The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from June 1995

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from June 1995

Spaces, inside and outside, in eighteenth-century Philadelphia.
June 22, 1995... For the past several decades, early American historians have focused considerable attention on the character of eighteenth-century Philadelphia, the largest city in British North America on the eve of the American Revolution. A significant amount...

Up and out or down and out? Immigrant mobility in the antebellum United States.
June 22, 1995... Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Stephan Thernstrom's Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), and it has now been more than twenty years since the appearance of...

Holy days, work days, and the standard of living in the Habsburg monarchy. (response to Hans-Joachim Voth in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1995)
June 22, 1995... A close reading of one's book is certainly among the greater honors an author can hope to receive from colleagues, even if the resonance is not always perfectly harmonious. Sculpting on the frontiers of knowledge always runs the risk of...

The Logics of Social Structure.
June 22, 1995... "Get back to the presents," insists the youthful voice in Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales. The storyteller complies: "There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths."(1)...

History and Memory.
June 22, 1995... Other Western thinkers can only listen in amazement as one French theorist after another comes upon the stage either to denounce modernity or to register his profound ambiguity about the historical era initiated in 1789. Joining them now is Le...

Giving: Charity and Philanthropy in History.
June 22, 1995... Bremner is one of the pioneers of modern social history. He produced one of the first serious studies of poverty in the United States - From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York, 1956) - and his 1960s project on the...

Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... By 264 B.C. the Romans had extended their dominion over the diverse peoples of the Italian peninsula, and during the next 118 years (264-146 B.C.), they brought under their sway the rest of the Mediterranean peoples, including the Hellenistic...

Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies.
June 22, 1995... This ambitious book offers its readers a wide-ranging study of women's involvement in credit transactions ranging from antiquity to the early modern period in the West, compared with their involvement in credit in the so-called developing...

Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300-1520.
June 22, 1995... Goldberg has made a major contribution to our understanding of women's work and marriage in European history. Based on an extensive (and intensive) examination of source materials for the city of York and its surrounding countryside, his study...

Growing up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... In this study of urban childhood and adolescence from the late-thirteenth through early-sixteenth centuries, Hanawalt combines the discipline of historical analysis based on archival data with creative writing. This is not a totally novel...

A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500-1620.
June 22, 1995... The royal manor and Liberty of Havering consists of 16,000 acres running north from the Thames River in southern Essex. In 1620, the Liberty began about fourteen miles east of the city of London. Between 1500 and 1620 - the years covered by this...

Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England.
June 22, 1995... Visionary Women studies the female charismatics of seventeenth-century England, concentrating on how Quaker women were different from their contemporaries and predecessors. Although the book focuses on the question of gender, namely, the ways in...

A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740's.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Harris offers an account of the political polemics of a murky decade, reading the conflicts and changes of Hanoverian politics through the charged medium of their representation in the public press. He takes up some important questions, still...

The Industrial Revolution and British Society.
June 22, 1995... The Industrial Revolution happened and it was important - but not too important. Such is the conclusion of ten students of Max Hartwell, an Australian economic historian, in a collection of essays on the Industrial Revolution and its relationship...

After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-1874.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... After Chartism addresses one of the central questions of nineteenth-century English history: What happened to independent working-class politics between the demise of the Chartist campaign for parliamentary reform in the late 1840s and the...

The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880-1940.
June 22, 1995... From the late nineteenth century onward, industrializing countries everywhere began to move at varying rates toward the welfare state. In this elaborately argued book, Orloff takes up the question of how modern social provision (to use her term)...

War and Government in the French Provinces: Picardy, 1470-1560.
June 22, 1995... Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, made good his wife's inheritance of Flanders and adjoining territories by winning the support of local nobles and municipal leaders through a combination of fief rentes, indentures, offices, and other...

Etat, finances et economie pendant la Revolution francaise.
June 22, 1995... This weighty tome, with thirty-one contributions, includes several papers of considerable merit; it also includes many of questionable quality. The unevenness of the contributions is matched by their wildly scattered list of topics; the papers go...

Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse.
June 22, 1995... This book examines the discursive practices that helped determine attitudes toward criminality and deviance in France and England primarily during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It is divided into three parts: The first explores the...

Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830-1871.
June 22, 1995... The Paris Commune of 1871 is widely known, but far less attention has been paid to the much shorter-lived revolutionary communes that appeared in a number of other French cities during the transition from Second Empire to Third Republic. Ballots...

Le Sacre-Coeur de Montmartre de 1870 a nos jours.
June 22, 1995... Even the most unobservant tourist in the city of Paris cannot but notice the odd white church that dominates the skyline. It draws the eye irresistibly and it draws the curious - thousands of them - to Montmartre every year. Montmartre's Bohemian...

Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830-1940.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Known for previous writings on the connection between science and colonialism, Pyenson in this study considers the relationship between the exact sciences and French colonialism. This work fits the newer approach to the history of scientific...

