The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from January 1998

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from January 1998

Nineteenth-century remarriage patterns in the Netherlands.
January 1, 1998... Like many other Western countries, the Netherlands entered a new era of familial instability after the mid-1960s. Children born in the 1970s and 1980s experienced a degree of family dissolution due to divorce similar to the degree of family...

Comparing global history to world history.
January 1, 1998... The historical profession has been slow to appreciate the importance of globalization. One reason appears to be the confusion caused by the claims of world history, which has been struggling to achieve its own identity. In its fight against more...

Encounters of another kind. (response to an article by Judith Modell, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 27, p. 481, 1997)
January 1, 1998... Modell's review of Implicit Understandings throws into serious question the validity of that old Hollywood adage that it is better to be criticized than ignored.(1) After reading her review, I am no longer so sure. It is bad enough to be...

Evolutionary history.
January 1, 1998... Diamond has written an entertaining and intriguing evolutionary history of the world. It deals with all of human history from the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution to the present, from Western Europe to the Pacific Islands. It is decidedly not...

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
January 1, 1998... Diamond has written an entertaining and intriguing evolutionary history of the world. It deals with all of human history from the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution to the present, from Western Europe to the Pacific Islands. It is decidedly not...

Herlihy's families.
January 1, 1998... The editors of Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living claim Herlihy's contributions to family history as his most significant scholarly accomplishment. The claim is just. Herlihy, a founding associate editor of this journal, devoted much of...

Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in Memory of David Herlihy.
January 1, 1998... The editors of Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living claim Herlihy's contributions to family history as his most significant scholarly accomplishment. The claim is just. Herlihy, a founding associate editor of this journal, devoted much of...

Who Elected the Bankers? Surveillance and Control in the World Economy.
January 1, 1998... Pauly is a rare political scientist, one with a significant experience in the private banking industry as well as in the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This versatility puts him in an unusually good position to address fundamental questions...

National Character: A Psycho-Social Perspective.
January 1, 1998... This book gathers the principal papers of a research program that has sustained an illustrious career. In this program, Inkeles' goal has been to move the study of national character from the realm of anecdote to the world of science. Building...

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... The art of portraying ideas in pictures is as old as humankind, but rarely has this art seen so masterful a tribute as Tufte's Visual Explanations. The author is a passionate advocate of the notion that visual images at their best illuminate and...

The Frozen Echo: Greenland the Exploration of North America ca. A.D. 100-1500
January 1, 1998... In this book, Seaver attempts to do what many scholars and laymen have tried to do for more than a century, to show why the originally successful Norse colony in Greenland vanished almost without a trace toward the end of the fifteenth century....

The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle Ages.
January 1, 1998... This milestone in the field of sociohistorical studies of crime and justice offers recent works by ten European and American scholars who examine crime in a variety of countries - not just Britain, France, and Germany but also Sweden and the...

Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World: 1492-1640.
January 1, 1998... Seed has written an erudite, provocative, and timely book of great interest to scholars of early modern Europe and colonial America. Drawing upon an array of sources in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, Ceremonies of Possession...

The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... The source under analysis in this book - the Relaciones Geograficas maps - is the result of a fortunate misunderstanding for historians. When Philip II ordered his cartographers to draw maps of his vast and numerous possessions, he was trying to...

The European Nobility: 1400-1800.
January 1, 1998... For Dewald, French nobles have been a career-long preoccupation: In three brilliant monographs, he has demonstrated that the nobles' situation is central to how historians understand processes of social, economic, and cultural change in the early...

Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500-1850.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... This textbook, part cliometric and part eclectic, is directed at novices, who are likely to be misled and confused by gross errors too numerous to be dealt with here and now. Overton first redefines "the agricultural revolution" to include the...

Dangerous Talk and Strange Behavior: Women and Popular Resistance to the Reforms of Henry VIII.
January 1, 1998... Jansen's study of women and popular resistance in Henrician England looks and feels like history. The materials that she has chosen and the methodologies that she employs rely on traditional historiographical methods and mentors. Her work is...

Law-Making and Society in Late Elizabethan England: The Parliament of England, 1584-1601.
January 1, 1998... Now that both Neale, the last of the great Whig historians, and Elton, the colossus of recent revisionist history, have gone to their respective research institutes in the sky, parliamentary scholars can settle down to the muddled realities of...

Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century.
January 1, 1998... Although literary servants like Samuel Richardson's Pamela have captured the imagination of contemporaries and historians alike, until recently, scholars have known little about the daily lives and aspirations of domestic servants. Female...

