Journal of Social History articles from June 1999

Journal of Social History archives from June 1999

The making of the domestic occasion: the history of Thanksgiving in the United States.
June 22, 1999... Four historians, Leigh Eric Schmidt, John Gillis, Penne Restad, and Stephen Nissenbaum, have recently published books about the history of Christmas and several other major holidays in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. Their...

The Civil War generation: military service and mobility in Dubuque, Iowa, 1860-1870.
June 22, 1999... In mid-1865, the people of Dubuque, Iowa - like people in cities and towns across the North - prepared to welcome home their husbands, sons, brothers, and neighbors who had successfully restored the Union. Outwardly festive, the event may have...

Assistance and repression: rural exodus, vagabondage and social crisis in France, 1880-1914.
June 22, 1999... Vous croyez expier les fautes de la France en me faisant mourir; cela ne suffira pas; vous commettrez un crime de plus; je suis la grande victime fin de siecle. Joseph Vacher, Bourg, France, 31 December 1897, on his way to the...

Conscription versus penal servitude: army reform's influence on the Brazilian State's management of social control, 1870-1930.
June 22, 1999... The Brazilian army's size, its share of national budgets, and its preeminent role in the management of government-legitimated violence made it the primary institutional bridge between the state and the "criminal" underworld in the late 1800s....

Myths of pacification: Brazilian frontier settlement and the subjugation of the Bororo Indians.
June 22, 1999... Introduction Upon the founding of the Brazilian Republic in 1889, hundreds of thousands of indigenous people continued to inhabit the nation's vast interior. These natives rarely gamer more than a passing reference in histories of the...

"One female prisoner is of more trouble than twenty males": women convicts in Illinois prisons, 1835-1896.
June 22, 1999... On September 11, 1835 the following entry appeared in the Alton Penitentiary Convict Register: No. 23. Received the body of Sally Jefferson in the penitentiary at Alton. Said convict is 5 feet 4 inches high, black eyes and hair, fair...

Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 2, Traditions.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Edited by Pierre Nora, Lawrence D. Kritzman. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, xii plus 591 pp.). By Joseph Amato Southwest State University Traditions is the second volume of what is to be the...

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Roy Porter (London: HarperCollins, 1997. xvi plus 831pp. [pounds]24,99; also New York: Norton, 1998. $35.00.). By Constance E. Putnam Tufts University Roy Porter's latest tome is, in several senses, a weighty matter, not quickly...

In Defence of History.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Richard J. Evans (London: Granta Books, 1997. vii plus 307pp. Australia $39.95.). E.H. Carr's What is History? and G.R. Elton's The Practice of History have a Siamese-twins quality. Great equals and opposites, each helped to "make" the...

The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Claudine Fabre-Vassas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. x plus 401pp.). How do we define what we are ? This question lies at the heart of many historical and anthropological studies, and has led scholars to look closely at the...

Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Gary Cross. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. vii plus 283pp. $29.95). Gary Cross's thoroughly researched and thoughtful history of toys does more than examine the playthings that have amused and instructed generations of...

De geschiedenis van de kindergeneeskunde in Nederland. Deel I: de periode tot 1700.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By M. J. Van Lieburg (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1997. 349pp.). The entire history of child medicine - until the present - in the Netherlands was due to appear, in one volume, at the occasion of the centennial of the Vereniging voor...

Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Culture, 1665-1800.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Marcia Pointon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xiii plus 439pp. $85.00). Marcia Pointon works at the margins between social history, cultural history, and art history, and she has shown that this marginal terrain can be...

The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Michael Anton Budd (New York: New York University Press, 1997. xix plus 218pp. $40.00). In a small museum in northern France there rests in elegant splendor a bone allegedly from the hand of Charlemagne. The relic provokes a...

A History of the Breast.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Marilyn Yalom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. xii plus 314pp. index, hardback $29.95). It's not the Nobel Prize or Quantum Physics that comes to mind when thinking of Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe or Pamela Anderson. In A History of...

Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Joy Damousi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. x plus 221pp. $64.95/cloth $18.95/paperback). It is impossible to review this book, old adages notwithstanding, without some consideration of its cover. Damousi has eschewed the...

The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls' Clubs, 1884-1928.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Priscilla Murolo (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xiv plus 227pp. $14.95/paperback). Priscilla Murolo contributes her careful examination of the Association of Working Girls' Societies and its successor...

Under the Cover of Kindness: The Invention of Social Work.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Leslie Margolin (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997. xiv plus 216pp.). Leslie Margolin's title encapsulates the thesis of the book. The emergence of a major profession in the United States occurred under the...

Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Joan Thirsk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. x plus 365pp. $47.50). This ambitious book is the masterwork of a distinguished English agrarian historian, written from (and influenced by) her retirement in the agriculturally...

The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Jon Gjerde (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xiii plus 426pp. $39.95). The title of Jon Gjerde's work comes from sermons delivered in 1849 by Albert Barnes, a Presbyterian clergyman, on the ramifications for the...

Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By David C. Hsiung (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1997. xv plus 239pp.). Among Appalachian scholars the subject of Appalachian difference or exceptionalism has been a longstanding topic of argument and debate. Were the...

Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Jean M. O'Brien (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii plus 224pp.). This study examines community membership and property holding in Natick, Massachusetts during the first 140 years, of the town's history. Natick was one of...

Black Jacks: African-American Seamen in the Age of Sail.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Jeffrey Bolster (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. viii 310pp. $27.00). Jeffrey Bolster's personal seafaring experience lends vibrance to his gorgeously detailed account Black Jacks: African-American Seamen in the Age of Sail....

