The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from January 1996

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from January 1996

Cultural demography: New England deaths and the Puritan perception of risk.
January 1, 1996... Perception of risk has a connection to actuality but does not mirror it. For example, recent news reports would not lead travelers to think that they would have to take a round-trip on a United States commuter airline everyday for 5,000 years...

Piece rates reconsidered: the case of cotton.
January 1, 1996... Workers paid by the piece should, in principle, cooperate with new techniques that increase their output, and hence their earnings. But, in practice, firms are reluctant to keep piece rates constant when output per worker rises. Nelson observed...

Personal pledging: medieval "reciprocity" or "symbolic capital?"
January 1, 1996... One interpretation placed on personal pledging in medieval villages emphasizes solidarity--a concept reminiscent of sociological and anthropological investigations into twentieth-century rural communities, although notions about the...

The economics of antebellum slave heights reconsidered.
January 1, 1996... The efforts of anthropometric historians to unearth the broad outlines of the biological standard of living during the course of the last two-and-a-half centuries are well known. Nonetheless, sixteen years have elapsed since Steckel published...

Interpreting cultural crisis: social history confronts humanities education.
January 1, 1996... Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective. By Fritz K. Ringer (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992) 379 pp. $64.95 Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History. By Peter N. Stearns...

Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective.
January 1, 1996... Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective. By Fritz K. Ringer (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992) 379 pp. $64.95 As a guide to cleavages in American politics and culture, the debate about teaching...

Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History.
January 1, 1996... Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History. By Peter N. Stearns (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1993) 254 pp. $24.95 As a guide to cleavages in American politics and culture, the debate about teaching...

Early Civilizations: Ancient Egypt in Context.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Early Civilizations: Ancient Egypt in Context. By Bruce G. Trigger (Cairo, American University in Cairo Press, 1993) 158 pp. $25.00 Over the last thirty years, several prominent anthropologists have applied their methodologies to the study of...

Justice and the Genesis of War.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Justice and the Genesis of War. By David A. Welch (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 335 pp. $49-95 Welch makes a welcome contribution to the study of war by analyzing the role of the justice motive in the outbreak of war. Within the...

Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education, vol. 2, The Fundamentalism Project.
January 1, 1996... Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education. Vol. 2, The Fundamentalism Project. Edited by Martin E. Marty and Scott Appleby (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993) $92 pp. $45 Given the resurgence of...

Explorations in Political Psychology.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Explorations in Political Psychology. Edited by Shanto Iyengar and William J. McGuire (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993) 484 pp. $55.00 cloth $24-95 paper Political psychology, as the name suggests, is an expressly interdisciplinary field...

Computing for Historians: An Introductory Guide.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Computing for Historians: An Introductory Guide. By Evan Mawdsley and Thomas Munck (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993) 231 pp. $59.95 cloth $19.95 paper Historians who try to teach computers have text problems. Absent any standard...

Intellectuals in the Middle Ages.
January 1, 1996... Intellectuals in the Middle Ages. By Jacques Le Goff (trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan) (Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell, 1993) 194 pp. $44.95 cloth $17.95 paper Intellectuals in the Middle Ages is a translation of Le Goff's popular Les Intellectuels...

Vassals, Heiresses, Crusaders, and Thugs: The Gentry of Angevin Yorkshire, 1154-1216.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Vassals, Heiresses, Crusaders, and Thugs: The Gentry of Angevin Yorkshire, 1154-1216. By Hugh M. Thomas (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) 237 pp. $34-95 This study of the class generally known to medievalists as "the...

A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c. 1422-c. 1485.
January 1, 1996... A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c.1422-c.1485. By Eric Acheson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 290 pp. $59.95 This book is a fine piece of historical research that addresses important questions in...

Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony.
January 1, 1996... Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony. By Karen Ordahl Kupperman (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 393 pp. $59-95. Not since A. P. Newton's The Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven, x914) has the...

Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638-1651.
January 1, 1996... Going to the Wars: the Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638-1651. By Charles Carlton (New York, Chapman and Hall, 1993) 428 pp. $29.95 Carlton's approach to war goes to the root of the historical controversy--the tension between...

The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution.
January 1, 1996... The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution. By Jerome Friedman (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1993) 304 pp. $45.00 cloth $16.95 paper In this curiously titled book, Friedman examines...

The Workplace Before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500-1800.
January 1, 1996... The Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500-1800. Edited by Thomas Max Safley and Leonard N. Rosenband (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993) 252 pp. $35.00 cloth, $14.95 paper This collection reveals that early modern...

Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century. By Kenneth Morgan (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 281 pp. $54.95 In 1700, Bristol was the second port in England and the third largest town. By 1800, although the absolute...

Commoners, Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England: 1700-1820.
January 1, 1996... Commoners, Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. By. J. M. Neeson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 382 pp. $54-95 In the eighteenth century, much of rural England was a world of agistments and turbary,...

The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900.
January 1, 1996... The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain 1700-1900. By Andrew Scull (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993) 442 pp. $45.00 In this expansion and reworking of his 1979 Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of...

