Journal of Social History articles from December 1996

Journal of Social History archives from December 1996

Middle class rising in revolutionary America: the evidence from manners.
December 22, 1996... In January of 1759, a young lawyer from Massachusetts recorded a painful self-assessment in his diary. Among other deficiencies, he noted: I have insensibly fallen into a Habit of Affecting Wit and Humour, of Shrugging my Shoulders, and moving...

Children's sleep: sketching historical change.
December 22, 1996... Sleep is not a conventional historical topic. It is after all a normally silent and unrecorded activity, which means that records of past sleep patterns are hardly abundant. It is also in the largest sense a human imperative: all people need...

'The number and quality of children': education and marital fertility in early-twentieth century Iowa.
December 22, 1996... Using remarkably rich data on the extent and type of schooling collected by the state census of Iowa in 1915, this essay explores the role of education in structuring the transition to low fertility in the United States. Its point of departure is...

'But it is a fine place to make money': migration and African-American families in Cleveland, 1915-1929.
December 22, 1996... At the peak of the World War I movement of Southern blacks to Cleveland, a migrant wrote a letter to relatives in the South informing them he found the city "a fine place to make money." But the letter also expressed his reservations about what...

Women's consumption and the industrial classes of eighteenth-century England.
December 22, 1996... I Recent research on the origins of industrialization in Britain and Europe has opened new questions on the role of demand, consumption and foreign trade. Did a growth in demand for consumer goods provide a stimulus to industrialization?...

Working-class masculinity, middle-class morality, and labor politics in the Chilean copper mines.
December 22, 1996... Miners around the world are renowned for both their militancy and their intense masculinity. Studies of miners tend to celebrate and embrace miners' manliness as central to their combative labor politics and to accept their particular...

'Disregarding the matrimonial vows': divorce in eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Scotland.
December 22, 1996... If marriage is the most important commitment in the life of most human beings, its dissolution is therefore traumatic, even in our own time, when it occurs so frequently. Debates on the ease or difficulty with which divorces should be granted...

Food riots revisited. (public protests in the seventeenth to the nineteenth century)
December 22, 1996... This paper revisits the question of food riots, a form of popular protest generally held to have been common between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Food riots were a reactionary form of collective...

The third gender in twentieth-century America.
December 22, 1996... George Chauncey's brilliant and often persuasive study of male homosexual relations in early twentieth-century New York was published two years ago on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riot that inaugurated the recent gay liberation...

The perils of patriarchy.
December 22, 1996... For at least a generation, historians have seen the elaboration of the family in Early Modern times as a crucial part of the development of social control, and an accurate reflection of the profound shift in civilization from a pre-industrial...

Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective.
December 22, 1996... Over the past ten years, historians, sociologists, and political scientists have come to rely on the insights of Theda Skocpol to help explain the contours of American social policy. Through innovative interdisciplinary and comparative research,...

The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France.
December 22, 1996... This book examines the ways Early Modem and nineteenth-century French journeymen - compagnons - evolved solidarities that weathered changes in the organization of work, workplace, and technology wrought by capitalism, Enlightenment, Revolution,...

The British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats: 1900-1931.
December 22, 1996... Challenging the constraints of conventional national histories and the narratives they have supported, Stefan Berger has produced a strongly argued and solidly documented comparative work on "the two biggest and most important European labor...

The Department Store: A Social History.
December 22, 1996... Perhaps, as we have now begun to realize, consumption rather than work has been all along the defining experience of modern society. In this highly useful study Bill Lancaster revisits a central institution of Western consumer culture, the...

Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy.
December 22, 1996... One can learn from those with whom one disagrees. The back jacket of this book is filled with glowing praise from Leftist scholars of race - Roger Wilkins, Frances Fox Piven, Michael Eric Dyson, Howard Zinn, Derrick Bell, Mary Frances Berry - and...

Crimes, Constables, and Courts: Order and Transgression in a Canadian City, 1816-1970.
December 22, 1996... The closest parallel to John Weaver's extensive study of Hamilton, Ontario, is to be found in the 1981 work of Lawrence Friedman and Robert Percival, which examined crime and the justice system of late-nineteenth-century Oakland, California. But...

Muhammad Ali: The People's Champ.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1996... There have been more beloved and famous American athletes - even black heavyweight champions - than Muhammad Ali. But no American athlete has ever rivalled him as a controversial and heroic figure and none compelled as much attention for what he...

Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South.
December 22, 1996... With the exception of Marylynn Salmon's pathbreaking Women and the Law of Property, legal historians have tended to avoid the issue of regionalism in the development of domestic relations law. Now, with Peter W. Bardaglio's Reconstructing the...

Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany.
December 22, 1996... Joel Harrington has written a first-rate book on marriage and the control of sexuality in sixteenth-century Germany, solidly based on both published and archival sources. Examining the views and practices among Lutherans, Reformed Protestants,...

Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: English Landownership, 1650-1950.
December 22, 1996... The career of Sir John Habakkuk as socio-economic historian - as well as Oxford University don and Vice Chancellor and as President of the Royal Historical Society - began in the 1930s. The book under review constitutes therefore a summing up of...

Aging in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age.
December 22, 1996... In his introduction to Old Age in Pre-industrial Society (1982), the editor of the Journal of Social History claimed that old age "as a field of history remains shockingly untended." Four years later, Peter Stearns detected a dramatic rise in...

Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazines for Girls Growing Up in England 1920-1950.
December 22, 1996... Prescriptive literature offers the social historian a useful source of information about social norms and standards in the past. While sermons, advice manuals, and periodical articles cannot be assumed to reflect actual behavior and experiences,...

Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives.
December 22, 1996... Natalie Zemon Davis opens her new book with an imagined dialogue, in which the three women of the title challenge Davis' interpretation of their lives, and her decision to include the three of them together in the same book. Davis justifies her...

The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule.
December 22, 1996... The "myth of the memsahib," which is rooted in the fiction of Kipling, Forster, and Orwell, has long lingered in the history of British India. This traditional view of European women in the British Empire has been unrelievedly negative. Fiction...

The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350.
December 22, 1996... Robert Bartlett has a remarkable story to tell; and he does so remarkably. The story is the "making of Europe," the process whereby an unusually expansive society - that of former Carolingian Europe - carried out its self-appointed task of...

Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II.
December 22, 1996... Wars and the way that they are fought are of increasing interest to social historians because they reveal much about the nature of the societies that fight them. The best of the several important histories recently written about the experiences...

Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840.
December 22, 1996... For decades historians have sought to date the emergence of the British middle class. Dror Wahrman believes that "the question, was the English middle class made by 1832, or by 1846, or by any other date" (p. 1) cannot be answered. In Imagining...

The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud.
December 22, 1996... The Naked Heart is the fourth volume of a continuing series by Peter Gay named The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud. Both titles are misleading. The Naked Heart is about cultural trends and personalities far more than experience, let...

Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France During the Nineteenth Century.
December 22, 1996... One really ought to compare this book, a study of the department of the Loire, with James R. Lehning's last work, The Peasants of Marlhes, which was published in 1980 and covered virtually the same territory in central France. The contrast...

Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America.
December 22, 1996... Recently I had a brief conversation with a member of a local Indian tribe. When I asked how he was doing, he replied in almost depressed fashion, stating that he had been attending too many funerals on the reservation recently. Naturally, I...

Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity: A Historical Perspective on Persistent Issues.
December 22, 1996... In 1985 Maris Vinovskis published The Origins of Public High Schools, a thoroughgoing critique of Michael Katz's The Irony of Early School Reform, the signal work of left-historical criticism of U.S. education, which appeared in 1968.(1) In...