The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from January 1995

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from January 1995

Body counts and 'success' in the Vietnam and Korean wars.
January 1, 1995... Scholars analyzing the Vietnam War frequently argue that the United States Army's fixation on body counts--the number of enemy dead--played a major role in contributing to America's failure to win against a third world nation with considerably...

Spanish and Nahuatl views on smallpox and demographic catastrophe in Mexico.
January 1, 1995... Carmichael and Arthur M. Silverstein, "Smallpox in Europe before the Seventeenth-century: Virulent Killer or Benign Disease?," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, XLII (1987), 168. The thesis of increasing virulence of...

Courtship, the Clandestine Marriage Act, and illegitimate fertility in England.
January 1, 1995... Illegitimate fertility in England more than doubled between 1750 and 1800. This study examines the extent to which Laslett's "courtship hypothesis" and Lord Hardwicke's Clandestine Marriage Act of 1753 account for the rise. Using Wilson and...

The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 4, America in the Age of Soviet Power: 1945-1991.
January 1, 1995... For more than fifty years, the modern state, as exemplified by the United States, has been obsessed with foreign policy; a foreign policy broadly defined to include national security, international finance, and trade and commerce. Meanwhile, the...

Iron Age Societies: From Tribe to State in Northern Europe, 500 B.C. to A.D. 700.
January 1, 1995... The relationship between archaeology and history has always been of major concern to archaeologists, if not historians, and is one of the central issues in the theoretical debates swirling through the discipline of archaeology today. Iron-Age...

Human Impact on the Environment: Ancient Roots, Current Challenges.
January 1, 1995... The task of probing the historical antecedents of our growing environmental crisis necessitates syntheses among many disciplines and the processing of data from a wide range of social and biophysical sciences, as well as from the humanities. In...

Ethnography and Historical Imagination.
January 1, 1995... This collection of previously published and unpublished articles is grouped into three parts of roughly equal length: (1) "Theory, Ethnography, Historiography," (2) "Dialectical Systems, Imaginative Sociologies," and (3) "Colonialism and...

Jewish Civilization: The Jewish Historical Experience in a Comparative Perspective.
January 1, 1995... What intrigues many people about the Jews is their historical continuity despite expulsion, dispersion, persecution, and modernization. Eisenstadt, a renowned political sociologist, seeks to explain this continuity through a historical and...

A History of Food.
January 1, 1995... Most of us spend our lives earning our daily food; until recently, most people also spent their lives either producing or preparing it. Thus, historians have studied food thoroughly, at least from some angles. They have long been interested in...

The Late Byzantine Army: Arms and Society, 1204-1453.
January 1, 1995... The Gibbonian syndrome--studies of decline and fall ("imperial life cycles")--is back in fashion.(1) For Byzantium military factors cannot be discounted, especially since in 1453 (on a traditional interpretation) Mehmet II's cannon blasted...

A History of Women in the West, vol. 2, Silences of the Middle Ages.
January 1, 1995... This volume of essays on medieval women offers Anglo-American scholars an unusual experience in reading across the disciplines. Medieval studies is interdisciplinary by its nature and, as one would expect in a collection of this type, the authors...

The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern.
January 1, 1995... Applebaum has devoted his professional career to the anthropology of work and to the direction of commercial projects that attempt to apply the skills of construction workers to meet social needs of our time. In this book he offers a compendium...

Importing the European Army: The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World, 1600-1914.
January 1, 1995... These two works of synthesis address a common problem: How did the military methods and institutions which catapulted Europe from relative insignificance in medieval times to world hegemony in the modern era influence the internal politics of the...

Economy and Society: European Industrialization and Its Social Consequences.
January 1, 1995... The patterns of economic and social development associated with European industrialization in the last several centuries have been primary topics of comment virtually since they occurred. The career of Sidney Pollard, spanning the second half of...

Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401-1499.
January 1, 1995... Carpenter's massive work will surely become a reference point for all future studies on the gentry of late medieval England. She starts with a useful discussion of the meaning of the terms gentleman, esquire, and knight and shows how these...

Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship and Kingship.
January 1, 1995... Boehrer argues that incest formed a major structural theme in at least fifty-two plays and numerous nondramatic works written between Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon in the 1530s and the execution of Charles I in 1649, including...

Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837.
January 1, 1995... Newman has asserted that studying nationalism in England is doubly challenging, because one element of the national ethos itself is the denial of nationalism and because the subject makes strong interdisciplinary demands. Colley has risen to the...

