Journal of Social History articles from September 1994

Journal of Social History archives from September 1994

From ritual to science: the medical transformation of circumcision in America.
September 22, 1994... The mutilation of the genitals among the various savage tribes of the world presents a strange and unaccountable practice of human ideas, which one is not able to reconcile with any reasoning power. Why such customs should be in vogue none can...

Inventing the African family: gender and family law reform in Cote D'Ivoire. (Ivory Coast)
September 22, 1994... When the National Assembly of the Republic of Cote d'Ivoire amended the family code in 1983, granting women equity with their husbands within legal marriages as well as greater financial autonomy, the Association des Femmes Ivoiriennes (AFI)...

A failed settler society: marriage and demographic failure in early Jamaica.
September 22, 1994... Jamaica in the eighteenth century was the jewel in Britain's imperial crown. According to any number of criteria, Jamaica was the most important colony held by Britain in British North America. Jamaica contributed the most of any colony to the...

Female householding in late eighteenth-century America and the problem of poverty.
September 22, 1994... Families in early modem England were more than twice as likely to be headed by woman as were white households in late eighteenth-century America. On average, in a preindustrial English community, women headed between one-sixth and one-fifth of...

War, gender, and industrial innovation: recruiting women weavers in early nineteenth-century Ireland.
September 22, 1994... Much has been written about the participation of women in war production during the twentieth-century but virtually nothing about women engaged in producing wa materiel during the Napoleonic war.(1) When the treaty of Amiens failed to secure a...

"Choosing' partible inheritance: Chilean merchant families, 1795-1825.
September 22, 1994... In the early spring of 1798 Salvador de Trucios dictated his will before a notary in Santiago, Chile. While enjoying relatively good health, the wealthy Basque merchant must have been nearly seventy years old,(1) and he certainly wanted his last...

The Secularization of the Academy.
September 22, 1994... Since the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 it has been open season on institutions of higher education. Dinesh D'Souza, Thomas Sowell, Charles Sykes, and a phalanx of less popular polemicists, have bashed...

"The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism".
September 22, 1994... Recent revisions in historians' interpretations of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, published before the works reviewed here, were summarized in Leonard Moore's review essay in the winter 1990 issue of the Journal of Social History, which i republished in...

Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language.
September 22, 1994... As linguist Dell Hymes points out in a comprehensive "Afterward" for this collection of essays, studying language can be a very complicated task. On the one hand, language can mean words and on the other, a way of life. It can turn on verbal...

Ethnography and the Historical Imagination.
September 22, 1994... This collection of essays by two anthropologists at Chicago focuses on theory and method but always in reference to the Tshidi of South Africa, with whom the have done field work since 1969. The topic is historical change and about how i is...

Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems.
September 22, 1994... At first glance one might doubt the unity of a book with chapter titles as diverse as "Why Tobacco Stunted the Growth of Towns and Wheat Built them into Small Cities: Urbanization South of the Mason-Dixon Line, 1650-1790" and "The Split...

The "True Professional Ideal" in America. A History.
September 22, 1994... Every scholar of the professions must now respond in some fashion to the debunking of professionalism that entered the mainstream of social theory durin the 1970s. This critique recognized that the process granting more privilege an higher status...

Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe Since 1650.
September 22, 1994... Leslie Page Moch's book is a step toward recognizing migration as a topic as significant in population history as mortality or fertility. Focusing on geographical population movement in western Europe since the end of the Thirty Years' War, Moch...

The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History.
September 22, 1994... Collections of essays are notoriously uneven in focus and quality. No matter ho carefully they select contributors, no matter how clear their guidelines, editors rarely are able to sustain throughout the volume those themes they pronounce are...

The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America.
September 22, 1994... The changes that this book describes stop short of the "sexual revolution" that the title promises. Kevin White's study of sexual ethics and masculine ideals i the period 1910-1930 searches for a male counterpart to the twentieth century's "New...

The Evolution of Women's Asylums Since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women.
September 22, 1994... The subject of most of this book, not apparent from its title, is three houses for dependent women in early modern Tuscany. After a valuable survey in chapter one of women's institutions across Renaissance Italy, the author in chapter two zeroes...

Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City.
September 22, 1994... The study of inheritance has become an important avenue into the inner workings of family life in early America. Probate records, especially wills, have been analyzed for information used to reconstruct the structure and size of the family, and...

Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900.
September 22, 1994... Centuries of Childhood is thirty-something now. Its account of the emergence of modernity has been assailed as well as amplified, but its premises and precepts remain as apt today as when they first appeared. Aries said and still says nearly...

A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public.
September 22, 1994... One should not judge a book by its title. Ronald Zboray's opus deals not with economic development but with the history of reading in the United States in th first half of the nineteenth century. He argues that mobility and rapid economi change...

The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchatel, 1550-1800.
September 22, 1994... Though some might view the title of this book as too sweeping, and though my mother was amused when seeing it that "modern" referred to a period ending nearly three centuries ago, Jeffrey Watt is persuasive in his identification of new emphases...

