Journal of Social History articles from December 1994

Journal of Social History archives from December 1994

The cultural significance of breastfeeding and infant care in early modern England and America.
December 22, 1994... In the late summer of 1752, the Reverend Ebenezer Parkman lay ill. His joints were stiff and painful; he frequently felt faint and feverish; and he had no appetite. As he confided to his diary on the 21st of August, "I am so wasted, that there...

Age relations and the social order in early New England: the evidence from manners.
December 22, 1994... Historians have recently begun to study the symbolic rituals of face-to-face interaction that we call manners, a rich source of clues about culture in past time. Manners constitute a mediating level of culture between a society's abstract...

"Dreams never to be realized": emotional culture and the phenomenology of emotion.
December 22, 1994... "Life is a bundle of habits," wrote Gladys Bell several months after her marriage in 1925 to Marlin Wilson Penrod. "The more habits (good) we possess the better for us in tho't, feeling conduct;--among them must be the habit of forming...

Suburbanization and the decline of Catholic public ritual in Pittsburgh. (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
December 22, 1994... Thirty-five thousand Catholic men filled Pittsburgh's Forbes Field on Friday, September 30, 1955 for the first of two prominent public rituals that fall weekend. They watched as 1,200 altar boys processed in from the center field gate ahead of a...

The student as strikebreaker: college youth and the crisis of masculinity in the early twentieth century.
December 22, 1994... In March 1905, Columbia University students deserted their classes en masse to help break a strike of subway workers against the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), the biggest strike New York had ever experienced. Almowt immediately after...

The counted and the uncounted: the occupational structure of early American cities.
December 22, 1994... Historians have examined the occupational and social structures of American cities in the Revolutionary Era and the early National Period for several reasons. For example, Gary Nash argues the cities were the "crucibles" of the political...

Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia.
December 22, 1994... The numbers tell the story: the heart of the New World African diaspora lies, not north of the border, but south. During the period of slavery, ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America as to the United States.(1) People...

Social Science as Civic Discourse: Essays on the Invention, Legitimation, and Uses of Social Theory.
December 22, 1994... Brown's argument is straightforward enough. Social science today, willy nilly, is the language of such civic discourse as we manage. "Why do just men suffer?, one formerly asked the rabbi. Because of structural unemployment, today answers the...

Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine.
December 22, 1994... Explaining Epidemics collects in one volume essays spanning over a quarter of a century of Charles Rosenberg's work. Only the Introduction, the prefatory notes to each chapter, and Chapter 14, the essay from which the title of the book is taken,...

The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History.
December 22, 1994... The beauty which we admire in contemporary Mediterranean landscapes, J.R. McNeill reminds us at the beginning of this learned but gloomy environmental history of the region, is that of a barren and depopulated countryside of relatively recent...

White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture.
December 22, 1994... The original impetus for this book was a request to conduct research on a collection of images of Africa and Blacks for an exhibition first held at the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam in 1989-90. The book grew out of Pieterse's initial report, and...

The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880-1940.
December 22, 1994... I first took note of Ann Shola Orloff's scholarship when an essay, "Why Not Equal Protection?: Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s-1920," she wrote with Theda Skocpol appeared in...

Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization.
December 22, 1994... In the 1980s, the Social Science Research Council and the University of Michigan sponsored five seminars on 20th century Soviet social history. The result is a wide-ranging set of essays analyzing the social dimensions of superindustrialization...

The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris.
December 22, 1994... There is bit of the voyeur in all historians. Social historians more than others may be afflicted with the desire to peer inside homes of the past to catch glimpses of people's personal lives. The late Annik Pardailhe-Galabrun, and her team of...

Maid and Mistress: Feminine Solidarity and Class Difference in Five Nineteenth-Century French Texts.
December 22, 1994... Inspired by reading Guy de Maupassant's Une Vie (1883) to write a history of the relationships of mistresses and maids in French fiction, Susan Yates has examined five examples of French realist fiction, including Une Vie, Balzac's Eugenie...

Sexual Customs in Rural Norway: A Nineteenth-Century Study.
December 22, 1994... Eilert Sundt (1817-1875) was a prolific analyst of Norwegian society during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. A Lutheran pastor by training, Sundt, whose work was funded directly by the Norwegian Parliament for two decades, devoted...

Death and the Afterlife in Modern France.
December 22, 1994... Thomas Kselman has defined his subject broadly. His book treats not only a changing complex of beliefs and practices relating to dying, but also competing ideas about life beyond death. Focusing on a series of simultaneous developments, he has...

The Early Colombian Labor Movement: Artisans and Politics in Bogota, 1832-1919.
December 22, 1994... The literature on Colombian labor has tended to neglect nineteenth-century artisans. Miguel Urrutia's The Development of the Colombian Labor Movement (Yale University Press, 1969) devoted less than a sixth of the 258 pages to the nineteenth...

Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870-1905.
December 22, 1994... The focal point of Charters Wynn's study of the working class in the Ukraine's iron and coal belt is October 1905: in that month workers in Ekaterinoslav and elsewhere in the region mounted an impressive general strike that as part of the...

Social Inequality in Oaxaca: A History of Resistance and Change.
December 22, 1994... It is often true that a well realized scholarly work falling short of an overly ambitious goal is ultimately more satisfying and important than a more narrowly defined study which succeeds completely within its modest bounds. That is certainly...

