Journal of Social History articles from December 1993

Journal of Social History archives from December 1993

Knowing one's place: perceptions of community in the industrial suburbs of Leeds, 1790-1890.
December 22, 1993... "Community" is a widely used but elusive concept. Its continued popularity is well explained by Williams's famous observation that, however the term is used, it carries wholly positive connotations. As Gemeinschaft it was once thought to have...

Agrarian rebellion and defense of community: meaning and collective violence in late colonial and independence-era Mexico.
December 22, 1993... Riot at Atlacomulco On the evening of 1 November 1810--All Saints Day--a riotous crowd in the village of Atlacomulco, in the Toluca area about sixty miles to the northwest of Mexico City, attacked the home of don Romualdo Magdaleno Diez, a...

The rhetoric of death and destruction in the Thirty Years War.
December 22, 1993... "Anno 1642, all the misery continued just as bad as in the previous year, so that the despair pressed all the harder . . . whoever has not himself seen and lived through such circumstances cannot believe what I note here."(1) This plaint by...

"Whence comes the lady tympanist?" Gender and instrumental musicians in America, 1853-1990.
December 22, 1993... At the turn of the century, women's roles moved from the domestic to the public sphere. Historians of the Progressive Era have documented this emergence, describing the suffragists' fight for political rights and the college-educated "new women,"...

Following the rules? Women's responses to incarceration, New Zealand, 1880-1920.
December 22, 1993... In May 1881, Catherine Driscoll was sentenced to a term of hard labor in the Dunedin prison. Within a month she was causing problems for the staff and other inmates. Following a disagreement with the matron over breakfast arrangements, Driscoll...

Negotiating the "folk highway" of the nation: sport, public culture and American identity, 1870-1940.
December 22, 1993... The emergent American state summoned new traditions and symbols to create a unified national culture.(1) This process was driven by an erratic period in capitalist development, which witnessed massive waves of immigration, the rise of a...

"Everyone's been good to me, especially the dogs": foster-children and young paupers in nineteenth-century Southern Iceland.
December 22, 1993... Introduction Parent-child relations in the European past have attracted considerable academic interest since the 1960s. During the 1970s and early 1980s historical research into the subject was largely concerned with questions relating to...

The seeds of prosperity and discord: the political economy of community polarization in Greenfield, Massachusetts, 1770-1820.
December 22, 1993... Introduction In June of 1816 fifty-one residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, petitioned their state legislature to incorporate themselves as a second congregational society, separate from the First Congregational Society of Greenfield. Six...

Guy Thuillier: "Paris will save nothing."
December 22, 1993... There is something out of the ordinary about this prodigiously energetic historian and French patriot who taunts Paris, where he lives and works, with the cry, "Paris will save nothing." At the core of Thuillier's great passion is the province of...

From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America.
December 22, 1993... The late twentieth-century crusade that created community mental health centers throughout the United States was a "radical policy innovation". Not only did the locus of mental health practice shift from the state mental hospital to the community...

Soft Soap, Hard Sell: American Hygiene in an Age of Advertisement.
December 22, 1993... Today in U.S. society soaps, shampoos, hair styling aids, cosmetics, and the behaviors that accompany these, have been established as essential to self-esteem and social acceptance. Vincent Vinikas's study of the promotion of grooming products...

Propylaen Technikgeschichte, vol. 4, Netzwerke Stahl und Strom: 1840-1914.
December 22, 1993... This volume is the first one to appear in a five-volume history of technology published by the Propylaen Verlag under the editorship of Wolfgang Konig, professor at the Technical University of Berlin. The completed work the first of its kind in...

A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe.
December 22, 1993... In recent years, the history of Western European pre-industrial peasant and laboring-class families has moved in two divergent directions. One direction has been toward a historical anthropology emphasizing changing definitions of family,...

Law, Family and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy.
December 22, 1993... It often pays to heed the name of a book. While Thomas Kuehn's title, Law, Family and Women, states his subject well, his subtitle, Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy outlines his method, trumpets his ambitions and yet concedes the...

Poor Women and Their Families: Hard Working Charity Cases, 1900-1930.
December 22, 1993... Beverly Stadum's study of hardworking charity cases provides a rich and sensitive analysis of the circumstances and struggles of impoverished women living in Minneapolis during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The study is based...

Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade.
December 22, 1993... Across America debate rages about single motherhood and its negative impact on morality. Female sexuality and its natural by-product--unwanted babies--invite public comment and government solutions. Critics of the welfare state label black women...

The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class and Gender.
December 22, 1993... This volume, the result of a conference at Carnegie Mellon University, offers provocative new ways of understanding the black migration. In general, the six authors show the migration to be more complex than previous works have indicated. Rather...

Coal, Class and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32.
December 22, 1993... The locus of scholarly attention in African-American history has shifted successively in the last decades: from slavery to Reconstruction and now to the Great Migration. Joe Trotter has played a leading role in recent studies of the mass...

