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A birth certificate establishes a child's legal identity and age, but few quantitative estimates of the significance of birth registration exist. Birth registration laws were enacted by U.S. states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using 1910-1930 census data, this study finds that minimum working age legislation was twice as effective in reducing under-aged employment if children had been born with a birth registration law, with positive implications for school attendance. There is some evidence that registration laws also improved the enforcement of schooling laws for younger children. A retrospective analysis with the 1960 census shows that the long-term effect of registration laws was to increase educational attainment by approximately 0.1 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While food variety continues to be of major interest to those studying eating and health, research has been mainly limited to laboratory research of simple meals. This paper seeks to enlarge the scope of eating research by examining the food offered in the earliest menus in United States restaurants and hotels of the early and mid-19th c, when restaurants began. This reveals a very large variety in what food was offered. The paper discusses why variety has declined in the US and probably elsewhere, including changes in the customer, changes in food service, changes of food availability, and the industrialization of the food supply. Menu analysis offers another approach to studying dietary variety across cultures and across time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Despite the influence of neo-Malthusian thinking in international development and environmental policy during the mid twentieth century, this story is often told from a US-centered perspective, with population control policies seen to roll out from the world geopolitical centers to the 'Global South' via the influence of large development institutions. Latin American perspectives on the population control question are seldom considered, except to suggest that the Catholic Church provided consistent, organized opposition to the expansion of family planning services. In this paper, using an political-intellectual history approach, I explore how the population question intersected with interrelated development issues in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century: health and nutrition, food and agriculture, rural livelihoods, economic dependency, and women's rights. I focus on the relationship between public health crises and pro-natalist policies; the influences of the eugenics movement in supporting national population growth as a biopolitical strategy; anarcho-feminist thought that stressed the emancipatory potential of fertility control and new social roles for women; the Brazilian Josué de Castro's research on the causes of famine and malnutrition, which took a structuralist approach and explicitly rejected neo-Malthusian and other environmentally determinist approaches to understand the causes of poverty and hunger; and Latin American engagements with the international family planning and population control agenda in the 1960s. With this history in mind, we can trace alternative intellectual roots of political ecology's critique of neo-Malthusianism and other deterministic environment-development theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the first viable and a still leading explanation for mid-twentieth century baby booms: Richard Easterlin's relative income hypothesis. He suggested that when incomes are higher than material aspirations (formed in childhood), birth rates would rise. This paper uses microeconomic data to formulate a measure of an individual's relative income. The use of microeconomic data allows the researcher to control for both state fixed effects and cohort fixed effects, both have been absent in previous examinations of Easterlin's hypothesis. The results of the empirical analysis are consistent with Easterlin's assertion that relative income influenced fertility decisions, although the effect operates only through childhood income. When the estimated effects are contextualized, they explain 12% of the U.S. baby boom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Democratic Party's electoral success during the 1930s has long intrigued politicians and scholars. To gain new insight into that success, this paper examines the striking heterogeneity in county-level support for Roosevelt. Even though the Depression's effects and the New Deal's benefits were famously widespread, only some parts of the country responded with large and durable partisan shifts. One reason is that several factors, including pre-New Deal economic hardship, Dust Bowl conditions, and New Deal spending, appear to have had effects that were largely transitory (i.e., faded by 1940). A complementary reason is that swing electorates can, and did, swing both ways. By contrast, several other variables -- notably economic and demographic factors discussed in the previous literature -- are related to relatively durable shifts. Finally, heterogeneity in marginal responses may have mattered greatly to national-level Democratic success. By demonstrating which factors were transitory and which were more durable, this paper illuminates the New Deal Realignment and, more generally, the influence of economic conditions and distributive policy on voter behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the medical histories of a sample of 25,000 Union Army soldiers and veterans to study the determinants of diagnosis, discharge, and