Journal of Social History articles from September 1995

Journal of Social History archives from September 1995

The perils of assimilation in modern France: the deaf community, social status, and educational opportunity, 1815-1870.
September 22, 1995... "The deaf and others who are disabled serve as a foil for the nondisabled in society. By portraying the disabled as different, odd, or not quite normal and by routinely putting them in an inferior position, the nondisabled assert their moral...

Public service personnel in West Germany in the 1950s: controversial policy decisions and their effects on social composition, gender structure, and the role of former Nazis.
September 22, 1995... Although a half century has elapsed since the end of World War II, comparatively little research has been done on German social history in the period after 1945. Instead, social historians have concentrated on examining events and processes in...

Flexible gender roles during the market revolution: family, friendship, marriage, and masculinity among U.S. Army officers, 1815-1846.
September 22, 1995... After nearly thirty years of research, separate spheres, domesticity, and patriarchy remain the dominant conceptual categories in the historiography of gender in nineteenth century America. Despite introducing an array of nuances, scholars have...

The integration of social classes.(Etiquette Books and Emotion Management in the 20th Century, Part 1)
September 22, 1995... INTRODUCTION This is a first report on a larger comparative study of changes in twentieth-century American, Dutch, English and German etiquette books. A central hypothesis is that major directional trends in dominant codes and ideals of...

St. Patrick's Day celebrations and the formation of Irish-American identity, 1845-1875.
September 22, 1995... I On the morning of St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1853, Archbishop John Hughes delivered an oration on the significance of the occasion before a crowd of worshipers at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Hughes dwelt on Saint Patrick's success...

Whatever happened to industrial waste?: Reform, compromise, and science in nineteenth century southern New England.
September 22, 1995... In 1886 James Olcott in a speech before the Agricultural Board of Connecticut called on his audience and the citizens of Connecticut to "agitate, agitate" in order to "cleanse" the state of the "social evil" of the pollution "sewage from...

Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990-1990.
September 22, 1995... As he so often does, Charles Tilly has taken on an enormous problem in this book and has produced an intelligent and provacative analysis of it. In many ways, this study represents the capstone of his lifelong interest in state formation. It...

Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity.
September 22, 1995... Edited by John R. Gillis (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994. xii plus 290pp.). This fine collection of essays focuses on the history of memory and identity, traditionally neglected subjects; the themes are concerned with...

American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style.
September 22, 1995... By Peter N. Stearns (New York: New York University Press, 1994. ix plus 368pp.). In this boldly innovative book, Peter Stearns brings together his work for the past decade on the history of emotions to propose a major new synthesis of American...

Am Beginn der Konsumgesellschaft: Mangelerfahrung, Lebenshaltung, Wohlstandshoffnung in Westdeutschland in den funfziger Jahren.
September 22, 1995... By Michael Wildt (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 1994. 396pp.). While the literature on the development of consumer culture in America is voluminous, parallel studies in Germany are scarce indeed. Michael Wildt's study of food consumption in West...

Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary France.
September 22, 1995... By Sarah Maza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xii plus 354pp. $35.00). A dispute over debts between a family of commoners and an aristocrat, a conflict between seigneur and villagers over the control of a local festival, a...

Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927.
September 22, 1995... By Mary Louise Roberts (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. xiv plus 337pp.). In her fascinating book on gender identities in post-World War I France, Mary Louise Roberts argues that "the blurring of the boundaries between...

Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918.
September 22, 1995... By Ellen Ross (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xvii plus 308pp. paperback/$19.95). Ellen Ross's eagerly awaited book is a marvel of detail on all aspects of motherhood among London's poor. Scores of women emerge from the neighborhood...

Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage and Hollywood Performance.
September 22, 1995... By Virginia Wright Wexman (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994. xiv plus 288pp. $49.50/cloth $16.95/paper). I learned to kiss watching television--movies in the afternoon when home sick from school--to tilt my head slightly to the...

Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama.
September 22, 1995... By E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc., 1992. xv plus 250pp. $16.95). I learned to kiss watching television--movies in the afternoon when home sick from school--to tilt my head slightly to the side, raise a foot, expect...

Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence.
September 22, 1995... By Anthony Molho (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994. xiv plus 458pp. $59.00). A generation ago Philip Jones made perhaps the most quoted of all modern observations about the history of Renaissance Florence: that it came...

Contraception and Abortion in 19th Century America.
September 22, 1995... By Janet Farrell Brodie (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. xviii plus 373pp.). In recent years, studies of family limitation have moved away from the whiggish frameworks, rooted in modernization theory, that dominated the...

Household and Family Among the Poor: The Case of Two Essex Communities in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.
September 22, 1995... By Thomas Sokoll (Bochum, Germany: Universitatsverlag Dr. Norbert Brockmeyer, 1993. xxiv plus 383pp.). This is a very clever book. By linking individuals mentioned in population listings and census enumerations with welfare documents which...

Home and Its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France.
September 22, 1995... Edited by Suzanne Nash (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993. ix plus 345pp.). These fifteen short essays depict perceptions of home and homelessness. The topic is especially germane for the nineteenth century because of...

