The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from December 1999

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from December 1999

Individual Life Chances, 1850--1910: A Norwegian-American Example.(Statistical Data Included)
December 22, 1999... John W. Slemmons' household engaged in the cooperative enterprise that typified the family farm in the late nineteenth century. Writing in 1892 about his Johnson County, Iowa, farm home, he recorded in his diary, "boys planted potatoes......

Jews in the Criminal-Justice System of Early Modern Germany.(Statistical Data Included)
December 22, 1999... The mistreatment of minorities under the guise of legality is not a twentieth-century phenomenon; nor is it confined to any particular group of people or country. In America, reports of race-influenced police brutalities, tampering with...

Urban Labor Markets, In-Migration, and Demographic Growth: Bremen, 1815-1914.(Statistical Data Included)
December 22, 1999... Despite the significance of geographical mobility in influencing the long-run development of European society, its historical reconstruction remains fragmentary. Traditionally, cities were centers of multiple migratory paths, but research on...

The Origins of African-American Culture.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South, 1526-1830. By Michael A. Gomez (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 370 pp. $18.95 Few aspects of American...

Society in Time and Space.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Society in Time and Space: A Geographical Perspective on Change. By Robert A. Dodgshon (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 230 pp. $59.95 cloth $19.95 paper Dodgshon believes it possible and fruitful to state general propositions...

The Emperor's Mirror: Understanding Cultures through Primary Sources.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Emperor's Mirror: Understanding Cultures through Primary Sources. By Russell J. Barber and Frances F. Berdan (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1998) 351 pp. $45.00 cloth $24.95 paper The Emperor's Mirror is a clearly written,...

Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another. By Spencer R. Weart (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998) 424 pp. $35.00 One of the most significant findings in international relations is that no two well-established...

Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers. Edited by Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 301 pp. $59.95 cloth $22.95 paper According to the introduction, this book draws on...

Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine. By Jack D. Pressman (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 555 pp. $49.95 One could say, with Pressman's aid, that the era of psychosurgery ended with the introduction of...

Handbook of Administrative History.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Handbook of Administrative History. By Jos C. N. Raadschelders (New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 1998) 372 pp. $39.95 Can administrative science contribute to the writing of administrative history? This is the question that...

Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens. By Cheryl Anne Cox (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998) 253 pp. $45.00 The focus of Cox's book is the relationship between law and...

Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition. By Erich S. Gruen (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 335 pp. $38.00 One seldom encounters a scholarly work such as Heritage and Hellenism that is such a pleasure to...

The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles. By Ronald C. Finucane (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997) 268 pp. $49.95 Since the publication of his Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England...

Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. By Jean-Claude Schmitt, Jr. (trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan) (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998) 290 pp. $33.00 This is not a book about ghosts per se but about...

Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages. By Jean Favier (trans. Caroline Higgett) (New York, Holmes & Meier, 1998) 390 pp. $39.95 Favier is one of the leading historians of late Medieval France. He has published a...

Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England. By Robin Fleming (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 548 pp. $95.00 This volume is a follow-up to Fleming's Kings and Lords in Conquest England...

Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England. By Tim Stretton (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 271 pp. $59.95 In this revealing monograph, Stretton sheds much light on women in the law courts of later sixteenth-century England....

Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650-1730.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650-1730. By Paul D. Halliday (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 393 pp. $69.95 This book is an important contribution to the work on English politics after...

Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830. By Elaine A. Reynolds (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998), 238 pp. $49.50 Building partly on the work of others, but mostly on her own...

Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854. By Christopher Hamlin (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 368 pp. $64.95 Hamlin's scrupulous examination of Edwin Chadwick's sanitation campaign attacks...

The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750-1900.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750-1900. By Mary Peckham Magray (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 182 pp. $45.00 In most ways, this volume is a pleasure to read: It boasts...

