Journal of Social History articles from March 2004

Journal of Social History archives from March 2004

"Lots of them did that": desertion, bigamy, and marital fluidity in late-nineteenth-century America.
March 22, 2004... Introduction In 1859, Caroline Dunkel married schoolteacher John Martin, whom she had known for two years. John was a black-haired, dark-complexioned man, as revealed in the small leather-framed tintype of him that Caroline saved. He...

"You cannot fix the scarlet letter on my breast!": women reading, writing, and reshaping the sexual culture of Victorian America.
March 22, 2004... At the end of the nineteenth-century cautionary tale, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne described the ultimate fate of the central characters of his novel. After a deathbed confession and reconciliation with little Pearl, the fruit of his...

The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: gender and power in the case of Ruth Snyder.
March 22, 2004... In the wee hours of March 20, 1927, Ruth Snyder and her lover, Judd Gray, brutally murdered her husband, Albert Snyder, while her nine-year old daughter slept across the hall. The pair bludgeoned Albert with a sash weight, strangled him with...

Divorce, patriarchal authority, and masculinity: a case from early national Vermont.
March 22, 2004... In 1976, in a pathbreaking article on divorce in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, Nancy Cott argued that the growing willingness of late eighteenth-century women to seek divorce implied that these wives were increasingly "asserting control...

"The forgetfulness of sex": devotion and desire in the courtship Letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld.
March 22, 2004... In 1837, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, daughters of a South Carolina planter turned abolitionist orators, each penned a series of public letters in which they attacked the rigid distinctions that their culture drew between the masculine and the...

Down memory lane: representations of domestic workers in middle class personal narratives of colonial bengal.
March 22, 2004... If one rummages through the pages of autobiographies and memoirs left by Bengali middle-class men and women living in colonial times one cannot possibly miss the characters and activities of the domestic workers surrounding the authors as they...

"Mexico in his head": slavery and the Texas-Mexico border, 1810-1860.
March 22, 2004... In September 1851, six years after Texas was annexed by the United States and fifteen years after independence from Mexico, Guy M. Bryan, politician and slaveholder of Brazoria County, wrote his brother-in-law in response to a proposal to swap...

Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the Gateway City: the Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), 1964-75.
March 22, 2004... Introduction When construction began on the federally assisted Gateway Arch project in the early 1960s, St. Louis, Missouri's civic, business and government elite viewed it as a means of revitalizing the blighted downtown riverfront area....

Conquering the British Ballarat: the policing of Victorian Middlesbrough.
March 22, 2004... Introduction The creation of a policed society was one of the major developments of the nineteenth century. As recent studies have shown, there was considerable variation from town to town and, while the process was never unproblematic,...

The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. By John E. Crowley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 368 pp.; 68 black and white illustrations, index. $42.00). Good books cross...

Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason. By Jessica Warner (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. xviii plus 267 pp. $24.95). Although presented as a "Tragicomedy in three acts" and in a style that occasionally descends to an arch...

American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience. By Arnon Gutfeld (Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2002. xx plus 252 pp.). It is hard to take this book seriously. In the preface in which Arnon Gutfeld...

Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America. By Jennifer D. Keene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xiv plus 294 pp. $40.00). Jennifer Keene has made a noteworthy and important contribution to a growing...

GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany. By Maria Hohn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xv plus 337 pp. $22.50). Maria Hohn provides a fascinating study of the encounter between Germans...

Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Edited by Mark Jackson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. xiii plus 293 pp. $84.95). Mark Jackson has brought together a solid if somewhat uneven collection of twelve...

Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History. By James S. Olson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. x plus 302 pp.). In 1967, while touring the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Italian surgeon and art aficionado T.C. Greco noticed...

Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History. By James C. Riley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii plus 243pp.). This book assumes that all human kind "want to live a long life" and that "society benefits from the experience and...

Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China. By Michael Szonyi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. xii plus 313 pp. $49.50). The ability to do fieldwork in the People's Republic of China has enabled historians...

Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America. By Shawn Johansen (London: Routledge, 2001. xii plus 249 pp.). Scholars have suggested an interesting anomaly about cultural and economic changes in the antebellum North....

Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption. By Barbara Melosh (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. x + 326pp. $29.95). Strangers and Kin is a welcome addition to the spate of recent studies of the history of...

Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. By Sherri Broder (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, vii plus 259 pp.). Sherri Broder analyzes how the tropes...

All that Makes a Man.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... All that Makes a Man. By Stephen W. Berry, II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 304pp.). In the decades after the Civil War, southern men who supported the Confederacy praised women, commemorated and otherwise storied them, for the...

Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America. Edited by Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2001. ix plus 308 pp.). Merril Smith's edited volume on the history of rape in Canada and America provides numerous...

Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California. By Clare V. McKanna, Jr. (Reno, University of Nevada Press, 2002. xii plus 148 pp.). This book raises the perennial question "How violent was the West?" through a study of 1317 homicides...

Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States 1848-82.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States 1848-82. By Najia Aarim-Heriot (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xiv plus 289 pp. $39.95). Sections of this ambitious book are...

Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750. Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750. Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror. By J.M. Beattie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xx plus 491 pp. $74). John Beattie's magisterial Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (Oxford,...

Paris: Capital of the World.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Paris: Capital of the World. By Patrice Higonnet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 493 pp. $35.00). I think it was James M. Barrie, Peter Pan's creator, who defended George Bernard Shaw against a critic who accused him of being...

Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender. By Francine Muel-Dreyfus. Translated by Kathleen A. Johnson. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001. 387 pp. $21.95). Vichy and the Eternal...

Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995. By John Rodden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xxx plus 506 pp. $74.00). As the author admits in the introduction, this book is "not the...

Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape. Edited by Paul A. Shackel (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2001. xiii plus 282 pp. $59.95). Consider these images: A country road. A marble sculpture. A reflecting...

What is History Now?(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... What Is History Now? Edited by David Cannadine (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xiv plus 172pp. [pounds sterling]19.99stg.). What is History Now? emerged from a two day symposium in November 2001 at the Institute of...

The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850.(Reviews)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850. By David Kuchta (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. x plus 303pp. $45). Although this work is not about fashion per se, it does have a lot to say about how...

'Lots of them did that': desertion, bigamy, and marital fluidity in late-nineteenth-century America.(Author Abstract)
March 22, 2004... Abstract: Beverly Schwartzberg, "'Lots of Them Did That': Desertion, Bigamy, and Marital Fluidity in Late-Nineteenth-Century America" Although marriage was invested with significant personal, ideological, economic, legal, and political...

'You cannot fix the scarlet letter on my breast!': women reading, writing, and reshaping the sexual culture of Victorian America.(Author Abstract)
March 22, 2004... Abstract: Jesse F. Battan, "'You Cannot Fix the Scarlet Letter on my Breast!': Women Reading, Writing, and Reshaping the Sexual Culture of Victorian America" By the nineteenth century, privacy was increasingly valued and increasingly...

The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: gender and power in the case of Ruth Snyder.(Author Abstract)
March 22, 2004... Abstract: Jessie Ramey, "The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: Gender and Power in the Case of Ruth Snyder" In 1928, the state of New York sent Ruth Snyder to the electric chair for the brutal murder of her husband. The case generated...

Divorce, patriarchal authority, and masculinity: a case from early national Vermont.(Author Abstract)
March 22, 2004... Abstract: Mary Beth Sievens, "Divorce, Patriarchal Authority, and Masculinity: A Case from Early National Vermont" This article explores the effects that divorce had on patriarchal authority within early nineteenth-century marriages by...

'The forgetfulness of sex': devotion and desire in the courtship letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld.(Author Abstract)
March 22, 2004... Abstract: Robert K. Nelson, "'The Forgetfulness of Sex': Devotion and Desire in the Courtship Letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld" In his love letters to Angelina Grimke in 1838, Theodore Dwight Weld did something one would...

Down memory lane: representations of domestic workers in middle class personal narratives of colonial Bengal.(Author Abstract)
March 22, 2004... Abstract: Swapna M. Banerjee, "Down Memory Lane: Representations of Domestic Workers in Middle Class Personal Narratives of Colonial Bengal" Salvaging information from the autobiographical narratives of middle-class men and women this...

'Mexico in his head': slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860.
March 22, 2004... Abstract: Sean Kelley, "'Mexico in His Head': Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860" The continual redrawing of the boundaries between the United States, Texas, and Mexico in the nineteenth century prompted slaves to view the...

Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the gateway city: the action committee to improve opportunities for negroes (ACTION), 1964-75.(Author Abstract)
March 22, 2004... Abstract: Clarence Lang, "Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the Gateway City: The Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), 1964-75" This article discusses the origins and development of the Action Committee to...

Conquering the British Ballarat: the policing of Victorian Middlesbrough.(Author Abstract)
March 22, 2004... Abstract: David Taylor, "Conquering the British Ballarat: The Policing of Victorian Middlesbrough" Over the period of the reign of Queen Victoria, Middlesbrough--the British Ballarat in Asa Briggs' memorable phrase--was transformed from a...