When Illness Strikes the Leader: The Dilemma of the Captive King from George III to Ronald Reagan.
January 1, 1995... As is well-recognized, incapacitating illness among national leaders has often had a decisive, although immeasurable, effect on the course of history. For example, how did the grave physical and mental incapacity of Leonard Brezhnev and his aging...

Consumption and the World of Goods.
January 1, 1995... Consumption and the World of Goods includes twenty-five essays on themes that are related to the developing material cultural of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, primarily in England. The topics are diverse and individual chapter lengths...

Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France.
January 1, 1995... Persons preparing to go on assignment in a foreign land, whether in government service, business, an academic program, or the like, need to know how things get done in the country where they are going. The best prepared are those who, apart from...

The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000.
January 1, 1995... Collections of essays may usually be likened to a room full of skilled musicians enthusiastically playing different scores. The individual instruments are played well but the total effect is cacophonous. Head and Landes are to be congratulated...

Re-Creating Authority in Revolutionary France.
January 1, 1995... The title of this volume of seven essays should be taken seriously because the authors believe that the authority that was re-created during or after the Revolution was based on culture and that this cultural authority assisted the process of...

"Sopra le acque saise": Espaces, Pouvoir et Societe a Venise a la Fin du Moyen Age.
January 1, 1995... Crouzet-Pavan has produced a finely wrought and highly detailed new study of the relationship between public power and urban fabric in late medieval Venice. Monumental in scope, the work evokes the past grandeur not only of Venice itself but also...

The Evolution of Women's Asylums since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women.
January 1, 1995... From the sixteenth century many Italian cities maintained a number of complementary institutions for the care or custody of females who were somehow detached from their positions in respectable society. There were convents for penitent...

Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence.
January 1, 1995... The breadth of sources underlying Strocchia's Death and Ritual is truly remarkable: statutes, chronicles, court cases, diaries (published and unpublished), testaments, ecclesiastical registers, novelle, letters of consolation, sermons, humanist...

Preachers of the Italian Ghetto.
January 1, 1995... This collection of seven essays examines Jewish preaching in Italy from roughly the mid-sixteenth through the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Most essays look at one significant preacher, examining his work in relation to the broader...

Poder, familia y consanguinidad en la Espana del antiguo regimen.
January 1, 1995... These essays reassess family strategies, the reproduction of social difference, and political economic changes as facets of the shifting life of preindustrial Spain. The authors, senior academics and younger scholars, represent multiple...

The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change: 1598-1700.
January 1, 1995... This is a slightly enlarged revision of the second volume of Lynch's Spain under the Habsburgs (Cambridge, Mass.; 2d ed., 1981). Like the earlier work, this book is not the outcome of primary research, but is a summary and synthesis of the...

Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany.
January 1, 1995... Did Germany take a peculiar political turn sometime in its history? If so, when did this happen and what were the reasons for it? These questions have significantly shaped the historiography of medieval as well as modern Germany over the last...

German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages: Players, Patrons, and Performance Practice.
January 1, 1995... This book is not so much about music as about music-making, musical life, and patronage. The theme is the practice of music in a broad sense rather than music as composition. German instrumental music of the late middle ages (about 1350-1520) has...

The Politics of Progressive Education: The Odenwaldschule in Nazi germany.
January 1, 1995... This book traces the creation and development of Germany's premier progressive school before, under, and after the Nazis. Part of the progressive pedagogical reform movement that was sweeping the United States and Western Europe in the decades...

The Making of a Bourgeois State: War, Politics, and Finance During the Dutch Revolt.
January 1, 1995... The process of state formation in seventeenth-century Europe characteristically involved the development of large centralized bureaucratic apparatuses to meet the demands of increasing taxation resulting from the growing costs of warfare. In the...

The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia.
January 1, 1995... Students of Russia have long commented on the deep public interest in sexuality in that country on the even of World War I. Despite this profound preoccupation with sex, however, Engelstein's remarkable study is the first to view late tsarist...

Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom.
January 1, 1995... This brief monograph examines the origins, dynamics, and repercussions of the pogrom in Kishinev on April 6-7, 1903. The first and most violent of the pogroms in the early twentieth-century Russian Empire left scores dead, hundreds wounded, and...

Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America.
January 1, 1995... The principal theme of this book is a critique of the convention (if not conceit) that "Columbus discovered America on October 12, 1492." For Zerubavel, this statement, unexplored by a wide spectrum of participants in the public political and...

Hernando de Soto and the Indians of Florida.
January 1, 1995... Attempting to determine Hernando de Soto's route of exploration in the southeastern United States in 1539-43 is both fascinating and frustrating. Some historians may question whether the effort is worth the expenditure of time and talent. An...

Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America.
January 1, 1995... Axtell wants to revise our understanding of the significance of the Columbian era and its consequences. In the last essay he offers a list of recommendations and, at the same time, a handy summary of his current thinking on the matter of...

Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus Through Abolition, 1492-1888.
January 1, 1995... This collection of essays rings a change on a new conceptualization of cultural contact in post-1492 America. Karras argues in the introductory chapter that the Atlantic world, as opposed to any single region, provides the most powerful...

Migrants, Emigrants, Immigrants: A Social History of Migration.
January 1, 1995... Migrants, Emigrants, and Immigrants attempts to "illustrate some of the directions current research in migration is taking in terms of themes, approaches and the evaluation of sources, and to highlight areas of potential concern for future...

In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880-1920.
January 1, 1995... According to the editor, these essays cover four broad subject areas: "representations of America as a land of freedom that prevailed among European immigrants and more specifically among radicals at the end of the nineteenth century"; the...

Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution.
January 1, 1995... This massive volume is a comparative study of political regimes, exuberantly argued and bountifully documented with quotations, epigraphs, and copious endnotes. The book has a tripartite structure and thematic design, with Book II, "New Modes and...

Beyond Reasonable Doubt and Probable Cause: Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence.
January 1, 1995... The law might be defined as a set of institutional arrangements for creating and maintaining boundaries, and most academic specialists have left the study of law, including its history, to lawyers. Shapiro's book is a welcome exception, an...

Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History.
January 1, 1995... If anyone has been wondering what Greene has been thinking or doing for the last twenty-five years, he or she need look no further than Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities for ready answers. In the sixteen essays collected here, he explores...

Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860.
January 1, 1995... Crime may not pay, but it sells. That images of crime and punishment pervade contemporary popular culture will not come as news to anyone who owns a television. But the extent to which graphic stories of deviance and retribution have been woven...

The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism.
January 1, 1995... The past thirty years have witnessed the publication of a tremendous number of books and articles on rural America. How are scholars to make sense of such a huge and often contradictory literature? Kulikoff suggests: "We need a model of rural...

From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850.
January 1, 1995... To argue for the one great transformation to a market economy, as do Rothenberg and the "moral economy" historians dealing with early America (her "dear enemies"), is to accept the finality and completeness of the event (ix). Although in her...

Agriculture, Geology, and Society in Antebellum South Carolina: The Private Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 1843.
January 1, 1995... This 1843 diary is a journal of Ruffin's five months as agricultural surveyor of South Carolina. The desire for a survey of South Carolina--its agricultural practices and potential--followed an economic downturn that began in 1837; planters...

Emancipation in Virginia's Tobacco Belt: 1850-1870.
January 1, 1995... At the conclusion of her detailed study of tobacco-belt blacks during the middle period, Morgan summarizes her major findings: first, by the 1850s, African-Americans in twenty-four counties of south central Virginia were well acquainted with the...

Victorian America and the Civil War.
January 1, 1995... Social historians have dramatically expanded historians' understanding of long-term cultural trends as well as the personal lives of individuals in past eras, but some of their more traditional colleagues still question whether these findings...

William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America.
January 1, 1995... Lane has written a big, bounteous, and brave book on black Philadelphia and the current crisis of the African-American community. This book will figure prominently in discussions of modern African-American history for years. Few are the...

The Company Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age.
January 1, 1995... Each essay in this fine book attempts to move beyond the confines of physically describing company towns to address social and cultural contexts and consequences. To accomplish this objective, the authors use the disciplines of industrial...

Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880-1940.
January 1, 1995... This is Fink's second book dealing with farm women in the northern prairies. The first, Open Country, was set in western Iowa; this deals with women who settled the western fringes of the corn belt in Nebraska. Settled late--in the 1870s--and...

The Persistence of Ethnicity: Dutch Calvinist Pioneers in Amsterdam, Montana.
January 1, 1995... A mile high instead of near sea level, with ditches bringing water in rather than taking it out, Gallatin County, Montana would seem an unusual place for a Dutch settlement. Yet it boasts a Dutch-American population numbering over 2,000, whose...

Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon.
January 1, 1995... Boag's study of the encounter between settlers and the landscape in the nineteenth-century Willamette and Calapooia valleys of Oregon combines the methodologies of cultural history, community studies, landscape studies, and environmental history....

The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism.
January 1, 1995... Numbers eschews the alluring low road of antifundamentalist polemics in this exhaustively researched volume that sensitively examines the hyperorthodox American Christians who have devised the tenets of so-called "scientific creationism" during...

The Paradox of Southern Progressivism: 1880-1930.
January 1, 1995... Call this book an intriguing journey through the minds of Dixie's social welfare reformers. Emphasizing cultural struggles over prohibition, public health, education, and women's suffrage, Link argues that "southern progressivism should be...