The Two Mr. Gladstones: A Study in Psychology and History.
January 1, 1998... William Ewart Gladstone has proved a notoriously difficult person to fathom: He eluded his contemporaries, and he has continued to foil scholars. Crosby, in his new biography of the British statesman, notes Gladstone's colleagues' incomprehension...

The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Power, Conflict, and Emancipation.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Here is yet another book analyzing and solving the Northern Ireland problem. Do we need it? Probably not, but this one is better than most and is instructive about the relationship between the virtual reality created by academic thinking and the...

"There Are No Slaves in France." The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime.
January 1, 1998... In the eighteenth century a modest number of blacks were present in France. Peabody estimates that, at any given time, the highest figure was probably 5,000. Most of them were slaves brought to France by their colonial masters from the West...

Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France.
January 1, 1998... From the late Renaissance until the French Revolution, French society had a love-hate relationship with the system of venality. In this clear and comprehensive treatment, Doyle explores how the sale of offices was both critical to the viability...

French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... This is the best kind of historical sociology. It takes a significant problem - the political transmutations of French revolutionary syndicalism from the early 1900s to the 1920s - and investigates it using a wide range of social and cultural...

The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary France, 1814-1848.
January 1, 1998... Reddy draws on insights of contemporary anthropologists and literary critics "to provide a useful conceptual tool for introducing individual experience and variation into historical ethnography" (3). With relation to the history of France in the...

Une ecole pour les scences sociales. De la VI section a'l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
January 1, 1998... The institution that began life in 1947 as the VIe section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sciences economiques et sociales) has played a vital and central role during the past fifty years in the development of interdisciplinary...

Science, Vine, and Wine in Modern France.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Paul's book grapples magisterially with the agenda of his title: the role of science in the French wine world from the eighteenth century to the 1930s. It is about wine, but even more about its diseases, its manipulation, economy, politics, and...

Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy.
January 1, 1998... In Women in the Streets, Cohn seeks to determine whether the status of women became more elevated or more depressed during the Renaissance in the cities of central Italy. He rightly points out that quantitative social history can answer this...

Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy.
January 1, 1998... Expanding and enhancing the quality of the population were primary concerns of Italian Fascism; numbers were said to correlate positively with national military, cultural, and economic strength. This notion translated into a broad program of...

Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... This magesterial book examines Russian charity from the late Muscovite period to the early twentieth century. It focuses on three problems: the attitude and response of state and local governments to the problem of poverty and the resulting,...

After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
January 1, 1998... This book contains one of the best concise discussions in print about the nature of Soviet nationality policy and its consequences. This feature is important to the structure of the book not only as background to the discussion of recent events...

The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West.
January 1, 1998... This is a distinctly postmodern book. It builds on Knobloch's four years as a "ranch wife" in Montana and her belief that capitalist agriculture is destructive to the land and alienates people from nature, from themselves, and from each other....

White Man's Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian Country, 1802-1892.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... "American Indians drank because non-Indians drank" (117). Thus concludes Unrau in his penetrating study of the alcohol trade and prohibition in "Indian Country" between 1802 and 1892. The study does not pretend to be interdisciplinary, so it...

A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West.
January 1, 1998... This collection consists of papers that were ostensibly presented "in recognition of the centennial of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis" (v). In reality these "scholars" came to "bury Caesar, not to praise him." Why not? To be fair,...

The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier.
January 1, 1998... The Midwest has long played a special role in the popular imagination as a land of thrift and hard work - the transplanted garden of the Protestant ethic established by the Puritan founders. In The Yankee West, Gray contributes to the ongoing...

The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland.
January 1, 1998... Whitman's book joins the growing number of studies that have important things to say about slavery in the early national period. Above all, it effectively challenges the general scholarly view that private, voluntary manumission, which was most...

Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... The stated purpose of this collection of essays is to examine "the curiosity, admiration, and condemnation" with which women domestic healers and professional physicians have been regarded throughout history (7). Nine of the authors work in...

Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science.
January 1, 1998... The title of this book's prologue, "A Source for Silent Spring," reflects Sellers' belief that the investigation of industrial diseases in early twentieth-century America helped shape subsequent studies of environmental pollution after World War...

Divergent Paths: How Culture and Institutions Have Shaped North American Growth.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... The classic question for students of economic development has always been why some societies grow and develop economically and others do not. In this ambitious interpretive essay, Egnal addresses this question through a comparative analysis of...