The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought. By Jacques Roger (ed. Keith R. Benson; trans. Robert Ellrich) (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 760 pp. $75.00 Specialists have exploited Roger's Sciences de la Vie (Paris,...

Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy, AD 400-1000.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy, AD 400-1000. By Paolo Squatriti (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. $54.95 Squatriti considers the public control of water from norms of Roman law and administration to mainly private...

Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia 1140-1200.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia 1140-1200. By Thomas N. Bisson (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 186 pp. $35.00 cloth $18.95 paper The "power" in Bisson's title is that of the count-king of...

The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany. By Susan C. Karant-Nunn (New York, Routledge, 1997) 282 pp. $74.95 The very title of this book would hardly have been conceivable a few years ago. In viewing the...

The Freudian Calling: Early Viennese Psychoanalysis and the Pursuit of Cultural Science.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Freudian Calling: Early Viennese Psychoanalysis and the Pursuit of Cultural Science. By Louis Rose (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1998) 228 pp. $24.95 paper This unusual little book approaches the well-worn field of early...

Kaiser and Fuhrer: A Comparative Study of Personality and Politics.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Kaiser and Fuhrer: A Comparative Study of Personality and Politics. By Robert G. L. Waite (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998) 511 pp. $50.00 Waite's comparative psychobiographical study of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler seeks...

Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950. By Don Kalb (Durham, Duke University Press, 1998) 339 pp. $64.95 cloth $21.95 paper Kalb's book is an attempt to revive mainstream labor...

Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. By David Henige (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) 532 pp. $47.95 The major premises of Henige's extended historiographical essay are well-known to scholars who...

Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700-1835.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700-1835. By Theda Perdue (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1998) 252 pp. $40.00 This book examines changes in Cherokee gender roles from the period of the Cherokees' sustained contact with...

The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and "Discovery" in the Southeast.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and "Discovery" in the Southeast. Edited by Patricia Galloway (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 447 pp. $60.00 This valuable book concerns the first European expedition,...

North American Exploration II: A Continent Defined.(Review)
December 22, 1999... North American Exploration. II. A Continent Defined. By John Logan Allen (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 472 pp. $75.00 This collection of six essays surveys the European exploration of North America from the mid-sixteenth...

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. By Ira Berlin (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 512 pp. $29.95 Our understanding of American slavery has been radically altered during the course of...

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. By Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 703 pp. $49.95 cloth $21.95 paper The field of slavery studies, which had...

Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality. By Paul Goodman (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 303 pp. $35.00 Goodman made great scholarly contributions with his studies of the connection between political...

The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. By Julie Roy Jeffrey (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 311 pp. $45.00 cloth $18.95 paper Two splendid works on ordinary women...

Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. By Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 285 pp. $49.95 cloth $16.95 paper In Come...

Seizing the New Day: African Americans in Post-Civil War Charleston.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Seizing the New Day: African Americans in Post-Civil War Charleston. By Winston L. Jenkins (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1998) 238 pp. $29.95 Despite the substantial literature about South Carolina Reconstruction--including...

Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State. By Robert C. Lieberman (Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998)306 PP. $45.00 Lieberman is a practitioner of the new institutionalism in social science. Since the...

The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. By Elliott West (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 1998) 422 Pp. $34.95 In this compelling work of historical imagination, West uses the late antebellum Colorado...

Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765--1900.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765--1900. By James L. Huston (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1998) 482 pp. $65.00 This interdisciplinary study of American economic thought...

A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948.(Review)
December 22, 1999... A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948. By Bryant Simon (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 345 pp. $49.95 cloth paper A Fabric of Defeat is an excellent study of the politics of South...

Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. By Nancy Isenberg (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 319 Pp. $45.00 cloth $16.95 paper This book provides the closest reading yet of the arguments of antebellum woman's rights...

