Journal of Social History articles from June 1994

Journal of Social History archives from June 1994

Fiction as social fantasy: Europe's domestic crisis of 1879-1914.
June 22, 1994... In the years 1879-1914 European fiction took a searching look at entrenched social institutions, scrutinizing the family in particular with a premium on boldness. Indeed, the bolder its approach, the broader and stronger did its appeal tend to...

Faces of violence: homicide trends and cultural meanings: Amsterdam, 1431-1816.
June 22, 1994... It would be hard to imagine a historical setting without violence. Throughout the ages, for example, the rulers of states have waged war against their enemies or employed police forces against lawbreakers. The focus of my research is what their...

Taming the 'King of Terrors': ritual and death in Schenectady, New York, 1844-1860.
June 22, 1994... Death is certainly the most universal and, perhaps, most terrifying of all human experiences.(1) Those dying know that all will eventually follow them, but they have only faith to guide them about their fate. Survivors must re-establish their...

'Buy where you can work': boycotting for jobs in African-American Baltimore, 1933-1934.
June 22, 1994... In early June 1933, the Baltimore Afro-American reported that the Prophet Kiowa Costonie, the "New Messiah" to his followers, had come to town: Discovered here about four weeks ago when tall stories of miraculous healings and divine cures...

The care of dependent African-American children in Chicago: the struggle between black self-help and professionalism.
June 22, 1994... During the Progressive and post World War I eras, social welfare provisions became both more organized and more professional. These developments significantly shaped modern day government programs and private philanthropy. Among the Progressive...

Workers and community: the case of the peat-cutters and the shipbuilding industry in Saint-Nazaire, 1881-1910.
June 22, 1994... In February 1901 in the French town of Saint-Nazaire, a port and shipbuilding center in western Brittany, the Penhouet shipyard reinstated its spring schedule of lengthened work days and an extended midday break of one and a half hours. About...

Family strategies and medical power: 'voluntary' committal in a Parisian asylum, 1876-1914. (includes appendices)
June 22, 1994... Recent research in the history of nineteenth century psychiatry has explored the expanding powers of the medical profession and the proliferation of the asylum, that "magic machine"(1) for curing insanity. This medicalization of madness has...

The Family Romance of the French Revolution.
June 22, 1994... The Family Romance of the French Revolution analyses the cultural and political dimensions of a widely shared if unconscious belief in an archetypal "family romance" that marked eighteenth-century French society. Hunt uses Freud's notion of...

The Family in Bahia, Brazil: 1870-1945.
June 22, 1994... Its title to the contrary, this book is not about "the Bahian family" as such. Its coverage is limited to the families of the upper and middle classes: an estimated 10 percent of the state's population in 1870, and perhaps somewhat more in 1920....

Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil: 1888-1988.
June 22, 1994... The social history of modern Brazil is largely unwritten. Race relations, in particular, have been especially neglected. Reid Andrews' book is a pioneering effort toward filling this gap. Andrews has wisely chosen to restrict his coverage to...

Class, Caste and Color: A Social and Economic History of the South African Western Cape.
June 22, 1994... Just a few years ago the conventional wisdom was that the early period of European colonialism in the region around Cape Town was largely irrelevant when compared to the industrial revolution that unfolded in the north during the latter part of...

Nachbarn am Rhein: Entfremdung und Annaherung der franzosischen und deutschen Gesellschaft seit 1880.
June 22, 1994... In this sequel to his earlier Social History of Western Europe(1) Hartmut Kaelble demonstrates once again the fascination and usefulness of comparative history in understanding national differences and similarities. His detailed comparison of the...

A History of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages.
June 22, 1994... Having edited the popular "History of Private Life" series with the late Philippe Aries (also published in this country by Harvard), Georges Duby is now editing with Michelle Perrot a "History of Women in the West" series, of which this is the...

