Journal of Social History articles from December 1997

Journal of Social History archives from December 1997

"Loveliest daughter of our ancient Cathay!": representations of ethnic and gender identity in the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. beauty pageant.
December 22, 1997... In February 1958, seventeen young women came from throughout the country to compete in the first Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Beauty Pageant. Sponsored by the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce (CCC) as part of the Chinese New Year celebration,...

Gender and civic authority: sexual control in a medieval Italian town.
December 22, 1997... One of the changes that marks the rise of effective self-governing communes in late medieval Italy is a new attention in the civic courts to cases involving sexual morality. Town officials began active pursuit of offenses that included not only...

Magical emasculation, popular anticlericalism, and the limits of the Reformation in western France circa 1590.
December 22, 1997... Although popular mentalities have become a subject of close scrutiny by historians of early modem France, few studies of the French Reformation have been rooted in the ethnography and folklore of the regions most affected by this epochal shift in...

Who were the evangelicals?: conservative and liberal identity in the Unitarian controversy in Boston, 1804-1833. (Massachusetts)
December 22, 1997... The years between 1794 and 1832 saw thousands of women and men received into membership in churches across the United States, marking an end to a drought that had left much of the religious landscape desiccated during the Revolutionary years and...

History from the inside out: prison life in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.
December 22, 1997... It cannot be denied, that [penitentiaries] have been Seminaries established and sustained at the public expense, for educating, in the most effectual and thorough manner, hundreds and thousands of villians [sic] to depredate and prey upon the...

Property offenses, social tension and racial antagonism in post-Civil War rural Louisiana.
December 22, 1997... The parish of Lafayette was the scene in June 1873 of a particularly brutal double murder. Daniel Lanet, a Frenchman, and Alexander Snaer, a black justice of the peace, who were also business partners, were murdered in their store by four blacks....

New schooling for a New South: a community study of education and social change, 1875-1885.
December 22, 1997... In May 1888, Wilson, North Carolina, "educationally speaking," had reached "a crisis in her existence." "Our future in every department of progress," wrote Josephus Daniels, the editor of the local newspaper, the Wilson Advance, "depends to an...

The Encyclopedia of New York City.
December 22, 1997... All moveables of wonder, from all parts Are here... Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty city is herself. William Wordsworth on the Bartholomew Fair(1) The aim of an encyclopedia is to gather together the knowledge...

Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses.
December 22, 1997... Good social and cultural historians are both fact-bound and original at once, so the requirements for being either keep rising. The kinds of material thought vital to social and cultural history multiply continually, as do the precautions for...

Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays.
December 22, 1997... Leigh Eric Schmidt's analysis of the links between American holidays and consumerism is both tremendously erudite and vastly entertaining. Schmidt begins by recounting briefly the tension between religious festivals and commercial enterprise...

American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword.
December 22, 1997... Seymour Martin Lipset has for many years been the historical sociologist most closely identified with the controversial idea of American exceptionalism, but this is the first of his many books to include the phrase in its title. Central to the...

Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford.
December 22, 1997... Many historians have heard of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Site X) and Los Alamos, New Mexico (Site Y) and readily associate each locale with the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government's top-secret effort during the Second World War to build an atomic...

The World of the Paris Cafe: Sociability Among the French Working Class, 1789-1914.
December 22, 1997... "I go to the cafe to create my relationships," the defiant murder suspect Sebastien Billoir avowed during an 1876 pretrial investigation. (p. 166) According to W. Scott Haine, however, workers did much more than meet and make friends in...

In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts.
December 22, 1997... David Conroy has written a fascinating and important book. In Public Houses takes a novel look at one of colonial America's best known institutions, the tavern. Taverns were central to much of early social history, especially in the New England...

Strassenpolitik. Zur Sozialgeschichte der offentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914.
December 22, 1997... The main aim of Thomas Lindenberger's extremely original and quite fascinating study, is to "establish the importance of the street as an arena of politics... in the late Kaiserreich." (p. 385) This he does admirably through a detailed analysis...

Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861-1914.
December 22, 1997... Urbanization in nineteenth-century Russia favored men; they found more jobs, higher pay, and friendly public spaces such as taverns and pubs that were generally off limits to women. Why then did women leave the villages? What kind of life awaited...

Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914-1940.
December 22, 1997... In recent years researchers have examined topics in Latin American women's history, although much remains to be done. Regarding Brazil, for example, June Hahner and Branca Moreira Alves have traced its feminist movements to 1940. The history of...

Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940-1970.
December 22, 1997... After I recovered from my initial horror at seeing a significant part of my own lifetime discussed as "oral history," I found this book as valuable as the author's earlier project, A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women,...

Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe.
December 22, 1997... Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe by Sandra Greene is a milestone in precolonial African history and something of a tour de force. Greene has collected and utilized extensive oral histories...

Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France.
December 22, 1997... Kristin Gager's study of adoption practices in early modern France explores a subject that is quite poorly known - in some measure because it was thought not to exist. From the medieval period onwards, Gager shows, there was a high level of...

Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity, and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York, 1870-1924.
December 22, 1997... Students of immigrant women in the U.S. work within an impressive array of disciplines, yet each disciplinary group remains surprisingly insular and unaware of research beyond its own methodological boundaries. In this brave attempt at...

Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily, 1860-1980.
December 22, 1997... This book contains far more and far less than its title suggests, so this review takes the form of a summary of contents, together with capsule indications of sources used by the authors and occasional critical evaluations of what they have made...

Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890-1940.
December 22, 1997... Ewa Morawska has written a gem of a book - not the hard-edged diamond she refers to in her fascinating appendix (itself a model account of a researcher's path), but the opalescent mother of pearl with its many nuances. Although she rarely refers...

Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945.
December 22, 1997... This well-written book is a somber assessment of the fate of European Jewry since the Holocaust. Post-World War II developments have come close to achieving, through vastly different and generally benign means, what the Germans set out to...

Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation.
December 22, 1997... Midway through this fascinating set of essays, Omer Bartov concedes that "teaching a course on the Holocaust brought me once more face to face with the familiar, yet still jarring realization that neither teachers nor students, nor for that...

Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World.
December 22, 1997... Sugar remains a mysterious and compelling substance. While scientists have developed an entire subfield known as glycobiology to probe sugar's vital role in human cell growth and immunology, social scientists continue to explore sugar's...

Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775.
December 22, 1997... North Carolina has received considerably less scholarly attention than have other mainland southern colonies of British North America. Its late settlement, diversified economy, and thin documentary record have made it less attractive to...

People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820-1930.
December 22, 1997... Among European countries, Germany's migrants have received perhaps the most scholarly attention. The enormous emigration of Germans to the Americas, the central role of the German economy in Europe during the entire twentieth century, and the...

Moonlight, Magnolias and Madness: Insanity in South Carolina from the Colonial Period to the Progressive Era.
December 22, 1997... In Moonlight, Magnolias & Madness: Insanity in South Carolina From the Colonial Period to the Progressive Era, McCandless has assembled a prodigious amount of research to tell the story of how the insane were treated over 100 years of South...

Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII.
December 22, 1997... Harlem at War centers on the Harlem riot of 1943: a hot summer night; a confrontation between a black soldier in uniform and a white policeman; wild rumors; black violence fed by the anger and frustration of centuries; looting and fires and the...

The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione's Cortegiano.
December 22, 1997... Peter Burke has written another interesting and enlightening book to add to his impressively long list - more than ten - of earlier published works. The main subject here is Castiglione's Cortegiano, not especially the meaning or sense of the...

The Ways of History. From the Ancientest Man to Our Days.
December 22, 1997... Igor M. Diakonoff is a distinguished Russian historian-orientalist who devoted almost all his life to the study of the socio-economic history of the ancient world, but recently he has turned from economic history to social psychology. Diakonoff...