Handwriting in America: A Cultural History.
January 1, 1998... This is an ambitious study that narrates the transformation of handwriting from elite habit to business skill to minimum social requirement for all and, most recently, to an expression of individualism. Alas, the book contains uncountable errors...

Rioting in America.
January 1, 1998... Rioting has punctuated American social and political development. In this fascinating book, Gilje examines the phenomenon in a sweeping study that covers the full span of American history. Defining a riot as an episode in which "any group of...

Policing the Southern City: New Orleans 1805-1889.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Arguing that the first major reform in American police forces occurred in the cities of the lower South during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Rousey examines New Orleans as a case study. In Crescent City, he says, large...

Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South.
January 1, 1998... Applying to the postbellum South the Marxist penological assumption that legal punishment is "distinct from, and relatively unconnected with, crime," Lichtenstein's deeply researched, well-written book contends that convict leasing and the chain...

Federal Taxation in America: A Short History.
January 1, 1998... Perhaps the only thing as inevitable as death and taxes is the reluctance of historical scholars to confront taxation - a task often left to economists and tax specialists. With his two recent contributions, Brownlee seeks to falsify this truism....

Funding the Modern American State: 1941-1995: The Rise and Fall of the Era of Easy Finance.
January 1, 1998... Perhaps the only thing as inevitable as death and taxes is the reluctance of historical scholars to confront taxation - a task often left to economists and tax specialists. With his two recent contributions, Brownlee seeks to falsify this truism....

Kinship and Politics: The Justices of the United States and Louisiana Supreme Courts.
January 1, 1998... In 100 pages of text, supplemented by another 120 of appendixes, Kurtz supports the argument that the United States legal elite, represented in his study by the 201 justices of the United States and Louisiana Supreme Courts, has an important...

The Viper on the Heart: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy.
January 1, 1998... This is one of very few scholarly studies of the anti-Mormon phenomenon in American history. It is not a general historical study; it focuses mainly on the medium of popular literature to trace the nature and extent of anti-Mormonism across time....

Importing Oxbridge: English Residential Colleges and American Universities.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Duke has written a small book about a smaller subject: the attempt of several American colleges and universities to recreate the Oxbridge ambience in small independent colleges. The value of his study lies not in its methodology (it is resolutely...

The Mines of Windber: The Struggles of New Immigrants for Unionization, 1890s-1930s.
January 1, 1998... By combining labor, immigration, and community approaches, Beik has written an informative account of the efforts of immigrant bituminous coal miners to organize a union in Windber, Pennsylvania. As the daughter of a Windber coal miner, she is...

The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State and the National Identity.
January 1, 1998... Paradoxically, in a country of immigrants, few studies have been dedicated to the comprehensive history of U.S. immigration policy. Some periods have been studied and some laws investigated, but, with the exception of Hutchinson's legislative...

Postwar Politics in the G-7: Orders and Eras in Comparative Perspective.
January 1, 1998... Understanding the orders and eras of world affairs requires a perspective that is both international and interdisciplinary. Postwar Politics in the G-7 is a valuable, exploratory comparative history of the politics of major economic powers during...

Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico.
January 1, 1998... During the rule of the Habsburg dynasty (1521-1700), both priests and laity in New Spain had a clear idea of the Church's role in society. The clergy formed a distinct class with certain privileges and duties, and, despite a high degree of state...

How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914.
January 1, 1998... This important volume is an effort to stimulate new interest in Latin American quantitative history. According to the editor, the rise of social history, as well as of a predominantly sociological and political approach to dependency theory, led...

Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing.
January 1, 1998... Civil Justice in China adds empirical weight to the revisionist case about Qing law that Huang and other scholars have argued in a previous volume.(1) Until recently, conventional wisdom held that Chinese courts almost entirely neglected civil...

Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire's End.
January 1, 1998... Howland's important new study about the constituting of "Japan" as an object of knowledge in late-nineteenth century Chinese thought addresses issues broadly concerned with textuality and history by taking on an ephemeral moment in Chinese...

Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Drawing upon rural proverbs, oral histories, and Mughal and - especially - British imperial records, Hardiman argues that Indian peasants have historically characterized their local "usurer" (sahukar) as someone who could expropriate surplus...

Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831-1896.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... This book is a "case study of monarchy in transition" (xvii). The transition in question starts from a past that, without much strain, could be described as medieval; it extends some way toward a future that - despite the recent efforts of the...