Journal of Social History articles from December 2005

Journal of Social History archives from December 2005

Introduction: where the hell are the people?(history of family and kinship)
December 22, 2005... It is something of a truism that the pendulum of academic fashion swings between the macro and micro levels of investigation and interpretation. From the majestic sweep of Braudel's Mediterranean to the simple mill of Ginzburg's Menocchio or...

Acts of deceiving and withholding in immigrant letters: personal identity and self-presentation in personal correspondence.
December 22, 2005... Those who do analytical work with personal letters soon become aware of the problem of being tempted to take for granted that what is written in them is a true account of the letter-writer's condition, intentions, or general state of mind. It...

The birth of the East Ender: neighborhood and local identity in interwar east London.
December 22, 2005... The East End of London plays a unique role in the British national imagination. An area redolent with historical and cultural associations, from Jack the Ripper to the Krays, from The People of the Abyss to EastEnders, the East End is Britain's...

Friends, Aliens, and enemies: fictive communities and the Lusitania riots of 1915.
December 22, 2005... In August, 1918, theatrical censor G.S. Street recommended for licence The Female Hun--a play due to open at the Lyceum Theater on October 2nd. "This is an ordinary melodrama, superior to the average...," commented Street. "The 'female Hun,'...

"Having lived close beside them all the time:" (1) negotiating national identities through personal networks.
December 22, 2005... Many scholars have treated nationality as a creature of the state, imposed more or less legitimately or "successfully" from the top down, (2) while others have stressed how individuals and groups have contested and helped define national...

Wild workhouse girls and the liberal imperial state in mid-nineteenth century Ireland.
December 22, 2005... In 1860, a riot broke out in the South Dublin workhouse, quelled only by the arrival of the police. The formidable adversaries were sixteen-year-old girls, who jeered at workhouse officials, and hurled heavy glass soda water bottles, platters,...

Kinship as a categorical concept: a case study of nineteenth century English siblings.
December 22, 2005... The late twentieth century's post-modern culture has produced a general questioning about boundaries and categories as part of the general turning away from a "master narrative." This has been associated with growing unease about accepted...

'Genius' and the household mode of intellectual production: 1795-1885.
December 22, 2005... In our age & country, every person with any mental power at all, who both thinks for himself & has a conscience, must feel himself, to a very great degree, alone.... I am in this supremely happy, that I have had & even now have,...

Family ties in the making of modern intelligence.
December 22, 2005... "These are our crowd... They've been vetted an' we're putting 'em through their paces." --Rudyard Kipling, 1904 Good intelligence officials know that one of the most important things they can do is recruit competent, reliable,...

Post-colonial domesticity amid diaspora: home and family in the lives of two English sisters from India.(Josephine and Judy Beck)
December 22, 2005... Through oral history, this essay explores the meanings of home and family in the memories and experiences of two sisters, Josephine and Judy Beck, who are part of the post-imperial British diaspora. Testifying to the persistence of empire as a...

Reading advertisements in a colonial/development context: cigarette advertising and identity politics in Egypt, c1919-1939.
December 22, 2005... Introduction How are we to make socio-cultural sense of advertising in colonial, later developing, settings? What differences exist between reading advertisements in the context of Western consumer societies and in less conspicuous...

Gender and generation: the university reform movement in Argentina, 1918.
December 22, 2005... In March 1918, students at the National University of Cordoba (UNC) rebelled against the university system, accusing professors of being authoritarian, inefficient, clerically oriented, and obscurantist. Founded in 1613 by Jesuits, the...

Review essay: recent work on early Western Mexico and the revival of the Black Legend.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Ricardo Leon Alanis, Los origenes del clero y la iglesia en Michoacan, 1525-1640 (Morelia; Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo; Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas, 1997). Alberto Carrillo Cazares, Vasco de Quiroga: La...

Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000. By Charles Tilly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xiv plus 305 pp.). This magnificent book draws on a large literature including the author's own research to make a plausible case...

A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture. By Michael Kammen (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 336 pp. $39.95). Spring, summer, autumn, and winter are nature-made periodizations with which...

The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Pena (New York: NYU Press, 2003. xi plus 328 pp. $35.00). Readers of Carolyn Thomas de la Pena's engaging study of bodies and machines in late...

