The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from December 1997

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from December 1997

"To free them from binding": women in the late medieval English parish.
December 22, 1997... Historians generally study the late medieval English parish in order to understand the Reformation. Consequently, they view the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries only as a period on the verge of major change from the perspective of later...

Generation(s) of human capital: literacy in American families, 1830-1875.
December 22, 1997... That human capital has played a critical role in the development of the American economy is generally accepted. Investments in people paid a handsome return through a productive and mobile work force. One indication of these investments in...

Soldiers, psychiatrists, and combat trauma.
December 22, 1997... In his memoirs of the Great War, Sassoon remembers hospital nights when "each man was back in his doomed sector of a horror-stricken Front Line, where the panic and stampede of some ghastly experience was re-enacted among the livid faces of the...

Wine and brandy production in colonial Peru: a historical and archaeological investigation.
December 22, 1997... Peru's colonial wine "industry" was born of necessity in the late sixteenth century, when it became increasingly apparent - in Spain and its New World colonies alike - that the homeland was incapable of supplying the colonies with adequate wine...

Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era.
December 22, 1997... Efforts to bring together the disciplines of anthropology and history are not new and probably will continue for a long time to come; both disciplines are constantly changing in response to developments inside and outside the academy -...

Aging in the Past: Demography, Society and Old Age.
December 22, 1997... Almost a quarter-century ago, Laslett and Richard Wall coedited a volume of essays that redefined historical interpretations of the family.(1) Laslett and his colleagues discovered that few extended families showed up in household listings from...

Stature, Living Conditions, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History.
December 22, 1997... The use of auxological data by historians has exploded during the last twenty years, and for good reason. Many historical populations have left behind abundant sources of information about the heights and ages of their citizens, providing...

Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action.
December 22, 1997... Collective action is one of the historical topics the study of which has demonstrated the overlapping interests of social history and sociological theory. This book examines two of the approaches that have marked recent work in the field, the...

Coordination and Information: Historical Perspectives on the Organization of Enterprise.
December 22, 1997... In 1990, Lamoreaux, Raff, Thomas K. McCraw, and Peter Temin organized a Conference on Microeconomic History at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The conference papers dealt with how large corporations handle information, focusing...

The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change.
December 22, 1997... Has the nation-state had its day? There are enough social scientists and politicians who sense an erosion of sovereignty in the territorial state to sustain a discussion about new ways to organize domestic and international politics. Spruyt, a...

The European Peasant Family and Society: Historical Studies.
December 22, 1997... Ten essays from this collection deal with peasant reproductive strategies in changing economic environments, ranging from Eastern Europe to the Atlantic; one considers peasants as consumers; and the other, included for no apparent reason, deals...

The Rise and Fall Of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700.
December 22, 1997... It is difficult for an immigrant to participate fully in unfamiliar national festivals. Nine years after crossing the Atlantic, I still struggle with the rituals of the American year. Yet, I "celebrate" the holidays because my daughter was born...

Prices, Food, and Wages in Scotland: 1550-1780.
December 22, 1997... It is a joy and a delight to review a book that is so masterful in the treatment of its subject as to engage the reader directly and immediately by its arguments. This is the best book in price history I have ever opened. It deals fluently and...

Social Change in the Age of the Enlightenment: Edinburgh, 1660-1760.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... In Social Change in the Age of the Enlightenment, Houston argues that the most significant changes in modern Edinburgh occurred roughly between the years 1720 and 1760. Though sensitive to the continuities in this urban world, Houston's focus...

The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660-1780.
December 22, 1997... For the first time during the past decade, historians have commenced a serious empirical and interpretive enquiry into the making of the British middle class. As Smail notes, most of the significant studies of this problem have concentrated on...

Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries: 1840-1880.
December 22, 1997... Dupree's study of family - in the broad context of work, neighborhood, and state and philanthropic welfare institutions - makes a strong case for focusing on an entire community, rather than on individual industries or separate occupations, as...

The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class.
December 22, 1997... Clark's big book is a deeply researched work of social and economic history. In conscious imitation of Thompson, she deals with the making of the English working class in three major urban areas - London, Glasgow, and Lancashire - from 1790 to...

Work, Gender, and Family in Victorian England.
December 22, 1997... Clark's big book is a deeply researched work of social and economic history. In conscious imitation of Thompson, she deals with the making of the English working class in three major urban areas - London, Glasgow, and Lancashire - from 1790 to...

Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780-1939.
December 22, 1997... O Grada's new economic history of Ireland is more a report on the current state of research in a field than a definitive synthesis of a subject. Readers who want to understand from this status report how Irish economic history has gotten to...

The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791-1798.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... The imminent anniversary of the tragic United Irishmen is blessed with a number of excellent studies of the 1798 Rebellion. This monograph takes its place as one of the best for diligent research and sound scholarship. For years, the rebellion...

