The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from June 1994

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from June 1994

Religion and social inequality in Ireland.
June 22, 1994... Anthropological analyses of rural Ulster communities have shown that dichotomous models minimize the complexity of social interaction between Catholics and Protestants. Historical studies of social structure based upon census data have provided...

Demonstrating communities in post-Ottoman Syria.
June 22, 1994... The origins and evolution of Arab nationalism have been the subject of historical inquiry for more than fifty years. During that time, however, most historians of the "Arab movement" have subscribed to the same idealist assumptions that guided...

Black violence in post-Civil War Louisiana.
June 22, 1994... How violent was Louisiana after the Civil War? This question has been the focal point of a major controversy involving both eyewitnesses and later historians. For post-Civil War white Louisianians, the whole question of violence was a sore point....

Material life in South Australia.
June 22, 1994... The acquisition and use of goods constitutes one meaning of the term consumption. It is a concept colored with multiple meanings, including the pathological implication of waste and destruction, as well as the moral burden of desire for material...

Religion on the run.
June 22, 1994... "At one time English religion had emphasized the static or the recurrent aspects of worship. Then for a century or more, England was conscious of acting a sacred history as opposed to reenacting it" (43). Sommerville's observation should shock no...

Freedom. I. Freedom in the Making of Western Culture.
June 22, 1994... Brave fellow, Patterson. Never before have I read a scholarly book as ambitious as this one. Patterson's aim is nothing less than to write the history of freedom, "the supreme value of the Western world" (ix). A large order on anyone's premises,...

Crossing Cultures: Essays in the Displacement of Western Civilization.
June 22, 1994... This volume aims to "examine post-Columbian cultural encounters." Although the first part of the title (crossing cultures) opens the possibility of a variety of interpretations, the general tone of the articles assumes that the so-called...

Rome and India: The Ancient Sea Trade.
June 22, 1994... New archaeological excavations in India and Sri Lanka (Arikamedu and the Tamilnadu area, Ter, Sonkh and the Deccan, and Mantai in Sri Lanka to mention a few) and reshaped critical approaches both by Indian and classical archaeologists and...

A State of Deference: Ragusa/Dubrovnik in the Medieval Centuries.
June 22, 1994... For the past several years, Dubrovnik and the provinces surrounding it have been sources of terrifyingly sad news, with stories flooding the press of extraordinary cruelty to people and to relics of its past. Under these circumstances, it is good...

The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London.
June 22, 1994... Archer's book is closely analyzed and intelligently argued, deeply rooted in a wide range of archival as well as printed sources, and nicely balanced in its critical judgments and interpretations. Archer is keenly aware that London was too...

The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement, c. 1550-1700.
June 22, 1994... Here is a slightly revised, expanded, and translated version of the author's Terre d'exil: L'Angleterre et ses refugies francais et wallons, de la Reforme a la Revocation de l'Edit de Nantes, 1550-1700, first published in 1985 amid the spate of...

The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts.
June 22, 1994... If the eighteenth century were a golden age for interdisciplinary virtuosity, then the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, now the Royal Society of Arts, was its Parnassus. Although overshadowed in the historiography...

The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge.
June 22, 1994... Barrell has long been recognized as a pioneering and rigorous practitioner of interdisciplinary method. The Birth of Pandora brings together a decade's worth of essays, including five which have appeared elsewhere and two published for the first...

City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London.
June 22, 1994... Walkowitz's long-awaited City of Dreadful Delight guides readers on a remarkable journey into late Victorian London, a city mythically divided between overworld and underworld, safety and vulnerability. Walkowitz organizes her study around the...

Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to World War I.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... According to the author, this volume serves as a complement to his earlier well-known work, The Rise of Merchant Banking (London, 1984). It is thus part of Chapman's valiant and commendable effort to redress the low degree of coverage given in...

Hailey: A Study in British Imperialism, 1872-1969.
June 22, 1994... Born in 1872, the year Benjamin Disraeli's Crystal Palace speech brought empire to the forefront of Britain's political agenda, Malcolm Hailey joined the Indian Civil Service in 1894. During the 1920s and early 1930s he served as governor of two...

