Journal of Social History articles from June 2004

Journal of Social History archives from June 2004

A "real boy" and not a sissy: gender, childhood, and masculinity, 1890-1940.
June 22, 2004... Maurice, a ten-year-old "sissy," had a chapter devoted to his dilemma in The Problem Child at Home, published in 1928. A victim of relentless teasing and taunting by his peers, Maurice was described as having a "soft, feminine face" and an...

Street-rats and gutter-snipes: child pickpockets and street culture in New York city, 1850-1900.
June 22, 2004... For over half a century, the street child was an inescapable fixture of the nineteenth-century industrial city. Lacking formal education, adult supervision, and sometimes even a home, such youths were derided as "rats," "gamins," "Arabs,"...

An unusable past: urban elites, New York City's evacuation day, and the transformations of memory culture.
June 22, 2004... Introduction The social and cultural history of tradition and memory has become a lively area of inquiry for American historians. Much current work uses festivals and holidays as a lens to understand political culture, with, for example,...

The supernatural state: water divining and the Cape underground water rush, 1891-1910.
June 22, 2004... Science and its Irrational Others The history of science in South Africa, in being rescued from the dead hand of Whig antiquarianism, has been delivered into a teleology of a different kind. Whereas Whig historians treated science as...

Retailing the revolution: the State Department Store (GUM) and Soviet society in the 1920s.
June 22, 2004... A 1926 newspaper article entitled "Under GUM's Glass Heaven," presented a vision of socialist retailing and consumption that depicted ordinary Soviet citizens indulging in the pleasures of shopping in the fabulous Red Square premises of the...

Legitimizing Soviet trade: gender and the feminization of the retail workforce in the Soviet 1930s.
June 22, 2004... In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entrepreneurs in France, Britain, Germany, and the United States created new retail venues and merchandising techniques that facilitated the growth of modern consumer society. As the...

The mysterious power of words: language, law, and culture in Ottoman Damascus (17th-18th centuries).
June 22, 2004... On February 13, 1763, 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad walked into the main courthouse of Damascus as a defendant. He had divorced his wife that very day and was now liable for the unpaid portion of her dowry, which according to the provisions of...

Policing male heterosexuality: the reformation of manners societies' campaign against the brothels in Westminster, 1690-1720.
June 22, 2004... The Sexual Offences Act of 1985 is generally seen as the first time that the law targeted male clients of prostitutes. The statute made "the soliciting of women for sexual purposes by men" punishable by summary conviction. (1) The MPs who...

Assigned to patrol: neighborhoods, police, and changing deployment practices in New York city before 1930.
June 22, 2004... Public and scholarly discussions of twentieth-century policing seem to agree that police became disconnected from citizens and neighborhoods during the twentieth century, and that political, technological, and organizational changes have...

Masturbation: The History of the Great Terror.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Masturbation: The History of the Great Terror. By Jean Stengers and Ann Van Neck. Translated by Kathryn Hoffmann (New York: Palgrave, 2001. ix plus 232 pp.). In Masturbation, Stengers and Van Neck document the fears about masturbation that...

Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain. By James J. Nott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv plus 274 pp.). James J. Nott pursues a completely original theme in this useful book. He provides an outline of...

Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris. By Louise E. Robbins (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xiv plus 349 pp. $52.00). Louise E. Robbins' Elephant Slaves and Pampered...

Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America. By Wendy A. Woloson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xii plus 277 pp. $46.00). Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in...

First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport & Coney Island.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport & Coney Island. By Jon Sterngass (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. ix plus 374 pp. 40.00). First Resorts: represents an admirable contribution to the growing...

Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century. By John Corrigan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xii plus 389 pp.). John Corrigan has written a rich and complicated book about the tangled subjects of...

Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law--An American History.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law--An American History. By Peter Wallenstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xii plus 305 pp. $35.00). Tell the Court I Love My Wife is a refreshingly broad social, political, and...

Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives. Edited by E. Wayne Carp (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. 257 pp. $57.50). A self-proclaimed "declaration of independence" for the new field of adoption history, this collection...

Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950. By Wendy Mitchinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 432pp.). While the history of childbirth in Canada has been discussed under the rubric of other, related issues, such as maternal and infant...

Knowledge of Evil: Child Prostitution and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth Century England.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Knowledge of Evil: Child Prostitution and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth Century England. By Alyson Brown and David Barrett (Cullompton, Devon and Portland, Oregon: Willan, 2002. x plus 212 pp. $45.00). In 1932, the British...

The Challenge of Crime: Rethinking our Response.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... The Challenge of Crime: Rethinking our Response. By Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. x plus 374 pp. $35.00). The Challenge of Crime has an ambitious agenda: a survey of research and policy, done with...

Law, Crime and English Society 1660-1830.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Law, Crime and English Society 1660-1830. By Norma Landau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xii plus 264 pp. $60). This work is offered as a tribute to John Beattie, whose writings have focused principally on eighteenth-century...

City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931. By Pablo Piccato (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. x plus 365 pp. $64.95/ cloth $21.95/ paper). Pablo Piccato connects his examination of crime, and less directly policing and...

The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945-1965.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945-1965. By Sylvie Murray (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. viii plus 252 pp.). This fine book is the latest installment in a small but vital...

A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan. By P. Renee Baernstein (New York and London: Routledge, 2002. xxii plus 270 pp.). Once consigned to the margins of ecclesiastical and social history, early modern religious women...

Working Women of Early Modern Venice.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Working Women of Early Modern Venice. By Monica Chojnacka (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xxii plus 188 pp. $32.50/hardback). Venice's rich archives continue to serve as a laboratory for the social history of the...

Workers' Participation in Post-Liberation France.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Workers' Participation in Post-Liberation France. By Adam Steinhouse (London: Lexington Books, 2001. xvi plus 245 pp.). This study of attempts to transform workplace industrial relations adds usefully to the scant literature on early...

Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880-1960.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880-1960. By Laura Lee Downs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. xv plus 411 pp. $14.95/paper $74.95/cloth). Legend has it that one could...

The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India. By Nandini Gooptu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxiii plus 464 pp. $80.00). It is no exaggeration to claim that UP, in colonial times the United Provinces and...

The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860-1945.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860-1945. By Roy Hora (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ix plus 264 pp.). The estancia, the large plot of land devoted to livestock raising has been--and...

English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers. By Barbara J. Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 xi plus 346 pp.). The product of decades-long research, careful thought, and wide reading in...

Defiance and Deference in Mexico's Colonial North: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Defiance and Deference in Mexico's Colonial North: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya. By Susan M. Deeds (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. 316 pp. cloth $55.00, paper $24.95). The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards...

Black Identity & Black Protest in the Antebellum North.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Black Identity & Black Protest in the Antebellum North. By Patrick Rael (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xxii plus 421 pp.). Born as a response to the emerging civil rights struggle of post World War II America, the...

Freemasonry on Both Sides of the Atlantic: Essays Concerning the Craft in the British Isles, Europe, the United States, and Mexico.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Freemasonry on Both Sides of the Atlantic: Essays Concerning the Craft in the British Isles, Europe, the United States, and Mexico. Edited by R. William Weisberger, Wallace McLeod, and S. Brent Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002....

The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789, and the French Revolution.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789, and the French Revolution. By Michael P. Fitzsimmons (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. x plus 245 pp.). August 4, 1789 figures significantly in any narrative of...

Barricades. The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Barricades. The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848. By Jill Harsin (New York: Palgrave Press, 2002. 407 pp.). Jill Harsin undertakes an interesting and worthy experiment in Barricades. She attempts to recover the world of...

History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880-1980.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880-1980. By Ellen Fitzpatrick (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. xi plus 318 pp. $39.95). Since the early 1990s a great wave of books and articles on the nature of memory...

