SRP Year
1988-1989
Principal Investigator(s)
Study Description
This project was an exercise in historical sociology and examined racial inequality in education in the southern United States in the early twentieth century. The project produced two datasets. The first contains data on all counties (N=1193) within each of 12 southern states in 1910, and includes variables on a variety of educational, economic, political, and demographic characteristics of the counties. The second contains data from the 1910 Census of Population on all members of one out of every 250 households in the United States.
In working on this project, students learned to deal with issues that are unique to historical analyses—for example, problems with data availability and comparability; how to locate and use archival materials; and how to conduct empirical analyses that do not do an injustice to the historical context within which they should be understood. Many of the issues covered were common to any empirical endeavor in sociology.
Research Team
Cher Jamison
Sources of Support
This study was supported by funding from the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University-Bloomington.
Related Scholarly Output
Publications
- Walters, Pamela Barnhouse. 1992. “Who Should Be Schooled? The Politics of Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the Turn-of-the-Century U.S.” Pp. 173–87 in The political construction of education: the state, school expansion, and economic change, edited by B. Fuller and R. Rubinson. New York: Praeger.
- Walters, Pamela Barnhouse. 2000. “The Limits of Growth: School Expansion and School Reform in Historical Perspective.” Pp. 241–61 in Handbook of the Sociology of Education, Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, edited by M. T. Hallinan. Boston, MA: Springer US.
- Walters, Pamela Barnhouse, and Carl M. Briggs. 1993. “The Family Economy, Child Labor, and Schooling: Evidence from the Early Twentieth-Century South.” American Sociological Review 58(2):163–81.
- Walters, Pamela Barnhouse, and David R. James. 1992. “Schooling for Some: Child Labor and School Enrollment of Black and White Children in the Early Twentieth-Century South.” American Sociological Review 57(5):635–50.
- Walters, Pamela Barnhouse, David R. James, and Holly J. McCammon. 1997. “Citizenship and Public Schools: Accounting for Racial Inequality in Education in the Pre- and Post-Disfranchisement South.” American Sociological Review 62(1):34–52.