"New Raiments of Self": African American Clothing in the Antebellum South.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Helen Bradley Foster (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ix plus 359pp. $46.00/cloth $19.95/paperback). For years, fashion exhibits in museums have ignored African Americans until the exhibits came to the 1960s. This book redresses...

Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Dale Cockrell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xx plus 236pp. $54.95). Social historians who have not dipped into the recent historical literature of the American theatre may be in for a surprise. Replacing the traditional...

Theatre Culture in America: 1825-1860.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Rosemarie K. Bank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xii plus 292pp.). Social historians who have not dipped into the recent historical literature of the American theatre may be in for a surprise. Replacing the traditional...

Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Margaret Morganroth Gullette (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997. xii plus 276pp. $29.95). "THE NAVY NEEDS YOU," implored a Navy recruiting poster during World War I. "DON'T READ AMERICAN HISTORY, MAKE IT!"...

Growing Old in the Middle Ages: 'Winter Clothes Us in Shadow and Pain.'.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Shulamith Shahar (New York and London: Routledge, 1997. ix plus 243pp. $69.95). Having already written books on women and on children in the Middle Ages (The Fourth Estate, 1983, and Childhood in the Middle Ages, 1990), Shulamith Shahar...

Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late Victorian Culture.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Keith Walden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. xx plus 430pp.). It is no secret that the Victorians loved to make exhibits of themselves and people defined as "others." But, for all that we know about this exhibitionary...

Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Katherine Grier (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. xii plus 267pp. $45.00/cloth $22.50/paperback). Katherine Grier's sophisticated study of the rise and fall of the Victorian parlor provides a fascinating window onto...

Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914-1919.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (New York: Cambridge, 1997. xvii plus 622pp. $90.00). In the great metropolitan centers of wartime Europe, few things were more important in the lives of contemporaries than food, heating, housing,...

The World Within War: America's Combat Experience in World War II.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Gerald F. Linderman (New York: The Free Press, 1997. viii plus 408pp.). More than 16,000,000 Americans served in the Armed Forces during World War U, but only 800,00 (or just 5%) took part in what Gerald Linderman calls "extended...

The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe During World War II.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Peter Schrijvers (New York: New York University Press, 1998. xiii plus 325pp.). Between early 1941 and late 1946, Americans underwent a metamorphosis from determined isolationists to global policemen. Of course, in between those years,...

Factory and Community in Stalin's Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Kenneth M. Straus (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. xiv plus 355pp.). In this monograph, Kenneth M. Straus argues that a reconstructed working-class consciousness evolved among Soviet workers in the course of the 1930s....

Vie et mort des bassins industriels en Europe: 1750-2000.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Rend Leboutte (France: L'Harmattan, 1997. 591pp.). I spent several years studying a French bassin industriel with Marcel Proust's lines from Le Temps retrouve in mind: "I knew very well that my brain was a rich bassin rainier, where...

Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Margot A. Henriksen (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1997. xxv plus 451pp. $34.95/cloth). Margot Henriksen begins Dr. Strangelove's America, her compelling history of Cold War America, by observing how the...

Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Susan Karant-Nunn (New York: Routledge, 1997. 282pp. $74.95). Susan Karant-Nunn provides an overview of the "ritual change" (p. 1) that Lutheran and (to a lesser extent in this book) Calvinist authorities introduced all over Germany...

Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Andre Vauchez (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxvii plus 645pp. $95.00). Basing himself primarily on seventy-one "processes" (inquiries) for canonization from 1198 to 1431 and supplementing these often lengthy documents...

Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914-1939.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Laura Lee Downs (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. xiv plus 329pp.). Once the armies of Germany, Britain, and France deadlocked into murderous stalemate on the Western Front in 1915, manufacturers in the belligerent...

Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and Imperialism.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Sheldon Watts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. xvi plus 400pp.). Sheldon Watts argues that the impact of epidemic disease is inseparable from the uses and distribution of power. Adopting a global approach, Watts concludes that...

Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Timothy Burke (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. ix plus 298pp.). Timothy Burke has set himself an ambitious task in Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. "Canonical...

The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Charles Van Onselen (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. xvi plus 649pp.). This brilliant, maddening and peculiar tome tells "the story of an independent man." Born during South Africa's industrial revolution, Kas Maine died in the violent...

Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Timothy A. Hacsi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. x plus 297pp. $39.95). The orphanage is not only a topic of historical interest but, in recent years, has become au courant in political debates on poverty, welfare, and child...

The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Daniel Letwin (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xiv plus 289pp.). Thirty years ago, labor historian Herbert Gutman wrote an essay on the career of Richard L. Davis, a black coal miner and leader in the...

Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State: 1919-1933.(Review)
June 22, 1999... By Young-Sun Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998. xii plus 289pp.). The Weimar republic has often been called the first welfare state. Scholars have devoted much attention to disputes between the Weimar Right and...

Review Essay: Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 2, Tradition.
June 22, 1999... Edited by Pierre Nora, Lawrence D. Kritzman. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, xii plus 591 pp.). By Joseph Amato Southwest State University Traditions is the second volume of what is to be the...

Review essay: The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present.
June 22, 1999... By Roy Porter (London: HarperCollins, 1997. xvi plus 831pp. [pounds]24,99; also New York: Norton, 1998. $35.00.). By Constance E. Putnam Tufts University Roy Porter's latest tome is, in several senses, a weighty matter, not quickly...