Journal of Social History articles from March 1999

Journal of Social History archives from March 1999

Anxiety and social explanation: some anxieties about anxiety.
March 22, 1999... I. ANXIETY AND SOCIAL EXPLANATION Anxiety is invoked as an explanatory device in a wide variety of historical and sociological writing. The general form of such accounts is that the occurrence and timing of some social phenomena is...

The way to a man's heart: gender roles, domestic ideology, and cookbooks in the 1950s.
March 22, 1999... The way to a man's heart So we've always been told, Is a good working knowledge Of pot, pan, and mold. The talented gal Who can whip up a pie, Rates a well deserved rave From her favorite guy. A juicy red steak, Or a tender, fish...

Social movements and the symbolism of public demonstrations: the 1874 Women's Crusade and German resistance in Richmond, Indiana.
March 22, 1999... In Richmond, Indiana, on February 18, 1874, Quaker temperance activist Martha Valentine led a small group of women to "La Belle," a saloon owned by German immigrant Chris Schultz. Chastising Schultz for the damage that he was causing to his...

Syphilis, foundlings, and wetnurses in nineteenth-century Italy.
March 22, 1999... I, the undersigned mayor of the Town of Camugnano, certify that the married couple Gaetano Cesarini and Domenica Puccetti find themselves in such penurious condition that they do not know how they are going to live. I further certify that...

Youth delinquency & "crime": the perception and the reality.
March 22, 1999... The number of youthful wrongdoers increases steadily and meaningfully. Yet it seems almost as if the criminal infection today selected youth above all other age groups.(1) Alois Zucker, Professor of law, Karl-Ferdinands University, Prague,...

Why they stole: women in the Old Bailey, 1779-1789.(Old Bailey Sessions Papers)
March 22, 1999... Why did women steal? In his answer to this question for early-modern England, John Beattie noted that women turned to theft "for the same reason men stole in this period - largely as a means of survival, as a way of supplementing inadequate...

Surviving the loss of the parent in a nineteenth-century Dutch provincial town.
March 22, 1999... Introduction Until late in the nineteenth century, the loss of one or both parents was an event with which many children were confronted. As a consequence of the low life expectancy, the high age at which reproduction started and the large...

Endangered Children: Dependence, Neglect, and Abuse in American History.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By LeRoy Ashby (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. xiii plus 258pp. $28.95). E. Anthony Rotundo Phillips Academy Twenty years ago, family history was a new and fashionable field. As an academic specialty, it drew excited attention and...

Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Priscilla Ferguson Clement (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. xii plus 287pp. $28.95). E. Anthony Rotundo Phillips Academy Twenty years ago, family history was a new and fashionable field. As an academic specialty, it drew excited...

Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Paula S. Fass (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xi plus 308pp.). Daniel A. Cohen Florida International University In 1977 Paula Fass published The Damned and the Beautiful, a social and intellectual history of the "modern"...

English Population History from Family Reconstruction: 1580-1837.(Review)
March 22, 1999... E.A. Wrigley, R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen and R.S. Schofield (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxii plus 657pp. $85.00). This tome tabulates thousands of family histories from Anglican parish registers reconstituted under the...

The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France: 1814-1848.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By William M. Reddy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xiii plus 258pp. $40). One should be wary of history books about subtexts, hidden logic and invisible codes. What is the author's own secret message? It is almost...

Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Edited by Sabrina Petra Ramet (New York: Routledge, 1996. xiii plus 231 pp. $65.00/cloth $18.95/paperback). This collection of thirteen essays explores issues of gender variety and transformation in many cultures and periods ranging from...

A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1977. xii plus 264pp.). "We will now deal with comedy... and see how, in inspiring the pleasure of the ridiculous, it arrives at the purification of that passion. That...

Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. x plus 200pp. $16.50). Extraordinary Bodies explores the representations of physical disability in nineteenth and twentieth century America. But more than introducing...

Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Peter N. Stearns (New York: New York University Press, 1997. xvi plus 294pp. $25.95). Often, one of the first things French people visiting America remark upon is the large number of fat people they see here. Recently, three months of...

Evolution of Sickness and Healing.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Horacio Fabrega, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xv plus 364 pp. $45.00). Truly amazing in scope, from the natural behavior of chimpanzees to postmodernist alternative healers, this is a synthesis concerning the...

Mental Ills and Bodily Cares: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Joel Braslow (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. xiv plus 240pp. $40.00). "With the decline of moral therapy in the second half of the nineteenth century and the rise of a more somatically based model of...

A Silent Minority: Deaf Education in Spain, 1550-1835.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Susan Plann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xvi plus 323pp. $40.00/cloth). During the last decade, historians, linguists and anthropologists have increasingly focused on the origins and composition of deaf communities...

Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria? Torrid Diseases in a Temperate World.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Robert S. Desowitz (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1997. 256pp. $25.00). This work - the latest in an epidemic of books on New World epidemics - is, as its title makes clear, aimed at a popular audience. Pinta - the name of a...

Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth-Through Nineteenth-Century Prague.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Sylvie-Anne Goldberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xvii plus 303pp. $45.00). Crossing the Jabbok is a fascinating study of Jewish communal politics and attitudes. By analyzing rituals associated with death and illness,...

Religion y cambio social en Puerto Rico (1898-1940).(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Nelida Agosto Cintron (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracan, 1996. 168pp. $8.95). In a country where sanctuaries and pilgrimage sites are found nearly on every corner of the map; where talk of apparitions, miracles and the...

The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the Pacific.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Edited by Doug Munro and Andrew Thornley (Suva, Fiji: Pacific Theological College and the Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1996. xi plus 321pp.). It is many years now since white historians of the Pacific -...

Reflections on Pacific Historiography.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Edited by Doug Munro (Special Issue of The Journal of Pacific Studies, Vol 20, 1996) (School of Social and Economic Development, The University of the South Pacific, 297pp.). Historians are becoming more relaxed telling stories about...

The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Matthew Restall (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997. xiv plus 441pp. $55.00). Restall offers a new ethnohistorical approach to the colonial experience of the Yucatec Maya, a group that has received considerable...

Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Leslie Choquette (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997. viii plus 397 pp. $45.00). This work is a tour de force and a tour de sources. In accord with recent research in France and Canada, it redefines French...

After the Famine: Irish Agriculture, 1850-1914.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Michael Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv plus 313pp. $54.95). To place this book in its historigraphical context one needs to be aware of two developments over the past generation. One of those developments - the...

The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 407pp. $29.95). This title is intriguing, and the narrative is even more so. It is of the Swiss family Platter whose chronicle spans the entire sixteenth and...

Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Susan B. Hanley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xiv plus 213pp.). The English-language bibliography on "everyday things" in Tokugawa Japan has until now been rather sparse. Charles J. Dunn's Everyday Life in Traditional...

Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movements in Northern Shaanxi, 1934-1945.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Pauline B. Keating (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997. xvi plus 340pp. $49.50). The Yenan [Yah'an] Way in Revolutionary China, Mark Seldon's controversial study of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, that barren area...

American Astronomy: Community, Careers, and Power, 1859-1940.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By John Lankford (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xxvi plus 447pp.). In American Astronomy, the first book-length essay on this topic, Lankford undertakes the daunting task of producing a collective biography of the...

Reisen in die Moderne: Der Amerika-Diskurs des deutschen Burgertums vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg im europaischen Vergleich.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Alexander Schmidt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997. 328pp.). This useful book is an exploration of German attitudes toward the United States during the second half of the Kaiserreich from 1890-1914, at a time when Germany's own intensive...

Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Mark Meigs (New York: New York University Press, 1997. ix plus 269pp. $40.00). World War I is an historical event which has no obvious meaning for Americans, writes Marks Meigs in the introduction to his book, Optimism at Armageddon:...

"Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking: 1930-1990.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Roger Horowitz (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xvi plus 373pp. $44.95/cloth $17.95/paperback). The "new" labor historians of the 1970s asserted kinship with social historians. This new generation of scholars...

Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Lyndal Roper (New York: Routledge, 1994. ix plus 254pp. $24.99). In this collection of essays, Lyndal Roper explores religion, sex, and subjectivity in early modern Europe. Seven of these essays have been previously published; two appear...

Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Simon P. Newman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. xiv plus 271pp. $39.95). This book treats public political events in America between 1788 and Jefferson's election in 1800, including parades and other open air...

In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By David Waldstreicher (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ix plus 364pp. $45.00/cloth $16.95/paperback). In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes examines "the relationship of nationalist ideology to political practice" (p....

Jewish Emancipation in a German City: Cologne, 1798-1871.(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Shulamit S. Magnus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. xii plus 336pp. $49.50). Among the excellent illustrations in her book, Shulamit S. Magnus shows a souvenir map of Cologne and its environs from the late nineteenth century....

A History of Young People in the West, vol. 1, Ancient and Medieval Rites of Passage.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Edited by Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt. Translated by Camille Naish (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997, vi plus 396pp. $35.00). The history of the social and cultural construction of "youth"...

The Dimension of Piety: Associative Life and Devotional Change in the Penitent Confraternities of Marseille (1499-1792).(Review)
March 22, 1999... By Andrew E. Barnes (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1994. x plus 285pp. $12.95). Andrew Barnes' book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on that most distinctive of early modern European social organizations, the...

Biography Database 1680-1830 on CD-ROM.(Review)(E-book Review)
March 22, 1999... Directed by John Cannon and Frank Robinson (England: Avero Publications Ltd. 1995. Personal Research Edition, Disk 1: $125.00). In recent years, it has become increasingly common for historians of the British Isles to write about "the long...