Journal of Social History articles from December 2003

Journal of Social History archives from December 2003

"The black lamb of the black sheep": illegitimacy in the English working class, 1850-1939.
December 22, 2003... The plight of illegitimate children was a well-known trope in Victorian fiction, and a concern to reformers of marriage law as well as those who worked for children's rights. England's bastardy laws were the harshest of Europe. An illegitimate...

Respectable mediocrity: the everyday life of an ordinary American striver, 1876-1890.
December 22, 2003... During March of 1887, as he approached his thirty-first birthday and ten-year anniversary as a salaried employee with St. Paul, Minnesota's most prestigious dry goods firm, an Irish-American named Michael J. Boyle suffered under "a paralyzing...

Maize-beer, gossip, and slander: female tavern proprietors and urban, ethnic cultural elaboration in Bolivia, 1870-1930.
December 22, 2003... In 1887 a young mother, Manuela Serrano, migrated with her family to Bolivia's capital city, Sucre, from Padilla, a small village a few days' ride away. Like many women who lived in the countryside, Manuela was a spinner. (1) She spun wool by...

Artificial limbs and industrial workers' bodies in turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh.
December 22, 2003... In her 1910 expose Work-Accidents and the Law, Crystal Eastman presented readers with this brief tale of work and loss in Pittsburgh: Andrew Antonik worked in the Homestead Steel Works at a "skull-cracker,"--a heavy iron weight...

'Chinese Demons': the violent articulation of Chinese otherness and interracial sexuality in the U.S. Midwest, 1885-1889.
December 22, 2003... By the evening of Wednesday, March 6, 1889, many residents of the neighborhoods bordering Grand Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin suspected something was afoot. By the next morning, numerous persons were convinced that something was wrong. One...

The lynching of persons of Mexican origin or descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928.
December 22, 2003... On November 16, 1928, four masked men tore into a hospital in Farmington, New Mexico and abducted one of the patients as he lay dying in bed. The kidnappers drove to an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of the city where they tied a rope...

The virgin and the bear: religion, society and the Cold War in Italy.
December 22, 2003... I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart... If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions...

"It was tough on everybody": low-income families and housing hardship in post-World War II Toronto.
December 22, 2003... ... he had his first heart attack in December 21, 1947. In between a couple of times, he brought up blood from the mouth and in March 49, I think it was March the 10, 1949 he came home from work and he had bled the whole day at...

The current debate about the origins of the Paleoindians of America.
December 22, 2003... In recent years, contributions from the fields of archeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and genetics have revolutionized the study of the origins, timing and process of human settlement in America. This re-thinking of the origins...

Reassuring "White Australia": a Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... In 1996, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, used the annual Sir Robert Menzies Lecture to make the following observations about Australian history: [There is a challenge] to ensure that our history as a nation is not...

Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867; 'More than Mere Amusement': Working-class Women's Leisure in England, 1750-1914; The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867. By Catherine Hall (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xviii + 556 pp. cloth, $50.00 paper $29.00). 'More than Mere Amusement': Working-class...

Masters of Illusion: the World Bank and the Poverty of Nations.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Catherine Caufield (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997. 384 pp.). The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) has been increasingly at the centre of international development since the end of World War II....

Histories of Leisure.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Edited by Rudy Koshar (Oxford: Berg, 2002. vii plus 365 pp. $25.50 paper, $68.00 cloth). Appropriately, Rudy Koshar introduces this collection of new scholarship on leisure in modern western European history with a nod to Theodore Adorno's...

Consumption Intensified: the Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Maureen O'Dougherty. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 224pp.). In the 1980s and early 1990s Brazilians suffered a traumatic bout with hyperinflation. The urban middle classes that had expanded significantly in the early 1970s...

Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe Since the Middle Ages.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Edited by Peter Scholliers (New York: Berg, 2001. xi plus 223pp. $65.00/cloth $19.50/paper). Peter Scholliers's Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe Since the Middle Ages is a refreshing addition to the field of...

Humor in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Rudolf M. Dekker (New York: Palgrave. 2001. vii plus 187 pp. $55.00). This slim volume has been translated into English from the Dutch original; I mention this only because there has been a double act of translation provided for the...

The Politicization Of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, And Community in the Late Ottoman State.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Kemal H. Karpat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. viii plus 533 pages). Historians of modern Turkey have often viewed the establishment of a secular republic by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 as a clear break with Turkey's Ottoman past....

Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Abigail Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xi plus 386 pp.). The 1850s and 1860s are arguably the least researched decades in the history of modern Germany. It has not aided our understanding that the scant monographic...

Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500-1789.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Edited by David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. viii plus 365 pp.). Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500-1789 is one of three projected volumes (the other two will cover the nineteenth...

Familie, Frau und Gesellschaft. Studien zur Strukturgeschichte der Familie in Westdeutschland 1945-1960.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Merith Niehuss (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001. 425 pp. 39 EU). According to Merith Niehuss, the West German family underwent profound and varied changes in the decade and a half following World War II. For every member of the...

To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865-1915.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Sally G. McMillen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. xviii plus 297 pp. $54.00/cloth $24.95/paper). Sally McMillen's latest book offers a detailed exploration of the institutional development of Sunday schools after...

Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Edward E. Baptist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiv plus 408pp. $59.95/cloth $19.95/paper). Ideas have power. The antebellum southern view of the South as a beleaguered bastion of gentility threatened by...

A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Greta de Jong (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002, xvi plus 316 pp.). The rise of civil right demands in the the first half of the twentieth century and the consolidation during the 1950s and 1960s of a political...

More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Susan D. Greenbaum (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xv plus 383 pp.). Scholars have long been interested in understanding why so-called race relations are different in the United States and Latin America. Notable among...

The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Seymour Drescher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. x plus 307 pp.). During the eighteenth century more than six million enslaved Africans survived the middle passage. Their numbers peaked during the last quarter of the century...

Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siecle.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Lenard R. Berlanstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv plus 300 pp.). This fine study of representations of French theater women between the seventeenth century and the First World War treats actresses and other...

Fashion and its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Diana Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. x plus 294 pp. $20.00/paper). In Fashion and its Social Agendas, sociologist Diana Crane takes on a comparative study of "fashion and clothing choices" (2) in the United States,...

Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Walter Simons (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. xv plus 335 pp. $65.00). The medieval Low Countries are comparatively little known to Anglophone scholars, who have long studied the histories of medieval England,...

Days of Discontent: American Women and Right-Wing Politics, 1933-1945.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By June Melby Benowitz (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. 230 pp.). How can a social movement's political significance be measured? To what extent do the views of a movement's leaders reflect the beliefs of its followers?...

The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Alex Bontemps (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. x plus 224 pp.). Writing on slave life in British North America, Alex Bontemps describes the psychological effects of what Black Studies scholar Maulana Karenga calls, "the...

Nursing, Physician Control, and the Medical Monopoly: Historical Perspectives on Gendered Inequality in Roles, Rights and Range of Practice.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Thetis M. Group and Joan I. Roberts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. xxxi plus 514 pp.). The authors' goal in this advocacy piece is to enlighten present day nurses by making them cognizant of gendered inequality and their...

Der zerstuckte Corper: Zur Sozialgeschichte der anatomischen Sektionen in der fruhen Neuzeit (1650-1800).(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Karin Stukenbrock (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001. 309pp.). The history of anatomy has long been a central concern of medical historians. Until recently, it was written as a story of progress that neatly encapsulated a bigger narrative...

The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Deborah Cohen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xii plus 285pp.). Disabled veterans have received considerable attention from historians but few if any recent volumes by a single author take up the subject so adeptly as...

Facing the Ocean: the Atlantic and Its Peoples 8000 BC-AD 1500.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Barry Cunliffe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. viii plus 600 pp. $45/25 [pounds sterling]). Although late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century discoveries elevated the Atlantic to unanticipated geopolitical prominence,...

The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Peter Biller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xxi plus 476 pp. $55.00). On page 358, Peter Biller, a recognized authority on medieval demographic thought, mused that, were History a laboratory science, he would have a control...

From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Allan Kulikoff (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiii plus 484pp. $59.95 cloth $22.50 paper). A vacuum induces the recurring modern impulse to commit unitary synthesis of colonial North American history....

Builders and Deserters: Students, State and Community in Leningrad 1971-1941.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Peter Konecny (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999. 384 pp.). While we have many studies of the Russian student movement before the revolution, our understanding of student life in the formative period of the...

A Social Laboratory for Modern France: the Musee Social and the Rise of the Welfare State.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... By Janet R. Home (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. xiii plus 354 pp. $19.95/paper $59.95/cloth). Traditionally, European historians have relied upon an interpretive model of social welfare development that offers only two options: the...