Current Table of Contents

• The Making of the Kelly Girl: Gender and the Origins of the Temp Industry in Postwar America
  This article examines how temp industry leaders exploited notions of "women's work" in the postwar era to create a new category of "respectable" but marginal employment. Although they employed substantial numbers of men, postwar industry leaders publicly cast temp work as "women's work," constructing the iconic image of the "Kelly Girl." In doing so, they entered the postwar cultural debate about women and work, encouraging housewives to get jobs for self-fulfillment while at the same time maintaining the primacy of the domestic sphere. Through this strategy they began to build a new model of employment that would eventually change the meaning of work in America.
• "The Whole Extent of the Evil": Origin of Crime Statistics in the United States, 1880–1930
  This article traces the origin and the development of crime statistics in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to the federal nature of the polity and decentralization of state power, the historical process of "governmentalization" of the state in the US differed markedly from other Western European nations. The path to the establishment of a national archive of crime statistics in the US was especially tortuous, and its trajectory was shaped by strategic alliances as well as conflicts between various institutional actors involved in the process.
• Controversies of US-USSR Cultural Contacts During the Cold War: The Perspective of Latvian Refugees1
  This article analyzes the conflict that emerged regarding the so-called US-USSR "cultural contacts" during the Cold War within the exile community of American Latvians. While most of the American political and cultural elites saw cultural exchanges with the Soviets as beneficial, the reactions of the émigrés were much more controversial and polarizing. This study reveals the unrecognized side of the Cold War politics as experienced by the refugee groups. The study employs American, Latvian and Soviet publications, memoirs, interviews and archival materials.
• Rules, Red Tape, and Paperwork: The Archeology of State Control over Migrants
  Conventional accounts of a drastic shift to migration restriction after World War I following a golden era of free movement obscure crucial processes of state formation around matters of administering migration. How and with what consequences did state control over migration become acceptable and possible after the Great War? Existing studies have centered on core countries of immigration and thus underestimate the degree to which legitimate state capacities have developed in a political field spanning sending and receiving countries with similar designs on the same international migrants. Relying on archival research, and an examination of the migratory field constituted by two quintessential emigration countries (Italy and Spain), and a traditional immigration country (Argentina) since the mid-nineteenth century, this article argues that widespread acceptance of migration control as an administrative domain rightfully under states' purview, and the development of attendant capacities have derived from legal, organizational, and administrative mechanisms crafted by state actors in response to the challenges posed by mass migration. Concretely, these countries codified migration and nationality laws, built, took over, and revamped migration-related organizations, and administratively encaged mobile people through official paperwork. The nature of efforts to evade official checks on mobility implicitly signaled the acceptance of migration control as a bona fide administrative domain. In more routine migration management, states legitimate capacity has had unforeseen intermediate- and long-term consequences such as the subjection of migrants (and, because of ius sanguinis nationality laws, sometimes their descendants) to other states' administrative influence and the generation of conditions for dual citizenship. Study findings challenge scholarship that implicitly views states as constant factors conditioning migration flows, rather than as developing institutions with historically variable regulatory abilities and legitimacy. It extends current work by specifying mechanism used by state actors to establish migration as an accepted administrative domain.
• Baseball in England: A Case of Prolonged Cultural Resistance
  The concern within this paper is to examine how, notwithstanding the growing global power of the USA and the declining power of Britain over a period of fifty years from 1874 to 1924, a series of attempts made by American entrepreneurs to establish the game of baseball in England were, to all intents and purposes, rebuffed. On four separate occasions during this period various American baseball entrepreneurs put on exhibition matches of baseball. On each occasion, baseball was given short shrift within the English press. We provide an empirical account before engaging in some theoretical reflections utilising a figurational sociological approach.