Journal of Social History articles from September 2003

Journal of Social History archives from September 2003

Social history present and future.(Introducing The Issues)
September 22, 2003... Social history has often had its temperature taken. In the United States the first probes came in the 1960s, when social historians had to define their core interests against a skeptical history establishment, reluctant to accept new topics and...

Preface.
September 22, 2003... There is no tidy means of dividing the essays that follow as, quite properly, they overlap in many ways. We decided, for example, against a special section on "non-Western" regions (an inappropriate designation in any case), because in fact...

Losses, gains and opportunities: social history today.(Introducing The Issues)
September 22, 2003... The impression is widely spread that this is not a good moment to be a social historian. It has become common-place that our present situation differs strongly from the situation around 1970 when Eric Hobsbawm made his famous proclamation of...

Social history in Europe.(Introducing The Issues)
September 22, 2003... 1. The current situation of social history Social history in Europe has passed through a period of changes and severe difficulties during the last twenty years or so. The general public became less interested in social history than in the...

Cultural history/social history: some reflections on a continuing dialogue.(The Cultural Turn And Beyond)
September 22, 2003... Social and cultural history have always been related to each other in strategic ways, correcting each other's blindspots and blunders, while they have also emphasized different elements of the past and pursued different methods. When I first...

The state of Indian social history.(The Cultural Turn And Beyond)
September 22, 2003... Indian social history appears to be in decline. Although fine work in the field has been published in recent years, the cutting edge of scholarship on the Indian past has moved elsewhere, particularly into the domains of cultural and...

Contemporary French social history: crisis or hidden renewal?(Central Issues)
September 22, 2003... In a paper for a conference about social history held in 1989, I remarked that social history in France slipped from a macro-social to a micro-social viewpoint during the Eighties. In other words, it had left global paradigms, often summed up...

Gaining ground.(Central Issues)
September 22, 2003... "L'histoire ne progresse pas, elle s'elargit; ce que signifie qu'elle ne perd pas en artiste le terrain qu'elle conquiert en avant." Paul Veyne, Comment on ecrit l'histoire More than thirty years ago, Eric Hobsbawm...

When fish walk on land: social history in a postmodern world.(Central Issues)
September 22, 2003... I was talking with friends the other night when someone mentioned a startling fact; there is such a thing as a walking fish. Birds have wings and fly; beasts have feet and walk; and fish have fins and swim. This much I thought I knew....

Social histories of old age and aging (1).(Central Issues)
September 22, 2003... One of the many important changes in approaches to social history in many countries in recent decades has been increasing awareness of the multiple forms of social diversity within all societies and, in consequence, the need for greater...

On agency.(Central Issues)
September 22, 2003... Sitting down to write a paper about the New Social History has been hard for me. Hard because it has made me face some of the manifest tendencies in my own work, and consign them to the purgatorial category of "my past," which allows me to keep...

Race is a relationship, and not a thing.(Central Issues)
September 22, 2003... To those who have not recently pored with religious fervor over the "Preface" to The Making of the English Working Class, the title above may require some explanation: no mere homage to one of social history's most influential practitioners, it...

The social history of the Reformation: recent trends and future agendas.(Social History And Standard Topics)
September 22, 2003... The advent of social history in the 1960s and 1970s as a methodologically new and innovative way to study the past significantly altered our understanding of many different areas of history. One of the fields most affected by social history has...

Amalgamating the social in the French Revolution.(Social History And Standard Topics)
September 22, 2003... Despite its status as a political event, the French Revolution has been very heavily associated with social explanations. From the revolution of the "people" of Jules Michelet through the Marxist interpretation of Georges Lefebvre, (1) probably...

Recent developments in social history.(Social History And Standard Topics)
September 22, 2003... Although this is the second time I have had the opportunity to assess the state of the discipline in the pages of the Journal of Social History, this role is not comfortable for me. Having been trained in sociology, I am, after all, still a...

Social history for beginners: a "young scholar" looks at his new profession.(New Topics And Historians)
September 22, 2003... I officially entered the historical profession in September, 1995, the month I began graduate school. Seven years of schooling would follow, ending at last with the presentation of a degree that looked all too small in its case and the chance...

Making sense of social history.(New Topics And Historians)
September 22, 2003... [M]an is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.... The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present. Karl Marx (1) I Eric Hobsbawm was...

Resistance and the social history of Africa.(New Topics And Historians)
September 22, 2003... In late 1926, African workers fled from their positions as field hands on Portuguese-run maize farms in the central Mozambican districts of Manica and Chimoio. The workers, all male, were coerced recruits brought from Chemba, a Zambezi valley...

The forgotten compass of death: apocalypse then and now in the social history of South Africa.(New Topics And Historians)
September 22, 2003... Ten years after South Africa's transition from strife-torn apartheid to multiracial democracy, HIV/AIDS has superseded freedom struggles as the urgent matter of the day. (1) Untimely death, in other words, no longer looms as a residual outcome...

