Search results for ""Author Lawrence Goldman""

A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. This is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and the arguments and conflicts between social classes. Numbers were collected in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this 'data revolution'. They became a regular aspect of governmental procedure thereafter, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera; Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics - statistics as we use them today - became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians emphasised the unity of mankind, some later practitioners, following Francis Galton, studied variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, and different Victorian statisticians, Victorians and Numbers traces the impact of numbers on the era and the intriguing relationship of Victorian statistics with 'Big Data' in our own age.

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Seven distinguished historians explain how a national political culture developed in America. A political culture is both the collectivity of a community's values and a mode of behavior—an end as well as a process of obtaining that end which is always changing. J.G.A. Pocock examines how Americans wrote their own history rather than relying on others. Jack Greene shows how British institutions and the common law were modified by unique colonial American experiences. Richard Vernier suggests that the economic crises of the mid-1780s resulted in the triumph of a national fiscal policy enunciated by Alexander Hamilton. Andrew Robertson demonstrates how election rituals transformed the American political culture of deference into an expanded, abstract world of electoral opinion knit together by newspapers. Joyce Appleby examines the importance of literacy to the exchange of ideas that created a national political culture. She also highlights the importance of volunteer associations to effect social and economic reform in America (including the abolition of slavery). Lawrence Goldman's case study of the National Reform Association, a nineteenth-century group of radical workers, describes how the reform movement's advocacy of cheap land led to the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. Rebecca Starr uses South Carolina to illustrate how the South developed its own political culture by the end of the eighteenth century that persisted well beyond the Civil War.

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