mortality from tuberculosis. We find that water and airborne diseases during the war contributed significantly to the presence of tuberculosis. Height and a higher body mass index (BMI) are also associated with protection against TB but these effects are not always robust. As an upper bound, we estimate that the contribution of modern gains in height and in BMI to the mortality decline of tuberculosis ranges from one-fourth to one-half with the rest explained by the decline in the prevalence of water and airborne diseases, especially diarrhea, dysentery, and typhoid played. The paper finds weaker support for alternative hypotheses that rely on occupational influences and exogenous changes in the virulence of tuberculosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recovery from the Great Depression began in March 1933, simultaneous to Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. However, the pace of that recovery between that date and the Second World War was extremely uneven with some dramatic starts and stops. Between March and July 1933, manufacturing production rose 78%, production of durable goods was up 199%, total industrial production rose 57%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 71%. Then the economy contracted sharply again beginning in August 1933–the July 1933 level of industrial production was not reached again until August 1935. This paper addresses two questions. What factors were responsible for bringing about the sharp recovery in the spring of 1933 and what factors brought this short-lived economic surge to an end? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists have increasingly turned to height data to gain insight into a population's standard of living. Because height measures are used when other data are unavailable, testing their reliability can be difficult, and concerns over sample selection have led to several vigorous debates within the heights literature. In this paper, I use a unique contemporaneous census to gauge the extent of selection into a contested sample of American Indian heights. I have linked people from the 1892 Boas sample of the Cherokee Nation to the 1890 Cherokee Census. An initial analysis finds evidence of negative selection into the Boas sample. A detailed examination of those measured reveals a more complex story. Two distinct groups are present within the data. The first group consists of 64 members of the Cherokee elite. Their households owned more land, invested more in improvements to their land, and had higher literacy rates. The remainder of the Boas sample is poor relative to both the elite and the rest of the Cherokee Nation. Part, but not all, of this difference is due to their residential location. Forty percent of the Boas sample lived in poorest district of Cherokee Nation. These differences in wealth between the two groups were mirrored by a fairly dramatic difference in average heights. The average height of all men in elite group was 173.9 cm while the non-elite were several centimeters shorter at just 171.2 cm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) is one of the most important figures in the history of American landscape architecture, conservation, and planning. Before he stumbled accidentally onto a career in park design, however, Olmsted was a dilettante gentleman farmer, social critic, and reformist man of letters. This paper considers the intellectual development of the early Olmsted by following his 1850 trip to England. It draws on two reservoirs of evidence: the documentary material in Olmsted's first book, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England ; and an experiment in historical geographical fieldwork undertaken by duplicating Olmsted's trip in May 2011. The essay argues that situating the ‘early Olmsted’ firmly within the intellectual history of antebellum social reform necessitates an interpretation of Olmsted's bourgeois republican radicalism which has been deemphasized in canonical histories of landscape architecture. It furthermore explores the category of mobility as an analytic and methodological tool, engaging with Olmsted's field practices in order to interrogate landscape as a experiential site of social and historical interpretation. Finally, it argues for the intellectual productivity of a fundamental tension between corporeality and transcendence intrinsic to the experience of landscape, a tension metaphorized within the very title ‘Walks and Talks.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent to which unskilled internal migrants in the United States were motivated by the possibility of upward occupational mobility. Drawing on the literature on contemporary migrant selection and sorting, I argue that workers with greater potential for occupational upgrading may have selected themselves out of counties with low skill premiums and sorted themselves into counties with high skill premiums. Using linked data from the U.S. Census and county-level wage data, I present results consistent with this argument, with a focus on shorter distance movers. Conditioning on migrant status, I find that unskilled migrants who moved to places with high skill premiums were most likely to upgrade. 