White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History.
June 22, 1994... Catherine Hall, best known for her Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (1987) written in collaboration with Leonore Davidoff, has here assembled ten essays; of these all but the first have been previously...

Ten Hours' Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England.
June 22, 1994... Ten Hours' Labor is a nuanced account of the ways that religion and reform shaped the labor movement in early nineteenth-century New England. Using labor and temperance journals, and to a lesser extent, letters and diaries, Teresa Anne Murphy...

Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930.
June 22, 1994... As I was driving to my office recently I caught the end of a National Public Radio report about the failure of American unions to organize the nation's clerical workforce. While this did not seem like a particularly new critique of American...

Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879.
June 22, 1994... Ambiguous Lives is an interesting, important genealogical study that contributes to southern women's history and to the understanding of southern interracial relations and the color caste dynamics found within the larger community. Presented...

The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns.
June 22, 1994... In this erudite and idiosyncratic work, Stephen Kern explores what he calls "one of life's deepest mysteries and most powerful emotions." Using literature, art and philosophy (his sources accounting for the word "culture" in the title), he...

The Secularization of Early Modern England. From Religious Culture to Religious Faith.
June 22, 1994... This is a strangely philosophical book, for its argument depends heavily on the author's idiosyncratic initial definition of secularization. A religious society, for Sommerville, weaves religious ritual into the fabric of life so that religion is...

From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d'Otranto.
June 22, 1994... In this rich and often fascinating study David Gentilcore lays out systematically what he calls "the system of the sacred" in early modern Terra d'Otranto, a province at the southeast edge of the kingdom of Naples, essentially comprising the heel...

Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy Since the Fifteenth Century.
June 22, 1994... Carroll's two previous books (The Cult of the Virgin Mary [1986] and Catholic Cults and Devotions[1989]) looked at various aspects of international popular Catholicism within an explanatory framework of orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis. In...

Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence.
June 22, 1994... This is an impressive history of Florentine death rites from the aftermath of the Black Death to the end of the Republic. The framework of the book will be familiar to students of Florentine history; the literature on social organization and...

Cultural History and Material Culture: Everyday Life, Landscapes, Museums.
June 22, 1994... In this volume Thomas Schlereth brings together fourteen previously published and two new articles that discuss the value of material culture study in understanding America's past and the role of museums in interpreting material culture. Arguing...

Death, Deeds, and Descendants: Inheritance in Modern America.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The major intent of this book is to identify sources of variation in transfers mortis causa. The author believes in the force of Americans' underlying beliefs, behaviors, and feelings about inheritance, but, as designed, the research cannot tell...

America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.
June 22, 1994... Claude Fischer has written a book examining how ordinary men and women used one of the anonymous technologies of the twentieth century--the humble telephone. Technology, he argues, cannot be understood through deterministic models which try to...

Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change.
June 22, 1994... For social historians who have essentially defined themselves as speaking of, about, for, or sometimes at otherwise silent historical and social masses, the fact that a collection of earnest academics should have come together in conference...

From Market Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850.
June 22, 1994... Professor Rothenberg has written two books in a single volume. The first book occupies Chapters 1-3, deals primarily with the years before 1750, takes the form of an ideological attack against advocates of a "moral economy" (who are characterized...

Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850.
June 22, 1994... David A. Zonderman styles his analytical approach "working-class intellectual history". Eschewing quantitative methods and the microcosmic techniques of community studies, he aspires to offer a fresh reading of workers' written responses to...

Josiah White: Quaker Entrepreneur.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... After achieving distinction as a scholar and clinician in psychiatry, Norris Hansell has embarked on a career in history. What was undertaken as an avocation resulted in a thoroughly professional and creditable contribution, the biography of...

Courting Danger: Injury and Law in New York City, 1870-1910.
June 22, 1994... Roscoe Pound's seeds sown almost a century past are finally bearing fruit in the field of legal history. His call for a sociological jurisprudence that looks at "law in action" and elucidates the social influences on legal development, has found...