The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... More than a century after Robert Koch's discovery of the causative agent, tuberculosis remains a killer. Since the 1980s, it has grown in ferocity, accounting for three million deaths a year and finding fertile new soil in the global spread of...

The Private Science of Louis Pasteur.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... This study of Pasteur is not a sweeping or exhaustive biography. Rather, it is a reassessment of his life and career in light of the availability, since the 1970s, of Pasteur's unpublished laboratory notebooks at the Bibliotheque Nationale in...

Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metal-Working Industries, 1914-1939.
December 22, 1997... The wartime process of "deskilling" or "dilution," by which less-skilled women replaced men in munitions factories, is not uncharted territory, but rarely has it received such close, or explicitly gendered, attention. Juxtaposing how employers...

Lucca 1430-1494: The Reconstruction of an Italian City-Republic.
December 22, 1997... Lucca has recently attracted the attention of a cluster of Anglo-American scholars (Meek, Blomquist, Osheim, Green), who have rewritten the late medieval history of this Tuscan town by exploiting its rich archival fondi.(1) Now joining this...

The District of the Green Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... Neighborhood studies take for granted (1) the continuing need to write "history from below" and (2) the premise that neighborhoods are the fundamental social structure. They see family and locality as the quarks of the social universe. The hard...

From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain.
December 22, 1997... Compared with Europe north of the Pyrenees, where the study of attitudes avant le mort began two decades ago with major works by Aries, Chaunu, and Vovelle, only recently has death and dying attracted historians of Spain.(1) The subject...

Pastors and Parishioners in Wurttemberg during the Late Reformation: 1581-1621.
December 22, 1997... This study takes its inspiration mainly from Bernard Vogler's magisterial investigation of the early Protestant clergy in the Rhineland - Le Clerge protestant rhenan au siecle de la reforme, 1555-1619 (Paris, 1976). Whereas Vogler exhausted...

Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950.
December 22, 1997... This complex and detailed analysis of German sex reform constitutes a significant contribution to a growing literature on the politicization and rationalization of sex and reproduction in the twentieth century. The broad-based movement for...

Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750.
December 22, 1997... The scholars of the Republic of Letters - the set of Huguenot refugees centered in Holland but reaching across Europe between 1680 and 1750 - have been overshadowed, in the history of ideas, by the more dramatic and dynamic intellectual...

Peasantry to Capitalism: Western Ostergotland in the Nineteenth Century.
December 22, 1997... In this ambitious and thoroughly researched book, Hoppe and Langton, two specialists in human geography, have attempted to apply the methods and concepts of time-geography to the study of the change from "peasant" to "capitalist" economies....

Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity.
December 22, 1997... For twenty years or more, a large number of English-speaking historians have been conducting and publishing research on the history of Russian labor in the period 1880 through 1941. Thirteen of them joined a Hungarian colleague to produce the...

The Development of Local Public Services, 1650-1860: Lessons from Middletown, Connecticut.
December 22, 1997... Potentially an interesting subject, the political economy of town and city governments is one of the least-studied aspects of early New England local history. In their massive assault on the past of the New England town, historians have focused...

Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... Of all the stereotypes that have been attached to Native Americans, that of the "drunken Indian" has been perhaps the most enduring. Unfortunately, it has its roots in tragic realities. Colonial documents report Indian delegates getting drunk...

In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... Centering on the taverns of Massachusetts, particularly Boston, from approximately 1680 through 1780, this intensively researched and well-written work bristles with insights into an evolving sociopolitical culture crucial to early America. As...

Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a way of Life: Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... By 1860, Mississippi had become the most "Southern" of all the states of the Old South. Largely rural and agricultural, with a black slave majority, Mississippi even led the South in cotton production. Yet, Mississippi's "Southernness" did not...

The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America.
December 22, 1997... The message, or controlling idea, in Conkin's book is suggested in its title: "Reformed" or "evangelical" Christianity, mostly of Calvinist derivation, remained central to the American culture and power structure through and beyond the 1850s....

Natives and Newcomers: Ethnic Southerners and Southern Ethics.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... This gracefully written book traces the movement of southern society from ethnically diverse to biracial and back to ethnically diverse again during the course of three centuries. Tindall makes three main points: During the colonial period the...

New South-New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South.
December 22, 1997... In this brief volume adapted from the 1990 Walter Lynwood Lectures, Woodman explores in rich detail the evolution of the legal bases for plantation agriculture in the American South after the Civil War. For Woodman, an eminent historian of the...

Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... Touring, or vacationing, common enough today, became an earmark of middle-class refinement and status during the nineteenth century. The desire to escape from the stress and unpleasantness of the new industrial world increased in conjunction...

From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820-1990.
December 22, 1997... Drawing upon a wide range of studies on global economic development, colonialism, nation building, and individual communities, this masterful synthesis advances our understanding of the gendered experience of immigration during nearly two...