Controlling Vice: Regulating Brothel Prostitution in St. Paul 1865-1883.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Controlling Vice: Regulating Brothel Prostitution in St. Paul 1865-1883. By Joel Best (Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1998) 175 pp. $24.95 cloth $16.95 paper Controlling Vice is an important and readable contribution to what is...

The Virtues of Liberalism.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... The Virtues of Liberalism. By James T. Kloppenberg (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 240 pp. $35.00 Historians and political theorists share a relationship not unlike that of the taciturn neighbors of rural New England foildore....

An Emotional History of the United States.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... An Emotional History of the United States. Edited by Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York, New York University Press, 1998) 476 PP. $60 cloth $22.50 paper The field of the history of emotions began in 1985 with an essay by Peter N....

African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory. By Gertrude Jacinta Fraser (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 287 pp. $39.95 In recent years, a plethora of autobiographical accounts, oral...

The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880-1990.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880-1990. By Dora L. Costa (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998) 234 pp. $40.00 The Evolution of Retirement is an economist's effort to explain why the labor-force...

A Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People's Right to Know.(Review)
December 22, 1999... A Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People's Right to Know. Edited by Athan G. Theoharis' (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1998) 245 pp. $29.98 This timely book consists of ten essays by scholars and journalists who...

Changing Patterns of Voting in the Northern United States: Electoral Realignment, 1952-1996.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Changing Patterns of Voting in the Northern United States: Electoral Realignment, 1952-1996. By Robert W. Speel (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) 218 pp. $35.00 Speel believes that beneath the voter volatility and...

The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.--Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.--Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era. By Kurkpatrick Dorsey (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1998) 311 pp. $35.00 In The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy, Dorsey...

Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain. Edited by Susan Shroeder (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1998) 200 pp. $45.00 cloth $19.95 paper Latin American historians have traditionally maintained that Spanish rule imposed...

The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil During the Export Boom, 1850-1930.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil During the Export Boom, 1850-1930. Edited by Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1998) 271 pp. $25.00 cloth $13.95 paper A few years ago, a...

Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile's El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile's El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951. By Thomas Miller Klubock (Durham, Duke University Press, 1998) 363 pp. $59.95 cloth paper $19.95 paper In 1904, William Braden, a United...

Senegambia and the African Slave Trade.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Senegambia and the African Slave Trade. By Boubacar Barry (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 358 pp. $59.95 cloth $18.95 paper Since Curtin's 1975 examination of Senegambia, studies of precolonial Africa have divided broadly (and...

Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929. By Allen Dye (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 343 pp. $55.00 This well-crafted and impressive econometric study of the Cuban...

The Political Ecology of Bananas: Contract Faming, Peasants, and Agrarian Change in the Eastern Caribbean.(Review)
December 22, 1999... The Political Ecology of Bananas: Contract Faming, Peasants, and Agrarian Change in the Eastern Caribbean. By Lawrence S. Grossman (Chapel Hill, University of North Caroling Press, 1998) 268 pp. $49.95 cloth $19.95 paper This is a...

The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. By Timothy Brook (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 320 pp. $40.00 Brook classifies his entertaining and generously illustrated book as "cultural" history. It...

ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age.(Review)
December 22, 1999... ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. By Andre Gunder Frank (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 461 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper Frank justifiably calls this his best book (v). It combines arguments and evidence from...

Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology and the World Market.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology and the World Market. By Sucheta Mazumdar (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 657 pp. $49.50 This long-awaited book comprises three overlapping projects. First, it is a...

Modernity and Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Modernity and Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East. By Juan R. I. Cole (New York, Columbia University Press, i997) 264 pp. $47.50 cloth $19.50 paper Cole's book illuminates significant aspects of...

In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine.(Review)
December 22, 1999... In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine. By Judith E. Tucker (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 221 pp. $40.00 In the House of the Law is an important, interesting, and first-rate work....

Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850--1950.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850--1950. By Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 384 pp. $64.95 cloth $24.95 paper With this wide-ranging set of essays,...