The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875.
June 22, 1994... What was the relation of neighborhoods to people's sense of community in nineteenth-century cities? Kenneth Scherzer argues that historians have too readily and nostalgically asserted that communities were spatially grounded in neighborhoods....

A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona, 1728-1832.
June 22, 1994... In this clear and well-documented work, Professor Thomson takes as his starting point Pierre Vilar's magisterial La Catalogne dans L'Espagne Moderne (1962). He builds on this heritage by following the transformations of the Catalan cotton...

Football and Its Fans: Supporters and their Relations with the Game, 1885-1985.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Although Taylor's title suggests a somewhat broader study of England's soccer fans, his focus--apart from some rather perfunctory chapters on the early years of the sport--is actually on the National Federation of Football Supporters' Clubs, an...

Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America.
June 22, 1994... Food preferences and impact constitute an important part of social history. They have on the whole received insufficient attention, because of the taint of the old pots and pans antiquarianism--how they lived and ate. Food has not even been...

The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War.
June 22, 1994... Despite its title, this work is not about nineteenth-century "policemen states" in which the "better-off people disciplined their inferiors."(1) Nor is it even about "the well-ordered police states"--like those of the seventeenth and eighteenth...

White-Collar Crime in Modern England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845-1929.
June 22, 1994... Does this comment on business morality sound familiar to contemporary ears? If we progress at the same rate for half a generation longer, commercial dishonesty will become the rule, and integrity the exception. On every side we see...

Dirt and Disease: Polio before FDR.
June 22, 1994... The leading cause of death in the 19th century, tuberculosis was a scourge that afflicted men, women and children of all ages, classes and geographic locations. A chronic malady characterized by a harrowing cough that occasionally gave way to...

The Jewish People in America: A Time for Healing, American Jewry Since World War II.
June 22, 1994... The five volumes in this excellent history of Jews in the United States are a tribute to the foresight and dedication of Henry Feingold who more than a decade ago decided that the best way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the...

Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse.
June 22, 1994... In this work Leps examines criminology texts, newspapers and popular fiction to study the discourse of criminality in late nineteenth century France and Great Britain. She begins with two primary hypotheses: "The truth of a period corresponds not...

Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance.
June 22, 1994... In the past decade, few English-speaking historians have given more thought to the Italian school of microhistory than has Edward Muir. One result of that attention has been the series of translations, Selections from Quaderni Storici, which he...

The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900.
June 22, 1994... For nearly two decades Andrew Scull, a sociologist who is equally at home in the discipline of history, has been an active participant in the debate dealing with the history of the care and treatment of the severely and persistently mentally ill....

Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe.
June 22, 1994... Forbidden History is an anthology of fifteen articles selected from the 1990 and 1991 volumes of the Journal of the History of Sexuality. It concentrates heavily on the period since the eighteenth century, although two pieces (one on syphilis and...

The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia.
June 22, 1994... Taking Michel Foucault's hypothesis concerning the interrelationship between sexuality and power within Western Europe as her starting point, Laura Engelstein brings a novel twist to Western historiography's preoccupation with Russian liberalism...

Les Colleges du Peuple: L'enseignement primaire superieur et le developpement de la scolarisation prolongee sous la Troisieme Republique.
June 22, 1994... During the nineteenth century educational systems were divided between primary schools, which taught the 3 R's to the common people, and secondary schools, which taught the classics to the bourgeoisie. A subject of lively debate was the...

Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States.
June 22, 1994... Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, intellectual work is more nearly a communal enterprise than a matter of individual achievement. The social and institutional context in which thinkers live shapes their thought more powerfully than...

Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France.
June 22, 1994... The years between 1860 and 1914 saw a resurgence in France of the formerly aristocratic ritual of the duel. Robert A. Nye argues that the explanation for this development is to be found in the adoption by the bourgeoisie of the discourse of...