About the project
Broadstreet is a blog dedicated to the study of historical political economy (HPE). Its goal is to foster conversations across disciplines in the social sciences, namely economics and political science, but also history, sociology, quantitative methods, and public policy. Correspondingly, its editors (and guest contributors) are drawn from these respective disciplines.
Given the boundaries that typically exist across academic disciplines, scholars who work on similar subjects – like HPE – rarely talk to one another or read each other’s work. Our hope in starting Broadstreet is to break down some of these artificial boundaries, generate true cross-disciplinary dialogues, and produce better and more wide-ranging HPE research.
The blog’s name, Broadstreet, is a nod to the legendary John Snow and his study of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London. Snow found convincing evidence for a previously unproven water-born theory of cholera transmission, with a rigorous yet interdisciplinary approach — using detailed socio-economic data, ethnography, historical patterns of disease transmission, and early techniques of causal inference. The Broad Street water pump in London’s Soho district was not only a meeting place for the diverse residents of the neighborhood, but served as the focal point for Snow’s interdisciplinary breakthrough. While the Broad Street pump is no more, the legacy of this innovative research lives on. We hope that Broadstreet will be go-to location for all those with interests in HPE.
Connect with the author
Vicky Fouka ’10 (Economics) is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is an alum of the Barcelona GSE Master’s in Economics and earned her PhD in Economics at GPEFM (UPF and Barcelona GSE).
Check out her most recent post on Broadstreet, “The Great Northward Migration and Social Transformation, Part I” which looks at the mass exodus of more than 5 million Black Americans from the Southern United States between 1915 and 1970.