Memoir, social history and commitment: Eric Hobsbawm's interesting times.(New Topics And Historians)
September 22, 2003... Social history is today a rather anxious pursuit. By some measures it is the norm for historical research and understanding and the basis on which all serious historians proceed. Its assumptions about the proper subject matter of history--about...

Afterword: for further discussion: Conference on Social History October 22-24, 2004.
September 22, 2003... The articles in this special issue paint no single picture of the current status and future prospects of social history. They vary quite fundamentally between optimism and pessimism, though all suggest complexity. Further, as one Journal of...

Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. xviii plus 267 pp. $25.95 cloth). The title of historian Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn's latest book captures perfectly her subject and thesis. Lasch-Quinn believes that an army of "race...

Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Alain Cabantous. Translated by Eric Rauth. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. xi plus 288 pp.). Blasphemy, or the denunciation of God, has receded in the Western world over the past two centuries as a serious moral and legal...

Listening to Nineteenth-Century America.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Mark M. Smith (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 269 pp.). On New Year's Day, at the close of the Civil War, a Florida plantation mistress named Susan Bradford Eppes waited in bed for the familiar sound of the...

Teach Me Dreams: the Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Mechal Sobel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xv plus 368 pp. $35.00). Mechal Sobel's Teach Me Dreams will grip readers from the first page to the last, sweeping them up in her vision of the process of self-formation in the...

Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity and Power in the British Mediterranean.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Thomas W. Gallant (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. xv plus 252 pp. $40 cloth/$19 paper). Compared to the East and West Indies, the Middle East or Africa, the Ionian Islands occupy a relatively minor role in the...

The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By David A. Bell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv plus 304 pp.). David A. Bell's elegantly written and handsomely produced book offers many new insights into the origins of modern French nationalism. Perhaps the most...

Farm, Shop, Landing: the Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Martin Bruegel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. xiii plus 305 pp. $64.95 [cloth], $21.95 [paper]). A decade ago, and for over a decade before that, as part of a wider discussion of the emergence of American capitalism, there was...

The Social Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Cuba.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Sherry Johnson (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2001. x plus 239 pp. $55.00). Cuba in the late 18th century was a society in the throes of multiple transformations. In response to the English seizure of Havana in 1762...

Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840-1880.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2001. xiv plus 299 pp. $49.95). Studies in Theatre History and Culture Series, edited by Thomas Postlewait. The practice of theatre history, which became a serious...

Communion of Immigrants: a History of Catholics in America.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By James T. Fisher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. x plus 166pp. $9.95). The Catholic Church has been in a crisis since the late 1960s. It sometimes boils over and draws broad public scrutiny, such as in the ongoing clergy sexual...

Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-style in Modern America.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Bill Osgerby (Oxford: Berg, 2001. xii plus 232 pp.). Although a number of scholars have explored how hedonistic, consumer-oriented styles of masculinity were encouraged by magazines such as Esquire and Playboy, Bill Osgerby furthers this...

Enfants Terribles: Youth & Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945-1968.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Susan Weiner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. vii plus 251 pp. $38.00). Many of the most influential studies of twentieth-century European youth are works of cultural studies or draw on approaches from cultural studies....

An Improper Profession: Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Edited by Barbara T. Norton and Jehanne M. Gheith (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. xiii plus 321 pp.). Professions in Imperial Russia resembled the Continental model: they were education-based and state licensed. Unlike...

The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Eric Van Young. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xvii plus 702 pp. $75.00/cloth). The process of Mexican independence from Spain began with the 1810 uprising of Father Hidalgo and his plebeian followers and ended eleven years...

Time and Work in England: 1750-1830.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Hans-Joachim Voth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. vii plus 304 pp. $70.00). In this carefully researched book, a young economic historian addresses one of the key questions of early industrialization--how long did the English people...

The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Alan Gallay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xviii plus 444 pp.). Drawing on English, Spanish, and French sources, Alan Gallay has written a superb book on the Indian slave trade that played a central role in the emergence of...

Blue: The History of a Color.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Michel Pastoureau (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001 [originally Bleu: Histoire d'une couleur. Paris, 2000]. 216 pages). Michel Pastoureau, author of previous works on the symbolism and social function of color, has...

Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Elizabeth A. Fenn. (New York: Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. xiv plus 370 pp. $25.00). Well-informed students of the American Revolutionary era have long known that virulent, localized outbreaks of smallpox...

Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Sharla M. Fett (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiii plus 290 pp.). Historians of slavery have come a long ways since the days of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Stanley Elkins, even Eugene D. Genovese. An evolving...

Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660-1880.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000. xix plus 428pp. 25 [pounds sterling]). One lure to visit Britain is the country house. While massive Chatsworth and Blenheim are among the most publicized...

Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Stephen L. Harp (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xiii plus 356 pp. $42.00). The title of Stephen Harp's highly intelligent and engaging book connotes more than one might initially suspect. On the one hand,...

Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... By Stephen H. Norwood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii plus 328 pp. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper). Stephen H. Norwood's Strikebreaking and Intimidation is a wonderfully readable, evocative, and economical work of...