Trouwen in Nederland: Een historisch-demografische studie van de 19e en vroeg-20e eeuw.
September 22, 1994... According to the ideas of 19th century middle and upper classes the lower classes married too young and did not consider their financial and social position. Young families crowded with children, extreme poverty and finally criminality were the...

Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England, 1660-1753.
September 22, 1994... One of the issues raised by Lawrence Stone's milestone work, The Family, Sex an Marriage in England, 1500-1815, was the significance of Lord Hardwicke's Act in 1753, which banned the marriage of minors without parental consent, and eliminated...

London in the Age of Industrialisation: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700-1850.
September 22, 1994... London lay downstream from industrialization, but the flow of new technology an higher rates of production did not by-pass the capital, as was once assumed. In a much needed re-evaluation that challenges, synthesizes and extends analysis o the...

Labour's Apprentices: Working-Class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England.
September 22, 1994... Young people (of both sexes) were an obtrusively numerous and visible component of English society in this era, and the 'lads' of Childs' account achieved further prominence as a social problem. At work, their ready assimilation into relatively...

The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture.
September 22, 1994... Blake Allmendinger's The Cowboy has three goals: first, to study heretofore neglected cowboy art; second, to show how that art depicts and comments upon cowboy labor routines; and third, "to show that artistic self-representations o labor also...

Forbidden Laughter: Popular Humor and the Limits of Repression in Nineteenth Century Prussia.
September 22, 1994... A senior colleague of mine sometimes introduces himself; "I am a mixture of Irish efficiency and German charm," adding "It is difficult to tell that joke i German." The anecdote underlines one of the most established notions of Anglo-Saxons about...

Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives.
September 22, 1994... In his contribution to Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany, the political scientist Peter Steinbach observes that "it would be an exaggeration to claim that electoral research today stands at the center of current...

The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored.
September 22, 1994... In this second of a superb two-volume study of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Abraham Ascher focuses on events and developments between January 1906 and June 3, 1907, when Prime Minister Peter Stolypin staged his notorious coup detat against the...

The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii.
September 22, 1994... In this engaging social history, Beth Bailey and David Farber address the complex interplay of cultural contacts in wartime Hawaii. As thousands of military personnel and civilian war workers migrated to Hawaii, Americans divided by region, race,...

Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe.
September 22, 1994... In this suggestive study, Margaret Jacob, who is known for her scholarship abou eighteenth-century scientific and civic culture, explores Enlightenment ideologies and their connections to Masonic elites in western Europe. The book is topically...

Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America.
September 22, 1994... Readers searching for the best example of the new men's history should look no further than Meanings For Manhood. This volume punctuates the emerging realization that "women" can no longer be equated with "gender" in historical analysis. The...

Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas.
September 22, 1994... This volume of twelve uniformly absorbing essays examines the working lives of plantation slaves in regions of the Caribbean and the southern United States. The collection's unity of approach heightens the explanatory force of each individual...

El Castillo: The Politics of Tradition in an Andalusian Town.
September 22, 1994... El Castillo is a cultural history of power relationships from the Old Regime to the present in a Spanish hill town in the southern region of Andalusia, a geneological study that "maps major lines of descent, patterns of affinity and points of...

Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community.
September 22, 1994... Free People of Color is the first sustained effort at analyzing the free Africa American communities of the antebellum North since Leon Litwack's pioneering North of Slavery published over thirty years ago. As James Oliver Horton states the book...

Masters and Lords: Mid-19th Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers.
September 22, 1994... The comparative study of slavery once focused primarily on the western hemisphere. During the past decade or so, however, the scope of comparison has been substantially widened, in books such as George M. Fredrickson's White Supremacy: A...

Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907.
September 22, 1994... Labor historians, especially in the past twenty years, have played a politicizing role in the historiography of the final decades of Russia's tsaris era, not unlike that of the laborers about whom they wrote. They provided a corrective to those...

American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race Since the Civil War.
September 22, 1994... American Sexual Politics illustrates the problems and some of the solutions in the study of the history of sexuality. While this collection of essays explores only American sexual patterns and concentrates on the issues of gender and race it can...

Social History in Museums: A Handbook for Professionals.
September 22, 1994... This is an excellent collection of essays that addresses both the theory and th practice of social history in museums. Written by British museum professionals skilled in social history, this volume contains ideas and information that can be...

Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900-1950.
September 22, 1994... Workshop to Office is a social history of southern Italian women and girls in New York from the turn of the century to the 1950s. The book follows significan changes in the family roles, work lives, and schooling patterns of two generations of...

Growing Up in Medieval London.
September 22, 1994... Thomas Seint John is born, baptized, and named, and in the process urinates on his godfather. Baby Joan is almost trampled by a horse and rider. After a typical morning at school, eight year-old Richard le Mazon fails into the river and drowns....