The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris.
September 22, 1995... By Dora B. Weiner (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. xvi plus 444pp. $48.50). The title of this book might lead the reader to expect a study of the politicization of health care during the French Revolution. Images of...

Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century.
September 22, 1995... By David Montgomery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. x plus 189pp. $21.95). Originating in the Tanner lectures delivered at Brasenose College, Oxford, Citizen Worker is the richest and fullest Montgomerian portrait of America's...

Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860.
September 22, 1995... By Peter Way (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xvii plus 304pp.). This book begins with a fiery introduction and then settles into an extremely valuable, well conceived, researched and written occupational case study: of canal...

Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations.
September 22, 1995... By Donald Reid (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991. 235pp. $39.95). Donald Reid has written a delightful and profound book about a world unseen but always present and full of peril in the minds of surface people and about...

Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850-1920.
September 22, 1995... By Alexander von Hoffman (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. xxiv plus 311pp.). Part of a growing literature on urban neighborhoods, Local Attachments is a case study of a Boston neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, from 1850...

Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930.
September 22, 1995... Edited by Thomas Bender & Carl E. Schorske (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994. xiv plus 400pp.). The fourteen parallel essays in this collection, half by Hungarians on Budapest, half by Americans on New York, deal in turn with politics,...

Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914.(E-book Review)
September 22, 1995... By Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier and Josh Brown. (New York: The Voyager Company, 1993. CD-ROM Educational Edition $195.00/Individual Edition $49.95). For some time now cyberbabble has pronounced the book obsolete: in the brave new world of...

Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England.
September 22, 1995... By Ilhana Krausman BenAmos (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1994. xi plus 335pp. $32.50/cloth). As the passion surrounding earlier debates in the history of the family subsides, historians have fumed their attention to the stage...

Die Macht der Trunkenheit: Kultur-und Sozialgeschichte des Alkohols in Deutschland.
September 22, 1995... By Hasso Spode (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1993. 300pp.) This book asks big questions about the cultural and social history of alcohol in Germany. Why was the German heavy drinker once considered a "hero"? When did drinking alcohol on a regular...

Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.
September 22, 1995... By Nancy MacLean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xvii plus 292pp. $30.00). Behind the Mask of Chivalry is a well-written, yet flawed, analysis of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. The author, Nancy MacLean, probes Klan texts, including...

The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front.
September 22, 1995... By J. Matthew Gallman (Chicago, Illinois: Ivan R. Dee Inc. 1994. 211pp. $22.50/cloth). In 1989 a provocative essay by Maris A. Vinovskis asked: "Have social historians lost the Civil War?" Even as Vinovskis posed the question, scholars,...

Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society.
September 22, 1995... By Allison Blakely (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994. xix plus 327pp. $35.00). Relatively little work has been done on race and racial ideology in the Dutch world. Most recent studies have concentrated on the British...

Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialized Area, 1830-1900.
September 22, 1995... By Richard H. Trainor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xix plus 437pp. $72.00). The "Black Country" (so-called because of the effect of the belching chimneys of the iron works in the early industrial revolution) refers to the cluster...

Attending to Women in Early Modern England.
September 22, 1995... By Betty Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1994. 382pp.). The papers included in Attending to Women in Early Modern England were presented at a 1990 symposium sponsored by the Center for...

Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution.
September 22, 1995... By Thomas Dublin (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. xix plus 324pp.). In a cautious introduction, Thomas Dublin, one of the pioneers of women's history, explores his continued fascination with some of the older questions about...

Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge.
September 22, 1995... By Charles B. Dew (New York: W.W. Norton Inc., 1994. xviii plus 429pp. $27.50). Charles B. Dew's Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge is a major book that will be enthusiastically welcomed by scholars of southern, African American,...

The Weaver's Knot: The Contradiction of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western France, 1750-1914.
September 22, 1995... By Tessie P. Liu (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994. xi plus 279pp.). Perhaps the first lesson this book teaches is how much scholars had to forget in order to construct the typical account of industrialization still found in...

Illegitimacy, Sex and Society: Northeast Scotland, 1750-1900.
September 22, 1995... By Andrew Blaikie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 268pp. $55.00). When civil registration began in Scotland in 1855 many were shocked to discover that the country had an illegitimacy ratio of over 9 per cent, that contrary to popular...

Freedom and Responsibility: The Social Market Economy in Germany, 1918-1963.
September 22, 1995... By A. J. Nicholls (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xiii plus 422pp.). A. J. Nicholls offers here a collective intellectual biography of several key figures (especially Ludwig Erhard and Karl Schiller) in West Germany's adoption of the...

The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control.
September 22, 1995... By Theodore W. Allen (New York: Verso, 1994. ix plus 310 pp. $19.95). "When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619," says the jacket blurb, "there were no `white' people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for...

Indentured to Liberty: Peasant Life and the Hessian Military State, 1688-1815.
September 22, 1995... By Peter K. Taylor (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994 xvi plus 275pp. $45.00). Americans know of Hesse-Kassel as the German territory whose prince leased his army to Britain for use in the American Revolution. Peter Taylor's...