Outwaite-3587-14.qxd 6/12/2007 5:32 PM Page 246 246 QUANTIFICATION AND EXPERIMENT 14 Quantitative History Margo Anderson WHAT IS QUANTITATIVE HISTORY? of multiple events or phenomena. Such a standpoint creates a different set of issues for Quantitative history is the term for an array analysis. A classic historical analysis, for of skills and techniques used to apply the example, may treat a presidential election as methods of statistical data analysis to the a single event. Quantitative historians con- study of history. Sometimes also called clio- sider a particular presidential election as one metrics by economic historians, the term was element in the universe of all presidential popularized in the 1950s and 1960s as social, elections and are interested in patterns which political and economic historians called for characterize the universe or several units the development of a ‘social science history’, within it. The life-course patterns of one adopted methods from the social sciences, household or family may be conceived as and applied them to historical problems. one element in the aggregate patterns of fam- These historians also called for social scien- ily history for a nation, region, social class or tists to historicize their research and con- ethnic group. Repeated phenomena from the sciously examine the temporal nature of the past that leave written records, which read social phenomena they explored. For both one at a time would be insignificant, are par- types of questions, historians found that they ticularly useful if they can be aggregated, needed to develop new technical skills and organized, converted to a electronic database data sources. That effort led to an array of and analyzed for statistical patterns. Thus activities to promote quantitative history. records such as census schedules, vote tal- Classical historical research methodology lies, vital (e.g., birth, death and marriage) relies upon textual records, archival research records; or the ledgers of business sales, ship and the narrative as a form of historical writ- crossings, or slave sales; or crime reports ing. The historian describes and explains par- permit the historian to retrieve the pattern of ticular phenomena and events, be they large social, political, and economic activity in the epic analyses of the rise and fall of empires past and reveal the aggregate context and and nations, or the intimate biographical structures of history. detail of an individual life. Quantitative The standpoint of quantitative history also history is animated by similar goals but takes required a new set of skills and techniques as its subject the aggregate historical patterns for historians. Most importantly, they had to Outwaite-3587-14.qxd 6/12/2007 5:32 PM Page 247 QUANTITATIVE HISTORY 247 incorporate the concept of the data set and growth and expansion of the United States data matrix into their practice. Floud (1972: had long required American historians to 17) defined the data set as ‘a coherent selec- consider quantitative issues in their study of tion of data from the whole range of historical the growth of the American economy, popu- data available to the historian, and it is lation and mass democracy. Thus, for exam- selected because it relates closely to the ques- ple, Frederick Jackson Turner’s classic 1893 tions that the historian wishes to consider.’ essay on ‘The Significance of the Frontier in The myriad instances of a phenomenon— American History’ was largely based on a for example, all United States presidential reading and interpretation of the results of elections—form the cases of the data set. The the 1890 population census. pieces of information collected about the But true ‘data analysis’ in the current sense cases—for example, the candidates running, had to await the growth of the social and sta- the year of the election or the vote totals— tistical sciences in the first half of the twenti- become the variable characteristics of the eth century, and the diffusion to universities data set, that is, the varying characteristics of in the 1950s of the capacity for machine tab- any particular case. The historian arranges ulation of numerical records, and then of the data in tabular form, that is, in a matrix of mainframe computing in the 1960s. One can rows and columns, ‘consisting of a number see the emerging field exemplified in semi- of rows, which will normally represent cases, nal studies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. and a number of columns, which will nor- In 1959, for example, Merle Curti and his mally represent variables’ (Floud, 1972: 18). colleagues at the University of Wisconsin The creation of quantitative data sets thus published The Making of an American required the historian to carefully compile Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a consistent information about the phenome- Frontier County. Curti et al. (1959) explored non to be investigated, and prepare the data Turner’s thesis with an in depth look in tabular form. Historians then were pre- at the mid-nineteenth century history of pared to apply the techniques of statistical Trempeleau County, Wisconsin, including its data analysis to the data set to answer the records of newspapers, diaries, private research question posed. papers and county histories. But they also In short, to make effective use of quantita- added data analysis of the employment pat- tive evidence and statistical techniques for terns derived from the individual-level fed- historical analysis, practitioners had to inte- eral census manuscripts for the censuses grate the rapidly developing skills of the from 1850 through 1880. social sciences, including sampling, statisti- Similarly, the ‘new’ economic historians cal data analysis and data archiving into their of the 1950s challenged the conventional historical work. That task led to the develop- wisdom of the day on several key issues in ment of new training programs in quantita- economic history. One debate centered tive methods for historians, to the creation of on the ‘necessity’ of the US Civil War. new academic journals and textbooks, and to Historians at the time argued that the war had the creation of data archives to support the been ‘unnecessary’ since the institution of research. race-based slavery would collapse under the weight of its unprofitability. In contrast, eco- nomic historians employed economic theory EARLY EFFORTS and data on output of southern agriculture to argue that the southern agricultural economy Historians had made use of quantitative evi- could have survived profitably into the twen- dence prior to the 1950s, particularly in the tieth century using slave labor (Conrad and fields of economic and social history. The Meyer, 1958). Robert Fogel challenged the Annales school in France pointed the way in conventional wisdom on the centrality of the pre-World War II period. The rapid railroads for the industrial development of Outwaite-3587-14.qxd 6/12/2007 5:32 PM Page 248 248 QUANTIFICATION AND EXPERIMENT the United States. Making use of economic analysis as part of its summer program in theory, carefully compiled data series, and quantitative methods. The course continues the logic of the counterfactual, Fogel to be offered each summer. At the Newberry argued that canals would have also suc- Library in Chicago, from 1971 to 1982 ceeded as a transportation system underpin- Richard Jensen spearheaded a summer pro- ning nineteenth-century American industrial gram in quantitative methods for historians. development (1964). By the early 1980s, about 40 percent of ‘New political historians’ such as Lee history graduate programs offered training in Benson, Allan Bogue, Richard P. quantitative history as part of the graduate McCormick, and political scientists with his- curriculum (Bogue, 1983: 220ff.).3 torical interests, such as Warren Miller and Additional institutional infrastructure of Walter Dean Burnham, translated the emerg- quantitative history can also be dated to the ing techniques of political scientists analyz- 1960s. New journals, textbooks, and edited ing contemporary election results and voter collections also promoted the growth of surveys to historical questions, and opened quantitative history. The Historical Methods up dramatic new insights into American Newsletter, for example, began publishing in political history.1 The new political historians 1967, and was renamed Historical Methods identified the parameters of party systems, in 1978. The Journal of Interdisciplinary developed the theory of the critical election, History began publication in 1970. The and argued that underlying structures of elec- Social Science History Association (SSHA) toral politics were accessible through histor- was founded in 1974 and the first issue of its ical analysis of voter turnout and election journal, Social Science History, appeared in results. In 1964 in England, demographers 1976. SSHA became the professional venue and historians founded the Cambridge Group for bringing together historians who con- for the History of Population and Social sciously adopted theory and methodology Structure and began a forty-year project to from the social sciences and social scientists retrieve, assemble and reconstruct 400 years doing historical work. The cross-fertilization of the family history of Britain.2 has continued, and, as noted below, many of The new possibilities of quantitative the innovations in quantitative history have history fit well with other trends within the been developed by scholars with formal discipline