Journal of Social History articles from December 1995

Journal of Social History archives from December 1995

'Employable mothers' and 'suitable work': a re-evaluation of welfare and wage-earning for women in the twentieth-century United States.
December 22, 1995... U.S. welfare policy has yet to adequately address a mother's two work roles - care-giving and wage-earning. These two responsibilities have produced conflicting policy responses, sometimes within the same historical period. Citizens and...

Culture and contrasts in a northern European village: lifestyles among manorial peasants in 18th-century Denmark.
December 22, 1995... This study deals with the reconstruction of peasant life in an East Danish manorial estates region seen in a cultural and social perspective. Even when a population could not write, it may be possible to reconstruct the cultural order in people's...

From children's point of view: childhood in nineteenth-century Iceland.
December 22, 1995... In their book Growing up in America, Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner challenged historians to explore more fully the following five questions relating to the history of childhood: 1. What have been the attitudes of adults toward children and...

The integration of the sexes.(Etiquette Books and Emotion Management in the 20th Century, part 2)
December 22, 1995... Introduction This is a second report on a larger comparative study of changes in twentieth-century American, Dutch, English and German etiquette books. A central hypothesis of this study is that major directional trends in dominant codes and...

Il mio buono compare: choosing godparents and the uses of baptismal kinship in renaissance Florence.
December 22, 1995... At terce, Sunday, 31 July 1411, Ginevra gave birth to a very attractive baby boy whom we had baptized on 4 August. The sponsors were my colleagues among the Standard-bearers of the Militia Companies with the exception of two: Giorgio and...

A cracked mirror: images and self-images of elderly men and women in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century.
December 22, 1995... Introduction Johannes van Oosterzee (1817-1882) was a professor in theology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands from 1863 until his death in 1882. Before he became a professor he was a clergyman and one of the most well-known...

Social and geographical mobility in the Old World and New World communities: Earls Colne, Ipswich and Springfield, 1636-1685.
December 22, 1995... The argument that follows seeks to fill a missing link among recent accounts of seventeenth-century New England settlements. Some of these accounts stress the hierarchical character of the new communities. Others dispute the importance of these...

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America.
December 22, 1995... How did the great detective Sherlock Holmes solve a mystery? Presumably by combining a fair amount of evidence, a touch of probability, and a dash of speculation. And seldom did a case go unsolved. Much like Arthur Conan Doyle's detective, the...

Children in Time and Place: Developmental and Historical Insights.
December 22, 1995... Collaborations between historians and other social scientists are exceedingly rare. Despite conference commentators' oft-repeated calls for collaboration and comparison, each discipline is jealous of its own territory and "trespassing" boundaries...

The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain: 1880-1980.
December 22, 1995... The relatively recent upsurge in the interest in consumption has produced a number of works which regard consumerism as the dominant term to be used in describing modern British society. John Benson has provided a healthy contribution to this...

Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty.
December 22, 1995... In his acknowledgments to this book, Friedel confesses to having felt guilty about how much fun he had researching and writing it. If it's a sin to enjoy diligent, down-and-dirty primary-source scholarship, Friedel has managed to inculpate reader...

Abandoned to Their Fate: Social Policy and Practice toward Severely Retarded People in America, 1820-1920.
December 22, 1995... Historians often choose their topics for very personal reasons. Some are perhaps even unaware of what drives them to explore and understand certain facets of the past. Philip Ferguson has few such unconscious impulses. He is passionate about his...

Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era.
December 22, 1995... This volume of essays examines the character and development of Edo and Paris, mainly from the 1590s to 1790s, treating state power and mercantile influence as the key variables in urban change. As with all such collections of essays, the work is...

A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England.
December 22, 1995... Martha Osborne Barrett (1827-1905) was a Massachusetts spinster who abandoned the trials of teaching in favor of work first in a machine shop, and later in a Salem millinery establishment. For many years, she served as secretary of the Ladies'...

Berlin Cabaret.
December 22, 1995... The new European metropolises of the late nineteenth century were the hothouses of aesthetic modernism. The increased speed of life, manifold new technologies, the disorientation, deracination and anonymity of the great city all afforded artists...

The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment and Family Crisis, 1770-1830.
December 22, 1995... One of the most pertinent issues that minority groups face is whether and how much they should assimilate into the majority. Successful assimilation may lead to economic prosperity and social acceptance, but full integration may also mean the end...

The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700.
December 22, 1995... David Harris Sacks has successfully produced an unusual and ambitious work. One would not expect an economic history full of statistics to appear in the series "The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics" edited by Stephen Greenblatt. But...

The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto.
December 22, 1995... The Era of Warring States is the most confusing period of Japanese history. It begins in 1467 with the Onin War - a civil war precipitated by a succession dispute between Ashikaga brothers for the office of Shogun. It ends in 1568 with the...

The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage labor in South Carolina, 1860-1870.
December 22, 1995... A half-century of constructive "revisionism" in the study of Reconstruction has arrived at an impasse. Following the path blazed by W. E. B. DuBois, historians overthrew the Dunning School's pro-southern apologetics and white-supremist...

The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa: 1843-1900.
December 22, 1995... Keletso Atkin's book intrigues on more than one level. For the specialist of South African history, it illuminates the nineteenth century history of the country's Natal region, and does so in sometimes unexpected ways. Hers is an...

