Journal of Social History articles from September 2006

Journal of Social History archives from September 2006

"It is his first offense. We might as well let him go": homicide and criminal justice in Chicago, 1875-1920.(SECTION I CRIME AND SOCIAL IMPACT)
September 22, 2006... Chicago's Pleasant Place erupted in violence on April 23, 1907, when John Nesczuk began work on a fence along the property line behind his house. Nesczuk's neighbor, John Wijas, complained that the fence intruded into his garden. "What are you...

Insecurity, outlawry and social order: banditry in China's Heilongjiang frontier region, 1900-1931.
September 22, 2006... Banditry poses a major social problem for frontier societies. A sparsely populated land that lacks effective jurisdiction provides room for bandits to emerge and maneuver. In China's northeasternmost province of Heilongjiang, which borders on...

Writing modern selves: literacy and the French working class in the early nineteenth century.(SECTION II WORKING CLASS: ACTION AND EXPRESSION)
September 22, 2006... In the closing pages of his memoirs which were written between 1821 and 1830, the carpenter Jacques Etienne Bede directly addressed those he expected would be the audience for his text--both master artisans and journeymen workers. Bede focused...

From resistance to collective action in a Shanghai socialist "model community": from the late 1940s to early 1970s.
September 22, 2006... Drawing on intensive ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on a Chinese community, this essay attempts to explore the trajectory through which a group of self-interested inhabitants became enthusiastic participants in a series of...

When community comes home to roost: the southern milltown as Lost Cause.(Cooleemee)
September 22, 2006... 'Community' remains something of a mantra for social historians. Not only as a favored unit of analysis--as in the perennial community study--but often as a practical, public history project, the recovery or reconstruction of community carries...

Becoming Jewish in early modern France: documents on Jewish community-building in seventeenth-century Bayonne and Peyrehorade.
September 22, 2006... The history of Sephardi Jews in southwestern France began with the establishment in the mid-sixteenth century of small enclaves of Iberian refugees in the regions of Les Landes and the Pyrenees-Atlantiques. The settlers, most of whom immigrated...

Alfred Packer's world: risk, responsibility, and the place of experience in mountain culture, 1873-1907.
September 22, 2006... On the morning of April 16, 1874, the bedraggled figure of a lone prospector appeared at the Los Pinos Indian Agency near Gunnison, Colorado. Asking for a drink of whiskey, the man said that he and five others had left a larger party of miners...

Review essay: re-membering the past.(The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975)(The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class)(Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain)(The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Likes of Us. A Biography of the White Working Class. By Michael Collins (London: Granta Books, 2004. 274 pp.). The Long Sexual Revolution. English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975. By Hera Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press,...

Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. By Steven Mintz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. v plus 445 pp. $29.95). The blurbs on the back of the book jacket come from commanding figures in the field, and they all converge...

Representation of Childhood and Youth in Early China.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Representation of Childhood and Youth in Early China. By Anne Behnke Kinney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. vii plus 294 pp.). The study of Chinese childhood is a fairly new field. Earlier, in 2002 Anne Kinney published an...

A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China. By Ping-chen Hsiung (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. xvi plus 351 pp. $70.00). "Tender voyage" is a Buddhist image that aptly evokes the fragility and vulnerability...

Discovering Child Poverty: The Creation of a Policy Agenda from 1800 to the Present.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Discovering Child Poverty: The Creation of a Policy Agenda from 1800 to the Present. By Lucinda Platt (Bristol, UK: The Policy Press, 2005. vi plus 143 pp. $23.95). In his 1999 lecture at Oxford University, "Beveridge Revisited: A Welfare...

Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960. By Stephen Robertson (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Stephen Robertson's Crimes Against Children is an important...

Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920. By Melissa R. Klapper (New York: New York University Press, 2005. x plus 309 pp. $45.00). Drawing on the voices of adolescent Jewish girls in the United States from 1860 to 1920, this book...

How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood. By Jane H. Hunter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 478 pp.). The story of how "young ladies" became "girls" is, as Jane Hunter tells it in her book of the...

