Journal of Social History articles from December 2008

Journal of Social History archives from December 2008

From anger to jealousy: explaining domestic homicide in antebellum America.(SECTION I VIOLENCE AND EMOTION)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... In 1859, on a peaceful Sunday in the nation's capital and in front of numerous shocked witnesses, New York Congressman Daniel Sickles shot and killed United States District Attorney Philip Barton Key. Sickles had just learned of Key's...

Texas and Virginia: a bloodied window into changes in American public life.(SECTION I VIOLENCE AND EMOTION)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... "Texans... hoped and prayed they never would share [their] emotion with another campus... Now, though, there's one more institution to add to the list of places we never again can consider safe.... No one can possibly expect the grief to...

"Conduct ... inexcusable and unjustifiable": bound children, battered freedwomen, and the limits of emancipation in Kentucky's Bluegrass Region.(SECTION I VIOLENCE AND EMOTION)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... In mid-1866 Flora Ewing, a "colored girl" living in Oldham County, Kentucky, field a complaint with the Freedmen's Bureau in which she claimed to have been the victim of assault and battery at the hands of a white man named Dorsey Young....

"Infantile specimens": showing babies in nineteenth-century America.(SECTION II CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... In October 1854 the prominent Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote to a friend that on a recent trip to the Midwest he had witnessed what he thought to be the first baby contest: "There has been a great Baby Show in Ohio; 127 babies were...

Engineers or artists? Toys, class and technology in Wilhelmine Germany.(SECTION II CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... In 1911, the Deutsche Spielwarenzeitung, which had a bi-weekly circulation of 20,000 stores and shops, advised toy sellers to tell customers "in the modern playroom everything is electric. Therefore the first requirement to facilitate play for...

Children and their educators: changing relations in a meritocratizing world.(SECTION II CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... Children growing up today in meritocratic post-industrial societies encounter a variety of socialization regimes--some introduced recently. Parents continue to be the most important adults in children's lives, but over the past century a host...

Longing to "belong": foster children in Mid-Century Philadelphia (1946-1963).(SECTION II CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD)(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... In 1956, W, a 15 year-old foster child residing at the Philadelphia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's temporary shelter, met with her caseworker to discuss her future placement plans. After a failed attempt to return home to...

"Peasant" Janissaries?(SECTION III REGIONAL ISSUES)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... In the second volume of the monumental sequence "Osmanli Kanunnameleri", compiled by A. Akgunduz, there is an interesting law (Devsirme Kanunnamesi) concerning recruitment of Christians for the needs of the Janissary Corps during the reign of...

The 1899 Cuban marriage law controversy: Church, State and empire in the crucible of nation.(SECTION III REGIONAL ISSUES)(Essay)
December 22, 2008... In December 1898, U.S. and Spanish officials signed the treaty of Paris, ending three decades of anti-colonial revolution in Cuba and nearly four hundred years of Spanish rule. (1) Cuba did not gain full independence with this act however, as...

Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920. By Kristin L. Hoganson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv plus 402 pp.). Consumers Imperium explores the international influences that...

Work and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Work and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany, 1870-1914. By David D. Hamlin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. x plus 286 pp.). Germany as 'belated nation'--lagging behind its Western European peers to...

Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977. By Winston A. Grady-Willis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. xxii plus 288 pp. $22.95). Winston/A. Grady-Willis has made an important contribution to...

No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870. By Diana Paton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. 294 pp.). Found guilty and facing sentencing in 1845, Edward Thompson made a speech to the...

Plantation Jamaica 1750-1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Plantation Jamaica 1750-1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy. By B. W. Higman (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2005. xiv plus 386 pp.). Accusations of fraud and mismanagement have long been levelled at...

The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 19th Century.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 19th Century. By Nigel Penn (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005. 388 pp.). The frontier zone occupies an important place in Southern African historical...

Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800. By Peter Thorsheim (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. xii plus 307 pp. $55.00 cloth, $26.95 paper). Over the last two decades or so, as concerns over urban smog and...

Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1600-1770.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1600-1770. By Emily Cockayne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xiv plus 335 pp. $35.00). Emily Cockayne's expansion of the range of social and environmental history to encompass sound and...

This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal. By Sarah T. Phillips (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. x plus 289 pp. $23.99 PB). In the preface to her important book, This Land, This Nation: Conservation,...

Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France. By Sara Beam (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.xi plus 268 pp. $55.00). According to the influential model of Norbert Elias, it was the royal state that ultimately...

Living the French Revolution, 1789-99.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Living the French Revolution, 1789-99. By Peter McPhee (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. x plus 319 pp. $74.95). It is not uncommon to hear historians of the French Revolution lament the absence of a reigning paradigm for...

The Spirit of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-1976.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... The Spirit of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-1976. By Gerd-Rainer Horn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x plus 254 pp.). A Piemontese painter makes the acquaintance of a Danish artist, and...

Iron Kingdom. The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Iron Kingdom. The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947. By Christopher Clark (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. xviii plus 776 pp.). Christopher Clark's study constitutes one of the most significant works...

Small Strangers: The Experience of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Small Strangers: The Experience of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925. By Melissa R. Klapper (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2007. X plus 220 pp). There are probably not enough of books like this: short, readable works that combine important...

America's Public Schools: From the Common School to "No Child Left Behind".(Book review)
December 22, 2008... America's Public Schools: From the Common School to "No Child Left Behind" By William J. Reese (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xii plus 355 pp.). During the last fifteen years the subfield of the history of education...

Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age. By Susan K. Cahn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 384 pp.). It would seem that the subject of the South has been reviewed, discussed, debated, stretched, pushed, and...

Children in Colonial America.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Children in Colonial America. Ed. James Marten (New York: New York University Press, 2007. xii plus 253 pp.). Do not judge a book by its cover; at least not this book. Children in Colonial America, a new collection of essays on childhood...

Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century. By Susan Smulyan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 202 pp.). Professor Smulyan, a member of the American Civilization program at Brown University, explores four quite...

In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural Historial of Arousal. By Niklaus Largier. Translated by Graham Harman (New York: Zone Books, 2007. 558 pp.). Niklaus Largier develops a model of flagellation as an ecstatic corporeality based in...

The Oprah Phenomenon.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... The Oprah Phenomenon. By Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson, eds. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. viii plus 303 pp. $35.00). During the 1970s and 1980s, white talk show hosts Merv Griffin, Phil Donahue, Dinah Shore, Mike...

Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business. By Pat Jalland (Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2006. viii plus 409 pp.). Jalland used the cipher of emotional culture to anchor an...

Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. By Caroline Walker Bynum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. xix plus 402 pp. $49.95). The subject of Caroline Walker Bynum's book is...

Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories..(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories. By Helen MacDonald (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, xiv plus 220 pp.). The whaler William Lanney, also called King Bill, died at an inn in a seedy part of Hobart Town, Tasmania, in March...

Age Discrimination: An Historical and Contemporary Analysis.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... Age Discrimination: An Historical and Contemporary Analysis. By John Macnicol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. x plus 308 pp.). The subject of John Macnicol's book is both narrower and broader than its title would indicate:...

In Search of Fame and Fortune: The Leahy Family of Engineers, 1780-1888.(Book review)
December 22, 2008... In Search of Fame and Fortune: The Leahy Family of Engineers, 1780-1888. By Brendan O Donoghue (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2006. xvi plus 338 pp. [euro] 45.00). Brendan O Donoghue's In Search of Fame and Fortune: The Leahy Family of...