The Last Shift: The Decline of Handloom Weaving in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire.
January 1, 1996... The Last Shift: The Decline of Handloom Weaving in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire. By Geoffrey Timmins (New York, Manchester University Press, 1993) 253 pp. $69.95 Three generations of historians have documented the distress experienced by the...

An Historical Geography of France.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... An Historical Geography of France. By Xavier de Planhol, with the collaboration of Paul Claval (trans. Janet Lloyd) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994) 563 pp. $79.95 What is historical geography for de Planhol? More than an inventory...

Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional Identity Among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional Identity among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility. By Raymond Mentzer, Jr. (West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, 1994) 272 pp. $32.95 This book looks at the adaptation and survival of a...

Le nombre et la raison: la Revolution francaise et les elections.
January 1, 1996... Le hombre et la raison: la Revolution francaise et les elections. By Patrice Gueniffey (Paris, Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1993) 559 pp. (NP) The French revolutionaries introduced democratic voting in France and...

The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris.
January 1, 1996... The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris. By Dora B. Weiner (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 444 pp. $48.50 Weiner's book on health care during the Revolutionary and Imperial periods in Paris adopts an almost...

Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy: The Life and Career of Cardinal Francesco Soderini, 1453-1524.
January 1, 1996... Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy: The Life and Career of Cardinal Francesco Soderini, 1453-1524. By K. J. P. Lowe (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 314 pp. $59.95 The jacket of Lowe's book on Soderini symbolizes the obstacles...

Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City. By John Martin (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993) 287 pp. $42.50 Martin offers an elegant, undogmatic, and beautifully written account of three currents of heresy...

A Case of Child Murder: Law and Science in Nineteenth-Century Tuscany.
January 1, 1996... A Case of Child Murder: Law and Science in Nineteenth-Century Tuscany. By Patrizia Guarnieri (Cambridge, Mass., Polity Press, 1993) 210 pp. $24.95 In 1875, a cartwright in a small Tuscan town tried to strangle a nine-year-old boy, whose...

The Medieval Spains.
January 1, 1996... The Medieval Spains. By Bernard F. Reilly (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 228 pp. $54-95 cloth, $17.95 paper The plural in the title of this book is but the first indication that the author has embraced one of the most important...

El Castillo: The Politics of Tradition in an Andalusian Town.
January 1, 1996... El Castillo: The Politics of Tradition in an Andalusian Town. By Richard Maddox (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1993) 336 pp. $49.95 cloth $19.95 paper Winner of the 1991 President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association,...

In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cites After World War II.
January 1, 1996... In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II. By Jeffrey M. Diefendorf (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993) 403 pp. $49-95 Diefendorf's book is excellent history, thorough, documented, well organized, and...

The Low Countries in the Early Modern World.
January 1, 1996... The Low Countries in the Early Modern World. By Herman Van der Wee (Brookfield, Vt., Variorum, 1993) 295 pp. $72.95 The exceptionality of the low countries' economic performance in the late medieval and early modern periods is often alluded to...

Family and Social Change: The Household as a Process in an Industrializing Community.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Family and Social Change: The Household as a Process in an Industrializing Community. By Angelique Janssens (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 317 pp. $64.95 Framing her research against competing social theories, Janssens employs...

Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism.
January 1, 1996... Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism. By James D. Faubion (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994) 307 pp. $35.00 Greece is a troublemaking nation. It used to annoy its NATO allies by being sympathetic to Palestinian...

The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. By Ronald Grigor Suny (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994) 185 pp. $35.00 cloth $13.95 paper This book, its author writes on the dust jacket, has a...

The Ancient Southwestern Community: Models and Methods for the Study of Prehistoric Social Organization.
January 1, 1996... The Ancient Southwestern Community: Models and Methods for the Study of Prehistoric Social Organization. Edited by W. H. Wills and Robert D. Leonard (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1994) 256 pp. $45.00 Archaeology allows scholars...

The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800. By Jack P. Greene (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1993) 216 pp. $29.95 The United States took possession of the title America rather...

Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture.
January 1, 1996... Jeffersonian Legacies. Edited by Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1993) 478 pp. $39.50 cloth $18.95 paper Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture. Edited by Barbatra B. Oberg...

An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784-1861.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784-1861. By William B. Skelton (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 1993) 481 pp. $45.00 cloth Contrary to earlier studies of the United States military such as those by Huntington,...

Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. By Richard J. Carwardine (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993) 487 pp. $45.00 In the midnineteenth-century United States, electoral politics became an activity that engaged the attention and...

The Mississippi Valley's Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.
January 1, 1996... The Mississippi Valley's Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878. By Khaled J. Bloom (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1993) 290 pp. $29.95 Epidemic incursions of yellow fever into the Mississippi Valley dated from the early days of...

The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialization of North America.
January 1, 1996... The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialization of North America. By Robert B. Gordon and Patrick M. Malone (New York, Oxford University Press, 1994) 442 pp. $49-95 Gordon is a geophysicist; Malone is a student of...

