of quantitative history as a distinct approach dates to the 1960s, when
the convergence of at least three trends prompted historians to turn
to numeric data and statistical analysis for help in answering questions
and framing interpretations.
First was a growing interest in the experiences of ordinary people as
distinct from the achievements of "great white men." Political
historians, for example, had long focused on the thoughts and actions
of presidents, prominent congressmen, and other "movers and shakers"
in the national government. But modern polling techniques suggested
that voters did not always share the values and views of the public
officials they voted for. Leaders could not automatically be considered
spokespeople for their followers. So how was a historian to find out
what really motivated ordinary people to vote for one person or one
party rather than another? In an effort to answer that question, a group
of "new political historians" turned to the study of voting
behavior, using electoral data and increasingly complicated statistical
techniques to determine which factors best explained voting patterns
in particular areas during given periods of time. Likewise, "new
social historians" set out to study history from "the bottom
up." One question they wanted to address was whether the American
ideal of equal opportunity was historical fact or fiction. Had it really
been possible for poor yet meritorious Americans to rise to positions
of wealth and status, or was the American social structure more bounded
by hereditary constraints than implied by the "myth of the self-made
man" and "the American dream"? Using census records,
tax lists, and other quantifiable material, the new social historians
sought to determine the extent of social mobility in American history.
They found that dramatic improvements in social position were rare,
but modest changes were more common.
A second trend that contributed to the rise of quantitative history
was the movement to establish history as a social science dedicated
to the rigorous, consistent, and precise application of social theory
and social scientific methods in the study of past human behavior. Thus
the new political historians of the 1960s borrowed from political science,
and the new social historians borrowed from sociology. Yet the most
celebrated and most controversial proponents of social-scientific approaches
were the "new economic historians," who applied highly mathematical
econometric theory and methodology to the study of longstanding historical
questions and often came up with unorthodox answers. One famous example
(at least within academic circles) will suffice. Conventional wisdom
held that the key explanation for the acceleration of American economic
growth during the nineteenth century was the advent and expansion of
railroads. Robert Fogel decided to test this hypothesis by constructing
a "counterfactual" model of what the nineteenth-century American
economy would have looked like without railroads. He imagined a network
of canals rather than railroads and then, building on limited data and
a body of theoretical assumptions, he calculated the probable rate of
economic growth under these alternative circumstances. To his avowed
surprise, he concluded that canals would have served the economy almost
as well as railroads, and hence that railroads were not indispensable
to American economic growth in the nineteenth century. Not everybody
was convinced, but few could ignore Fogels audacious approach.
He was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in large part because
of this pioneering work in the new economic history.
The third factor that encouraged the rise of quantitative history in
the United States and elsewhere was the advent of the digital computer.
In the early 1960s, huge mainframe computers cost hundreds of thousands
of dollars each. The first academic "power users" tended to
be natural scientists, but over time social scientists also discovered
the advantage of these huge electronic devices for processing large
amounts of information and executing elaborate calculations involving
many variables and complex manipulation of the data. By comparison to
many of their colleagues in related disciplines, historians were rather
late in making the transition from note cards to punch cards, the essential
input media of the mainframe era. As late as 1965, only a few dozen
historians were involved in computerized research projects nationwide.
But by the early 1970s, the computer revolution was reaching into history
graduate programs, and increasing numbers of young historians learned
the basic procedures of data entry and analysis using software such
as SPSS. Especially for the study of large populations with hundreds
of "data elements," the mainframe computer proved a godsend.
Still, most historians continued to shy away from computers until the
triumph of the personal computer in the 1980s and the advent of user-friendly
software for word processing as well as statistical manipulation. Today
the typical personal computer sitting on a faculty desk or in a college
computer lab is hundreds of times more powerful and also much easier
to use than the enormously expensive mainframes of the founding era
of quantitative history.