Journal of Social History articles from June 1995

Journal of Social History archives from June 1995

Homicidal compulsion and the conditions of freedom: the social and psychological origins of familicide in America's early republic.
June 22, 1995... Something strange and horrible happened in a number of American households of the early republic. In a series of curiously clustered incidents, spaced over a period of six decades, a handful of men, loving husbands and affectionate fathers, took...

Clothes shopping in Imperial Russia: the development of a consumer culture.
June 22, 1995... The buying and selling of goods has taken on increased importance with the rise of modern industrial capitalism. While humans have always traded goods, the development of advertising, the mass production of consumer goods and the need for...

Burying the "destroyer of one happy home": manhood, industrial authority, and political alliance building in the murder trial of Ira Strunk.
June 22, 1995... In the fall of 1885, Ira Strunk, a teacher and proprietor of a small business college in New Albany, Indiana, read in a local gossip column that "a prominent married lady was having an affair with a local bachelor."(1) He assumed this referred to...

No pedestals: women and violence in late nineteenth-century Ireland.
June 22, 1995... In English courts in the nineteenth century women were at a marked disadvantage. Officials accepted the image of women as delicate creatures who required the protection and supervision of men. Women who failed to match the image were usually...

"Foisted upon the government": institutions and the impact of public policy upon the aged. The elderly patients of Rockwood Asylum, 1866-1906.
June 22, 1995... There is a great deal of controversy concerning the amount of care families have been willing to provide for the dependent aged in the past. A wide variety of historical writings about public institutions have highlighted the fact that the number...

Afro-Jamaican traditions and labor organizing on United Fruit Company plantations in Costa Rica, 1910.
June 22, 1995... While Costa Rica's reputation of being the most pacific and homogeneous of the countries of Latin America is not entirely undeserved, historians have increasingly called this view into question. Recent works have documented inequalities in land...

Marriage or a career?: witchcraft as an alternative in seventeenth-century Venice.
June 22, 1995... Despite significant changes in the historiography of European witchcraft, the figure of the witch seems to remain the inevitable center of such studies. It is, after all, for his, or most often, her "witchly" qualities that the person, initially...

Secondary schools and social structure in 19th century Germany.
June 22, 1995... Ever since the 1977 publication of Detlef K. Muller's massive study of secondary education for boys in nineteenth-century Berlin, Sozialstruktur und Schulsystem,(1) efforts to test, revise, or challenge its controversial theses have been a major...

Das Realschulwesen in Preussen: Schulentwicklung und Sozialstruktur der Realschulabiturienten der Rheinprovinz in der 2. Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts.
June 22, 1995... Ever since the 1977 publication of Detlef K. Muller's massive study of secondary education for boys in nineteenth-century Berlin, Sozialstruktur und Schulsystem,(1) efforts to test, revise, or challenge its controversial theses have been a major...

Sozialgeschichte des Bildungswesens als Regionalanalyse: Empirische Analysen zur Strukturentwicklung der hoheren Schulen Westfalens im 19. Jahrhundert.
June 22, 1995... Ever since the 1977 publication of Detlef K. Muller's massive study of secondary education for boys in nineteenth-century Berlin, Sozialstruktur und Schulsystem,(1) efforts to test, revise, or challenge its controversial theses have been a major...

Bildungschancen und soziale Mobilitat in der stadtischen Gesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts.
June 22, 1995... Ever since the 1977 publication of Detlef K. Muller's massive study of secondary education for boys in nineteenth-century Berlin, Sozialstruktur und Schulsystem,(1) efforts to test, revise, or challenge its controversial theses have been a major...

How to succeed in revolution without really trying.
June 22, 1995... History surprises. As Charles Tilly points out in the opening pages of European Revolutions, 1492-1992, scarcely had Europeans decided that the age of revolution was over, than revolution swept through eastern and central Europe, toppling one...

European Revolutions: 1492-1992.
June 22, 1995... History surprises. As Charles Tilly points out in the opening pages of European Revolutions, 1492-1992, scarcely had Europeans decided that the age of revolution was over, than revolution swept through eastern and central Europe, toppling one...

The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies.
June 22, 1995... It required nearly two decades and several dozen books before the social mobility craze among American urban and social historians burned itself out. The Constant Flux may reignite the fire. The most comprehensive comparative study of its kind,...

The Coachmen of Nineteenth-Century Paris: Service Workers and Class Consciousness.
June 22, 1995... Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, thousands of coachmen served the people of Paris as drivers of voitures de place, coaches that could be hired at municipal cab stands, or as drivers of voitures sous remise, vehicles that...

The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Regime French Society.
June 22, 1995... With the emergence of several new works, the exhaustion that overtook the study of eighteenth-century France following the 1989 bicentennial celebrations seems to be abating. In 1989 a linguistic approach, particularly that of Francois Furet,...

The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation.
June 22, 1995... With the emergence of several new works, the exhaustion that overtook the study of eighteenth-century France following the 1989 bicentennial celebrations seems to be abating. In 1989 a linguistic approach, particularly that of Francois Furet,...

The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain.
June 22, 1995... Partly because of the recent preoccupation with 'post-modernism', there has been a revival of interest of late amongst historians in the so-called 'birth of the modern': the modern novel, the modern portrait, the modern sense of time, and so...