Arbeit und Macht im Huttenwerk: Arbeits-und industrielle Beziehungen in der deutschen und amerikanischen Eisen-und Stahlindustrie von den 1860er bis zu den 1930er Jahren.
December 22, 1995... One of the more promising developments of the historiography of the 1980s and 1990s is a strong commitment of young historians in particular towards a genuinely comparative history between nation states.(1) Thomas Welskopp's fine study of...

Muted Fury: Populists, Progressives, and Labor Unions Confront the Courts, 1890-1937.
December 22, 1995... Muted Fury, William Ross's new account of insurgent critiques of the courts, adds to the growing literature which tries to connect larger structures to the lives of ordinary Americans, shedding new light on how judicial power operates in America....

Revolution From Above, Rebellion From Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century.
December 22, 1995... At a time when the lemmings of cultural studies have gleefully flung themselves over the Cliffs of Culture, it is somewhat refreshing to read a book that is audaciously materialist and unabashedly political. No "signification" here and...

Industry and Politics in Rural France: Peasants of the Isere, 1870-1914.
December 22, 1995... In this study of the department of the Isere in southeastern France Raymond A. Jonas argues that peasants' experience of the mid-nineteenth century rural crisis was particularly marked by the presence in the countryside of the Lyonnais silk...

Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850.
December 22, 1995... James A. Epstein's Radical Expression provides British historians with a much needed study of the ideas and symbols that underpin nineteenth-century radicalism and help explain its development. Epstein traces popular constitutionalism and Painite...

Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America.
December 22, 1995... This thought-provoking book pursues the theme of religious melancholy in the American Protestant experience from the colonial settlement to the present. Melancholy here refers to a mourning over the absence of God's love and anxiety over how to...

The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach.
December 22, 1995... The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity presents a series of related theses concerning the social and cultural evolution of Christianity during its first millennium. The most striking thesis is that contrary to the argument in several...

Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth Century Diocese of Grenoble.
December 22, 1995... Keith Luria starts Territories of Grace, his study of devotional life in the rural parishes of early modern Grenoble, from the premise that the dichotomy earlier generations of scholars have posed between elite and popular culture should be...

Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War.
December 22, 1995... In this day of academic hyper-specialization any serious effort to work the interface of fields and strategies of research deserves a sympathetic hearing. Scheff moves from individuals to group behavior, using a family systems model, on the...

The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America.
December 22, 1995... Historians have interpreted the influence of twentieth-century psychiatry as either the triumph of reason over superstition, or as the hoodwinking of innocent populations by plotters intent on social control. Elizabeth Lunbeck challenges both...

Vance Packard and American Social Criticism.
December 22, 1995... When academics cite thinkers whose ideas shaped the nature of social debate in the 1950s and 60s, they customarily evoke figures such as Betty Friedan, Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse, David Riesman and C. Wright Mills. Seldom do they mention Vance...

Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I.
December 22, 1995... In Between Mutiny and Obedience Leonard V. Smith centers his case study of the French Fifth Infantry Division during the First World War around a critical social history question, the question of power relationships within a relatively closed...

Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France.
December 22, 1995... The fulcrum on which this excellent book seems most to pivot is an interesting conundrum: why were lawyers so instrumental in fashioning a revolution that destroyed the judicial system in which they practiced? To answer this question, Bell leads...

Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914.
December 22, 1995... This detailed and well researched study examines a key period in the history of Jewish life in England. The years between 1840 and 1914 witnessed the transformation of English Jewry from a small, politically and legally disadvantaged minority...

Curing and Insuring: Essays on Illness in Past Times: The Netherlands, Belgium, England and Italy, 16th-20th Centuries.
December 22, 1995... Scholars looking for points of comparison with English, French, German or American studies in the social history of medicine should take note of this useful anthology. It is the fruit of a 1990 conference on "Illness and History" held at the...

"We Ask For British Justice": Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain.
December 22, 1995... The well-known and emotionally-charged story of nonwhite immigration to Britain since the 1950s has obscured our understanding of the roots of international labor migration and racism in the interwar years. Laura Tabili argues that British racism...

Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare.
December 22, 1995... At the beginning of this insightful piece of intellectual and social history, Linda Gordon notes that she stands on the shoulders of others who have worked on the administrative history of social welfare programs. In this regard, she is far too...

Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900-1933.
December 22, 1995... By linking political history with the overarching concept of the state, Morton Keller reinvigorated the field in 1977 with the publication of Affairs of State. What were previously lengthy and tedious discussions of such topics as the tariff or...

Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States.
December 22, 1995... Focusing on the politics of maternalism in the United States, Europe and Australia, Mothers of a New World brings together some of the best new scholarship on the history of the welfare state. According to editors Koven and Michel, women used...

A History of Warfare.
December 22, 1995... Social historians and military historians have had a difficult time establishing common intellectual and ideological ground. To be sure, some areas of warfare, such as the belief system of the "common soldier" (Keegan's own 1976 book The Face of...

Environmental Inequalities.
December 22, 1995... Until the late 1980s environmentalism was generally considered a white middle-class issue. The exposure of Love Canal in 1979 and the increased concern among African-Americans about the location of toxic dumps in their neighborhoods, along with a...

The Making of Victorian Sexuality.
December 22, 1995... In 1988 John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman published their one-volume history of sexuality in America, Intimate Matters. Their survey, intended for both students and a general audience, focused on specific issues, with a generous consideration...