Journal of Social History articles from June 1996

Journal of Social History archives from June 1996

The uneven rewards of professional labor: wealth and income in the Chicago professions, 1870-1920.
June 22, 1996... In 1879, the Illinois State Medical Society formed a Special Committee on Medical Education, headed by the prominent Chicago physician Ephraim Ingals, to study the conditions of medical training and practice in Illinois. In its report, the...

Defining the industrial chemist in the United Kingdom, 1850-1921.
June 22, 1996... 1. Introduction Scientific and technical workers occupy a pivotal position within manufacturing industry and perhaps within industrial society as a whole. Their work and occupational location have received a good deal of attention in...

Managing danger in the home environment, 1900-1940.
June 22, 1996... "Since the dawn of history, woman has been in charge of the home and has been responsible for it. This work of home safety is peculiarly woman's work." Arvilla Miller, General Federation of Women's Clubs, 1929 Introduction Where does...

Why did the infants and toddlers die? Shifts in Americans' ideas of responsibility for accidents - from blaming mom to engineering.
June 22, 1996... On April 5, 1933, five-year-old David Myers of Youngstown, Ohio, got his hand caught and "mangled" in a washing machine wringer in his home. At St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a thumb and two fingers were amputated. The newspaper report did not suggest...

Learning and earning: schooling, juvenile employment, and the early life course in late nineteenth-century New Haven.
June 22, 1996... Thomas Gradgrind took no heed of... [the circus] of course, but passed on as a practical man ought to pass on, either brushing the noisy insects from his thoughts, or conveying them to the House of Correction. But, the turning of the road took...

When love goes wrong: getting out of marriage in seventeenth-century Spain.
June 22, 1996... "What therefore God has joined together let no man put asunder."(1) Based on this New Testament injunction, the Catholic Church took marriage out of the hands of humans and placed it among the sacraments defined by God. With its new status as a...

A choice not to wed? Unmarried women in eighteenth-century France.
June 22, 1996... Ever since the conceptualization of the "Western European Marriage Pattern," historians have been aware of the fact that a sizeable minority of the population remained unmarried in early modern and modern Western Europe, possibly between fifteen...

Demographic change in a post-export boom society: the population of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1776-1821.
June 22, 1996... Introduction The social and economic history of Minas Gerais in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is extraordinary in comparative perspective. It is perhaps the only known example of a large-scale Latin American slave system which...

Freedmen in a slave economy: Minas Gerais in 1831.
June 22, 1996... There is little question that Brazil by the early 19th century had the largest free colored population of any slave society in America. By the first national census of 1872 the free colored - all of whom came from slave origins - numbered 4.2...

Literacy among New England's transient poor, 1750-1800.
June 22, 1996... A number of historians have investigated the rate of literacy of New Englanders before 1800, using as their sources various legal documents connected with the disposition of estates. Kenneth Lockridge used wills from towns in Massachusetts,...

The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paycheck, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies.
June 22, 1996... In The Social Meaning of Money, Viviana Zelizer examines the ways in which the popular classes in the United States have resisted the "flattening" of social relations by money that Georg Simmel predicted. Zelizer uses three case studies - the...

Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell.
June 22, 1996... It was not so very long ago that while the history of ideas was energetically pursued the history of the body was utterly neglected, and similar intellectual snobberies also held back approaches to the history of the senses. When in the 1980s...

Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience?
June 22, 1996... Although not a historical study of love and romance, this is an important book for historians interested in emotion and culture for three reasons. It provides important anthropological data about love in many societies. It reminds historians as...

The Social Construction of Democracy: 1870-1990.
June 22, 1996... The title of this collection led this reviewer to hope for an historical and analytical survey of the principal recent movements toward democracy. Such an expectation may be too high. In any case it was not satisfied. The book has nothing to say...

The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France.
June 22, 1996... In a certain sense, all diseases are social in definition: elaborate and often elusive culture-based constructions that incorporate a wide range of elements from the biomedical to the symbolic. In this first study in English of tuberculosis in...

Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and Storytelling.
June 22, 1996... In Altered Conditions, Julia Epstein addresses a question of great cultural moment: that of the relationship of the body to the self. She argues that "cultures produce explanatory stories about the human body in order to contain human beings...

Vom Kranken zum Patienten: "Medikalisierung" und medizinische Vergesellschaftung am Beispiel Badens, 1750-1850.
June 22, 1996... Francisca Loetz's social history of health care in Baden between 1750 and 1850 is motivated by one overriding concern: to correct the standard picture of "medicalization," the process by which the health of people in modern societies came...

Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria.
June 22, 1996... In Bearing the Dead Esther Schor proposes that "mourning is a cultural rather than psychological phenomenon... a force that constitutes communities and makes it possible to conceptualize history." (pp. 3, 4) Starting from this assumption Schor...

Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages.
June 22, 1996... Never in the history of Europe were the living and the dead closer than in the Middle Ages. As Pat Geary points out in the introduction to this collection of essays, the living did not just bury and commemorate the dead. The dead "were drawn into...

Les Mots des femmes: Essai sur la singularite francaise.
June 22, 1996... Well known in this country for her incisive work on the culture and politics of the French Revolution (Festivals and the French Revolution, 1976, tr. 1988; Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, co-edited with Francois Furet, 1988; L'homme...

Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940.
June 22, 1996... Mary Neth and Sally McMurry tell the story of the Great Transformation of the rural north from self-sufficient, family centered farming to a heavily capitalized agriculture tied to distant markets and split from community and home. Their titles,...

