibid., XXVI
(1996), 563–588; Howard Bodenhorn, “The Mulatto Advantage: The Biological Conse-
quences of Complexion in Rural Antebellum Virginia,” ebenda., XXXIII (2002), 21–46.
17 Michael McCormick, Ulf Büntgen, Mark A. Cane, Edward R. Cook, Kyle Harper, Peter
Huybers, Thomas Litt, Sturt W. Manning, Paul Andrew Mayewski, Alexander F. M. More, Kurt
Nicolussi, and Willy Tegel, “Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire: Reconstructing
the Past from Scientific and Historical Evidence,” ebenda., XLIII (2012), 169–220; John Haldon, Neil
Roberts, Adam Izdebski, Dominik Fleitmann, Michael McCormick, Marica Cassis, Owen
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THE REVIVAL OF QUANTIFICATION IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH Quan-
titative research by scholars affiliated with U.S. history depart-
ments expanded rapidly in the late 1960s and 1970s, remained
strong through the 1980s, and collapsed precipitously in the
1990S. The rejection of quantitative methods by historians coin-
cided with the cultural turn: Beginning in the late 1970s, UNS. sein-
torians began questioning the epistemological foundations of
historical social science. Relativist interpretations gained favor over
empiricist and positivist approaches. In place of systematic empir-
ische Forschung, many saw the role of the historian as an interpreter of
Sprache, Agentur, and discourse.
The decline in the number of articles using quantitative
methods—both in the JIH and in the mainstream historical
journals—was not, in all likelihood, driven by changes in editorial
policies. It is much more plausible that the change emanated from
the bottom up, as the flow of submissions from historians dimin-
ished. The mainstream historical journals responded by publishing
more non-quantitative articles, especially research in cultural his-
tory. The JIH followed a different path, greatly reducing the total
number of research articles published and increasing the number of
book reviews and review essays to compensate.
Recent years have seen a revival of quantification in historical
Forschung, with modest increases in articles containing statistical ta-
bles or graphs in the American Historical Review, Journal of American
Geschichte, Journal of Modern History, and Past & Present. In the JIH, Die
mean number of articles per year by historians using quantitative
methods fell 72 percent from the 1970s to the 2000s, but it grew
126 percent between the 2000s and the 2010s (through the first issue
von 2019). The revival of historical quantification has been most pro-
nounced among historians based in Europe. Over the past decade,
the mean number of quantitative JIH articles per year by historians
located outside the United States grew 230 Prozent, compared with
just 49 percent growth among U.S.-based historians.
Doonan, Warren Eastwood, Hugh Elton, Sabine Ladstätter, Sturt Manning, James Newhard,
Kathleen Nicoll, Ioannes Telelis, and Elena Xoplaki, “The Climate and Environment of
Byzantine Anatolia: Integrating Science, Geschichte, and Archaeology,” ebenda., XLV (2014), 113–161;
Luís Espinha da Silveira, Daniel Alves, Nuno Miguel Lima, Ana Alcântara, and Joseph Puig,
“Population and Railways in Portugal, 1801-1930,” ebenda., XLII (2011), 29–52; Sharon DeWitte
and Philip Slavin, “Between Famine and Death: England on the Eve of the Black Death—
Evidence from Paleoepidemiology and Manorial Accounts,” ebenda., XLIV (2013), 37–60.
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| S T E V E N R U G G L E S A N D D I A N A L . M A G N U S O N
The revival of quantification among U.S. Historiker, which is still
new and small-scale, can be detected only through quantitative anal-
ysis of publications. Klein, one of the most perceptive analysts of
quantification in history, recently wrote, “North American historians
still show hostility for any kind of quantitative and comparative work
that does not fit into these new styles and ideologies, especially in the
field of social history. Although European pioneers in these new his-
torical trends do not unilaterally see any inherent conflict between
macro- or micro-history (in Ginzburg’s terms, “serial history and in-
dividual biography”), North American cultural historians are reluctant
to relate individual experience to the larger world that they inhabit;
such a strategy would require an explanation of the universality or the
uniqueness of the individuals in question. This rejection of quantita-
tive evaluation marks a good deal of the current cultural history.”18
There is still broad hostility to quantification among U.S. Historiker,
and it is likely to continue for some time. Trotzdem, the evidence
for a broad-based revival of quantification among U.S. historians is
strong. What has caused that revival? The cultural turn in history is
gradually fading. When postmodern history became entrenched in
the establishment, it lost the excitement of its insurgency three de-
cades ago. As Spiegel noted in her presidential address to the
American Historical Association, we have seen “accumulating dis-
content with poststructuralism.” The “science wars” of the 1990s—
which pitted postmodernist critics of science against its rationalist
defenders—are over. In the face of climate-change denial and gen-
eral hostility towards science on the political right in the United
Zustände, humanistic skepticism about the scientific enterprise seems
to be diminishing.19
The waning influence of the cultural turn has encouraged the
revival of quantification in history, but it is not the only factor.
New data resources and new methods are creating exciting oppor-
tunities for quantitative analysis, and new technology makes data
analysis far simpler and less expensive than it ever was in the hey-
day of historical quantification. We now have free access to billions
18 Klein, “‘Historical Turn,’” 297.
19 Gabrielle Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” American Historical Review, CXIV (2009), 1-15.
For the decline of postmodern history, see de Vries, “Changing the Narrative”; Spiegel (Hrsg.), Prac-
ticing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005); für die
science wars, Keith Ashman and Philip Baringer (Hrsg.), After the Science Wars (New York, 2001).
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QUANTIFICA TIO N IN HIS TORY
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of individual-level census records describing the entire enumerated
populations of multiple countries and hundreds of localities within
them between 1703 Und 1940. These data include the characteristics
of all enumerated individuals nested into households. New machine-
learning, record-linkage techniques are allowing investigators to link
censuses together to form longitudinal series, allowing scholars to
examine the life histories of tens of millions of people, to trace fam-
ilies across multiple generations, and to link individuals to admin-
istrative documents (Militär, tax, and vital records). Census and
survey samples for ninety-four counties in the period 1960 durch
the present are also available. 20
Außerdem, new spatial tools allow us to measure change for
consistent geographical footprints in more than ninety counties,
and to merge demographic data with historical climate data and
land-cover information. Every year, new historical data sources
become available for research on myriad topics, such as climate
ändern, agriculture, religion, Gesundheit, stature, immigration, the slave
trade, Spanish colonial expenditures, and Chinese lineages. Per-
haps most important, textual sources are being digitized. Millions
of digitized books are already available, and increasingly archival
manuscript sources are being made available in digital form.
Klein argued that the explosive growth of digital historical
data has stimulated a “historical turn” in the social sciences. It would
be a big mistake for historians to abandon the quantitative analysis of
the past to economists, sociologists, and demographers. Too often,
social scientists analyze historical data without understanding the
context of the time and place in which the data were generated,
and without interrogating the motives and biases of their creators.
The revival of quantification allows historians to participate and
engage with the rapid growth of historical social science, welche
will benefit both history and social science.21
20 Ruggles, “Big Microdata for Population Research,„ Demografie, VI (2014), 287–297;
idem, “The Future of Historical Family Demography,” Annual Review of Sociology, XXXVIII
(2012), 423–441; idem, Catherine Fitch, and Evan Roberts, “Historical Census Record Link-
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21 Klein, “‘Historical Turn.’”
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