Journal of Social History articles from June 1993

Journal of Social History archives from June 1993

Manly gambles: the politics of risk on the Comstock lode, 1860-1880. (Virginia City, Nevada)
June 22, 1993... During his tour of the great silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada in 1876, journalist and geologist Eliot Lord was both impressed and horrified by the "cool" detachment of Cornish miners as they risked their lives underground in pursuit of hard...

Narratives of Don Juan: the language of seduction in seventeenth-century Hispanic literature and society.
June 22, 1993... How do men seduce? With looks, gestures, and movement, with voices, sighs, and sounds, with promises, words and stories. Seduction is not any one thing said, seen, or done, but a whole elaborately joined set of scenes containing movement, sounds,...

Men and romantic love: pinpointing a 20th-century change.
June 22, 1993... Esquire magazine was established in 1933, the first durable magazine ever aimed explicitly at middle-class men as men, rather than professionals, Christians or another ancillary focus. The magazine's founder and long-time editor, Arnold Gingrich,...

Illegal operations: women, doctors, and abortion, 1886-1939.
June 22, 1993... On 9 July 1919 Sarah Robins, mother of three small children, died in Vancouver General Hospital, her septic poisoning the aftermath of a bungled abortion. In the dying declaration which the doctors extorted from her, Robins left an agonizing...

The "Double-V" campaign in World War II Hawaii: African Americans, racial ideology, and federal power.
June 22, 1993... Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as the United States joined the war that had been raging for so long, the largest circulation African American newspaper in the country called for a "Double V" campaign: "Victory over our enemies at home and...

Clandestine marriage in the Scottish cities 1660-1780.
June 22, 1993... For most human beings marriage is the most important decision of their lives. It determines the conditions and prospects not only of the marrying couple but also of the progeny. It sets up a new social unit. Therefore it is not surprising that,...

"Shattered Nerves:" Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England.
June 22, 1993... Janet Oppenheim's "Shattered Nerves" is a study of the meaning of depression in English culture during the Victorian and Edwardian years (c. 1830s-World War I). Using an empirical methodology that ranges widely in medical and literary sources,...

American Nervousness: 1903, An Anecdotal History.
June 22, 1993... Tom Lutz has written a thoughtful and theoretically sophisticated book about the discourse concerning neurasthenia, a psychological disorder that apparently afflicted large numbers of bourgeois and elite people in turn-of-the-century America. It...

Health Care in the Parisian Countryside: 1800-1914.
June 22, 1993... Although it is surely one of the central questions in the social history of medicine and health care, we still know surprisingly little about how the transformation of medical science and institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth...

The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Regime and Revolutionary France.
June 22, 1993... This volume brings together a series of pioneering essays, the earliest dating from 1978, on public assistance and health care in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All are learned, lively, and well-argued; they reflect both Jones's...

Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol.
June 22, 1993... The history of medicine may seem tangential to the social historian; but every so often a work appears that so successfully bridges the disciplinary divide as to demand the attention of scholars broadly concerned with problems of social change...

Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World.
June 22, 1993... The comparative study of revolutions has produced some path-breaking studies, beginning with Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution (1938, revised edition 1965). The year after the 1965 edition of Brinton, Barrington Moore, Jr. published Social...

Freedom, vol. 1, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture.
June 22, 1993... Orlando Patterson's first volume on Freedom is easy enough to read, and the very devil to review. The reader is drawn on by Patterson's simple but orderly chronological plot, and by a style that is energetic and occasionally elegant, despite the...

The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance.
June 22, 1993... The Bounds of Race brings together a collection of papers that originated at a Cornell University conference hosted by Dominick LaCapra. Fifteen years ago, few social historians would have read a book of essays written mostly by literary critics....

The Broken Spell: A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe.
June 22, 1993... To the best of my knowledge, this is the first general textbook on the history of mentalities in preindustrial Europe. Up till now, work on the history of mentalities has focused on a single country or region, or it has singled out one aspect of...

Big Business and Industrial Conflict in Nineteenth Century France: A Social History of the Parisian Gas Company.
June 22, 1993... The Paris Gas Company, like its counterparts across Europe, contributed to the reenchantment of life that overtook many urban dwellers after the pinched and dark years of early industrialization had given way to the more consumer aware society of...

The Making of an Industrial Society, Whickham: 1560-1765.
June 22, 1993... The debt owed to the coal industry for Britain's industrial revolution has been recently reprised by E. A. Wrigley, who notes that "It was not from the soil but from beneath the soil that the raw materials of a new economic age were drawn."(1) A...

Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934.
June 22, 1993... Helmut Gruber's Red Vienna is a major new study of the Socialist culture in the Austrian metropol during the interwar years. He succeeds in capturing the flavor and the details of the Austrian Socialist Party's (SDAP) grand experiment to change...

In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800-1940.
June 22, 1993... France is still a country which can appreciate an author--even a budding author. 'Vous etes ecrivain, m'sieur?' asks the electrician tottering on an old metal ladder, sparks flying from the wire he has ripped from behind the library shelves; 'Ah,...

A Social History of British Broadcasting, vol. 1, 1922-1939: Serving the Nation.
June 22, 1993... Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff have produced an impressive study of the British Broadcasting Corporation during the inter-war years. The authors investigate the early days of broadcasting and explore how "public service" radio evolved in the...

Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880-1940.
June 22, 1993... Published in the Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time, the book represents the authors' efforts to integrate their findings about Middle East populations into the broader literature on pre-modern and modern population...

Yankee Destinies: The Lives of Ordinary Nineteenth-Century Bostonians.
June 22, 1993... It has been two decades since the publication of Peter Knights' two excellent works, The Plain People of Boston and "Men in Motion" co-authored with Stephan Thernstrom (Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Autumn, 1970). Released during the apex...

The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870-1930.
June 22, 1993... Lisa M. Fine offers fascinating glimpses into the work and social worlds of Chicago women in clerical work. Tracing women's tentative entry into the office, the discussion of women's fitness for the work, and finally the acceptance or...

Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century.
June 22, 1993... Each generation of historians recasts the Puritans to suit current perceptions. With John Frederick Martin's Profits in the Wilderness, we have Puritans appropriate for the Reagan-Bush era: Puritans as entrepreneurs. Martin follows closely...

Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism.
June 22, 1993... Amanda Porterfield's new book provides a culturally-based interpretation of gender status in Puritan New England. Sermons and prescriptive literature on family behavior furnish the principal sources, but the author also makes use of a few studies...

The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans.
June 22, 1993... Anyone who investigates the American Civil War cannot ignore its horrifying human and material destructiveness. So it is with historian Charles Royster, whose new book represents an imposing inquiry into the social history of organized human...

City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920.
June 22, 1993... For most of the nineteenth century, according to Timothy J. Gilfoyle, prostitution occupied a prominent and remarkably public place in New York City life. Brothels operated openly, and the leading madams of the city became celebrated figures in...

Life for Us is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915-1945.
June 22, 1993... Black Detroit has attracted more than its share of scholarly attention. This is not surprising, as its history provides striking examples of the hope and despair, the constructive achievements and violent conflict that have characterized black...