Journal of Social History articles from December 2006

Journal of Social History archives from December 2006

Erratum.(Correction notice)
December 22, 2006... In Jennifer Brier's article "'Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out': Anti-AIDS Activism and the Legacy of Community Control in Queens, New York," published in Summer 2006, Vol. 39 No. 4, an error was made on p. 965. The first line of the second...

Judicial authority and popular justice: crimes of passion in Fin-de-Siecle Paris.
December 22, 2006... In 1894, a top statistician from the French Ministry of Justice published a report that exposed a shocking increase in the rate of acquittal for cases tried by jury in French assize courts. Emile Yvernes reported that acquittals for serious...

Yorkshire lasses and their lads: sexuality, sexual customs, and gender antagonisms in Anglo-American working-class culture.
December 22, 2006... Industrialization, especially nineteenth-century factory work, challenged the patterns of working-class family life and the moral role of women, which varied widely from region to region and from industry to industry. (1) Patrick Joyce defined...

Runaway wives: husband desertion in medieval England.
December 22, 2006... Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone's view of married...

The consequences of uniformity: the struggle for the Boy Scout uniform in colonial Kenya.
December 22, 2006... In the late 1950s, authorities in Uganda arrested a number of young men from Kenya trying to sneak over the border while dressed in variations of the Boy Scout uniform. Although European Boy Scout leaders were alarmed by these potential...

"The sublime of the bazaar": a moment in the making of a consumer culture in mid-nineteenth century England.
December 22, 2006... Early in 1844 Richard Cobden, accompanied by Robert Moore and Peronnet Thompson, visited Harriet Martineau on her sick bed at Tynemouth. Cobden's intention was to persuade Martineau to use her considerable propagandist powers to further the...

"Headed for Louisville:" rethinking rural to urban migration in the South, 1930-1950.
December 22, 2006... Roughly 140 miles southwest of Louisville, Kentucky a confederate flag flew over the center of a small town called Russellville. A son of sharecroppers and the grandchild of slaves, James Wright was seventeen and recently married, and like many...

Nobles, patricians and officers: the making of a regional political elite in late medieval Flanders.
December 22, 2006... In the county of Flanders the late medieval period was an era of important social mobility among the dominant classes, as a result of the formation process of the Burgundian state. I argue that in the course of the later Middle Ages, and more...

Poor relief and the dangerous and criminal insane in Scotland, c. 1740-1840.
December 22, 2006... Nearly a century ago in Religion and the rise of capitalism, R. H. Tawney opined: "there is no touchstone... which reveals the true character of a social philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it regards the misfortunes of those of...

Fear and contemporary history: a review essay.(SECTION III REGIONAL ISSUES)
December 22, 2006... A number of books in recent years, including an important new entry by Joanna Bourke, have pointed to significant changes in American and/or modern fears, in ways that cry out for historical assessment. The very bulk of the work, most of it...

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. By Scott A. Sandage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. x plus 362 pp. $35.00). This long-anticipated, thought-provoking cultural history of failure in the United States deserves a...

A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... A Nation of Realtors[R]: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class. By Jeffrey M. Hornstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 264 pp. Cloth $79.95, Paperback $22.95). I cursed Jeffrey M. Hornstein as I poked...

Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-1945.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-1945. By Kelly Schrum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. xii plus 209 pp. $29.95). While many historians have discussed teenagers and the formation of teen culture in the...

American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and national Identity in the Kinsey Reports. By Miriam G. Reumann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 305pp.). Miriam Reumann's American Sexual Character is a welcome addition the...

Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture. By Karen Harvey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 272 pp.). As a book intended to introduce students and scholars to ways of reading erotic...

The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made. By Mary Patrice Erdmans (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. 290 pp.). Sociologist Mary Patrice Erdmans wrote a book which is gutsy, honest, innovative, and...

From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris. By Barbara B. Diefendorf (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ix plus 341 pp.). Barbara Diefendorf takes issue with those who have treated...

Backlash against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present. By Ellen Reese (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. xvi plus 355 pp.). Mention welfare backlash and most people will think of cuts in social spending that...

Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine, 1880-1940.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine, 1880-1940. By Lee M.A. Simpson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. ix plus 209 pp. $49.50). Had it been filed in the mid-to-late 1980's, this work would have been...

Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914-1945.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914-1945. By Kristen Stromberg Childers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. xii + 261 pp. $39.95). Kristen Stromberg Childers examines "public manifestations" of fatherhood to...

Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. By Alexandra Shepard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xii plus 292 pp. $99.00). In this richly detailed book, Alexandra Shepard surveys the many ways that gender interacted with other...

Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680-1720.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680-1720. By Jennine Hurl-Eamon (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005. xii plus 213 pp. $44.95). Jennine Hurl-Eamon's Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680-1720 joins a rapidly expanding...

Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. By Virginia DeJohn Anderson (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiii plus 322 pp. $37.50). Just over thirty years ago, a writer using a pseudonym in this...

Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood. By Jyotsna Kapur (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. ix plus 196 pp.). Movies, even the most innocuous G-rated children's films, are anything...

Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia. Indrani Chatterjee, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 302 pp.). An ambitious and original set of essays, Unfamiliar Relations extends the study of the history of...

A History of Household Government in America.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... A History of Household Government in America. By Carole Shammas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002, xiii plus 232 pp. $55.00). In recent years, several studies examining the ways in which marriage has not only been a...

Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Rethinking Home. A Case for Writing Local History. By Joseph A. Amato (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002. xvi plus 245 pp. $48.00 cloth, $18.95.). The problem with traditional writings that fall under the heading of 'local...

Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest. By Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. vii plus 300 pp.). Few historians still ask Frederick Jackson Turner's question: How did the...

Migration and Immigration: A Global View.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Migration and Immigration: A Global View. By Maura I. Toro-Morn and Marixsa Alicea (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. xxxii plus 255 pp.). This volume provides an introductory review of issues in migration, focusing especially on the...

The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960. By Lara Putnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii plus 303.). In 1906, in Port Limon, on the Caribbean coast of...

Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815. By Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling and David N. Doyle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xxvii, plus 788...

Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German American Identity.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German American Identity. By Russel A. Kazal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. vii plus 383, with maps, tables, and index.). Ethnic identity is both a historical and a local affair. Becoming...

Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War. By Michael J. Bennett (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xv plus 337 pp. $34.95 hb). This book is a significant contribution to the historiography of the Civil War. Union...

Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919. By Karin L. Zipf (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xi plus 207 pp.). Under colonial American custom and law, apprenticeship was both a means by...

Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movement in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movement in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986. By J. Todd Moye (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xi plus 281 pp.). Sunflower County in Mississippi...

Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954. By Alex Lubin (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 224 pp.). Alex Lubin's alternatively thought-provoking and frustrating new study explores the meanings...

The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. By W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. xiii plus 418 pp. $27.95). As part of a more general fascination with the constructivism of historical knowledge and popular...

Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. By Heather Andrea Williams (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiii plus 320 pp. $29.95). Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Heather Andrea...

Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920. By Paul Ortiz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xxviii plus 382 pp.). Between...

The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850-1935.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... The Criminals of Lima and their World: The Prison Experience, 1850-1935. By Carlos Aguirre (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. xi plus 310 pp.). Many historians and most Latin Americanists will find this book engaging even if...