Journal of Social History articles from March 1996

Journal of Social History archives from March 1996

Contraceptive consumers: gender and the political economy of birth control in the 1930s.
March 22, 1996... In 1933, readers of McCall's probably noticed the following advertisement for Lysol feminine hygiene in the magazine's July issue: The most frequent eternal triangle: A HUSBAND... A WIFE... and her FEARS Fewer marriages would flounder...

"Kiss without shame, for she desires it": sexual foreplay in American marital advice literature, 1900-1925.
March 22, 1996... In 1932, a young man named Arthur sought advice from William J. Fielding, the author of Sanity and Sex, Sex and the Love-Life and several "little blue books" on sexual topics. "I am contemplating marriage with a virtuous, beautiful Southern girl...

"Not worse than other girls": the convent-based rehabilitation of fallen women in Victorian Britain.
March 22, 1996... The Victorians were both fascinated by deviance and obsessed with its control. Victorian Britain developed a wide range of institutions designed to control, contain, or change nonconformist and problematic behaviour. The study of the control of...

The rocky road to a "drug free Tennessee": a history of the early regulation of cocaine and the opiates, 1897-1913.
March 22, 1996... To the modern mind, inundated with images of "Drug Wars" and besieged by injunctions to "Just Say No," the present illegality of the substances known as narcotics(1) has nearly the universality and permanence of an Aquinian natural law....

The Amesbury-Salisbury strike and the social origins of political nativism in antebellum Massachusetts.
March 22, 1996... On May 31, 1852, John P. Derby, newly appointed agent of the Salisbury Manufacturing Company, announced that "luncheon" privilege would be abolished the following day. The so-called "luncheon" privilege, a custom at this woolen factory since it...

By-employment and agriculture in the eighteenth-century rural Netherlands: the Florijn/Slotboom household.
March 22, 1996... For the last two decades research on the history of the family has emphasized the complexity of the relationship between peasant households and the process of social and economic change.(1) In her recent survey of the literature, Tamara Hareven...

The illegitimate and the illegal in a South African city: the effects of apartheid on births out of wedlock. (Cape Town)
March 22, 1996... Expectations are running high in South Africa that, with the end of apartheid, the way is now open for a new society to emerge in which, inter alia, current serious dislocations in family life will disappear. One consequence of these dislocations...

"The shelter of the uniform": the Brazilian army and runaway slaves, 1800-1888.
March 22, 1996... Antonio de Moura's luck ran out at 3:00 pm on 28 November 1863. Three months earlier he had voluntarily enlisted in the Brazilian Army's Eighth Infantry Battalion, then stationed in Salvador, the capital of the province of Bahia. Shortly...

The logic and limits of "plant loyalty": black workers, white labor, and corporate racial paternalism in Chicago's stockyards, 1916-1940. (Chicago, Illinois)
March 22, 1996... "It all sounds pretty good to me, but what does Mr. Armour think about it?" This oft-quoted response to a union organizer's pitch by an anonymous Black laborer at Chicago's anti-union Armour and Company packinghouse in 1919 matches a once...

Research note: searching for working-class Philadelphia in the records of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
March 22, 1996... The Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS) was founded in 1816 as the nation's first savings bank. Its stated purpose, as articulated in its 1817 Articles of Association, was to provide "mechanics and tradesmen" with a safe repository for...

Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women.
March 22, 1996... When examined with skill, advertisements can be fascinating documents that provide historians with unusual access to the aspirations and anxieties of a people. Lori Anne Loeb demonstrates as much in this intriguing analysis of late Victorian...

Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century.
March 22, 1996... Despite kindred concerns about fashion and an occasional similarity in organization, these two works otherwise bear striking differences in tone and even substance. Perrot invites the reader to join his Second Empire shoppers for a spree at Le...

Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia.
March 22, 1996... Despite kindred concerns about fashion and an occasional similarity in organization, these two works otherwise bear striking differences in tone and even substance. Perrot invites the reader to join his Second Empire shoppers for a spree at Le...

Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes.
March 22, 1996... Theatre as social text is still underworked by social historians, but they can find an exemplary model in this collaboration by two scholars in English and Drama who combine the interpretive range of cultural studies with close attention to...

The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy.
March 22, 1996... Fashion is in fashion: in recent years cultural critics have taken it up as a serious object of study. The way in which dress inscribes certain power relations and constructs differences of race, gender and sexual orientation - these topics have...

Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870.
March 22, 1996... Between 1790 and 1870 American theater evolved from an irregular operation into a dynamic, profitable, and influential enterprise. In the first half of this period, argues Faye Dudden in her elegant blend of biography, analysis, and narrative,...

Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act.
March 22, 1996... In June of 1910 President Taft signed the White Slave Traffic Act into law. This law, more commonly known as the Mann Act, made it a federal crime to transport women or girls across state lines with the "intent and purpose to induce, entice, or...

An Environmental History of Britain Since the Industrial Revolution.
March 22, 1996... Social historians have found much filth behind the prim facade of Victorian society. Environmental historians are finding plenty of muck beneath Victorian Britain's rising tide of economic progress. B.W. Clapp here is concerned to show the...

