Journal of Social History articles from March 1998

Journal of Social History archives from March 1998

"First a Negro ... incidentally a veteran": black World War Two veterans and the G.I. Bill of Rights in the deep south, 1944-1948.
March 22, 1998... In 1994, during the fiftieth anniversary of the G.I. Bill of Rights, politicians, journalists, and scholars helped perpetuate one of America's great myths - that the G.I. Bill of Rights positively transformed the lives of an entire generation of...

Birth control and the black community in the 1960s: genocide or power politics?
March 22, 1998... Birth control in the 1960s became a hotly debated focal point in the public discourse on sexuality. Although much of the dialogue centered around Catholic opposition to so-called state sponsored immorality, a new dimension to the controversy...

The effects of racism and racial discrimination on minority business development: the case of black manufacturers in Chicago's ethnic beauty aids industry.
March 22, 1998... Overview In this paper, the historical development of Chicago's ethnic beauty aids industry is examined from the perspective of black manufacturers. The central argument of this paper is that the business strategies of black manufacturers in...

Undesirable aliens: race, ethnicity, and nationalism in the comparison of Haitian and British West Indian immigrant workers in Cuba, 1912-1939.
March 22, 1998... In late March 1937, Cuban soldiers descended upon the sugar central Ermita in eastern Cuba and rounded up a "numerous contingent" of Haitian cane cutters who had been working in Cuba for years, including the "elderly" couple Elisa Dis and Enrique...

The social shaping of business behaviour in the nineteenth-century women's garment trades.
March 22, 1998... Introduction A popular account of the development of the clothing trade in the South Bridge area of Edinburgh, published in 1901 as a publicity device by J. and R. Allan Ltd., a major department store owned by a male entrepreneur, failed to...

"Intended as a terror to the idle and profligate": embezzlement and the origins of policing in the Yorkshire worsted industry, c. 1750-1777.
March 22, 1998... On 3 April 1785, officials from the House of Correction in the ancient Cheshire salt-making town of Middlewich conveyed Martha Pimlott, a poor single woman, to the nearby market town of Knutsford. There, they carried out the directives of a...

"Without belonging to public service": charities, the state, and civil society in Third Republic Bordeaux, 1870-1914.
March 22, 1998... Addressing the 1872 annual meeting of the General Council of the Societe pour l'extinction de la mendicite dans Bordeaux, the vicomte Charles de Pelleport-Burete, the association's secretary, proudly characterized the Societe as "part of that...

Industrial unionism as liberator or leash? The limits of "rank-and-filism" in American labor historiography.
March 22, 1998... American labor historians - like the movement whose history they chronicle - seem to have reached a crossroads of sorts. As the U.S. labor movement struggles to cope with the globalization of markets, the shift to a post-industrial economy, and...

"We Are All Leaders": The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s.
March 22, 1998... American labor historians - like the movement whose history they chronicle - seem to have reached a crossroads of sorts. As the U.S. labor movement struggles to cope with the globalization of markets, the shift to a post-industrial economy, and...

The CIO: 1935-1955.
March 22, 1998... American labor historians - like the movement whose history they chronicle - seem to have reached a crossroads of sorts. As the U.S. labor movement struggles to cope with the globalization of markets, the shift to a post-industrial economy, and...

Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto's American Tragedy, 1900-1950.
March 22, 1998... Richard Harris' Unplanned Suburbs is a superb study of working-class suburbanization in Toronto during the first half of the twentieth century. Harris not only documents the process and patterns of Toronto's early twentieth-century working-class...

Social Utopias of the Twenties: Bauhaus, Kibbutz and the Dream of the New Man.
March 22, 1998... This volume represents the results of two 1994 conferences, one in Dessau, Germany, and the other in Belt Berl, Israel, in honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus and the transmission of part of its heritage to...

All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890.
March 22, 1998... In All the Modern Conveniences Maureen Ogle examines the beginnings of "modern plumbing" in the United States. Ogle traces the American system of plumbing back to roots in the 1840s, challenging earlier studies which Ogle claims are flawed by the...

Reading Berlin 1900.
March 22, 1998... Berliners have long assumed that their city is unique among metropolises for the changeability and fluidity of the cityscape itself. Berlin, said one observer, is condemned always to become, never to be. While this may seem prosaically true in...

The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915.
March 22, 1998... In 1915, a physician's public announcement that he had withheld lifesaving treatment from a seriously malformed newborn prompted an outburst of press coverage and commentary from individuals across the American spectrum of political and social...

Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language.
March 22, 1998... In the historiography of the American deaf, nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over education, and especially over language and pedagogy, have emerged as the central narrative. In 1817 the American Asylum for the Deaf, the first American...

Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia.
March 22, 1998... The study of Russian history continues to be dominated by the state school of historiography which first developed in Russia in the nineteenth century. According to its practitioners, the Russian state played the defining role in the development...

Gender, Sex and Subordination in England: 1500-1800.
March 22, 1998... Gender, Sex & Subordination in England 1500-1800 is a general survey of the construction and meaning of gender in early modern England. This ambitious work claims to map "a new historical country," the realm of gender and patriarchy, for the...

The Politics of Women's Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750-1915.
March 22, 1998... This book is a historian's history. Judith Coffin's study of the politics of women's work in one of the most vital of French industries contributes to our understanding of society and culture, of labor and legislation, of French politics and...

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs.
March 22, 1998... Sometimes it takes two books to tell a story, and to tell the story of colonial Virginia it takes three or even four. For now we must add to Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, Kathleen Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and...

First Generations: Women in Colonial America.
March 22, 1998... Carol Berkin's new book, First Generations: Women in Colonial America, is a significant addition to the literature of early American women's history. This work is particularly welcome in that it synthesizes many of the specialized studies that...

Rioting in America.
March 22, 1998... Paul Gilje's book, Rioting in America, surveys a fascinating subject, the riot, over the entire course of British colonial and U.S. history. At once a form of popular political mobilization in a democracy and a symptom of deeply held divisions in...

People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure and Labor in Early Anglo-America.
March 22, 1998... In this work, which is part of the publisher's Sport and Society series, the author attempts a sophisticated study of changing patterns of sport, leisure and labor in colonial society, focusing particularly on Massachusetts and the Chesapeake...

Aging and Generational Relations: Life-Course and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.
March 22, 1998... This volume features some of the papers prepared by international scholars for a 1991 conference on "aging and generational relations over the life course" at the University of Delaware. An historical sensibility informs this cross-cultural...

The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization.
March 22, 1998... Walter Mignolo's The Darker Side of the Renaissance chronicles what may be labeled the "cognitive imperialism" which accompanied the territorial conquests of the Spanish Monarchy in the New World. More than just the lands of Native American...

Carnival, Canboulay and Calypso: Traditions in the Making.
March 22, 1998... In the last decade scholarship on Trinidadian creole popular culture has been greatly enriched by a number of significant monographs, dealing variously with calypso (Rohlehr 1990, Hill 1993), steelband (Stuempfle 1995, Blake 1995), and general...

Daily Life in the Inca Empire.
March 22, 1998... A recent addition to the "Daily Life Through History" series, this book is a compendium on the Incas. As authors of a large Andean empire, the Incas were a conquering elite. To give this book something of a view from below, Malpass fuses...

Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South.
March 22, 1998... Alex Lichtenstein's provocative and powerfully written book may well settle the old "continuity debate," that is, the historiographical controversy over just how new the New South was. While to some, this may seem like a tired issue, Lichtenstein...

Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps.
March 22, 1998... This book is a thoroughly researched, well-written work. It focuses upon several very large estates owned by two family dynasties during the nineteenth century: the Manigaults and the Allstons. It devotes a great deal of attention to these elite...

The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country Since the Middle Ages.
March 22, 1998... Professors Eric Monkkonen and Eric Johnson, editors of The Civilization of Crime, have long belonged to what was originally, in 1973, known as "the Dutch Group," which has metamorphosed into the International Association for the History of Crime...

The Powers That Punish: Prison and Politics in the Era of the "Big House," 1920-1955.
March 22, 1998... The main body of this book is an interesting study of the interactions between state politics and the State Prison of South Michigan which was "the largest walled institution in the world." Bright stresses that his interest is in, "how politics...

Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance.
March 22, 1998... Lynne Viola's new book provides a welcome addition to the growing literature on Soviet collectivization and the Russian (Soviet) peasantry in the 1930s. Like other recent work, Viola's main sources are newly opened Soviet archives, whose contents...

Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine.
March 22, 1998... In Confession and Community in Seventeenth Century France, Gregory Hanlon sets outs to identify the substance of religious toleration as it was lived in one French village over the course of the seventeenth century. Possessing a wide and thorough...