The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783-1810.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783-1810. By James A. McMillin (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 207 pp. +.1 CD-ROM, $39.95). Less is known of the details of US slave voyages than...

Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720-1835.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720-1835. By David J. Libby (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. xvii plus 163 pp. $40.00). If one had visited Natchez in the recent past, he would have found a relatively sleepy little town,...

Race, Class and Power in the Building of Richmond, 1870-1920.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Race, Class and Power in the Building of Richmond, 1870-1920. By Steven J. Hoffman (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2004. vi plus 232 pp.). In Race, Class and Power in the Building of Richmond, 1870-1920, Steven J. Hoffman...

The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New Southern City.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New Southern City. By Gregory Mixon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. xi plus 197 pp.). In a slim volume of less than 200 pages, Gregory Mixon has constructed an excellent...

Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929-1933.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929-1933. By Pamela E. Swett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xvi plus 337 pp.). Many of our current understandings of how the Nazi regime functioned after 1933...

From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1965.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1965. By Jennifer Mittelstadt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiii plus 267 pp. $49.95, cloth; $19.95, paper). Jennifer Mittlelstadt,...

Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917. By Jane Burbank (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004. xxxiii plus 375 pp. $49.95). This excellent study of peasant use of township courts brings...

Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. By Eiko Ikegami (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv plus 460 pp.). Through an analysis of aesthetic networks in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1867),...

Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900: Volume I, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900: Volume I, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru. By Carlos A. Forment (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xxix plus 454 pp.). This impressive work of both research...

Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops. By Robert J.S. Ross (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. xii plus 396pp. $19.95 Pb.). When I was growing up buying clothes often led to the humming of the jingle, "look...

The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown, U.S.A.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown, U.S.A. By Lisa M. Fine (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. 256pp.). Scholars, like everyone else, inevitably respond to their cultural milieu. Lisa Fine's excellent study...

Rats and Revolutionaries: The Labour Movement in Australia and New Zealand, 1890-1940.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... "Rats and Revolutionaries": The Labour Movement in Autralia and New Zealand 1880-1940. By James Bennett (Dunedin: Otago History Series, University of Otago Press, 2004. 214 pp. NZ$39.95). The old Imperial history treated each colony as part...

Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modem Florida.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modem Florida. By Gary R. Mormino (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. xvii plus 457 pp. $34.95). Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams is the thirty-sixth monograph published...

The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850. By Peter Guardino (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. ix plus 405 pp. $23.95). Peter Guardino's new book reflects some of the most interesting and innovative trends in...

Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West, 1890-2000.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West, 1890-2000. By Cas Wouters (London: Sage Publications, 2004. ix plus 188 pp. $99.95). In Sex and Manners, Cas Wouters presents part of a larger comparative study of change in...

Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s. By Christina Cogdell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. ix plus 328 pp.). In this provocative study, art historian Christina Cogdell links eugenic ideology with...

A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels and Systems of Thought.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels and Systems of Thought. By Stephen Kern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 437 pp. $29.95). With A Cultural History of Causality, Stephen Kern sets out to undertake what...

The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. By Mary Ting Yi Lui (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. xiii plus 298 pp.). Using an array of sources ranging...

English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modern Prison, 1850-1920.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modem Prison, 1850-1920. By Alyson Brown (Suffolk: The Boy-dell Press, 2003. vii plus 205pp.). Alyson Brown's English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture...

Lords of Misrule: Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Lords of Misrule: Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain. By Antony Taylor (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. xii plus 233 pp.). As the British government dismantles the historic...

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaiba, 1580-1822.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaiba, 1580-1822. By Alida C. Metcalf (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xxi plus 280 pp. $22.95). First published in 1992 by the University of California Press, the...

Reluctant Pioneers: China's Expansion Northward, 1644-1937.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Reluctant Pioneers: China's Expansion Northward, 1644-1937. By James Reardon-Anderson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. xvii plus 288 pp. $60.00). In the past two decades an influential body of research has emerged on Qing...

Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe. By Avraham Grossman. Trans. Jonathan Chipman (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004. xv plus 329 pp. $29.95). This important and pioneering book presents a panoramic overview of...