Health and socio-demographic conditions as determinants of marriage and social mobility

This paper makes use of data collected from military registers and marriage certificates for the population of Alghero, in Sardinia, for the period 1866-1925, with the aim of investigating the role played by physical characteristics and health in the possibility of social mobility through marriage. Our findings demonstrate that, whereas physical defects and ill health had little impact on the chances of marrying an illiterate woman, these factors did have a negative effect on the chances of marrying a woman who was literate. In a context in which intergenerational social mobility remained limited and the family had the final say on marriage arrangements, it is likely that only healthy individuals were selected for marriages regarded as strategic for the purposes of forming and strengthening family alliances, and/or improving the social position within the community.health, marriage, Sardinia, social mobility

Demographic responses to short-term stress in a 19^th century Tuscan population: the case of household out-migration

This paper deals with the relationship between household emigration and short-term crisis in a rural community of mid-19th century Tuscany. Based on a detailed reconstruction of individual and household life-histories, the paper shows the close relationship between household emigration and different kinds of short-term stresses, either economic, epidemiologic or within the household. Despite the different response by SES - with the poorest strata of the population much exposed to price changes and mortality crisis - the death of the household head appears as one of the most powerful factor of household emigration

Demographic responses to short-term stress in a 19th century Tuscan population: The case of household out-migration

This paper deals with the relationship between household emigration and short-term crisis in a rural community of mid-19th century Tuscany. Based on a detailed reconstruction of individual and household life-histories, the paper shows the close relationship between household emigration and different kinds of short-term stresses, either economic, epidemiologic or within the household. Despite the different response by SES - with the poorest strata of the population much exposed to price changes and mortality crisis - the death of the household head appears as one of the most powerful factor of household emigration.emigration, household, Italy, sharecropping, short-term stress

Intensity of Agricultural Workload and the Seasonality of Births in Italy

According to “the energy balance mechanism” theory, female ovarian function is strongly hindered by even a modest negative energy balance (the difference between calorie intake and calorie consumption). Agriculture-based economies were characterized by periods of extremely intense workload (especially in summer when grain was harvested) without sufficient nutrition. We analyze the role of the intensity of agricultural workload (proxied by marriage seasonality) on seasonal oscillations in births. Using data at the regional level, from Italian Unification to the eve of the World War I, we find some empirical support for the energy balance theory. In particular, we find the strength of the relationship between marriage seasonality and birth seasonality to be lower in the more developed Northern part of the Italian country, in which some signs of industrialization had already been present

Performance analysis of the toroidal field ITER production conductors

The production of the superconducting cables for the toroidal field (TF) magnets of the ITER machine has recently been completed at the manufacturing companies selected during the previous qualification phase. The quality assurance/quality control programs that have been implemented to ensure production uniformity across numerous suppliers include performance tests of several conductor samples from selected unit lengths. The short full-size samples (4 m long) were subjected to DC and AC tests in the SULTAN facility at CRPP in Villigen, Switzerland. In a previous work the results of the tests of the conductor performance qualification samples were reported. This work reports the analyses of the results of the tests of the production conductor samples. The results reported here concern the values of current sharing temperature, critical current, effective strain and n-value from the DC tests and the energy dissipated per cycle from the AC loss tests. A detailed comparison is also presented between the performance of the conductors and that of their constituting strands

Male partner choice in Sardinia, late 19th-early 20th century

This paper makes use of data collected from military registers and marriage certificates for the population of Alghero, in Sardinia, for the period 1866-1925, with the aim of investigating the role played by physical characteristics and health in the possibility of social mobility through marriage. Our findings demonstrate that, whereas physical defects and ill health had little impact on the chances of marrying an illiterate woman, these factors did have a negative effect on the chances of marrying a woman who was literate. In a context in which intergenerational social mobility remained limited and the family had the final say on marriage arrangements, it is likely that only healthy individuals were selected for marriages regarded as strategic for the purposes of forming and strengthening family alliances, and/or improving the social position within the community

Deaths and survivors in war: The Italian soldiers in WWI

OBJECTIVE The aim of this paper is to study the selection effects of mortality among soldiers in WWI. METHODS Individual-level data of more than 62,000 soldiers born between 1874 and 1899 in north-eastern Italy was used. Almost 10% of these soldiers died in the war. A data set was constructed by linking two different sources, the call-up registers and the Roll of Honour of the fallen Italian soldiers of WWI. RESULTS The risk of death of soldiers in war depended partly on the soldier\u2019s assignment to corps and partly on personal behaviour and individual characteristics. A relatively small number of soldiers of large body size fell in battle. The most universal cause of death was illness. Literate soldiers were less likely to die in captivity. CONTRIBUTION The concept of mortality differential has rarely been applied to soldiers engaged in conflict. This is because they were supposed to experience similar perils and run similar risks during the war. However, our study found evidence of strong mortality differentials among soldiers, which were strictly associated with the striking differences in terms of literacy, education, and socio-economic status that permeated the Italian society of that time and that the universal enrolment allowed to highlight

Son Preference in a Sharecropping Society: Gender Composition of Children and Reproduction in a Pre-Transitional Italian Community

Before the demographic transition, were couples able to control their fertility? Can we find evidence for this by comparing households with different occupations, in which the sex composition of the offspring may reveal a preference for children of a given sex and reproductive behaviours that differ in response to economic factors? To address this question, Matteo Manfredini, Marco BresCHi and Alessio fornasin make use of an original database on the fertility of nineteenth-century Tuscan families that combines information from parish registers and from a local census of inhabitants. They compare the probability of further births according to the sex composition of surviving children, focusing on four social groups: day labourers, sharecroppers, smallholders and non-agricultural occupations. The authors find evidence that sharecroppers tended to favour large families in order to secure a male heir