Journal of Social History articles from September 1993

Journal of Social History archives from September 1993

Anger and affability: the rise and representation of a repertory of self-presentation skills in a World War II disabled veteran.
September 22, 1993... At the age of 30 in 1944 Sergeant Harold Russell, a Cambridge, Massachusetts butcher, was serving as a demolitions instructor at a North Carolina military base. During a training exercise, he tried to determine why an explosive charge failed to...

In defense of privilege: the city of London and the challenge of municipal reform, 1875-1890.
September 22, 1993... In March 1986, Prime Minister Thatcher eliminated the Greater London Council, successor to the London County Council, successor to the Metropolitan Board of Works.(1) Unlike the City Fathers, the rulers of the Greater London Council, as well as...

Elite women workers and collective action: the cigarette makers of Gijon, 1890-1930.
September 22, 1993... On May 2, 1898, the Spanish industrial city of Gijon witnessed perhaps the most dramatic riot in its history, when thousands of angry consumers took to the streets in protest against an unpopular food tax. Adding to the drama was the fact that...

"Your old father Abe Lincoln is dead and damned": black soldiers and the Memphis race riot of 1866.
September 22, 1993... Between May 1 and May 3, 1866, racial conflict erupted violently in Memphis, Tennessee. Irish policemen and firemen, together with white laborers and small businessmen, rioted in the southern part of the city. For three days they attacked the...

Schools and the paternalist project at Le Creusot, 1850-1914.
September 22, 1993... Eugene Schneider, head of the Le Creusot metalworks, the leading metallurgical center in France, died in 1875. Three years later, residents of Le Creusot launched a campaign to erect a statue in his honor. Their effort was crowned with success....

A Cultural History of Gesture.
September 22, 1993... For the non-specialist, one of the charms and fascinations of anthropological documentary films is the image they provide of how a foreign people move. To the uninitiated eye, the gestural vocabulary of an unknown culture is at once informative...

Fundamentalisms Observed: The Fundamentalism Project, vol 1.
September 22, 1993... In this weighty tome, Martin Marty and E. Scott Appleby offer an encyclopedic introduction to the varied and tumultuous world of religious fundamentalism. Sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Fundamentalism Project will...

Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film.
September 22, 1993... Over the past two decades scholars have utilized the study of popular culture and film as a focal point for answering questions that have puzzled students using more traditional evidence to understand the nature of twentieth century culture and...

Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664-1730.
September 22, 1993... Joyce Goodfriend's new book, Before the Melting Pot, as its title indicates, continues the discussion started by Thomas Archdeacon, John Murrin, and others about the role of ethnicity in New York history during the colonial period. The issue is...

The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846.
September 22, 1993... Broad interpretations of a period, such as Charles Sellers has written, are comparatively rare, and it is a pleasure to read one as lively, provocative and conceptually rich as this. The Market Revolution skillfully works an analysis of early...

Mexico's Merchant Elite, 1590-1660: Silver, State and Society.
September 22, 1993... The seventeenth century in Mexico, characterized forty years ago by Woodrow Borah as a century of depression, has, despite the work of such notable historians as Peter Bakewell, Jonathan Israel, Irving Leonard, and Thomas Calvo, among others,...

The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation and Crisis, 1567-1767.
September 22, 1993... The title suggests that this fine monograph is an essay in the social history of elite families in colonial Venezuela. It is that, but it is also more. The author sets his study of the elites firmly in their economic base, which for many of...

Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783.
September 22, 1993... Usner's book effectively translates the complex history of the Lower Mississippi Valley in the first century of European settlement into a coherent story. He is one of the few historians to tackle this particular region, and after reading his...

Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis.
September 22, 1993... Historians have long offered the rivalry between Chicago and St. Louis as a textbook example of the impact of geography on urban growth. Chicago was both the primary western beneficiary of the Erie Canal, which linked the West with New York...

William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America.
September 22, 1993... Roger Lane is one of the most forceful proponents of the position that capitalism of the modern city and the political economy of the twentieth-century state have had a stronger influence on the condition of African-Americans than did chattel...

Peasantry and Society in France since 1789.
September 22, 1993... The great problem of the vanishing peasantry is that it has taken so long to vanish - longer indeed than the vanished "working class" that was once supposed to replace it. So a few old ideologues are going to sigh with relief and others may...

Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century.
September 22, 1993... Skillfully using the recent debate over the design and building of the Vietnam War Memorial to draw readers into his analysis of commemorations, John Bodnar explores the concept of public memory through "official and vernacular cultural...

Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America.
September 22, 1993... Mid-way through Lives in Trust, antrhopologist George E. Marcus explains the origin of the book's central argument. Having embarked on an ethnographic study of dynastic families in Galveston, Texas, Marcus observed what he took to be a limiting...

The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century.
September 22, 1993... Until quite recently, the German bourgeoisie was often described in terms of its supposed failures and deficiencies. This portrayal was a major feature of the Sonderweg paradigm, which interpreted the course of modern German history up to 1945...

The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945.
September 22, 1993... Both Michael Burleigh of the London School of Economics and Wolfgang Wippermann of the Free University of Berlin have written previous related monographs based on primary sources, but in this volume they synthesize a wide range of existing...

Strasse und Brot: Sozialer Protest in den deutschen Staaten unter besonderer Beruecksichtigung Preussens, 1847-1849.
September 22, 1993... The book under review deals with the rebellious years 1847-1849 in Germany from the perspective of "street politics." The first part of the book is based on about 1,500 cases of social protest, condensed out of five contemporary newspapers....

The Many Faces of Defeat: The German People's Experience in 1945.
September 22, 1993... Edward Peterson has here a painful tale to tell. Putting guns into young men's hands and turning them loose on defenseless peoples (civilians or prisoners of war, enemies or even nominal allies) gives those men a power that corrupts. Even the...

Herrschaft und Alltag: Ein Industrierevier im Dritten Reich.
September 22, 1993... The social history of the Thousand Year Reich reminds us how difficult it is to describe the boundaries between accomodation and endorsement, between acquiescence and acceptance, between complacency and complicity. The very complexity of...

The Making of the Modern Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Athens.
September 22, 1993... The Making of the Modern Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Athens. By Paul Sant Cassia with Constantina Bada (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xv plus 278 pp. $65.00). "This original and ground-breaking...

Menninger: The Family and the Clinic.
September 22, 1993... Menninger: The Family and the Clinic. By Lawrence J. Friedman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1990. xix plus 472 pp.). In Menninger: The Family and the Clinic Lawrence Friedman takes on the formidable task of drawing together the...

The Erosion of Childhood: Child Oppression in Britain, 1860-1918.
September 22, 1993... "The lot of the child at the end of the First World War was a striking improvement on that of the child of the 1860s," argued the late Lionel Rose in his study of Victorian childhood in Great Britain (p. 244). As a result of the economic and...

School, State, and Society: The Growth of Elementary Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France - A Quantitative Analysis.
September 22, 1993... Drawing upon an immense amount of data and buttressed by a solid foundation in the secondary literature, Grew and Harrigan have written a path breaking study of the development of French elementary education that settles several interpretative...

Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians.
September 22, 1993... With Poverty and Compassion, Professor Himmelfarb concludes her remarkable two-volume assessment of the Victorian responses to poverty. The entire project now ranges from Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus in the 1780s to T. H. Green, Alfred...

Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s.
September 22, 1993... In the last twenty-five years, scholars have done much to remove the mask from the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Students of the Klan have intensively explored the Invisible Empire in the Southwest, the Rocky Mountain states, the Pacific Coast...

The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870-1929.
September 22, 1993... This book examines an important but often ignored component of migration to the United States - the phenomenon of return migration. Return migration reached a peak between 1908-1910 when nearly 823, 000 aliens departed from the U.S. for Europe....

Aufstieg und Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus in einer industriellen Kleinstadt: Osterode am harz 1918-1945.
September 22, 1993... Sixty years after the birth of the Third Reich questions about who supported Nazism and why remain current. Anti-foreigner violence in the Federal Republic and the ethnic-national warfare in the Balkans reveal that many of the ideas which...

Verbotene Kunste: Volksmagie und landlicher Aberglaube in den Dorfgemeinden des Saarraumes (16.-19. Jahrhundert).
September 22, 1993... "Microanalysis on the village level" (p. 12) is Eva Labouvie's aim in this interpretive study of magic in the Saarland. She therefore draws from anthropological methods to analyze the inner logic of "unspectacular" uses of magic rather than...

The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War.
September 22, 1993... This work by Bruce Levine provides a welcome and largely successful attempt to integrate immigration, labor and political history through a consideration of the role of radical German democrats in the Civil War era United States. It opens...