Journal of Social History articles from December 1998

Journal of Social History archives from December 1998

The strange history of the decade: modernity, nostalgia, and the perils of periodization.
December 22, 1998... At the root of all historical inquiry is time. "In truth," Fernand Braudel once observed, "the historian can never get away from the question of time in history: time sticks to his thinking like soil to a gardener's spade."(1) The omnipresent...

Commissioner Foucault, Inspector Noel, and the "pederasts" of Paris, 1780-3.(police commissioner Pierre Louis Foucault; police inspector Louis Henri Noel)
December 22, 1998... On 10 October 1783 Jacques Francois Pascal, a defrocked monk who had assaulted an errand boy and stabbed him seventeen times, was broken on the wheel and burned alive in the place de Greve before a large crowd. The Memoires secrets, the most...

Administrative infrastructure and social enquiry: finding the facts about agriculture in Quebec, 1853-4.
December 22, 1998... In the thirty years since Philip Abrams stressed the importance of mundane administrative questions in the development of the 'social science', there has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in this area and in the history of statistics...

From ethnicity to race and gender: transformations of black lay sodalities in Salvador, Brazil.
December 22, 1998... Black lay sodalities functioned as a very special type of voluntary association for enslaved women and men of African descent in Brazil during the slavery regime.(1) Every African-born slave was obliged to be baptized as a Roman Catholic before...

Youth gangs, masculinity and violence in late Victorian Manchester and Salford.
December 22, 1998... It is surprising how few people, outside of the police and those residing in the immediate neighbourhoods where the outrages occur, really know what "scuttling" is. In the first place, the "scuttler" is not a thief, nor does he aspire to be a...

Sharing scarcity: bread rationing and the First World War in Berlin, 1914-1923.
December 22, 1998... The destruction of local bread rationing center #46 made a lasting impression on its daytime inhabitants. Those first to arrive at the scene on the drizzling October morning found splinters strewn across the sidewalk and a gaping hole where the...

Gender, media and consumerism in Germany, 1920s-1950s.
December 22, 1998... In the English-speaking world, "cultural studies" has become a major academic industry. Publishers' catalogs bulge with lists of books on film, television and the other media. University departments offer courses on the history of rock 'n roll....

Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Republic Sphere, 1923-1945.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Kate Lacey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. xiii plus 299pp.). In the English-speaking world, "cultural studies" has become a major academic industry. Publishers' catalogs bulge with lists of books on film, television and...

How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Erica Carter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xiv plus 272pp.). In the English-speaking world, "cultural studies" has become a major academic industry. Publishers' catalogs bulge with lists of books on film, television...

Moderne Zeiten. Freizeit, Massenmedien und "Zeitgeist" in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Axel Schildt (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1995.733 pp.). In the English-speaking world, "cultural studies" has become a major academic industry. Publishers' catalogs bulge with lists of books on film, television and the other media....

Technology and gender: fabrics of power in late Imperial China.
December 22, 1998... By Francesca Bray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xvi plus 419pp. $50.00 / cloth; $19.95/paperback). Francesca Bray's book on gender and technology in China from the Song until the late mid-Qing is structurally three...

Das unendliche Meer der Lufte: Lufttverschmutzung, Industrialisierung und Risikodebatten im 19. Jahrhundert.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Franz-Josef Bruggemeier (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1996. 344pp.). Franz-Josef Bruggemeier has produced a valuable contribution to the still small body of literature on societal responses to the unprecedented rise of environmental pollution...

The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Carol Sheriff (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. xvii plus 251pp. $21.00). Two decades ago, Paul E. Johnson's landmark book A Shopkeeper's Millennium explored the social context of religious revivalism in the booming Erie Canal town of...

Health and Healing in Nineteenth-Century Germany.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Mary Lindemann (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii plus 506pp.). Scholars of the social history of medicine have a wide spectrum of methodologies from which to choose; the legacy of the Annales school - the history of...

Sick, Not Dead: The Health of British Workingmen During the Morality Decline.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By James C. Riley (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xvii plus 349pp.). In the nineteenth century friends and network of kin were no longer adequate in times of illness. To supplement the aid they gave, British...

