Social science lost one of its giants with the death of Charles Tilly on April 29, 2008. The Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, Tilly had built his reputation on works examining large-scale social change and its relationship to contentious politics, especially in Europe since 1500. His academic expertise covered a wide range of areas, including urbanization, industrialization, collective action, and state making. He was extremely prolific, authoring, coauthoring, editing or coediting fifty-one published books and monographs and over six hundred scholarly articles during his fifty-year career—with two books, Credit and Blame and Contentious Performances, appearing in 2008 alone. His other major publications include the following:

Democracy (2007)
Why? (2006)
Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (1998)
Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (1984)
From Mobilization to Revolution (1978)
The Vendee: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter-Revolution of 1793 (1964)