Urban Policy in the Twentieth Century.
January 1, 1995... This anthology of seven insightful articles does not argue that there has been a specific, much less a consistent, urban policy in the twentieth century. But the collection does clearly demonstrate that governmental priorities and policy...

Alternative Paths: Soviets and Americans, 1917-1920.
January 1, 1995... The product of a liberal post-cold war mindset, this book deals with the hopeful aspects of United States-Soviet relations from the Bolshevik revolution to August 1920 when, as a result of the Red scare, the United States broke off diplomatic...

Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970.
January 1, 1995... The rapid growth of Spanish-speaking populations in areas like the southwestern United States and south Florida has attracted increasing public and scholarly attention in recent years, yet few Americans recognize that the Latino population of the...

Shaping Technology Building Technology: Studies in Sociotechnical Change.
January 1, 1995... This book is based on the premise that "technology always embodies compromise. Politics, economics, theories about the strength of materials, notions about what is beautiful or worthwhile, professional preferences, prejudices and skills, design...

Neighborhood Politics: Residential Community Associations in American Governance.
January 1, 1995... Dilger says that residential community associations, which numbered more than 150,000 in the United States in 1990, not only are exerting great pressure on our officially constituted local governments but are also providing and substituting for...

Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s.
January 1, 1995... Lynn's study of progressive women reformers in cold-war America offers an alternative to scholarship focused on postwar domestic ideology which, she argues, too often assumes that "most women's lives were awash in a sea of domesticity" (11). She...

George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy: 1947-1950.
January 1, 1995... Miscamble's book is the fourth major study of Kennan to appear since 1988, and, despite one major problem, it is a valuable addition to this booming specialty. Mayers treated Kennan's entire career from the generous perspective of cold war...

American Trade and Power in the 1960s.
January 1, 1995... This ambitious volume seeks to disentangle the complex international trade and tariff negotiations directed by the United States during the 1960s and to examine the historiographical debate "concerning the motives, aims, and outcome of U.S....

Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics.
January 1, 1995... Opinion polling has become one of the most pervasive elements of American politics over the last thirty years, increasingly relied on for information, suggestions on directions that political leaders should follow, legitimization of policy...

The Contexts of Acadian History: 1686-1784.
January 1, 1995... This admirably concise volume provides both an effective "critical narrative of Acadian history" and an insightful summary of current knowledge about it. Each section focuses on a critical juncture: the 1680s, when the French settlements in the...

Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal.
January 1, 1995... This translation into English is the third edition of Dechene's book, which first appeared in French in 1974 and again in 1988. Already a classic, it remains the most remarkable study of the history of New France. In order to understand the...

Crofters and Habitants: Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848-1881.
January 1, 1995... This book examines "the people of a particular place at a particular time in as multifaceted a fashion as possible"; it is a version of "histoire totale" but covers what we might call the "courte duree" (7). Little argues that "two stable,...

Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763.
January 1, 1995... Cannibal Encounters is a lucid and terse examination of direct interactions between Island Caribs and Euopeans in the Lesser Antilies, and the indirect influence of literary images of Island Caribs (and other Native Americans) on the emergence of...

Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St, Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix.
January 1, 1995... This book is primarily concerned with social and institutional structures. Although HaWs social history is not static, it gives insufficient attention to chronological development particularly of government and politics.(1) There is little...

White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture.
January 1, 1995... This book is about images and power; more particularly, how unequal power relationships drive the production and consumption of images of the less powerful by the more powerful. Since the focus is on images of blacks in the West, the theme is...

Black Mountain: Land, Class, and Power in the Eastern Orange Free State, 1880s-1980s.
January 1, 1995... The past three years saw the beginning of a low-level war between black South Africans and white farmers throughout much of the region stretching from South Africa's border with Lesotho south to Ciskei "homeland." The black fighters of this...

The Surreptitious Speech: Presence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947-1987.
January 1, 1995... Presence Africaine has been the most influential journal in preserving and "rehabilitating" African cultures by presenting a forum dedicated "to bring new life to the Africans from inside their culture" and to disseminate this culture to the...

Modern Guerrilla Insurgency.
January 1, 1995... For the past decade, United States Department of Defense planners have been warning about the persistence of insurgency as a form of conflict in which American forces might again become involved. United States Marines were pressed recently to...

The Political History of Modern Iran: From Tribalism to Theocracy.
January 1, 1995... Few topics in modern Middle East studies have generated more publications in the past decade than that of the Iranian revolution of 1978-79. Like Kamrava's book, many of these new works examine the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century...