A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of Asylum to the Age of Prozac.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Edward Shorter (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997. xii plus 436pp.). One can hardly pick up a publication that professes to address intellectual issues these days without being accosted by some discussion of the seemingly deserved...

Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities and Social Relations.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Edited by Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin (Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi B. V., 1997. x plus 273pp.). This is a pioneering work, based upon a conference designed to open up a field of inquiry not effectively cultivated before the 1990s. Naturally...

Lebenserwartungen in Deutschland, Norwegen und Schweden im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Arthur Imhof (Berlin, Germany: Akademie Verlag, 1994. 724pp.). This is really three books: reflections on the meaning of death, a general history of north-central Europe, and statistical documentation of mortality rates. These three...

When Abortion Was a Crime: Women Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-7973.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Leslie J. Reagan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xiii plus 387pp.). When Abortion Was a Crime is a carefully researched and exceptionally nuanced analysis of the changing definitions and experiences of induced abortion...

Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Nicola Beisel (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997. x plus 275pp. $35.00). Nicola Beisel has written an important book that will be of interest to historians and sociologists of childhood, family, obscenity,...

Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration n the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Edited by Brooke Larson and Olivia Harris with Enrique Tandeter (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. viii plus 428pp.). To what degree have markets corroded pre-Hispanic Andean norms, institutions and practices during the four...

The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680-1780.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Margaret R. Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xiv plus 343pp. $48.00). Margaret Hunt presents a vivid and complex portrait of the culture and context of the rising English urban middle classes. This publication...

Society and Professions in Italy: 1860-1914.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Edited by Maria Malatesta (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. viii plus 340pp. $59.95). The summary and the positive evaluation of this book published in the American Historical Review (February, 1997) are eminently sensible and...

The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question: 1700-1775.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Steven Laurence Kaplan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. xviii plus 761pp.). A public scapegoat in times of dearth, the baker was at all times a unique personification of issues surrounding food and subsistence in old...

Ale, Beer, and Brewster in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Judith M. Bennett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xiv plus 260pp. $49.95). This is a good book, offering much to students and their teachers as well as to medieval historians. Judith Bennett has taken as her subject the...

The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Bertram Wyatt-Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xv plus 454pp. $17.95/paperback). For several years, historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown has examined the distinctive features of Southern culture and society. In Southern Honor:...

The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Peter Mandler (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997. viii plus 523pp.). Peter Mandler has done a masterful job in examining England's long-standing and complex relationship between its stately homes and its people. It is an...

Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630-1860.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Glenn Wallach (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. ix plus 265pp. $29.95). Claiming that much scholarship on youth, generations, and the family produced since the 1960s has been founded on theories that -...

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Michael P. Carroll (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii plus 275pp. $39.95). Notwithstanding a humble introduction, wherein the author claims the good service of bringing lesser known and untranslated Italian research...

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. x plus 310pp.). In this ambitious study, Jay Winter challenges key distinctions prevalent in scholarly writing on the cultural consequences of the Great War. In addition he...

La societat rural a Catalunya en temps feudals: Valles Oriental, segles XIII-XVI.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Merce Aventin i Puig (Barcelona, Spain: Columna Assaig, 1996. 657pp.). The Catalan region of Valles Oriental, north and east of Barcelona, is the setting for this study of medieval peasants and their attempts at self-sufficiency....

Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Gerald Sorin (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xv plus 294pp.). Writing a one-volume historical survey may be the most daunting challenge for any historian. In the last twenty years, there have been several...

Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Steven C. Bullock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., 1996. xviii plus 421pp. $49.95). This encompassing and stimulating study by Steven C. Bullock...

Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Mary P. Ryan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xii plus 376pp. $27.50). Civic Wars extends Mary Ryan's effort to understand changing conceptions of the public sphere that she explored in Women and Public. Representations...

His Majesty's Rebels: Communities, Factions and Rural Revolt in the Black Fores, 1725-1745.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By David Martin Luebke (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. xiii plus 270pp.). In the early eighteenth century the Benedictine abbey of St. Blasien tried to consolidate its jurisdictional and seigneurial authority in the...