Saint Louis: Crusader King of France.
June 22, 1994... Louis IX has always been an elusive figure. Thanks to the richness of the extant records dealing with him and his reign, we know, or we can potentially know, more about Louis than about any other ruler of his age, with the possible exception of...

The Ideology of the Great Fear: The Soissonnais in 1789.
June 22, 1994... In France in July 1789, peasants and townspeople across the kingdom took up arms to check the rumored invasion of brigands coming to destroy the harvest. Although the brigands never appeared, the widespread ferment that was incited by panic...

Revolutionary France: 1770-1880.
June 22, 1994... The bicentennial of the French Revolution has brought forth many fine histories of that pivotal event in as many languages. But none has attained the scope of Furet's volume in the projected five-volume history of France from 987 A.D. to 1987....

The Trial of Madame Caillaux.
June 22, 1994... Practitioners of medieval and early modern history long ago discovered in documents generated by court cases an extraordinarily rich source for the exploration of cultures in the distant past. Berenson joins the growing ranks of historians of...

Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso's Barcelona.
June 22, 1994... In this ambitious book, Kaplan argues that a unique and autonomous "civic culture" defined by principles of communal solidarity, economic justice, and regional freedom emerged in Barcelona in the period between 1888 and 1939 (8). Kaplan's survey...

Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age.
June 22, 1994... In the seventeenth century, the last century of the European plague, Italian public health authorities and physicians fretted about the reappearance of a disease which, in its bubonic form, might cause the death of three-quarters of those who...

The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present.
June 22, 1994... This volume, with historians, demographers, anthropologists, and classicists as contributors, covers a period of two millennia of Italian history. Its eighteen chapters encompass various aspects of family life in ancient, medieval, and modern...

The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560-1720.
June 22, 1994... The burden of Forster's book is to take issue with Chatellier and Delumeau with respect both to the substance of the Counter-Reformation and how "whatever-it-was" actually happened.(1) He agrees with them (and with most scholars of the...

The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany.
June 22, 1994... How Jews assimilated into modern European culture and society, and still retained a Jewish identity, is the central question in modern Jewish history. In The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, Kaplan has made a crucial contribution to our...

From Tsarism to the New Economic System: Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Davies, the foremost Western historian of the Soviet interwar economic system, suggests in his introduction, that this collection of essays accomplishes what has not been done before; it systematically compares the tsarist economy on the eve of...

CD-ROM Edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette: Folio I, 1728-1750.(E-book Review)
June 22, 1994... For early American historians, few sources are as rich or contain the range of information as colonial newspapers. However, to mine the contents of a newspaper is costly in terms of time and eyesight. The document must be examined page by page,...

The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities.
June 22, 1994... Gentility, as it is described and analyzed in the first half of this important (and beautifully produced) new book, traveled easily over time and space from European courts and cities to English county families, and, without changing much as a...

Liberty/Liberte: The American and French Experiences.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This collection of essays was written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the French gift to the United States of the Statue of Liberty. The contributors are distinguished: Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer, both Alexis de...

Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century.
June 22, 1994... Made famous by Bolton, borderlands history has been making a comeback after a half-century or more of obscurity. As part of this resurgence, the history of colonial Louisiana, once sorely neglected, has begun to attract a number of imaginative...

Life After Death: Widows in Pennsylvania, 1750-1850.
June 22, 1994... In this study of widows in southeastern Pennsylvania, Wilson compares urban Philadelphia with its rural neighbor, Chester County. She finds considerable differences in widows' inheritances for the majority of the period under study. Not until...

Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869.
June 22, 1994... This book is an important examination of social consensus and political conflict in a mid-nineteenth century upper South county in which slaves accounted for half of the population, and the occupations of the white residents varied from planters...

Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840-1950.
June 22, 1994... An article in The New York Times reported that although a group of high school students in Boston could not stay awake during morning physics class, they were animated during their afternoon vocational education training course.(1) Most important...

Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854-1868.
June 22, 1994... Since the publication of Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York, 1970), students of pre-Civil War American politics have understood the unusual power of the ideology of "free labor" in undermining the institution of slavery....

The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This book is one for which we have been waiting. Hundley, author of classic monographs on Colorado River water politics and of a popular textbook history of California, has now written a remarkable water history of the Golden State. It is also...

Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950.
June 22, 1994... Small Worlds joins the expanding shelf of historical anthologies on these often appealing subjects. The rising interest of historians and historical social scientists is due in part to contemporary concerns about the present condition and...

The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present.
June 22, 1994... Jones does not precisely define whom she means by the "dispossessed." The subjects of her history are not below a certain level of income or standard of living, nor are they without means of support. They appear to be Americans who historically...

Meadows of Memory: Images of Time and Tradition in American Art and Culture.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Kammen discusses the role of memory in American history, a theme much on his mind in his recent work. Claiming that ideas about history are much more prominent in American imagery than art historians have recognized, and that they inform many...

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature.
June 22, 1994... This book shows, as we expect, elegance and suppleness of language and of thought, and all the best qualities of the academic mind. Fender combines archival history and literary criticism. He draws connections between letters written by...

Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880.
June 22, 1994... Kaestle's book breaks ground by crafting a view of reading in the United States in the past century. It is unparalleled in its attempt to bring together rich and imaginative sources of information about and methods for exploring the reading...

Revolutionary Sparks: Freedom of Expression in Modern America.
June 22, 1994... In recent years, neo-Nazis who burned a cross in the yard of an African-American family and anarchists who torched Old Glory have gained First-Amendment protection. Surveying the diversity of speech acts seeking constitutional shelter, legal...

Political Mischief: Smear, Sabotage, and Reform in U.S. Elections.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Felknor reminds us that negative campaigning is nothing new. In 1796, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson traded dastardly accusations. Jeffersonian Democrats denounced Adams' vanity and spread tales about his legendary temper. Adams' Federalists...

The President as Party Leader.
June 22, 1994... A comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of the president's role as party leader would be a most welcome addition to American political literature. As Davis notes at the outset of this volume, there has been "no full-length study of the...

The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America.
June 22, 1994... Historians will find that Mead has got a lot wrong. But I hope that they and other academics will overlook these and other, more ideological, objections to consider the more provocative points in his latest book about antipoverty policy. The...

Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Political Thought.
June 22, 1994... McCartney's bold intellectual attempt in his first book is to interrelate conceptually what might be called three faces of black-American political thought: the antislavery or abolitionist face, the black nationalist face, and the black...

Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939.
June 22, 1994... Eichengreen breaks new ground in his investigation of the links between international financial structure and the onset, depth, and duration of worldwide depression in the interwar period. He argues that the gold standard worked prior to World...

Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931-1991.
June 22, 1994... Grimshaw makes no claim to writing impartial and objective history of black politics in Chicago. This is "not an arid, journalistically balanced, or detached work," Grimshaw warns for "it is informed by a point of view" (xii). That point of view...

Worse than the Disease: Pitfalls of Medical Progress.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Important and extraordinary, this book is beautifully written and makes the subject matter fascinating and understandable to any interested and intelligent reader. The author examines some of the problems of "big modern medicine" by taking...

War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica.
June 22, 1994... Archaeologists and ethnohistorians long have recognized that warfare was a central feature of all prehistoric Mesoamerican cultures. However, scholars only recently have begun to investigate in detail the role that war played in the development...

The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory of the Bahamas.
June 22, 1994... We are fortunate that this first book-length study of the "Sub-Taino" Lucayan aborigines of the Bahamas archipelago is by one of the most sophisticated and adventurous of contemporary interdisciplinary archaeologists. Keegan not only challenges,...

The Cambridge History of China. XV. The People's Republic, part 2: Revolutions Within the Chinese Revolution.
June 22, 1994... The numerous contributors to this formidable volume all present important arguments in the ongoing debate within the field of Chinese studies over the meaning of the cultural revolution and Deng Xiaoping's reform programs. Scholars who pick up...