Examines the geographic mobility of recently arrived European immigrants in the United States during the 19th century. In a sample of 1,544 immigrants who arrived in America between 1840 and 1850, 13.7% were located in New York City in 1850. By 1860 only 5.6% remained in New York. A number of developments in the 1840's facilitated the movement of immigrants out of New York, some passing through without stopping and others moving out shortly after their arrival. Communication between employers in the interior and immigrant arrivals in New York increased in the 1840's as employers began to station recruiters in New York City. The Commissioners of Emigration of New York began in 1847 to correspond with labor contractors in the interior regarding newly arrived unskilled labor. And immigrants arriving in New York in the 1840's found increased transportation alternatives for moving to the interior. The cost of travel was not a barrier for those seeking to leave New York.

Compares statistics on the economic status of immigrants to the United States who persisted at a location and those who relocated to pursue new occupations during 1850-60. Laborers who moved from their counties of residence were not less likely to improve their position than those who remained, while nonlaborers who moved were more likely to lose economic status.

Immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before the Civil War were less likely to reside in locations with high immigrant concentrations as their time in the U.S. increased. This is contrary to the experience of recent immigrants who show no decrease in concentration after arrival. The reduced isolation of antebellum immigrants was not due to their own movement to places with fewer immigrants but due to the movement of the native-born into places (particularly cities) with large immigrant concentrations. The isolation of contemporary immigrants even after several years in the U.S. thus results more from the reluctance of the native-born to relocate to places with many immigrants than from immigrants' reluctance to move to places with fewer immigrants. Contemporary immigrants had greater success than antebellum immigrants avoiding unskilled jobs as they entered the U.S. job market, though they moved out of unskilled jobs less often than antebellum immigrants when comparing their occupations at two points in time after arrival. Improvements in occupational mobility between antebellum and recent immigrants were most apparent among those in other than unskilled jobs. These findings suggest the need to reevaluate some of the premises upon which the concerns about the economic performance of recent immigrants are based.

Discusses the process by which the Social History Research Laboratory at the University of Minnesota designed the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). The Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) consist of random selections of information that have been taken from the US decennial censuses since 1850. These samples are useful sources of information for the decade from which they were taken, but because each census records data differently, much of the information is incompatible with other censuses. The Social History Research Laboratory has converted these PUMS into an integrated form called IPUMS. By designing common coding systems for such items as household composition, familial relationships, occupations, and geographical location, the IPUMS allows a researcher to chart social changes over time. Versions of the IPUMS data series were released in 1993 and 1994, and the final version will be released in November 1995 by the National Archives. A three-volume set will also be released that provides detailed documentation for the data series and user information.

Describes the system developed to encode geographical data for the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the 1850, 1880, and 1920 US censuses. PUMS are random samples of households taken from the US decennial censuses and coded into computer format for use by historians and social scientists. The Social History Research Laboratory at University of Minnesota has done much of the work for the 1850, 1880, and 1920 PUMS. The coding of birthplaces was a straightforward process, but determining the place of residence became more problematic due to differences in political jurisdictions at the local level and incomplete information. In many cases, publications by the Census Bureau had to be consulted. The PUMS does not distinguish between rural and urban dwellers because of the many gray areas that exist in the population totals. Therefore, this variable must determined by the individual researcher.

The future universal distributed digital library is already foreshadowed by the availability over the World Wide Web of two massive social data sets, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Public Use Microdata Samples of historical censuses. Scholarly publication on the net is illustrated by the Electronic Journal of Sociology and the Journal of World-Systems Research. Both of these developments have the potential to enhance scientific progress and equality of access to the cutting edge of science. Sociologists are only beginning to become critical of the potential social harm of the universal net, however, and to take advantage of research opportunities to study net society. For an example of the potential vitality of social life on the net, this essay ends by sketching the activity of new religious movements on the World Wide Web. Keywords sociology, computing, telecommunications, World Wide Web, research, religious movements.

Discusses the process by which data from the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) were put into computer format by the Social History Research Laboratory of the University of Minnesota. PUMS are random samples of households and individuals taken from the US decennial censuses from 1850 onward, and they can be used to analyze social structure and societal change. In order to make the data available in a computer-usable format, a variety of data symbols were used to abbreviate information in categories such as birth place, occupation, and marital status. Once loaded, the data samples were then verified in order to insure accuracy.