1 offer some evidence that migrant sorting explains much of this result. My results imply that previous research focusing solely on wage gains provides an incomplete picture of the factors motivating east-west migration in nineteenth century America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) created a globally influential model of regional development through centralized planning of massive public works to re-engineer social and natural systems in impoverished areas. TVA invested heavily in malaria control, since its own reservoirs created perfect breeding grounds for malaria-carrying anopheles mosquitoes. Eventually, both the TVA and malaria control would become key elements in an influential metanarrative in which an American ideology of 'technological modernism' dominated international development in the post-World War II era, until modern environmentalism and other social movements undermined the assumptions and goals of this ideology. This paper argues that a more subtle understanding of the history of ecological thought in regional development and malaria control challenges the dominant metanarrative. TVA malaria control actually reflected a tension between two important and competing ideological threads of TVA's master ethos of integrated regional development: socio-ecological holism and techno-scientific reductionism. Socio-ecological holism provided the grand vision for a transformation of nature and society, conceived as a unitary whole. But it was techno-scientific reductionism, which accommodated intimate, ecologically grounded knowledge of the habitats and behaviors of anopheles mosquitoes, that made malaria control possible. In this way, the TVA experience reflected theory and practice in malaria control internationally, before the advent of DDT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper chronicles one researcher''s journey at the National Institute of Mental Health, exploring ways to understand the neural systems responsible for the cognitive sub-processes of working memory tasks. Both the opportunities and the pitfalls with applying the idea of cognitive subtraction to neuroimaging data were well-known from studies using positron emission tomography. We took advantage of the improved temporal resolution of fMRI with a delayed-recognition task and identified the time-courses of the different stages of the task (encoding, memory delay, and recognition test) as predictor variables in a multiple regression analysis. Because these signals were temporally independent, individual components of tasks could be contrasted with one another, rather than entire tasks, reducing the problem of violations of pure insertion in cognitive subtraction. This approach enabled us to draw more detailed conclusions about the neural systems of higher cognition and the organization of prefrontal cortex than had been possible before fMRI. Further enhancements and innovations over the last 20years by a multitude of researchers across the field have greatly expanded this knowledge, but this approach called “orthogonal task design” has remained a fundamental component of many of these modern studies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Many postbellum southern farms specialized in cotton, but black-operated farms planted much larger shares of cotton than white-operated farms. This paper tests various explanations for the pattern of specialization using 1879 farm-specific data, We find that the cross-sectional racial variation in cotton share is largely explained by location and on-farm labor supply conditions, consequences of the legacy of slavery, rather than debt constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the history, production, and use -- practical and rhetorical -- of maps created by the United States government during World War II as related to the development and execution of aerial bombing policies against Japan. Drawing from a range of maps and primary documents culled from libraries and archives in the United States, we argue that maps provide an important, and hitherto neglected, means through which to trace the exploration and eventual embrace of the incendiary bombing of Japan's cities. In particular, our aim is to show how maps, along with the men who made and used them, played a central role in the planning and prosecution of air raids on urban Japan. We also address the mobilization of American geographers into the war effort, the re-configuration of America's spatial intelligence community during World War II, and the ways in which maps were constructed in the context of total war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses program notes from the Metropolitan opera to quantify changes in ethnic preferences as a result of news of German atrocities during World War I; these data indicate that the War created a persistent shift in ethnic preferences, which effectively switched the status of German Americans from a mainstream ethnicity to an ethnic minority until the late 1920s. Difference-in-difference analyses investigate whether this shift in preferences triggered taste-based discrimination in one of the world's most elite professional settings: applications to trade at the NYSE. This analysis indicates that changes in preferences more than doubled the probability that applicants with German-sounding names would be rejected. Placebo regressions for other non-German minorities yield no evidence of taste effects. Equivalent regressions that distinguish German Jewish from other Jewish applicants, however, indicate that German Jewish applicants were similarly affected as were other Germans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: During its long history of developing and deploying remote sensing instruments, NASA has provided scientific data that have benefitted a variety of scientific applications among them archaeology. Multispectral and hyperspectral instruments mounted on orbiting and sub-orbital platforms have provided new and important information for the discovery, delineation and analysis of archaeological sites worldwide. Since