Governing Pleasures: Pornography & Social Change in England, 1851-1914.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Governing Pleasures: Pornography & Social Change in England, 1851-1914. By Lisa Z Sigel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. ix plus 227 pp.). In this genuinely groundbreaking book, Lisa Sigel seeks not only to bring pornography...

Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939-1945.(Reviews)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 By Sonya O. Rose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xii plus 328 pp.). Which People's War? analyzes the tensions and contradictions of home fronts in...

'Real Boy' and not a sissy: gender, childhood, and masculinity, 1890-1940.(Abstracts)(Author Abstract)
June 22, 2004... Abstract: Julia Grant, "'Real Boy' and not a Sissy: Gender, Childhood, and Masculinity, 1890-1940" This essay charts the changing definitions and experiences of sissy boys in early twentieth century America. At this time the term sissy,...

Street-rats and gutter-snipes: child pickpockets and street culture in New York City, 1850-1900.(Abstracts)(Author Abstract)
June 22, 2004... Abstract: Timothy J. Gilfoyle, "Street-Rats and Gutter-Snipes: Child Pickpockets and Street Culture in New York City, 1850-1900" For over half a century, the street child was an inescapable fixture of the nineteenth-century industrial city....

An unusuable past: urban elites, New York City's Evacuation Day, and the transformations of memory culture.(Abstracts)(Author Abstract)
June 22, 2004... Abstract: Clifton Hood, "An Unusuable Past: Urban Elites, New York City's Evacuation Day, and the Transformations of Memory Culture" This article examines the dissolution of tradition through an analysis of the formation, transmission,...

The supernatural state: water divining and the cape underground water rush, 1891-1910.(Abstracts)(Author Abstract)
June 22, 2004... Abstract: Lance van Sittert, "The Supernatural State: Water Divining and the Cape Underground Water Rush, 1891-1910" The revisionist scholarship on colonial science assumes its inherent rationality. The example of water divining in southern...

Retailing the revolution: the State Department Store (GUM) and Soviet society in the 1920s.(Abstracts)(Author Abstract)
June 22, 2004... Abstract: Marjorie L. Hilton, "Retailing the Revolution: The State Department Store (GUM) and Soviet Society in the 1920s" This article examines the role of mass marketing and retailing in the recreation of Soviet society in the NEP period...

Legitimizing Soviet trade: gender and the feminization of the retail workforce in the Soviet 1930s.(Abstracts)(Author Abstract)
June 22, 2004... Abstract: Amy E. Randall, "Legitimizing Soviet Trade: Gender and the Feminization of the Retail Workforce in the Soviet 1930s" In the 1930s the Soviet retail workforce was increasingly feminized. At the same time, Communist leaders launched...

The mysterious power of words: language, law, and culture in Ottoman Damascus (17th-18th centuries).(Abstracts)(Author Abstract)
June 22, 2004... Abstract: James Grehan, "The Mysterious Power of Words: Language, Law, and Culture in Ottoman Damascus (17th-18th Centuries)" Like other aspects of social life, speech and conversation have their own rich and intricate history. But even in...

Policing male heterosexuality: the reformation of manners societies' campaign against the brothels in westmminster, 1690-1720.(Abstracts)(Author Abstract)
June 22, 2004... Abstract: Jennine Hurl-Eamon, "Policing Male Heterosexuality: The Reformation of Manners Societies' Campaign against the Brothels in Westmminster, 1690-1720" The societies for the reformation of manners, driven by volunteers' desires to...

Assigned to patrol: neighborhoods, police, and changing deployment practices in New York City before 1930.(Abstracts)(Author Abstract)
June 22, 2004... Abstract: Christopher Thale, "Assigned to Patrol: Neighborhoods, Police, and Changing Deployment Practices in New York City before 1930" Police are widely assumed to have lost close links to neighborhood as a result of the demise of foot...