We argue that the enumerators' occupational returns from the important census of 1880 were heavily edited prior to publication. The effect was to substantially reduce the number of individuals reported with an occupation. For youthful and older males and all women the editing was so substantial as to qualitatively affect the apparent trend in labor force participation for these groups over time. The stylized facts regarding labor market dynamics during the period of American industrialization and the historical stories constructed around them will now need to be reexamined. We contend that the editing was secretly authorized by Francis Amasa Walker, Superintendent of the Tenth Census of 1880 and one of the most prominent and decorated economists, statisticians, and public servants in America at this time. While other scholars have identified potential sources of bias in census figures, no one has heretofore suggested that the official statistics of the United States were covertly altered to present a picture different from information collected by census enumerators. If we are correct, the sociology of official nineteenth-century American statistics will require rethinking.

Using the census survival method to calculate net flows across employment states between 1900 and 1910, we find that approximately one-fifth of all men who reached the age of 55 eventually retired before their death. Many of these retirees appear to have planned their withdrawal from paid employment by accumulating assets, becoming self-employed, and then liquidating their assets to provide a stream of income to finance consumption in old age. This `modern' retirement behavior, we argue, has important implications for the economic history of capital and labor markets, of saving and investment, of insurance and pensions, and of the family economy.

Discusses the process by which the consistency of the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) for the 1850, 1880, and 1920 US censuses was checked. PUMS are random samples of households taken from the decennial censuses that can be used to discern social trends over the course of time. The PUMS datasets for the 1850, 1880, and 1920 censuses were constructed and put into computerized format at the Social History Research Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. After the data was coded into machine-readable form, it was checked for consistency. This entailed a variety of computerized checks that looked for logical inconsistencies that were corrected either by the computer software or human operators. Many problems arose due to familial relationships, and these often had to be solved by the use of inferred data, merging multiple households into one, or merging two households.

Historians have been slow to make the Census Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) that have been issued in the past decade. These resources, now available for nearly every census since 1850, are too valuable to be left to demographers and cliometricians. The following is a demonstration of how the Public Use Samples can clarify old debates and open new avenues for social-historical research.

It was in the chaotic din of a Chinatown garment factory that 74-year-old Ho Yin-peng discovered a better way to survive than snipping loose threads from clothing at 5 cents a dress.Her co-workers told her that even though she lived with her son, she could qualify for the Federal welfare program known as Supplemental Security Income if she was over 65 and had been in this country for more than three years.So after she passed the third anniversary of her residence in the United States in 1991, she applied and soon began receiving $280 a month, far more than she made in the factory at $40 a week. She has not worked since."It's not enough for living expenses, but its more than when I was working," said Mrs. Ho, who now shares a small apartment with a friend in Chinatown. "Everyone knows about this."Created in the early 1970's to bolster the incomes of retirees who did not receive enough in Social Security, the Supplemental Security Income program is increasingly being sought out by elderly immigrants new to this country....

This dissertation is an analysis of determinants of school attendance in the United States from 1850 to 1950. This study considers the effect on school attendance of three interrelated sets of characteristics: the individual, their family and the community. The types of students and the duration of their school attendance changed considerably over this 100-year period. In the middle and late nineteenth century, variations in individual, family and community characteristics had a tremendous impact on who went to school. By 1950, however, these variations made little difference; by then virtually all American children of school age attended school. This dissertation relies primarily on Federal Census data from the Integrated Public Microdata Series (IPUMS), constructed in conjunction with the Social History Research Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. This rich body of information, combining individual-level data from eleven Public Use Microdata Samples spanning 140 years from 1850 to 1990, provide the first ever analysis of school attendance at a national level for such an extended period of time. The study contains an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction outlines the topic, and discusses the historiography of school attendance. The first chapter is a broad overview of factors affecting school attendance in the United States. In this chapter I introduce the framework for this study, namely, that characteristics affecting school attendance existed on three levels, the individual, the family and the community. The second chapter is an analysis of the effects of race and region on the prospects for attending school. Chapter Three examines the effects of household economic and family structure and provides a brief discussion of the effects of child labor and mandatory school attendance laws. An analysis of the effects of immigration and ethnicity on school attendance is detailed in the fourth chapter, while Chapter five analyzes the effect evangelical religious groups had in promoting school attendance. The conclusion highlights the main points of the analysis, and connects the rise in school attendance to a broader theme of the homogenization of life in the United States in the twentieth century.