the early 1970s, several of the ten NASA centers have collaborated with archaeologists to refine and validate the use of active and passive remote sensing for archaeological use. The Stennis Space Center (SSC), located in Mississippi USA has been the NASA leader in archaeological research. Together with colleagues from Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), SSC scientists have provided the archaeological community with useful images and sophisticated processing that have pushed the technological frontiers of archaeological research and applications. Successful projects include identifying prehistoric roads in Chaco canyon, identifying sites from the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery exploration, and assessing prehistoric settlement patterns in southeast Louisiana. The Scientific Data Purchase (SDP) stimulated commercial companies to collect archaeological data. At present, NASA formally solicits “space archaeology” proposals through its Earth Science Directorate and continues to assist archaeologists and cultural resource managers in doing their work more efficiently and effectively. This paper focuses on passive remote sensing and does not consider the significant contributions made by NASA active sensors. Hyperspectral data offers new opportunities for future archaeological discoveries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the dynamics behind the selling of a federally owned World War II factory in Tell City, Indiana in 1946 and 1947. The federal agency charged with disposing of wartime plant, the War Assets Administration, reversed its decision to sell the factory to a small innovative company, Electra-Voice, selling it instead to the giant electrical equipment manufacturer, General Electric. What would make federal administrators who were part of a powerful liberal state apparatus committed to economic competition and anti-monopoly change their mind? The answer lies in what I call place-based corporate hegemony. Probing the material consequences of everyday action, place-based corporate hegemony revolves around the formation of alliances based on axiomatic values, the continued appeal of these values, the redistribution of symbolic and material resources, and the incorporation of threatening elements. Deploying a range of archival materials I show how the concerted efforts of the community, business organizations, politicians and unions as well as General Electric to question the initial decision forced the state to rethink and change its decision. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Between 1915 and 1920,18 U.S. states considered the introduction of compulsory health insurance. Progressive reformers expected state health insurance to be welfare enhancing for American wage-workers since it would result in lower cost insurance and an extension of coverage to more of the population. The evidence presented in this paper indicates that the absence of broad political support for health insurance legislation in this early period reflects that compulsory insurance would not have improved on what was available and affordable through voluntary arrangements and had the potential to reduce the welfare of wage-earners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural policy in the United States is often structured around conflicts and relationships within particular production regions. These regional solutions may evolve into national policies. This paper explores a historical example of this, the development of fluid milk policy and the fluid milk economy in the Chicago milkshed between 1900 and the New Deal. This example is particularly interesting because it was part of the rise of the post-World War II modern food system. Both urban and rural groups were important in this development. Urban groups took a particular interest in milk production and regulation due to its importance as a nutritious but highly perishable staple. Rural groups responded to urban attempts to control production practices by organizing cooperatives. Negotiations and strikes resulted in an agreement in 1929 that was positive for farmers, the Chicago Department of Health, and other major entities in the milkshed. It attempted to place regulatory barriers around the milkshed. However, it soon failed due to improvements in transportation technology and new distribution systems that allowed for cheaper retail prices. The group then proposed a marketing plan to the USDA, which became the ancestor of the federal milk marketing order program. This story sheds light on the manner in which local interest groups and internal politics within the U.S. Department of Agriculture combined to shape New Deal agricultural legislation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The history of medical geography is marked by a search for ancestors. The story usually begins in the writing of Hippocrates before re-emerging in the works of 18th and 19th century practitioners. In recent years, historical geographers have called for the destabilising of such assertions of lineage and descent. This paper offers a reconsideration of the history of medical geography through an exploration of the often hidden connections and intersections that have helped to frame the future trajectory of the sub-discipline. More specifically, we focus on the important contribution made by Dr Jacques Meyer May and offer a complex and multi-layered account that examines the close interweaving of his work as a colonial surgeon and specialist in tropical medicine and his role as a medical geographer in the United States. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]