Matrimonio e Sessualita a Roma nell'Ottocento.
June 22, 1995... With only a slight delay, Italy too has seen an explosion of works on the history of women in general, and the history of sexuality in particular. The development of this historiography, though, has not been easy. Symptomatic of these...

From Father's Property to Children's Rights: The History of Child Custody in the United States.
June 22, 1995... Mary Ann Mason, an expert in family law and Associate Professor of Law and Social Welfare at the School of Social Welfare, University of California, has published widely on the current status of women and children. In The Equality Trap (1988),...

Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945.
June 22, 1995... Despite the rich collection of current literature addressing the role of women in shaping social welfare policy in the United States, Regina G. Kunzel breaks new ground in her history of maternity homes for unmarried mothers from 1890 to 1945....

Birth Weight and Economic Growth: Women's Living Standards in the Industrializing West.
June 22, 1995... As the title and subtitle of this important book promise, it is a study of the relationship between the birth weight of infants, and the living standards of the working-class women who bore them, within the context of economic development. And...

Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its Interpretation.
June 22, 1995... The final chapter, in which the editor offers us the "foundations of an integrated historiography", supplies an exciting climax to a book of uneven quality which almost always expands the horizons and sustains the interest. Wilson stakes out the...

Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London.
June 22, 1995... In the prologue of his book on the Old Price riots at the Covent Garden theatre in 1809, Marc Baer explains the need for a new study of the event: in the past, the riots have been "something of an embarrassment for a variety of scholars... for...

Le Temps Des Foires: Foires et Marches Dans le Midi Toulousain de la Fin de l'Ancien Regime a 1914.
June 22, 1995... Thomas has a fine subject in this study of rural markets and fairs in the century and a half before World War I. Local markets were, after all, centers of peasant sociability, and nearly every activity necessary to rural survival transpired at...

Germany After the First World War.
June 22, 1995... It is almost hard to remember the time when the literature on the aftermath of the First World War in Germany concentrated its attention on the Revolution of 1918-1919 and its failures, the role of the workers' and soldiers' councils and the...

The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventive Medicine, 1856-1900.
June 22, 1995... With all the frightening headlines about various mystery illnesses and AIDS, the fear of any sexual contact, the demand for compulsory blood tests, it is easy to forget that only a hundred years ago infectious diseases killed millions of people....

Criminal Law and Colonial Subject: New South Wales, 1810-1830.
June 22, 1995... That Byrne elects the years 1810-1830 is significant, for they mark the critical ones in the transformation of a colonial criminal justice system geared to a convict population to one accommodating a predominantly free society. Although Bryne's...

Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier: 1600-1800.
June 22, 1995... This absorbing study deals with the triangular relationship of Taiwan's indigenous Austronesian peoples, Chinese immigrants, and officialdom, and with the accompanying economic, demographic and social changes that transformed a little-known...

Body, Subject and Power in China.
June 22, 1995... This ambitious collection is an attempt not just to add new topics to Chinese social history but in the Foucauldian tradition to question Western social science, rooted in 18th century rationalism, which, it is argued, essentializes the...

The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana.
June 22, 1995... Almost thirty years ago Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a controversial report on the breakdown of the Negro American family. In chapter three, devoted to the "roots" of the problem, he quoted his friend and Harvard colleague Nathan Glazer that...

Social Change and Labor Unrest in Brazil since 1945.
June 22, 1995... This book is a quantitative study of strike activity in Brazil from 1945 to 1989. It is based on time-series data, gathered by the author from newspaper reports and union and government sources, on the frequency and duration of strikes, and the...

Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820.
June 22, 1995... Recent works in the history of science have focused on communities of scientific practitioners and their relations to larger societies outside those communities. Golinski's purpose is to show that chemistry in Britain advanced not just by means...

Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
June 22, 1995... Some time ago feminist historian Carolyn Merchant initiated the exploration of the roots of the gendered nature of Western science which has since become a major subject of investigation for feminist historians, (Merchant, The Death of Nature:...

From Congregation Town to Industrial City: Culture and Social Change in a Southern Community.
June 22, 1995... In 1974, Carl Degler suggested there was an "other South" - a group of Southerners who, in his words, "stood out against the prevailing views and values of their region."(1) After twenty years of historical scholarship, we know that Degler only...

Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis.
June 22, 1995... Lenard Berlanstein has done historians two favors: initially, he organized a lively session for the 1990 meetings of the Society for French Historical Studies titled "The Future of Labor History: From Proletarianization to Discourses?" featuring...

Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain.
June 22, 1995... Susan Kingsley Kent's new study deals with the always-fascinating subjects of gender boundaries and sex war during and after World War I in Britain. The book, though focused on feminists and feminist thought, is a case study in a still larger...

Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization.
June 22, 1995... In this pathbreaking study, Sheila Fitzpatrick portrays collective farm life in the 1930s from the perspective of the peasantry. While most of the literature published so far on the rural 1930s concentrates on political and organizational...

Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936.
June 22, 1995... This pathbreaking study reminds us, at a time when such Russian and Western scholars as Dimitrii Volkogonov and Richard Pipes are vilifying Lenin and the Bolsheviks for creating a monolithic party that laid the foundations for the repressive...