Jerome M. Clubb

COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT: THE "STATUS REVOLUTION" REVISITED

Virtually from the beginning “collective biography,” or “prosopography,” has been seen as one of the most powerful and useful techniques of the “new” quantitative history. As Lawrence Stone succinctly described that technique, it is “ … the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors by means of a collective study of their lives.” It is not case, of course, as Stone also makes clear, that the new quantitative historians invented collective biography. In fact, the approach was used by historians and other social scientists well before the advent of quantitative history. Even so, the technique has frequently been employed by quantitative historians and may even be seen by some as virtually a hallmark of that approach to historical studies.

Computer Technology and the Source Materials of Social Science History

IN HIS 1978 PRESIDENTIAL Address to this Association, Allan Bogue urged us to direct our attention to problems associated with the use and development of computer-readable source material (Bogue, 1979). My remarks are in a similar vein. They are limited, however, to only one of the categories of source material that Bogue discussed: information that is originally recorded and stored in computer-readable form. In this area problems have become substantially larger and more pressing than they seemed in 1978, although possible means to their amelioration are now also becoming more apparent. The problems concern, in the first place, the rapidly growing volume of potential source material that is recorded and stored in computer-readable form; and, in the second place, the danger that much of this material will not be preserved or that it will be preserved only in forms that sacrifice its central and crucial advantage of manipulability. These issues are obviously pervasive. As everyone knows, com-

Murray Murphey and the Possibility of Social Science History

APPLICATION OF social scientific methods and approaches to the study of history has always been the subject of considerable and often acrimonious debate. In recent years, however, the terms of the debate have taken a somewhat different and, to some of us, surprising turn. Notes of pessimism and defensiveness have entered the arguments of practitioners; some feel the need to repeat the once useful polemics of twenty odd years ago; and there is talk of the intrinsic limitations of the general enterprise. At the same time, the traditionalist camp announces with a measure of glee that the tides of social scientific history are on the wane. Numerous successes and achievements can, of course, be noted particularly in such areas as demographic and economic history and mass political behavior. But the fact remains that social scientific approaches to the study of history have not swept the historical profession as some of the predictions of headier days would have had it. Most historians simply remain unconverted and unconvinced in older ways.