Transforming Rural Life: Dairying Families and Agricultural Change, 1820-1885.
June 22, 1996... Mary Neth and Sally McMurry tell the story of the Great Transformation of the rural north from self-sufficient, family centered farming to a heavily capitalized agriculture tied to distant markets and split from community and home. Their titles,...

The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990.
June 22, 1996... In this personal yet analytical narrative, anthropologist Jane Adams investigates how and why farm life in Southern Illinois has changed in the last century. Most of the story's contours are by now familiar to historians of rural America; the...

Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... This is a good example of the new cultural history: the focus is on the ways in which a culture shapes girlhood, rather than on the "lived experience" of girls. Lynne Vallone makes no bones about this, although she would maintain that in many...

Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China.
June 22, 1996... Imperial China, for many Western and even Chinese readers, still hovers in mind as a land of unchanging Confucian tradition, a timeless realm where women were illiterate and therefore invisible to historians - except for their bound feet. Dorothy...

Towards a Structure of Indifference: The Social Origins of Maternal Custody.
June 22, 1996... In this volume Debra Friedman examines the historical origins of contemporary child custody arrangements. She argues that during the forty-year period from 1880 to 1920, the presumption that fathers should be awarded custody of their children was...

In Subordination: Professional Women, 1870-1970.
June 22, 1996... In Subordination is a general survey of women in five professional groups in Manitoba over a hundred-year period. The five groups chosen are university teachers, physicians, lawyers, nurses, and public and high school teachers. Each group is...

Naissance du chomeur: 1880-1910.
June 22, 1996... Historians are turning increasingly to metaphors of birth, invention, and construction to connote the centrality to the historical project of studies of the creation, dissemination, legitimation and eventual naturalization and assimilation of...

'Die Manie der Revolte': Protest unter der Franzosischen Julimonarchie (1830-1848).
June 22, 1996... German historical sociologist Werner Giesselmann's massive study of social protest under the July Monarchy is a self-conscious attempt to swim against the tide of most recent research in social history. At a time when most scholars have abandoned...

Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888.
June 22, 1996... It has become a common-place that ethnicity is socially constructed. The problem is to write the history which such an observation implies. To do so is to uncover precisely what notions of ethnic affiliation and solidarity obscure for people...

Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany.
June 22, 1996... When, in 1931, Fritz Lang made M, one of the first and greatest sound films, he wanted as his subject "the most heinous crime." The director ultimately hit upon "a child-murderer, a man who is forced... by some perverted urge... to kill." (p....

Les Voltigeurs de la Republique: L'Inspection du travail en France jusqu'en 1914.
June 22, 1996... This important and well-documented study of France's pre-1914 labor inspectors treats a group of civil servants who mediated between the state and significant segments of the larger society. By terming them light infantry soldiers (les...

Popular Culture, Crime, and Social Control in 18th-Century Wurttemberg.
June 22, 1996... Swabia, with its abundant source materials, has attracted much attention from historians, and since the 1980s this historiography has been dominated by social/cultural historians. A recent and compelling addition comes from Karl Wegert. In his...

An Economy of Violence in Early Modern France: Crime and Justice in the Haute Auvergne, 1587-1664.
June 22, 1996... As its title announces, this book is about an economy of violence, an "endless, small-scale economy of provocation and riposte" (p. 231) that defined the world of private justice in the Haute Auvergne between 1587 and 1664. Like most historians...

Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885.
June 22, 1996... Critics both within and without the discipline have long maintained that social history is essentially nothing more than reprocessed local history. The belief that all history is past politics spawns elitist notions that provincialism promotes...

New South-New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South.
June 22, 1996... Few historians of the postbellum rural south are unfamiliar with Harold Woodman's groundbreaking article on the laws of tenancy and sharecropping, which appeared in Agricultural History in 1979.(1) Woodman's new book constitutes an expansion and...

Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714-80: A Political and Social Study.
June 22, 1996... It is a mistake to dismiss xenophobia, racism, antisemitism and the like as purely and simply irrational. Paranoid and divorced from reality such belief systems assuredly are. But historians are, increasingly, recognizing their constituent...

History and Society in Central Europe, vol. 2, Nobilities in Central and Eastern Europe: Kinship, Property and Privilege.
June 22, 1996... This is the second volume in a series of English-language occasional papers on East Central European social history, sponsored by the "Istvan Hajnal Circle" [Hajnal Istvan Kor], named after the prominent Hungarian social historian, Istvan Hajnal...

Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru.
June 22, 1996... The formation of the nation-state is still an on-going process. This is certainly the case in postcolonial regions, such as Latin America, where border disputes and peasant uprisings continue to punctuate the political landscape. Florencia...

Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History.
June 22, 1996... The cult of rural life, an integral part of European noble culture since antiquity, did not take hold in Russia until the late eighteenth century. When, however, it finally emerged, as part of the late harvest of European cultural values sown by...

Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit: The History of the St. Francis Medical Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
June 22, 1996... In the decades following the Civil War, the number of hospitals in the United States burgeoned. From a handful of primarily Protestant or public institutions preceding the War, by the 1920s a hospital census recorded nearly six thousand. In...

The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology.
June 22, 1996... Until quite recently, those of us who taught courses in the history of American technology had to resort to anthologies or collections of documents for a text. With publication of Pursell's book, intended for use in college courses, we now have...