In the past, parents' sex preferences for their children have proved difficult to verify. This study used John Knodel's German village genealogies of couples married between 1815 and 1899 to investigate sex preferences for children during the fertility transition. Event history analyses of couples' propensity to progress to a fifth parity was used to test whether the probability of having additional children was influenced by the sex composition of surviving children. It appears that son preference influenced reproductive behaviour: couples having only girls experienced significantly higher transition rates than those having only boys or a mixed sibset. However, couples who married after about 1870 began to exhibit fertility behaviour consistent with the choice to have at least one surviving boy and girl. This result represents a surprisingly early move towards the symmetrical sex preference typical of modern European populations.

If triangulation and its worth have long been contested amongst social scientists, historians have not discussed it. In this paper, a historical demographer practises data triangulation by combining qualitative and quantitative sources. The aim is to explore how these sources identify nineteenth-century women's occupations and thus challenge the gender bias found in population registers as they report incomplete information on women's work. This bias is acknowledged by feminist historians and also evident in quantitative records in developing countries. To explain the outcome of dissonant data that this historical study shows and shares with modern triangulation approaches, women's ability to represent their occupational identities in the different sources is discussed. Some of the epistemological implications that arise from the triangulation of data that subsists under separate paradigms are also reflected upon. Although triangulation is far from infallible, it is argued that it helps to gain, view and question knowledge.

Normative time occupies a prominent place in life course theory. Time intersects with the life course to dictate discourses of appropriate life stage progression in a linear chain of events from birth to reproduction and finally death. Taking crip time and the life course as their focus, the papers in this special section recognize that cultural understandings of what constitutes disability are connected to understandings of time and the idea of a normative life course, which in turn builds on ableist norms. The idea of ability as the desirable normal state creates a realm of compulsory able-bodidness. Everybody that falls outside this hegemonic assumption is culturally deviant and wrong. Crip time creates an understanding of time that differs from ableist time and unravels the social construction of ability. Crip time is approached from multiple perspectives in this special section and traverse a number of disciplines and different methodologies.

Abstract:This article presents problems and possibilities associated with incorporating into history teaching a digital demographic database made for professional historians. We detect and discuss the outcome of how students in Swedish upper secondary schools respond to a teaching approach involving digitized registers comprising 19th century individuals and populations. Even though our results demonstrate that students experience the use of this digital database as messy, stressful, complicated, even meaningless and frustrating, they also perceive working with it as most interesting. We discuss this twofold outcome, its reasons and lessons to learn from it. When technology is functioning and the task is specialized and sufficiently guided by the teacher, which is not always the case, our results propose that digital databases can stimulate young people's interest and historical thinking. Knowledge construction based upon historical thinking is evident in the students' examination papers in which they present and debate their findings. These papers indicate that students can use a digital database and write history based upon empirical evidence, source criticism and historical empathy, just as professional historians do.

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