Prior research on consanguinity and kin marriage in Western societies has remained surprisingly silent on the postwar period, when kin endogamy is often believed to have become completely obsolete. In this study, we combine historical and contemporary data to chart and understand long dur & eacute;e changes in the incidence of different types of kin marriage in the Netherlands from the 1840s until today. Our study shows that cousin marriages comprised 2.7% of all unions during the 1871-1880 period and decreased to approximately 1.5% during the 1911-1922 period. Sibling set exchange marriages peaked at 4.7% in the last decade of the nineteenth century, after which they declined to 2.8% between 1911-1922. Surprisingly, despite this overall decline, a slight resurgence in sibling set exchange partnerships occurred in the 1970s and 1980s among the members of the baby boom generation. Moreover, cousin marriages saw a slight rise among those born in the 1970s, possibly partly as a result of import marriages among migrant groups. Kinship availability, religious-ideological group formation, and class-and education-based assortative mating explain these different trends, often reinforcing each other, and thereby producing specific spatial patterns of kin marriage. Our findings show that trends and patterns of kin endogamy were highly path-dependent and may wax and wane conditional on historical circumstances.
This article examines the interplay between theoretical interpretations of earthquakes and the practical efforts to mitigate their effects in the pre-modern era. Between the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, shifting explanations-from Aristotelian and theological to mechanistic and naturalistic-coexisted with emerging insights into structural vulnerability and safety. Major earthquakes in 1570, 1638, 1688, and 1693 served as testing grounds for new ideas about construction and urban planning, though their impact remained limited. Following the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Calabrian earthquakes of 1783, debates in Italian academies contrasted natural electricism with volcanism, while the first technical building guidelines marked a step toward modern seismic awareness. Yet economic and political constraints hindered their implementation, revealing the persistent gap between scientific understanding and practical means of protection.
This article revisits David Sabean's study of Neckarhausen, exploring how social-historical research on kinship can be conducted today using digitized sources, online databases, and new analytical tools. To demonstrate some of the possibilities these sources offer researchers, we present two data corpora: the Neckarhausen Research Database and a subset of the Online Heritage Books (Ortsfamilienb & uuml;cher), which covers W & uuml;rttemberg, northwest Germany, and the county of Wittgenstein. Using these corpora, we identify the first couples to marry kin of specific types and contextualize their choices through legal norms, regional dynamics, and database information. A tentative comparison reveals a recurring link between innovative marriage strategies and local power holders-a pattern first observed by Sabean-though these actors differed in their positions of power. In the southwest, they were office-holding farmers; in the northwest, they were large-scale landowners; and in Wittgenstein, they were princely elites. We argue that digital history can facilitate the kind of micro-historical, network-based, variation-seeking analysis that Sabean envisioned and pioneered on a wider scale. Recognizing that Sabean's kinship study does not primarily rely on demographics or statistics, but rather is a comparative reconstruction of kin networks, underscores its foundational role in historical kinship research today.
