The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from January 1994

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from January 1994

Voter turnout among European immigrants to the United States.
January 1, 1994... Studies of electoral participation in the United States have repeatedly found that: (i) turnout is positively related to socioeconomic status (whether measured by income, education, or occupation), and (2) turnout is lower among newly...

Height, nutrition and mortality risk reconsidered.
January 1, 1994... Recent excursions in anthropometric history have sought to reconstruct the nutritional status of prior populations by measuring height at ages when growth has been, or is nearly, completed. The idea that height may serve as a proxy for...

The nutritional status of French students.
January 1, 1994... The effort of anthropometric historians to unearth the broad patterns of human biological well-being is now too well-known to need detailed reiteration. Less acknowledged, however, is that French historians in the Annales tradition were among...

Background to Discovery: Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook.
January 1, 1994... European exploration of the northwestern approaches to North America came relatively late compared with the probes made by seafaring nations into the north and south Atlantic and the south Pacific regions. The motives, however, remained fairly...

Bering's Voyages: The Reports from Russia.
January 1, 1994... European exploration of the northwestern approaches to North America came relatively late compared with the probes made by seafaring nations into the north and south Atlantic and the south Pacific regions. The motives, however, remained fairly...

The Voyage of Sutil and Mexicana, 1792: The Last Spanish Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America.
January 1, 1994... European exploration of the northwestern approaches to North America came relatively late compared with the probes made by seafaring nations into the north and south Atlantic and the south Pacific regions. The motives, however, remained fairly...

In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science, and Empire, 1780-1801.
January 1, 1994... European exploration of the northwestern approaches to North America came relatively late compared with the probes made by seafaring nations into the north and south Atlantic and the south Pacific regions. The motives, however, remained fairly...

The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life.
January 1, 1994... MacNeish starts the book with a discussion of people who have studied the problem of agricultural origins. He pigeonholes them in his first chart, and I find that I am a materialist of the Marxist school. So be it, but if he had ever read my...

Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 2, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence.
January 1, 1994... As an Egyptologist who had earlier spent twelve years studying the Greek and Roman classics, I was initially delighted with the premise of Bernal's first volume, especially since I had encountered the Aryan bias in writers of the now distant...

Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.
January 1, 1994... Historians need constantly to remind themselves that what we think of as natural is often mutable and constructed. Our concentration easily slips, until a book like Laqueur's Making Sex comes along. This exciting, and sometimes difficult, study...

The Decline of Mortality in Europe.
January 1, 1994... Thomas McKeown, in his influential The Modern Rise of Population (New York, 1976), argued that the decline of mortality in Europe since the eighteenth century was, for the largest part, caused by improved nutrition. Better sanitation...

Urbanization and History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions.
January 1, 1994... As I pressed on with my reading of this highly technical volume, I discovered in myself a growing disengagement. The feeling was disconcerting, the more so in view of the enthusiasm with which I had emerged from the three editors' exceptionally...

The Fall of the British Monarchies: 1637-1642.
January 1, 1994... For most of this century, the historiography of the English Civil War has been dominated by developmental or structural interpretations, focusing on the rise of liberty or of parliamentary sovereignty on the one hand, or on the emergence of...

Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England: 1640-1700.
January 1, 1994... The Latitudinarians have occupied a distinguished place in the historiography of Restoration England; they are regularly invoked when the religion, natural philosophy, or politics of the period are being discussed. Once a Restoration...

Friends in Life and Death: The British and Irish Quakers in the Demographic Transition, 1650-1900.
January 1, 1994... This pioneering collaboration between a social historian and a historical demographer grew out of the merger in the mid-1960s of two separate investigations: Vann's of the demography of Quakers in southern England as an aspect of their social...

A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin.
January 1, 1994... In 1877, James McNeill Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, and others exhibited at the Grosvernor Gallery work of advanced taste that moved away from the story-telling style that was so characteristic of Victorian paintings. John Ruskin, the great...

Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working-Class Education in the Nineteenth Century.
January 1, 1994... Smelser's pioneering Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, 1959) is a classic functionalist text indebted to the general sociological theory of Talcott Parsons. It charted far-reaching changes in the British cotton industry,...

The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy.
January 1, 1994... In 1840 in Britain, 67 percent of the young men and 51 percent of the young women indicated their basic literacy by signing their names in the marriage register. By 1900, literacy was nearly universal among both groups. Until recently,...

Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris: 1789-1810.
January 1, 1994... Hesse's engaging study shows what happened when the highly regulated, privileged publishing industry of eighteenth-century France was suddenly deregulated and left to the combined forces of the market and republican politics. The result is a...

Essays on the French Revolution: Paris and the Provinces.
January 1, 1994... The five essays collected here purport to examine the interaction between Paris and the provinces during the French Revolutionary decade and to explore "the extent to which provincial history supplies the key to understanding the dynamic of the...

The Continuity of Feudal Power: The Caracciolo di Brienza in Spanish Naples.
January 1, 1994... Continuity, survival, and persistence: historians, once fascinated by decline, crisis, and change, are now increasingly attracted by the notion of the ongoing hegemony of the old regime. The main debate focuses on the nineteenth century, but...

The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism.
January 1, 1994... Public opinion is a notoriously elusive concept. Even in open societies, awash with printed materials and continually monitored by pollsters, it is not easy to know what the "public" thinks. It is even harder to uncover popular attitudes in...

Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich.
January 1, 1994... Public opinion is a notoriously elusive concept. Even in open societies, awash with printed materials and continually monitored by pollsters, it is not easy to know what the "public" thinks. It is even harder to uncover popular attitudes in...

Europe, America, and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitalism, vol. 2, America and the Wider World.
January 1, 1994... The fascinating second volume of Europe, America, and the Wider World brings together several (published and unpublished) works of the quality that have made the author an eminent economic historian. It examines various aspects of United States...

Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems.
January 1, 1994... Economic, social, and labor historians will find this collection provocative. Without question, Earle is one of the more ingenious scholars in historical geography and the social sciences generally. His greatest strength is in trying to solve...

Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783.
January 1, 1994... Anyone who expects Usner's new book to be a revision of his Duke University dissertation (1981) will be pleasantly surprised. Usner has substantially reworked and rethought much of his earlier work and has produced an unprecedented history of...

The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
January 1, 1994... Twenty-seven years ago, in the article "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution," Wood questioned the interpretation then taking shape in the writings of Bailyn and others that looked to the patterns revealed in the colonists'...

Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History.
January 1, 1994... Beyond the Pale is a book about race by a British feminist who is not an academic. It is the kind of book that could not exist in America these days, where we do not allow white people to discuss race and racism without the authority of the...

Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South.
January 1, 1994... Using court documents, Unruly Women adds much information about the plight of rural poor women in the old South, although the data are confined to only three counties in the piedmont district of North Carolina. Its basic premise is that one can...

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth-Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel.
January 1, 1994... This outstanding festschrift by Fogel's students, "grandstudents," and "adopted" students, reflects their mentor's commitment to collaborative, empirical research that is truly interdisciplinary in scope. An economist, Fogel also achieved...

The Social Survey in Historical Perspective: 1880-1940.
January 1, 1994... In 1983, while working in the papers of early social surveys at the Archives of the British Library of Political and Economics Science at the London School of Economics, Bales and Sklar began planning an anthology on the history of the social...

Poor Women and Their Families: Hard-Working Charity Cases, 1900-1930.
January 1, 1994... Welfare work and welfare workers in the early twentieth century have enjoyed a kind of postmortem celebrity. With careful attention and some brilliant scholarship, their historians have illuminated class, gender, and racial tensions in...

Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s.
January 1, 1994... This engaging book argues persuasively that there was indeed a "Consumer Durables Revolution" during the 1920s, but it refines our understanding of the shift in a number of ways. Olney distinguishes between minor (housewares, jewelry, medical...

Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare.
January 1, 1994... Lotchin successfully describes a critical element in the development of twentieth-century California in this important book. He previously coined the term metropolitan-military complexes to describe the political alliances that lobbied to...

Search for the American Right Wing: An Analysis of the Social Science Record, 1955-1987.
January 1, 1994... The subject matter of this book is what social scientists, and some historians, have had to say about four loosely connected groups of American right wingers in the postwar years: followers of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, "radical right" activists of...

Secret Judgments of God: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America.
January 1, 1994... These nine essays illuminate and expand the emerging consensus concerning the role of introduced disease in shaping the experience of Amerindian populations in colonial Spanish America. Three major topics form the backbone of the book:...

Social Assistance and Bureaucratic Politics: The Montepios of Colonial Mexico, 1767-1821.
January 1, 1994... The graying of America and the contribution of this demographic shift to our budget deficit woes have prompted a number of historical studies of aging and the institutions that society devises in response. Readers may be surprised to learn that...

Familia, heranca e poder em Sao Paulo: 1765-1855.
January 1, 1994... Despite an extensive historical bibliography about Latin American landowning elites, most of these studies, in fact, deal with individual families or estates or with regional economies and the role of haciendas or plantations within them. If...

Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988.
January 1, 1994... Deciding what will count as social history has become problematic with the postmodern turn in sociohistorical inquiry, and Andrews' book on race relations in Brazil evidences the difficulties. Andrews challenges the received notion of Brazil as...

Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality: Brazil's Contestado Rebellion, 1912-1916.
January 1, 1994... In April 1915, a military force that included nearly half of the Brazilian army stormed a fortified village called Santa Maria in southeastern Brazil, killing an estimated 600 rebels described by the government as "religious fanatics." Although...

Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina.
January 1, 1994... From the 1860s on, as thousands of European immigrants arrived in Argentina, Buenos Aires developed a reputation as the center of the "white slave trade." Those involved in this commerce supposedly kidnapped European women and shipped them to...

Iran's First Revolution: Shi'ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909.
January 1, 1994... The Iranian Constitutional Revolution against the absolute monarchy of the Qajar dynasty, which went on in some form from I905 tO 19I', attracted surprisingly little Western academic interest until recently. In the Pahlavi period (1925-79), it...

Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal: A Socio-Historical Perspective.
January 1, 1994... Studies of the evolution of tropical science in colonial settings have now reached a stage of sophistication that enables us to understand the ways in which "hard" science and its applications were shaped by the political economy of empire....

Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society.
January 1, 1994... "Islanders know that they live in information societies" (xiv). This is the provocative contribution to current postmodernist discourse theory made by Lindstrom's Knowledge and Power. Foucault left his admirers with major unfinished business:...

Identity Through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society.
January 1, 1994... Meticulously researched and eloquently written, Identity through History does more than reconstruct a history of a nonliterate society from individual life histories, mission records, and contemporary ethnographies. It also undertakes, with...