American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature. Edited by David C. Miller (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993) 344 pp. $40.00 American Iconology serves as a model for innovation in interdisciplinary history,...

Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora. By Walter F. Pitts, Jr. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993) 199 pp. (NP) This is a study of the African origins of African-American forms of worship. We are told that the...

Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
January 1, 1996... Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. By Eric Lott (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993) 314 pp. $24.95 Lott's study of the class, sexual, and racial connotations of antebellum minstrelsy raises major issues...

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self. By G. Edward White (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993) 628 pp. $37.50 The centrality of Holmes in American law and philosophy has produced a massive and continuing wave of scholarship...

The Warren Court in Historical and Political Perspective.
January 1, 1996... The Warren Court in Historical and Political Perspective. Edited by Mark Tushnet (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1993) 220 pp. $29.95 In his introductory essay, Tushnet concedes that "perhaps the most we can hope" about a book...

Demythologizing an Elite: American Presidents in Empirical, Comparative, and Historical Perspective.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Demythologizing an Elite: American Presidents in Empirical, Comparative, and Historical Perspective. By Mostafa Rejai and Kay Phillips with Warren L. Mason (Westport, Conn., Praeger Publishers, 1993) 156 pp. $45.00 This short book, the product...

Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History.
January 1, 1996... Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History. By Reed Ueda (Boston, Bedford Books, 1994) 182 pp. $35.00 cloth $6.50 paper America continues to radiate a magnetic attraction in a world beset by ethnic violence and subsistence economics. This...

Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years.
January 1, 1996... Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy during the Interwar Years. By Beth A. Simmons (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994) 330 pp. $39.50 The period between World War I and World War II warns us of the consequences of...

The First French Canadians: Pioneers in the St. Lawrence Valley.
January 1, 1996... The First French Canadians: Pioneers in the St. Lawrence Valley. By Hubert Charbonneau, Bertrand Desjardins, Andre Guillemette, Yves Landry, Jacques Legare and Francois Nault, with the collaboration of Real Bates and Mario Boleda (trans. Paola...

Surgeons, Smallpox, and the Poor: A History of Medicine and Social Conditions in Nova Scotia, 1749-1799.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Surgeons, Smallpox, and the Poor: A History of Medicine and Social Conditions in Nova Scotia, 1749-1799. By Allan Everett Marble (Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993) 330 pp. $39.95 During the past two decades, scholars have begun...

Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan: 1648-1812.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648-1812. By Robert W. Patch (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993) 329 pp. $49.50 As an archaeologist with something more than a passing interest in current studies of the precolumbian Maya, I have been...

Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840-1880.
January 1, 1996... Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840-1880. By Paul Gootenberg (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993) 243 pp. $45.00 cloth $20.00 paper Peruvians conceded occupation of the nearby...

Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia.
January 1, 1996... Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia. Edited by Martin A. Klein (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) 222 pp. $40.00 cloth $14.95 paper Even if there were fewer slaves in the Americas than...

Iron, gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. By Eugenia W. Herbert (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994) 277 pp. $39.95 cloth $18.95 paper The author, a historian, surveys the available literature published...

Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The precolonial State of Bundu.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu. By Michael Gomez (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 252 pp. $59.95 Bundu was a small state in the upper Senegal River, which probably never numbered over 30,000 people....

The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environment in the History of the Middle East, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1500.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environment in the History of the Middle East, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1500. By Peter Christensen (Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 1993) 351 pp. $58.00 There is a widespread impression that the Middle...

On Modern Jewish Politics.
January 1, 1996... On Modern Jewish Politics. By Ezra Mendelsohn (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993) 168 pp. $39-95 cloth $14.95 paper The title notwithstanding, this book is chiefly a study of Jewish political movements in Poland and the United States in...

Central Authority and Local Autonomy in the Formation of Early Modern Japan: The Case of Kaga Domain.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Central Authority and Local Autonomy in the Formation of Early Modern Japan: The Case of Kaga Domain. By Philip C. Brown (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993) 312 pp. $45.00 This is an important book. Using a major domain (Kaga) as a...

Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility. By Takie Sugiyama Lebra (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993) 430 pp. $45.00 During the 1980s, studies of Japan by American anthropologists became fissured in a way...

The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China.
January 1, 1996... The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China. By Susan L. Shirk (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993) 399 pp. $48.00 cloth $15.00 paper This is an ambitious work. Shirk does not set out simply to describe the nature and course of...

Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India. By Stewart Gordon (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994) 223 pp. $23.00 Much of the best historical research and writing on early modern India has drawn on a variety of...

Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials Before the Papal Magistrates. By Thomas V. Cohen and Elizabeth S, Cohen (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993) 308 pp. $50.00 cloth $19.95 paper This volume both epitomizes and contributes to...

The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps. By Robert Weinberg (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993) 302 pp. $29.95 As a case study in the history of prerevolutionary Russian workers, this monograph is interesting and...