Labor's Flaming Youth; Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923.
December 22, 1993... "The Telephone Operators' Department constituted in effect the first national trade union controlled and officered by women". Stephen Norwood's excellent study both tells the story of the rise and fall of the Telephone Operators' Department (a...

Images of Youth: Age, Class, and the Male Youth Problem, 1880-1920.
December 22, 1993... Studies of turn-of-the-century adult attitudes about treatment of youth all contend that a major shift in perceptions of youth occurred but they differ concerning the reasons behind the changes. Some argue that a changed treatment of youth,...

Politics and Class in Milan: 1881-1901.
December 22, 1993... Louise Tilly seems to have directed her new book, Politics and Class in Milan, 1881-1901, more toward labor historians than scholars of modern Italy. Much of the material is already available in other overviews of the nineteenth-century working...

Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso's Barcelona.
December 22, 1993... The intense social and political struggles which have accompanied Barcelona's industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have long interested historians. Temma Kaplan's new book Red City, Blue Period: Social...

Police and the Social Order in German Cities: The Dusseldorf District, 1848-1914.
December 22, 1993... This book fills an important gap in the historiography on the German police. Whereas All Ludtke, Wolfram Siemann and Hsi-huey Liang have written on the police in the early 19th century and in the Weimar Republic, very little was known hitherto...

Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848.
December 22, 1993... To risk a gross generalization, social historians are concerned with demarcating the slow, developmental changes of a social order; when confronted with sweeping social change, there is a tendency to investigate its contexts, rather than the...

Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900.
December 22, 1993... The study of male fraternal ritual in the United States has always had some trouble being taken seriously. No matter how often historians emphasize the importance of associative relations among men, the field is still haunted by the specter of...

Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence.
December 22, 1993... With one exception, the essays of this volume derive from a conference on 'Epidemics and Ideas' held at Oxford in 1989. Subsequent revision in the light of discussion at the conference and, mayhap, a firm editorial hand produced a remarkably...

A Rural Society After the Black Death: Essex, 1350-1535.
December 22, 1993... Whether one speaks of demography or mentalite, the Black Death has long served historians as a convenient turning point. It has become almost a reflex action for a whole generation of historians to date the beginning of the early modern world in...

The German Experience of Professionalization: Modern Learned Professions and Their Organizations from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era.
December 22, 1993... A number of works on the German professions have appeared recently, opening up some of the most fertile terrain available for students of modern German history. While a majority of these studies tend to focus on the development of a single...

Der Boom: 1948-1973, Gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Folgen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in Europa.
December 22, 1993... In the years from 1948 to 1973, Europeans as a group got richer faster than at any other period in their history. Kaelble and his coauthors offer historical perspectives on the causes and consequences of that startling dash to affluence. Five...

Bureaucrats and Beggars: French Social Policy in the Age of the Enlightenment.
December 22, 1993... In 1972, when Thomas Adams completed the dissertation upon which this book is based, it was possible to see the emergence of the welfare state as simply a natural development of Enlightenment thought. Eighteen years later, when this book was...

Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570-1720.
December 22, 1993... The Conference on Latin American History awarded Wightman the Eugene E. Bolton Prize for the best book of 1990. It has been praised as an important study of Indian migration and its relationship to changes in other aspects of colonial society:...

Student Protest in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai.
December 22, 1993... From the May 4th Movement of 1919 to the "Democracy Movement" of 1989, student protests have punctuated the history of modem China. At every stage of the national struggle, students have been among the first to take to the streets: against Great...

The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945.
December 22, 1993... Henrika Kuklick's fifty year social history of British anthropology provides an engaging and convincing case for the transformation of the emerging field from an applied, service-oriented discipline whose practitioners worked outside the academy...

Gay Voices from East Germany.
December 22, 1993... Marcus presents a Studs Terkelish anthology covering the development of gay rights in the United States. Some 47 people are interviewed, including eight straights. Interestingly, three gays prefer to use pseudonyms so that their "outing" will not...

The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster.
December 22, 1993... Barton contends that certain emotional extremes (despair, desire, fascination, and envy) were characteristic of the Roman world in the late Republic and early Empire (1st C. B.C.-2nd C. A.D.) and that the gladiator and the "monster" (the latter...

Crofters and Habitants. Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township: 1848-1881.
December 22, 1993... In 1852, two groups of migrants, 35 Protestant families from Lewis in Scotland, out of 2,337 who came to Canada, and 58 Catholic families from older French Canadian parishes south of Quebec city, had recently settled in Winslow township, Megantic...

Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution.
December 22, 1993... If the French Revolution is often remembered in images of wine and blood-soaked gutters a la Mme de Farge or the guillotine, tumbril, and green room of the Committee of Public Safety, such is not the picture portrayed in Margadant's Urban...