Journal of Social History articles from March 1997

Journal of Social History archives from March 1997

Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America.
March 22, 1997... This is an unusually rich and imaginative scholarly work which belongs to the steadily growing field of the history of childhood and adolescence. Professor Graff answers the call of those scholars who have urged that more attention be paid to the...

The First Teenagers: The Lifestyles of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain.
March 22, 1997... The historical analysis of young people has focused on either the post-war emergence of the teenager or on the changing concepts of adolescence and the problematization of youth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No work has...

Killing Time: Leisure and Culture in Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1800-1850.
March 22, 1997... Scott Martin uses leisure as a means to survey the cultural, technological and social changes that transformed the region around Pittsburgh from an agrarian-commercial frontier to the vanguard of the industrial revolution. While building on the...

The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America.
March 22, 1997... Having spent decades mapping out the histories of a variety of previously neglected groups, it seems that U.S. social historians are finally beginning to regard seriously one of the most marginalized subgroups in their own mental landscape....

Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834.
March 22, 1997... With the publication of Popular Contention in Great Britain, Charles Tilly sums up more than two decades of reflection and labor not only on the British experience but also on the nature and meaning of popular struggle in the modern world....

Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco.
March 22, 1997... In Unbound Feet, Judy Yung traces and examines changes and continuity in the lives of Chinese women across generations in San Francisco between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Yung correctly points out, there has been a dearth of...

Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune.
March 22, 1997... This is the most original and challenging reinterpretation of the Paris Commune to appear, certainly in English, for many years. More generally, we have long needed a book that takes a rigorous critical look at the roots of Parisian popular...

The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society.
March 22, 1997... As the title suggests this book really deals with two questions, the history of the prison and the history of punishment. The idea of ridding society of deviant or dangerous members is presumably as old as civilization but the predominance of...

The Emancipation of Prisoners: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Dutch Prison Experience.
March 22, 1997... This book is a condensed version of Franke's Dutch work on the subject (Twee Eeuwen Gevangen), which appeared in 1990 and had over 900 pages. One chapter from the Dutch version, dealing with parliamentary debates about the prison system in the...

Dorfliche Gesellschaft und Kriminalitat: Das Fallbeispiel Lippe, 1650-1800.
March 22, 1997... Two interwoven questions drive Frank's study of criminality in a rural town, Heiden, in the "Grafschaft" of Lippe. One is quite specific: to what extent were the relationships among the town's different social groups changed by state attempts to...

Kriminalitat in Rom: 1560-1585.
March 22, 1997... This is a welcome, meticulous, and puzzling study. Some two decades after the heyday of quantitative history and histoire serielle, it reproposes a statistical method for analyzing crime in early modern Europe. Peter Blastenbrei has chosen an...

Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940.
March 22, 1997... When historians use archival evidence to study institutions, they often find that people start the institutions with mixed motives and achieve mixed results. That, in essence, is what the seminal work of Gerald Grob tells us about mental...

The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660-1780.
March 22, 1997... Does the category of class retain any analytic usefulness at all in this post-Cold War, post-categorical age? This book argues with some success that it does. Halifax, located in the heart of England's cloth-producing country, went from being a...

Rise of Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change.
March 22, 1997... This book grapples with an important subject, the internal factors that led to the disappearance of the 600 year old Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. The fundamental indigenous cause, the author argues, was the emergence of a...

Histoire sociale de la medecine (XVIIIe-XXe siecles).
March 22, 1997... Despite what its broad title might suggest, this volume, which is aimed at the cultivated French general reader, is a social history of medicine in France since the eighteenth century. Faure's exposition starts from the premise, which few...

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England.
March 22, 1997... This book constitutes a major exploration of the cultural infrastructure of science at a crucial stage in its development. Steven Shapin, perhaps the most sophisticated historical sociologist of science currently active in the English-speaking...

"Daddy's Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children.
March 22, 1997... An exemplary combination of solid primary source-work, elegant readability, and theoretical creativity, William Tuttle's Daddy's Gone to War will be of particular interest to historians of childhood and the life course, and of potentially more...

Gentlemen Bourgeois and Revolutionaries: Political Change and Cultural Persistence Among the Spanish Dominant Groups, 1750-1850.
March 22, 1997... Right-wing Spanish nationalist historiography in its heyday from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century tended to apply the tourist slogan "Spain is different" to the history of the peninsula in the areas of interpretation and...

The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785.
March 22, 1997... Students of eighteenth-century Britain have eagerly anticipated this book, and it will not disappoint them. Kathleen Wilson is to be commended for the meticulousness of her research, the general clarity of her prose, and the acuity of her...

The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815-70.
March 22, 1997... The nineteenth-century Prussian bureaucracy has drawn an enormous amount of attention from generations of historians. Whether construed as Hegel's benevolent "universal estate," or as the early core of an ill-fated Prussian liberalism, or as an...

Soziale Traditionen in Zeiten des Wandels. Arbeiter und Handwerker im 19 Jahrhundert.
March 22, 1997... Historians are still seeking a compelling conceptualization of social change in the lives of manual producers in nineteenth-century Europe. More and more scholars have rejected older models that reduced economic and social reality in that century...

The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914.
March 22, 1997... This study of labor history in Britain and Germany is intended as a contribution to modern cultural history. By discussing the concepts of culture in metatheories such as Habermas' as well as in recent discourse theory, Biernacki aims to show,...

Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries: 1840-1880.
March 22, 1997... Talk about deferred gratification - Dupree began this study in the 1970s, received her doctorate from Oxford in the early 1980s and, now, in the mid-1990s this work sees the light in public! In point of fact, Family Structure in the Staffordshire...

Power and the Professions in Britain: 1700-1850.
March 22, 1997... Nowadays in this so-called information age the old cliche that knowledge is power has assumed new meaning. In one instance corporate entities are trying ever harder to catalogue and tap their intellectual assets such as knowledge and creativity...

The "Girl Problem": Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930.
March 22, 1997... The construction and regulation of female adolescence has recently drawn the attention of a number of historians. Focusing on the early years of the twentieth century in particular, such historians as Kathy Peiss (Cheap Amusements: Working Women...

Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society.
March 22, 1997... At first glance, the argument of Mary Beth Norton's Founding Mothers & Fathers seems plausible, and appears to be a nice hook on which to hang a great deal of material about gender and power in seventeenth-century America. In her view, early New...

The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present.
March 22, 1997... The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present is a welcome addition to a historiography which, until very recently, lacked any serious studies of infertility in America. Marsh and Ronner present "a history both of...

Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815-1914.
March 22, 1997... Add Gerard's to the legion of English country house books, but recognize that it is surely a cut above most. Certainly, it is not the coffee table variety. This is also to say that it is not about architecture or the decorative arts but about...

Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History.
March 22, 1997... The central problem of this ambitious, original, and densely argued book is the contrast between responses to the first two cholera epidemics in Paris, in 1832 and 1849. The former, which figures far more prominently in the historical literature,...

The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968.
March 22, 1997... The Separate City is an engaging and well-written study that examines the physical and political development of African-American communities in three southern cities, Atlanta, Georgia, Memphis, Tennessee, and Richmond, Virginia. The choice of...

Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology.
March 22, 1997... This is a satisfyingly hefty tome, full of scholarly delights. Every article is the result of serious research, whether in modem communities or colonial archives; no one, however conversant with Andean studies, could read it without discovering...