Social Movements and Social Change: The First Abolition Campaign Revisited.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Leo d'Anjou (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996. xii plus 292pp. $47.95/cloth $23.95/paperback). As its title suggests, this is essentially two books in one. It begins and ends as an exercise in sociology concerned with "the social...

The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Edited by Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 1996. xii plus 383pp.). Columbus landed on one in 1492, but the hundreds of islands and islets that make up the West Indies long...

Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Peter Gamsey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv plus 269pp. $59.95). This meticulously organized book is a "revised and extended version" of the W. B. Stamford Lectures given by Profesor Garnsey at Trinity College Dublin,...

The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Olwen Hufton (London: Harper Collins, 1995. ix plus 613pp. index, hardback/$ 35.00). In this impressive study, Olwen Hufton takes on the history of women in Western Europe in the early modern period with both hands. This reconstruction...

Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers Pension in Chicago, 1911-1929.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Joanne L. Goodwin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xii plus 284pp.). Joanne Goodwin's case study of the mothers' pension system in Chicago is a magnificent addition to the vast scholarly literature on women and...

Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Neil Sutherland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. xviii plus 327pp.). This work is a sequel to Sutherland's classic study of childhood at the turn of the century, Children in English Canadian Society. In Growing Up he extends...

Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Edited by Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jutte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ix plus 369pp.). Norbert Finzsch provides a most useful introductory essay to this collection, linking the theoretical contributions of Michel...

Goldstrand und Teutonengrill: Kultur-und Sozialgeschichte des Tourismus in Deutschland 1945 bis 1989.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Edited by Hasso Spode (Berlin: Werner Moser, Verlag fuer universitaere Kommunikation, 1996, 207pp.). This edited volume includes twelve essays on the history of German tourism from the end of World War II to reunification. The collection is...

Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By John T. McGreevy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. vi plus 362pp. $27.50). How does one celebrate and honor the achievements of communities based to a significant degree on one of America's most persistent moral failures?...

The Memory of the Modern.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Matt K Matsuda (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. vi plus 255 pp. $49.95/cloth $18.95/paperback). Matt K Matsuda intends his account to be a "general history of France" (and Europe "in some ways") between the...

Education and Cultural Transmission: Historical Studies of Continuity and Change in Families, Schooling and Youth Cultures.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Edited by Johan Sturm, Jeroen Dekker, Richard Aldrich, Frank Simon (Ghent, Belgium: Paedogogica Historica, International Journal of the History of Education, 1996. 360pp.). Pedagogy as a field for scholarly contemplation was rarely...

Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatan, 1876-1915.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. x plus 406pp.). Fruit of a long scholarly collaboration, and a profound knowledge of Yucatecan history embodied in part in previous major monographs by both...

The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Dagmar Kift (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. x plus 244pp. $54.95). Once a matter of nostalgic cliche, music hall has prompted a proliferation of approaches and contextualisations that demonstrate both the rich historical...

The Eclipse of the State Mental Hospital: {Policy, Stigma, and Organization.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By George W. Dowdall (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. xiv plus 262pp. $21.95/paperback). Many historians, including Ellen Dwyer, Gerald Grob, David Rothman, and Nancy Tomes, have produced excellent studies of the...

The Origin of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Thomas J. Sugrue (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996. xvii plus 375pp.). For those of us involved in the struggle for social and racial justice, Thomas Sugrue has written a fascinating and very depressing book. Sugrue's work...

Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Mary J. Dobson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 647pp. $64.95). Based on very extensive research utilizing a variety of sources, this detailed study of death and disease in three counties of southeastern England during the...

History of Pedlars in Europe.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Laurence Fontaine (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 1996. 280pp. $17.95/paperback $49.95/cloth). When this book was published in France, it was hailed for breathing new life into the moribund field of social history. That it...

The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude1783-1933.(Review)
December 22, 1998... By Howard Johnson (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 1996. xvii plus 218pp.). Columbus landed on one in 1492, but the hundreds of islands and islets that make up the West Indies long remained terra incognita for scholars....