Neither Wolf nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change.
March 22, 1996... Around 2,000 B.C., native North Americans began to domesticate plants in what is now the American southwest. By A.D. 700, they practiced horticulture in all parts of the continent where the length of the growing season and the supply of rainfall...

Three Frontiers: Family, Land and Society in the American West, 1860-1900.
March 22, 1996... While few would deny that urban social historians have provided important insights into the process of class and gender formation or the world of work, leisure, and politics, Dean May argues that it is time to look more closely at rural...

Hungerkrisen in Preussen wahrend der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts.
March 22, 1996... This is a statistically high-powered, theoretically sophisticated, empirically fresh, and convincingly argued study. It challenges the historical literature's interpretation of food shortages accompanied by high mortality in central Europe in the...

Erfullt leben - in Gelessanheit sterben Geschichte und Gegenwart.
March 22, 1996... This volume contains papers discussing the increased expectancy of life at birth which occurred in European societies after 1600. It addresses to two principal audiences - the educated general public and scholars whose research treats themes...

Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth Century France.
March 22, 1996... The War of the Demoiselles is one of the most striking incidents in French rural history, a series of rural riots made notable by the practice of the peasant participants of disguising themselves as women. It is often interpreted as a response by...

Labour in the Medieval Islamic World.
March 22, 1996... The economic history of the Islamic world has developed slowly and erratically. Even with scholars like Claude Cahen, Eliyahu Ashtor, and Andrew Watson, who devote special attention to economic questions, a tendency to draw sweeping conclusions...

Democratic Miners: Work and Labor Relations in the Anthracite Coal Industry, 1875-1925.
March 22, 1996... Labor unrest in the anthracite coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania was legion and legendary. The draft protests and strikes of miners during the Civil War; the guerrilla warfare of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s; the ongoing organizing...

Industry in the Countryside: Wealden Society in the Sixteenth Century.
March 22, 1996... Of England's regional woollen industries, that of the Kentish Weald is probably the least well known. Quite significant in its sixteenth-century heyday, it declined in the seventeenth century, leaving the field to its three better known rivals:...

Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941.
March 22, 1996... David Hoffmann's title captures one of the paradoxes of the Soviet 1930s: most workers in this capital city of the world's first proletarian dictatorship were fresh from the provinces. Both the Soviet regime and subsequent historians have found...

Lebenslaufe, Familien, Hofe: Die Bauern und Heuerleute des Osnabruckischen Kirchspiels Belm in proto-industrieller Zeit, 1650-1860.
March 22, 1996... As the title indicates, this study traces life-courses, families, and farmsteads in a Northwest German township over the course of two centuries. Readers will notice the cross-fertilization of ideas, but also important contrasts, between Jurgen...

Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White "Better Classes" in Charlotte, North Carolina, 1850-1910.
March 22, 1996... During the last decade, as our appreciation for the complexity of nineteenth-century Southern social relations has grown, a number of historians have suggested the need to examine a long-neglected group, the black proprietors and professionals...

Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
March 22, 1996... The new labor history (now over twenty years old) has come in for a drubbing lately by many of the field's younger scholars. Most recently, David Roediger and Peter Way have called new labor historians to task for being overly romantic about the...

The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868.
March 22, 1996... It is very fitting that V. A. C. Gatrell, whose work with the criminal statistics of the nineteenth century was seminal for all historians working in the field, should now point us in new directions. In this remarkable book, brimming with the...

The Culture of the English People: Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution.
March 22, 1996... The aim and scope of this book are accurately reflected in its title. About one third of the work traces the history of housing in England. Not only the physical structure but all aspects of heating, lighting and furnishing are dealt with in...

Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century.
March 22, 1996... Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century is an important book. Charlotte Erickson, Professor of American History Emerita at Cambridge University, has written about immigration from the British Isles throughout her...

Cricket and the Victorians.
March 22, 1996... I have been in England many times during the summer test matches and have many friends who have tried to explain the game to me (one read Kipling and W. G. Grace aloud during dinner). I am embarrassed to admit that I still fail to really...

In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life.
March 22, 1996... Few arguments in modern sociology have become as trite and predictable as the notion that professionals occupy a special place in the class structure of advanced capitalist societies. Amidst all the idle theorizing about the values and behavior...

Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America.
March 22, 1996... For nearly twenty years now, Howard Segal has been urging Americans to reject the very idea of a technological imperative, and to realize that we can choose our technologies in terms of human needs. Not only is the most advanced technology not...

The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siecle Germany.
March 22, 1996... It is rare to find a scholarly book that combines, as this one does, a profoundly serious moral perspective with a style that stoops to ridicule the absurd and burlesque aspects of its subject in unsparing detail. Kevin McAleer writes about the...

The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Few scholars have contributed more to modern French history than Eugen Weber. In Peasants into Frenchmen, he chronicled the integration of rural people into urban culture and national life. Subtitled "The Modernization of Rural France," the book...