The Land and the Loom: Peasants and Profit in Northern France, 1680-1800.
December 22, 1994... The typical village study commonly grants us entry into a rich microhistorical world and, sometimes, a major historiographical debate. Liana Vardi's detailed analysis of the economy of the village of Montigny and its region of Cambresis reveals a...

The Aristocracy in Europe: 1815-1914.
December 22, 1994... Not so many decades ago an undergraduate introduced to surveys of "Western Civilization" was taught that the eighteenth century constituted "the age of aristocracy," the nineteenth century "the age of the bourgeoisie," and the twentieth century,...

Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History.
December 22, 1994... In this intentionally provocative book, John Burnham tries to argue four inter-connected themes: That there has been a significant inversion in cultural values in the twentieth century so that the morally "bad habits" and disreputable social...

Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950.
December 22, 1994... Historians have never quite known what to do with children. Are children simply adults-in-waiting so that historical generalizations about adults will suffice for understanding children? Or do we have reasons to believe that developmental and...

Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century.
December 22, 1994... Professor Hall's Africans in Colonial Louisiana is destined to become an influential work not only on colonial slave societies but on the social and economic history of Louisiana's Europeans. Given how little we know about early Louisiana, it is...

Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653.
December 22, 1994... This complex book includes at least three important contributions to an understanding of the many changes England experienced in the seventeenth century. First, it describes the commercial changes which created a new group of merchants separate...

The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism.
December 22, 1994... Historians are leery of "grand designs" and all-encompassing explanations of the past, and of none more so than the Marxist theory of history. They complain (often with good cause) about the tendencies of such approaches to force weak empirical...

Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy.
December 22, 1994... In Tumult and Silence at Second Creek, Winthrop D. Jordan examines a little-known slave rebellion which occurred in Mississippi during the Civil War. No doubt eagerly anticipated by fans of his earlier work, including the classic White Over...

Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina.
December 22, 1994... This is a valuable book on an important subject. As Professor Bill Cecil-Fronsman points out, the "common whites" (whom he defines on page 1 as "white nonslaveholders and small slaveholders who saw themselves as nonelite") were the largest social...

American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era.
December 22, 1994... American Manhood provides perhaps the best indication that men's history is at last emerging from its troubled and protracted adolescence, a ten-year stretch that has yielded, despite repeated calls for more and better research, only a handful of...

Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889-1930.
December 22, 1994... While historians have long considered the American settlement house a model of Progressive era reform, they have disagreed on its meaning: as reform, feminist historians most especially have cited it as the harbinger of forward-looking New Deal...

The Modern Christmas in America.
December 22, 1994... William B. Waits' study of Christmas is subtitled "A Cultural History of Gift Giving," and his approach and focus are true to this emphasis. Using "insights and sensitivities gleaned from anthropology (5)," especially the work of Marcel Mauss,...

When Strikes Make Sense - And Why: Lessons from Third Republic French Coal Miners.
December 22, 1994... Losing strikes--the more the better--benefits workers. To present and defend this conundrum the historical sociologist Samuel Cohn has produced a creative and thought-provoking analysis of the outcomes of coal miners' strikes in France between...

The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps.
December 22, 1994... The 1905 revolution is attracting the attention of more and more historians. For decades Soviet historians, and to a large measure Western scholars as well, have been entranced by the revolutions of 1917, seeing that year as the defining point of...

Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France.
December 22, 1994... "May they be cursed in town and cursed in the fields. May their barns be cursed and may their bones be cursed. May the fruit of their loins be cursed as well as the fruit of their lands". French monks of the Middle Ages hurled curses like these...

Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control.
December 22, 1994... Sacrificed for Honor offers a fascinating look at a grim topic--the large-scale abandonment of new-borns in nineteenth-century Italy. Few readers might guess that illegitimacy and abandonment were common in Italy. Aware of our stereotypes,...

Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States.
December 22, 1994... Taking her title from the fact that early government funding programs concentrated on American war veterans and American mothers, Theda Skocpol's massive study traces the history of American social welfare from the end of the Civil War through...

Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890-1920.
December 22, 1994... A comparative history of social policy in two countries must meet the test of making clear the ideological and political parameters of policy-making in each country to historians who are not specialists in that nation's history. Alisa Klaus rises...

Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism.
December 22, 1994... "Discoverers get power from their discoveries only through the institutions that legitimize them," writes Mario Biagioli in Galileo Courtier, (30) implicitly posing such provocative questions as what it meant for a discoverer, like Galileo, to...

Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood.
December 22, 1994... In this volume Miriam Formanek-Brunell examines the relationship between dolls and American culture over a one-hundred-year period that encompasses the Victorian era and the evolution of modem industrial society. Challenging specifically the...

Peasant Russia, Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period.
December 22, 1994... In this useful and well-written book, Christine Worobec presents an excellent synthesis that ties together three important sources: The extensive ethnographic literature compiled in Russia in the late nineteenth century, recent studies of Russian...

The People Speak Out: Anti-Semitism and Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria.
December 22, 1994... James Harris' useful monograph joins a series of recent studies which challenge the prevailing orthodoxy on the origins of modern, particularly German antisemitism. According to a still widely accepted view, crucial changes in attitudes toward...