In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

a p p e n d i x o n e Firefighting by the Numbers Quantitative data played an important role in this study of the history of fire protection . Over the course of the project, I examined a variety of quantitative materials . These included several data sources whose procedures for use have been amply discussed by historians, including the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and the United States Census. However, in addition to exploring these more standard sources, I also analyzed two databases that I created from the personnel files of the St. Louis and Philadelphia fire departments. Although this data has helped me to better understand how the experiences of firefighters changed over time, making sense of them required me to move into territory not normally traversed by historians. With this appendix, I want to outline, briefly and generally , the procedures and approaches that I followed in order to make the data in the personnel files of these fire departments suitable for analysis.* * St. Louis Fire Department, Personnel File; Philadelphia Fire Department, Roster, FH; IPUMS, http://www.ipums.umn.edu/usa/; for more discussion, see Mark Tebeau, “‘Eating Smoke’: Masculinity , Technology, and the Politics of Urbanization, 1850–1950” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University , 1997), 463–79; also, on quantitative methods, more broadly, see for instance, Konrad H. Jarausch and Kenneth A. Hardy, Quantitative Methods for Historians: A Guide to Research, Data, and Statistics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Stephan Thernstrom, “On the Socioeconomic Ranking of Occupations,” in The Other Bostonians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University The process began with studying the methods that each department utilized to keep personnel records. The Philadelphia Fire Department kept a membership ledger, divided alphabetically by last name, though within alphabet category, the names were listed by order of the firefighters’ year of first entry into the department . The ledger to which I was given access covered the period from the department ’s inception in 1871 until 1955. Unfortunately, the PFD appears to have stopped using the ledger abruptly in 1955. As a result, any information about fire- fighters whose careers continued after that date was absent from the ledger. The PFD ledger, then, represents a complete record of the department between 1871 and 1955. However, it does not contain an exhaustive record of all those firemen’s careers. The St. Louis Fire Department kept personnel records in three different card files that were used over different but overlapping time periods. The card files to which I was given access included firefighters who began their careers at the department’s inception in 1857 through about 1953. The cards were used and updated regularly after 1953. Thus these cards represent a more complete record. Organizing the data in a fashion that made it amenable to analysis required a long, though relatively simple process that I performed in consultation with quantitative historians, especially John Modell. The first step involved entering data. I first assigned a basic identifying tag (a page, card file, and item number), and then entered the name of the firefighter, the date of entrance, the date of exit, and the reason for his final exit from the department. After entering this information, I “cleaned” the data, looking for duplications, correcting entry errors, and ensuring consistency in each database. This process took many hours, turning into months, in that it involved the painstaking process of checking my computerized database against the original records, again and again. Over this time, I organized, sorted, and reorganized the data. Later, as I finished this process, I performed quality checks as well as some preliminary analyses to learn more about the databases, especially whether systematic errors appeared. Once this process was complete, I had created a database of all firefighters who entered the St. Louis Fire Department between 1857 through 1950, which had 3,437 unique names. I also had developed a database of all the firefighters who entered the Philadelphia Fire Department from 1871 through 1955, which contained 8,035 individuals. 344 Appendix 1 Press, 1975); Theodore Hershberg, Michael Katz, Stuart Blumin, Laurence Glasco, and Clyde Griffen, “Occupation and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Cities,” Historical Methods Newsletter 7 (1974), 174–216; Charles M. Dollar and Richard J. Jensen, Historian’s Guide to Statistics (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971); Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). [3.133...

Share