Journal of Social History articles from March 2006

Journal of Social History archives from March 2006

Introduction.(future of social history)
March 22, 2006... This special issue continues a conversation launched in our Winter, 2001 issue, on the future of social history. The first set of papers focused heavily on current problems, including the knotty relationship with the "cultural turn" and its...

Part I: social history and spatial scope.
March 22, 2006... Social historians' decisions about geographic framework, or regionalization, are rarely as explicit as those involving chronological framework, or periodization. This is particularly true in the common tendency to choose national units for...

To study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World.
March 22, 2006... the unity is submarine breathing air, our problem is how to study the fragments whole... --Edward Kamau Braithwaite (b. Barbados, 1930), "Caribbean Man in Space and Time" (1) This essay is about the past, present, and...

Crowds and leisure: thinking comparatively across the 20th century.
March 22, 2006... The not-so-new social history movement that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s was strongly identified with the first industrialization and its social consequences. Despite the fact that the 20th century is now history, social historians have...

Transnational journeys and domestic histories.
March 22, 2006... In Mike and Stefani, an Australian documentary film released in 1952, a family group--Mike, Stefani, their young daughter and Mike's adolescent nephew--are shown on board ship, bound for Australia. (1) The displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany...

The transnational contexts of early twentieth-century American urban segregation.
March 22, 2006... "Segregation is apparent everywhere," warned Dr. Ernest Lyon to a standing-room only congregation at Baltimore's largely black John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church on December 4, 1910. Cities divided by race could be found "not only in the...

Part II: issues of power in social history: social history and the state.
March 22, 2006... Social historians have grappled with the issue of approaching the state and politics since the inception of the field. Some were, admittedly, attracted to social history because conventional political approaches repelled them, and the impulse...

From hegemony to governmentality: changing conceptions of power in social history.
March 22, 2006... What was new about social history in its pioneering phase in the 1960s and 1970s? Answers to this question tend to focus on its objects of enquiry: the attention given to neglected social groups and the opening up of fresh fields of study, such...

Custom and the politics of sovereignty in South Africa.
March 22, 2006... Four eras of tribal and state formation have marked the modern history of South Africa. The conquest years of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a colonial state and the reworking of ethnic identities tied to tribal political...

Radical rudeness: Ugandan social critiques in the 1940s.
March 22, 2006... In a scathing letter of eighteen single-spaced typed pages, Semakula Mulumba declined the Bishop of Uganda's 1948 invitation to dinner. Dinners and other forms of entertainments and hospitality were, Mulumba asserted, pernicious forms of...

The state and social history.
March 22, 2006... Introduction As has been noted by many observers, social history emerged in the 1950s and 1960s out of two potentially contradictory impulses. On the one hand, social historians sought to recapture the lives and experiences of the working...

Part III: reintroducing and refining social structure in social history.
March 22, 2006... There is widespread agreement that attention to social structure has declined in historical research over the past two decades, partly as a result of changes in the classic structures of industrial society and the decline of Marxism, partly as...

The cultural turn and a new social history: folk dance and the renovation of class in social history.
March 22, 2006... Class has largely disappeared as a useful category of analysis in social history, most especially for the social history of the recent past. While this is a problem general to social history, it is especially acute in the well-established field...

Fear, hatred and the hidden injuries of class in early modern England.
March 22, 2006... Class struggle... is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. But these latter things, which are present in class struggle, are not present as a vision of spoils that fall...

Part IV: social history and audience.(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Social history has always flourished as a research field, and this will remain true in future. Opportunities to reach wider audiences, in the interests of promoting not just an interest in history but the capacity to apply historical analysis...

The future of learning and teaching in social history: the research approach and employability.
March 22, 2006... Thinking about the future of social history in pedagogic terms raises several fundamental issues that require detailed and on-going consideration. Decisions on precisely what social history students should cover, and on how strongly social...

Reality, identity and empathy: the changing face of social history television.
March 22, 2006... The last decade has witnessed a remarkable renaissance of public history in Britain. Historical programming commands a dominant position in the terrestrial television schedules; radio remains replete with 'discussions of' and 'journeys into'...

Historians and audiences: comment on Tristram Hunt and Geoffrey Timmins.
March 22, 2006... Historian Claude Bowers was one of the great speakers of his era. As a high school student in Indiana in the 1890s, when debate was more important than basketball, he was a champion debater and also won the Indiana State High School Oratorical...

Part V: opportunities for the future.(social history)
March 22, 2006... Social history has matured as a field. It has lost some of the zeal of youth. It has been shaped by a series of new topical interests and theoretical approaches, some clearly beneficial, some verging on the faddish. It needs now to reassert...

New approaches to social history. Myth, memory, and place: Monmouth and Bath 1750-1900.
March 22, 2006... 1. A Hard and Soft Social History In the post-war decades in Britain, social history, in what may be called its heroic age, was new and fashionable, and could expect to attract devotees by virtue of these qualities alone. From the later...

Social history as "sites of memory"? The insitutionalization of history: microhistory and the grand narrative.
March 22, 2006... Flashbacks In 1976, to mark the occasion of its tenth anniversary, the Journal of Social History (JSH) put out a special volume containing a number of articles on the status and position of social history within the academic world. Among...

Common ground: integrating social and environmental history.
March 22, 2006... Introduction Environmental problems have pushed their way to the top of the global political agenda and pose an enormous challenge to humanity now, and for the future. The growing demands of consumer societies in both developed and...

The old social history and the new social sciences.
March 22, 2006... While social historians in the United States have begun to look at the new cultural history as a source for inspiration and ideas for new research, they have largely ignored new developments within the other social sciences. It is my aim to...

Behavioral history: a brief introduction to a new frontier.
March 22, 2006... The expansion of social history research over the past several decades provides an exciting opportunity for practitioners that begs for more formal and systematic exploration. The ability to offer serious historical analysis for all major...