The Limitations of Quantification in Local Historical Studies

Abstract

Robert Doherty. Society and Power: Five New England Towns, 1800-1860. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. 128 pp. Robert D. Mitchell. Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977. 251 + xiv pp. Statistical studies of American urban history now appear to be at least as important as more traditional ones in the literature of the field. In the long view, this is something that happened with astonishing swiftness. As recently as 1965, Charles Glaab, in his "The Historian and the American City: A Bibliographic Survey" (in The Study of Urbanization, eds. Philip Hauser and Leo Schnore), commented on various kinds of writings — urban biography, period studies, special themes in urban history—with very little reference to quantification. Today's surveyor would be compelled to focus on such work. Similarly, statistically-oriented studies —most notably those by historian Merle Curti (The Making of an American Community, 1959) and, more recently, by historical geographer James Lemon (The Best Poor Man's Country, 1972) — have greatly affected the kind of inquiry now being made into the history of rural areas and populations.