The Light-Green Society. Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The Light-Green Society. Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000. By Michael Bess (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xix plus 369pp. Paperback $18.00). Michael Bess acquits himself brilliantly of a tempting...

The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914-1916.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914-1916. By David Silbey (London: Frank Cass, 2005. x plus 189 pp.). This brief book, containing just 131 pages of text, attempts to explain why working-class Britons responded...

Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America. By Joshua Piker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 284 pp. $39.22). Johua Piker's Okfuskee is a community history that depicts Okfuskee, a Creek town, as part of an inviting,...

Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans 1880-1930.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930. By Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xxv plus 369 pp. $30.00). Hiawatha gets the prize for most misinterpreted American Indian. An Iroquoian culture hero, he...

Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life. By William L. Van DeBurg (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. xiv + 283 pp. $29.00). There is insight in Hoodlums, intelligence, and much scholarly erudition: 48...

Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks and the Western Steamboat World.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks and the Western Steamboat World. By Thomas C. Buchanan. (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xv plus 256 pp. $32.50). Black Life on the Mississippi is an...

The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916. By William D. Carrigan (Champaign, II: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xi plus 308 pp. $35.00). With The Making of a Lynching Culture, William D....

Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740. By Anthony S. Parent, Jr. (Chapel Hill and London: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2003....

In the Shadow of Slavery: African-Americans in New York City, 1625-1863.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... In the Shadow of Slavery: African-Americans in New York City, 1625-1863. By Leslie M. Harris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xii plus 380 pp. $42.50). Leslie M. Harris' In the Shadow of Slavery: African-Americans in New York...

A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town. By Alice Garner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. xi, 286 pp. with maps, photos, and index). Alice Garner introduces her Shifting Shore with a...

Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 1890-1940.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 1890-1940. By David M. Pomfret (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. xii plus 315 pp. $84.95). A recent addition to a new series...

Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America. By Bryant Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. vii plus 285pp.). Temple University historian Bryant Simon opens with the story of Jordan Sayles, an African...

Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It. By Alison Isenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xvii plus 440 pp. Cloth $32.50 Paper $20.00). The closing of the last downtown Woolworth stores in the...

Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America. By Marina Moskowitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xii plus 300 pp. $45.00). In Standard of Living, Marina Moskowitz is not interested in the...

Boosters, Hustlers, and Speculators: Entrepreneurial Culture and the Rise of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1849-1883.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Boosters, Hustlers, and Speculators: Entrepreneurial Culture and the Rise of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1849-1883. By Jocelyn Wills (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2005. xi plus 290 pp. $34.95). Jocelyn Wills' case study of St....

The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861. By Jonathan Daniel Wells (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xv plus 321 pp. $59.95). It is difficult to imagine that after decades of analysis and voluminous...

The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. By Warren R. Hofstra (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xv plus 410 pp. $49.95). The Shenandoah Valley was rich with towns by...

Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia. By Gregory Carleton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 288 pp. $34.95). This book provides a detailed reading of discussions of sexuality in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It begins...

The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. By Liz Conor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 329pp.). Feminist, postmodern, and cultural studies theorists have long argued that from the beginning of modern...

Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World. Edited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. xvi plus 433 pp.). The size, diffusion, and complexity of Italian mass migration...

The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality. By Rhonda Y. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. v plus 306 pp.). Rhonda Williams tells a much bigger story in The Politics of Public Housing:...

All We Know Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... All We Know Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941. By Melissa Walker (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 341 pp.). Melissa Walker's book, All We Know Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry...

Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society. By Iris Parush (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press. xix plus 340 pp. $29.95). In 1876, a young Russian Jewish woman named Sarah...

The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarland and the Stratemeyer Syndicate.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarland and the Stratemeyer Syndicate By Marilyn S. Greenwald (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. xiv plus 310pp. $32.95). Surely the Hardy Boys series of adolescent mystery novels is one of the...

British Friendly Societies, 1750-1914.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... British Friendly Societies, 1750-1914. By Simon Cordery (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. xiii plus 230 pp.). Simon Cordery's examination of British friendly societies is a long-overdue look into the origins, operations,...

The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany.(Book Review)
December 22, 2005... The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Michael B. Gross (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004. xiii plus 354 pp. $70.00). The main topic is the evolution and...