Journal of Social History articles from September 1998

Journal of Social History archives from September 1998

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, gender roles, and the decline of devotional Catholicism.
September 22, 1998... For twenty years following 1930 Catholic women and men flocked to St. Philomena church in Pittsburgh's east end to participate in the novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. In doing so, they joined with thousands of other Catholics across America...

The making of an underground market: drug selling in Chicago, 1900-1940.
September 22, 1998... Historians understand marketplaces to be the kinds of "space" which illuminate social and economic relationships. Taken together, the diverse transactions of the marketplace show how terms such as "community" and "neighborhood" are given meaning...

Of men, magic, and the law: popular justice and the political imagination in South Africa.
September 22, 1998... South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s saw the widespread emergence of "people's courts." These informal structures of justice arose in the context of intense political conflict and struggle against the apartheid government, the collapse of...

Legacy of resistance: uncovering the history of collective action by black agricultural workers in Central East Arkansas from the 1860s to the 1930s.
September 22, 1998... There is a broad, sweeping, lonesome bend in Big Creek only a few miles below Trenton and known as "The Basin" where the giant alligator gar (sic) flounce lazily and the scaly, venomous moccasin lay unmolested on partially submerged logs and tops...

Women in the classroom: mass migration, literacy and the nationalization of Sicilian women at the turn of the century.
September 22, 1998... In January of 1908, Rosa welcomed her husband Angelo home from the United States, where he had spent the last four years working in the coal mines on the outskirts of Birmingham Alabama. In his store-bought suit, starched white collar and leather...

The poor and disabled in early eighteenth-century Russian towns.
September 22, 1998... Pre-industrial Europe recognized two basic categories of impoverishment. The first group - the disabled, those who endured serious chronic or acute disease, the insane, the aged, and the orphan - had always earned the pity and charity of those...

Charity, status and leadership: charitable image and the Manchester man.
September 22, 1998... While significant relationship which existed among charity, status and social leadership in the Victorian urban environment has been fully recognised, it has only provided a limited focus for study.(1) This article is concerned with the...

New York farmers and the market revolution: economic behavior in the mid-Hudson Valley, 1780-1830.
September 22, 1998... For many years scholars of the early national period have engaged in a lively debate concerning the economic behavior and market strategies of farm families in the northern United States. Although the debate continues, there is general agreement...

"Schaffe, Schaffe, Hausle Baue": Hans Medick, the Swabians, and modernity.
September 22, 1998... By Frederick Marquardt Syracuse University Hans Medick's big new book carries us into the middle of two major controversies. The first is the extensive scholarly discussion surrounding the concept of "proto-industrialization." This analytical...

Weben und uberleben in Laichingen, 1650-1900: Lokalgeschichte als Allgemeine geschichte.
September 22, 1998... By Hans Medick (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996. 708pp.). Hans Medick's big new book carries us into the middle of two major controversies. The first is the extensive scholarly discussion surrounding the concept of...

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
September 22, 1998... By Eva Illouz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xv plus 371pp.). Eva Illouz has written a provocative study of romantic love in the United States today. Consuming the Romantic Utopia raises issues and reaches conclusions that...

A World of Their Own: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values.
September 22, 1998... A World of Their Own: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values. By John R. Gillis (New York: Basic Books, 1996. xix plus 310pp.). To readers worried that the family isn't what is used to be, John Gillis offers the cold comfort of learning...

Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change.
September 22, 1998... By Maureen Perkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. viii plus 270pp.). The almanac has long held a certain fascination for cultural historians, while related works of popular literature such as the fortune-telling chapbook and dream book have...

The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain.
September 22, 1998... By Ronald Hutton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xx plus 542pp. $35.00). Don't judge a book by its cover or by its title. Together, the Stonehenge image on the dust jacket and the solar reference suggest another of those New Age...

Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa.
September 22, 1998... Edited by Hildi Hendrickson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. viii plus 268pp. $49.95/cloth $16.95/paperback). This is not only a book about attire. The eight essays here use clothing and bodily adornment as points of entree into a wide...

Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa.
September 22, 1998... By Frederick Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvii plus 677pp.). This is an important book by a leading Africanist labor historian. It is also quite different from the author's previous works. Hitherto Frederick Cooper -...

Das Volkswagenwerk un seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich.
September 22, 1998... By Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger (Dusseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1996. 1055pp. DM 98). Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger have written the definitive company history of the Volkswagen motor company from its foundation in 1937 to the immediate...

Hitler's Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany Under the Third Reich.
September 22, 1998... By Ulrich Herbert (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxi plus 510pp. $80.00). This book is a translation of Ulrich Herbert's Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des "Auslander-Einsatzes" in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches...

Conflits du Travail, Changement Social et Politique en France depuis 1950.
September 22, 1998... By Monique Borrel (Paris: L'Harmattan. iv plus 266pp.). Beneath a paragraph making large claims for its content, the back cover of Conflits du Travail bears a little passport-style photograph of Monique Borrel. She peers out at readers...

Organizing the Unemployed: Community and Union Activists in the Industrial Heartland.
September 22, 1998... By James J. Lorence (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. xx plus 407pp.). Labor studies of the Great Depression often concentrate on the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and organized labor. By the early...

History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth.
September 22, 1998... By Paul A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xviii plus 428pp. $34.50). This long-awaited book on the Boxer Uprising is a critical inquiry into the different ways in which we understand the past. Cohen seeks to distinguish the...

Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned.
September 22, 1998... By Stephen Haliczer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 267pp. $49.95). Sexuality in the Confessional is the latest work to mine Inquisitorial archives for a rich lode of information about how Europeans in an earlier age thought and...

The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Christmas That Shows How It Was Transformed from an Unruly Carnival Season into the Quintessential American Family Holiday.
September 22, 1998... By Stephen Nissenbaum (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1997. xiii plus 381pp.). If on the night before Christmas, 1822, a New York gentlemen like Clement Clarke Moore heard "such a clatter" out on the lawn he might very well have expected to have...

Moral Codes and Social Structure in Ancient Greece: A Sociology of Greek Ethnics from Homer to the Epicureans and Stoics.
September 22, 1998... By Joseph M. Bryant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. xv plus 575pp.). Bryant promises a sociology of Greek ethics from Homer to the Stoics and Epicureans, and he certainly delivers on his promise; but this book in fact offers...

The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883.
September 22, 1998... By Gary Laderman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. xi plus 227pp. $28.50). Historians and other observers have often depicted twentieth-century American culture as one which denies death. Certainly the modest literature on...

Natives and Strangers: A Multicultural History of Americans.
September 22, 1998... By Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger L. Nichols, David M. Reimers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xiv plus 370pp. $25.00). More migrants from the most diverse set of origins spanning the longest sustained period of time have made America...

Mexicans in the Midwest: 1900-1932.
September 22, 1998... By Juan R. Garcia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. x plus 292pp.). This long-awaited and important work synthesizes recent literature on the "Mexican Generation" in the Midwest, focusing on its major population centers of Chicago...

"Civilizing" Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889-1930.
September 22, 1998... By Teresa A. Meade (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. xi plus 212pp.). Professor Meade informs her readers at the outset that "the process of writing this book has been long and choppy.... [I]t is a...

Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution.
September 22, 1998... By Holly A. Mayer (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. xiv plus 307pp. $39.95). To comprehend the Continental army in more holistic terms, Holly A. Mayer would have us envision a functioning community consisting...

The Modern University and Its Discontents: The Fate of Newman's Legacies in Britain and America.
September 22, 1998... By Sheldon Rothblatt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiv plus 461pp. $59.95). The Modern University and Its Discontents is a series of essays, most of which have been previously published in different forms. Rothblatt relates...

Local Hospitals in Ancien Regime France: Rationalization, Resistance, Renewal, 1530-1789.
September 22, 1998... By Daniel Hickey (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997. xviii plus 275pp. $44.95). Although the history of charitable institutions from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century has attracted the attention of a growing number of...