The Origins of the American High School.
December 22, 1997... Until recently, the rise and development of free public high-school education has been depicted as part of the progress of American society toward democratic ideals. In the 1960s, however, a group of "revisionist" historians questioned this...

Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939.
December 22, 1997... Between 1900 and the 1930s, 1 million Mexicans immigrated to the Southwest and other places where no Mexicans had ever gone before. The population of Mexican origin in the United States increased threefold. This dynamic movement was cut short...

Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution.
December 22, 1997... Greenberg's memoir of his work at the Legal Defense Fund, which began as the NAACP's legal arm, relates the success of the organization that spearheaded the civil rights revolution. The LDF, with Thurgood Marshall at its helm during what John...

Crimes, Constables, and Courts: Order and Transgression in a Canadian City, 1816-1970.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... This ambitious study encapsulates more than 150 years of development in the criminal justice system in Hamilton, Ontario. Its primary theme is the shift from local and personal to centralized and professional administrative structures. Within...

Law and Transformation of Aztec Culture: 1500-1700.
December 22, 1997... Kellogg has been carving a niche for herself in Aztec studies through her innovative approach to what happened to Aztec society - especially, to Aztec women - when the conquering Spanish began to negotiate a permanent compliance with European...

Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... Boyer's engaging book offers an expansive window onto the texture of daily life in colonial Mexico. Treating bigamists, not as deviants, but as representative of the masses of ordinary colonial Mexican people, Boyer makes extensive use of the...

Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... In Imperial Identities, Lorcin examines the pro-Kabyle, anti-Arab stereotypes created and developed by the French in Algeria between 1830 and 1900 - the first seventy years of French colonialism in North Africa. These stereotypes not only...

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: The Mortality Cost of Colonizing Liberia in the Nineteenth Century.
December 22, 1997... Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is an example of three-way interdisciplinary history. McDaniel has written a book partly about migration history. His introductory chapter deals with migration from Africa by way of the slave trade. The second chapter...

Colonial Psychiatry and "The African Mind."
December 22, 1997... This heavily documented, archival history of psychiatry, or "ethnopsychiatry," in "Africa" - largely confined to a small number of sub-Saharan countries - can be of keen interest to historians, social scientists, and psychiatrists for three...

The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918-1970.
December 22, 1997... A thoughtful tribe of British-trained social anthropologists entered Africa, beginning in the 1930s. They were organized into dominant moieties that favored patrilineality, were virilocal, and were much more ascriptive than they acknowledged....

Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... Reno has written an important and useful book on corruption and decline in Sierra Leone and, to a lesser extent, in Liberia and the rest of West Africa. The aim of the book is to understand how a state actually fails and what happens when the...

Between Two Worlds: The Construction of Ottoman State.
December 22, 1997... Since the publication of Herbert A. Gibbons, The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford, 1916), the evolution of a petty principality of uncertain origins in northwest Anatolia into a major empire has been an ongoing topic of debate among...

My Enemy's Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination, 1900-1948.
December 22, 1997... Eisenberg's study of Zionist-Maronite relations provides documentary evidence of a singularly important dimension of Israel's pre-1948 Maronite policy. Although it is a far more modest and incomplete analysis than some of the major works that...

Redefining the Egyptian Nation: 1930-1945.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... Redefining the Egyptian Nation is a sequel to the authors' Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900-1930 (New York, 1986). Taken together, the two volumes provide a comprehensive and authoritative view of the main...

Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1997... This is an important collection of articles that demonstrates the usefulness of comparative history in addressing a phenomenon that transcends national boundaries. Birnbaum and Katznelson have brought together a group of social scientists and...

To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War.
December 22, 1997... In this timely book, Marshall - an economic historian - provides a compelling explanation for the outbreak of the Pacific war: the competition between the United States and Japan for the control of strategically vital raw materials of Southeast...

The Making of a Japanese Periphery: 1750-1920.
December 22, 1997... Until recently, the themes of commercial and economic life had all but disappeared from the study of early modern Japan. Neither William Hauser's Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade (Cambridge,...

Capitalism From Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery.
December 22, 1997... Until recently, the themes of commercial and economic life had all but disappeared from the study of early modern Japan. Neither William Hauser's Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade (Cambridge,...

The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940.
December 22, 1997... Chandavarkar's thesis for his book was originally set out in a 1981 article on "Workers' Politics and the Mill Districts in Bombay between the Wards," (Modern Asian Studies, XV [1981], 603-647). In that article and in his current book, he seeks...

Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947.
December 22, 1997... This is a peculiar book, most especially for its methodology. Perhaps 80 percent of it reads as though it had been researched and written in the early 1970s, during the heyday of Anil Seal. The appearance of a ferociously traditional, detailed...