Journal of Social History articles from September 2007

Journal of Social History archives from September 2007

Analyzing the history of religious crime. Models of "passive" and "active" blasphemy since the medieval period.(SECTION I CRIME AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION)
September 22, 2007... This article provides a critical survey of the history and historiography of blasphemy placing this neglected subject within the wider history of sin, crime and criminality. In doing so it suggests a model of analysis which shows historical...

Expanding the compass of domestic violence in the Hanoverian metropolis.(SECTION I CRIME AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION)
September 22, 2007... What goes on behind closed doors? This is a question that nosy neighbours and their academic cousins, historians, have been asking for a very long time. Family historians among that lot have uncovered much about family social and economic life,...

Creating an alternative kinship: slavery, freedom, and nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban hijos naturales.(SECTION II RACE AND NATION)
September 22, 2007... Introduction In 1883, a free African laborer, Julio Fernandez, petitioned the Catholic Church of Cuba for acknowledgment of his paternity of two young children. In form, that request was typical of many others. Cuban men of the colonial...

Complexities of imagining Haiti: a study of national constitutions, 1801-1807.(SECTION II RACE AND NATION)
September 22, 2007... The first four national constitutions in Haiti (1801-1807) reflect a complex and contested dialogue among different factions, each trying to define Haiti in their own cultural terms. These constitutions emerged within the context of power...

"Men of colour": race, riots, and black firefighters' struggle for equality from the AFA to the Valiants.(SECTION II RACE AND NATION)(African Fire Association)
September 22, 2007... Fire! Few exclamations instinctively instill an intense, visceral reaction that conjures up terrifying images of one's home engulfed in flames, families left homeless, or worse, the loss of life. Benjamin Franklin recognized this potential...

Made in Miami: the development of the sportswear industry in South Florida, 1900-1960.(SECTION III CONSUMERISM, WORK AND EDUCATION)
September 22, 2007... While a number of scholars have examined the history of the textile industry in the South, the emergence of South Florida as a major locus of the production of clothing, particularly sportswear, has received limited empirical attention....

Vocational education, work culture, and the children of immigrants in 1930s Bridgeport.(SECTION III CONSUMERISM, WORK AND EDUCATION)(Bridgeport, Connecticut)
September 22, 2007... In 1917, the United States Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act mandating federal aid for vocational education. The law became an important catalyst for the expansion of vocational schooling throughout industrial America. While in 1918...

Gymnastic exercises, or "work wrapped in the gown of youthful joy": masculinities and the civilizing process in 19th century Hungary.(SECTION III CONSUMERISM, WORK AND EDUCATION)
September 22, 2007... The Subject and its Context The aim of this article is to highlight how masculine dispositions have changed in the course of the civilizing process, and how a major drive for change--modern man--was born in the 18-19th centuries. On the...

Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. By William H. Sewell, Jr. (The University of Chicago Press, 2005. xi plus 410 pp. $70.00 [hardcover]; $27.50 [paperback]). Logics of History is a fascinating and insightful book on...

American Behavioral History: An Introduction.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... American Behavioral History: An Introduction. Edited by Peter Stearns (New York: New York University Press, 2005. x plus 259 pp. $21.00). Behavioral history, apparently a new approach to social studies, seeks to explain patterns of...

Dominance By Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Dominance By Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission. By Michael Adas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 542 pp. $29.95). The title "Dominance By Design" conceivably might be misread to mean the...

Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. By Peter Fritzsche (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2004. pp. 268. $27.95). Starting point as well as result of this inspiring book is the abrupt beginning...

On Foot: A History of Walking.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... On Foot: A History of Walking. By Joseph A. Amato (New York: New York University Press, 2004. 333 pp.). In the fall semester, 2006, I directed two projects studying the relationship between pedestrian behavior and vehicles over time in the...

Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933. By Gideon Reuveni (New York and oxford: Berghahn books, 2006. xii plus 310 pp. $75.00). At a time when German history is awash with studies about consumption,...

Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965. By Linda Eisenmann (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. viii plus 280 pp.). The decade of the 1950s has become an increasingly interesting period for historians'...

Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven's Working Class, 1870-1940.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven's Working Class, 1870-1940. By Stephen Lassonde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xvi, 301 pp. $45.00). When studying immigrant Italian families in New Haven, Connecticut,...

Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America. By Janet Nolan (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. xv plus 191 pp. $45.00 cloth; $18.00 paperback). Janet Nolan's Servants of the Poor:...

To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. By Christopher Hilliard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 390 pp. $29.95). This monograph is a thoroughly researched, well-written study of writing by...

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. By Adam Hochschild (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. xi plus 468pp.). With Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild presents the first narrative history of...

Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations. By David Fort Godshalk (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xvi plus 365 pp.). At first glance, Veiled Visions, David Fort...

Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City. By Thelma Wills Foote (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. x plus 334 pp.). In Black and White Manhattan, Thelma Wills Foote uses race as a central...

The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State. By Mary Poole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xi +258 pp. $59.95, cloth; $22.50, paper). This is a long overdue book: since...

Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. By Nancy MacLean (New York and Cambridge, MA.: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2006. 496 pp.). For the past four decades, analysts have drawn a distinction...

Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. By LeeAnn Whites (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. vii plus 244 pp. cloth $75.00, paper $24.95). The title, Gender Matters, indicates both the topics addressed...

Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935. By Leigh Ann Wheeler (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 251 pp.). This book fills an important gap in historical understanding about...

Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture. By Rachel Devlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 254 pp. $19.95 paper. $49.95 cloth). From the perspective of today's relentless...

Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920. By Paul R. Deslandes (Bloomington & Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2005. ix plus 319 pp.). Oxbridge Men is a study of undergraduate masculinity at...

Men, Women and Property in England, 1780-1870.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Men, Women and Property in England, 1780-1870. By R. J. Morris (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv plus 445 pp. [pounds sterling]55, $95.00). This work by Morris, a highly respected social/economic and urban...

Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity and Conflict.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity and Conflict. Edited by John K. Walton (Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2005. viii plus 244 pp.). A collection of independent chapters that began as conference papers, this volume offers...

Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina. By Richard D. Starnes (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005. xiv plus 231 pp.). Each year about twenty million motorists drive along the Blue Ridge...

Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780-1830.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780-1830. By Karin Wurst (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. ix plus 485 pp. $59.95). Karin Wurst takes fashion seriously. The dissemination of...

Seduction of Culture in German History.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Seduction of Culture in German History. By Wolf Lepenies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. viii plus 260 pp.). Wolf Lepenies is a well-known German professor of sociology at the Free University of Berlin who has spent several...

Crime et culture au XIXe siecle.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Crime et culture au XIXe siecle. By Dominique Kalifa (Paris: Perrin, 2005. 331 pp.). The question of crime obsessed nineteenth-century French society. This statement is Dominque Kalifa's starting point for Crime et culture au XIXe siecle,...

Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City. By Marilynn S. Johnson (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. 365 pp. $19). One of the fundamental features of the modern state is its monopoly of legitimate violence in society. At home,...

A Mad, Bad, & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... A Mad, Bad, & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846. By Boyd Hilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xxvi plus 757 pp. $45). Hilton's questioning whether Englishmen who lived during the years 1783-1846 deserved the label 'mad, bad, and...

The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study. By Stuart J. Borsch (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xii plus 195 pp. $50.00). Borsch's book probably contains a few nuggets of gold (as opposed to fool's gold). Yet the...

At Home in the Hoosier Hills: Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810-1870.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... At Home in the Hoosier Hills: Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810-1870. By Richard F. Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. xi plus 274 pp. $35.00). In At Home in the Hoosier Hills, Richard F. Nation...