Economies et societes: La production agricole de la France de 1810 a 1990: departements et regions. Croissance, productivite, structures, 3 vols.
June 22, 1995... Chockful of tables and statistics (volumes 2 and 3 are nothing else), Toutain's three volumes are meant for specialists; but the information that his quantitative history offers can be useful to all historians of contemporary France, and to...

The Holocaust, the French and the Jews.
June 22, 1995... For more than a generation after the liberation of France, little attention was paid to the experience of Jews under the Vichy government or in German-occupied France. The French were reluctant to grapple with the territory torn between...

La France, l'aide americaine et la construction europeenne: 1944-1954, 2 vols.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Bossuat offers much evidence for understanding the once ill-regarded French Fourth Republic as the rough draft for the once well-regarded Fifth. In the highly adverse circumstances of defeat, division, and decay, the French sought to rebuilt and...

Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600.
June 22, 1995... The authors propose an approach to works of art that differs from both traditional iconography and more recent contextualism. Iconographers study the ways in which ideal programs are represented in works of art; contextualists look for the ways...

Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance.
June 22, 1995... One of the prominent themes of Muir's book concerns how participants and observers of the Cruel Carnival, which occurred in Friuli in 1511, retold events, either in written form or in oral narratives told around the fogolar or hearth. Muir...

Reevaluating the Third Reich.
June 22, 1995... The essays in this book reflect topical and conceptual approaches that were "in" for the field of Nazi studies in the late 1980s. They included - in addition to the issue of historicization - Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life), the...

A Plague of Insurrection: Popular Politics and Peasant Revolt in Flanders, 1323-1328.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... This book, described by its author as "based exclusively on published materials that have been known for some time," discusses a general rebellion in western Flanders that is little known in the English-speaking world (9). Unfortunately, it is...

The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchatel, 1550-1800.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... For the past thirty years, historians of marriage and the family have attempted to answer questions about the definition of the modern without notable success. What is the modern marriage, the modern family? How did they come into being? This...

Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914.
June 22, 1995... This illuminating study takes hooliganism as a text to be read and interpreted for its revelations about social and cultural conflict in late imperial Russia. The sensationalist boulevard press first popularized the term, applying it to the...

The Gypsies.
June 22, 1995... This monograph, one in a series on The Peoples of Europe, is a worthwhile contribution to our knowledge about the Gypsy, or Roma, population of Europe. Fraser ably examines a wide range of printed sources to ascertain the origins of the Gypsies,...

Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley.
June 22, 1995... The appearance of John Smith's A True Relation in 1608 established the reputation of the Powhatan chiefdom as the dominant native group in the Chesapeake Bay region; subsequent scholarship has reinforced, and perhaps exaggerated, that focus,...

The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... For good reason, anthropologists and historians in recent years have tended to deemphasize warfare in the relations between Europeans and Indians in the New World. Not only did the two peoples deal with each other in a variety of other ways -...

The Political Economy of North American Indians.
June 22, 1995... For the past several decades, political economy has returned to vogue as a theoretical approach. Anthropologists, in particular, have welcomed it as a useful tool that offers another holistic view of their disciplinary issues. Often used with a...

Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City.
June 22, 1995... This carefully researched social science monograph is based upon a statistical analysis of 2,400 wills and allied probate documents, as well as census and tax records. It starts with the Dutch in the 1620s, brilliantly details their survival...

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World: 1400-1680.
June 22, 1995... Less is known about the early transatlantic slave trade before 1700 than for the period when the trade was at its height in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even less is known about the way that Africans participated in the trade, both as...

Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America.
June 22, 1995... John Adams compared the difficulty of getting the colonies to agree on independence at the same moment to having thirteen clocks chime the hour simultaneously. Now Roeber has added a fourteenth clock, the German-speaking immigrants who comprised...

A Field of Divine Wonders: The New Divinity and Village Revivals in Northwestern Connecticut, 1792-1822.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... The "field of wonders" is a cultural landscape located in a corner of Connecticut during the early republic that Kling maps in order to reexamine the period of religious revivalism called the "Second Great Awakening." Echoing Mathews' hypothesis...

Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution.
June 22, 1995... Why did elites frame the United States Constitution and support the establishment of a powerful central state in America? This question is essential to American history, and Brown has found a new means to approach it. Rather than examining...

Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... In the summer of 1800, the hired slave Gabriel, a blacksmith in Henrico County, put in motion a plan to march on Richmond, capture governor James Monroe, and liberate his fellow bondsmen. Joining him were hundreds of blacks, but on the day of the...

From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880.
June 22, 1995... In a recent essay on central and eastern Europe, Hobsbawm, the esteemed British historian, launched a short, but powerful jab against postmodernist notions of radical indeterminacy, impossible objectivity, and casual distinctions between fiction...

The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Miller's study reinterprets the relationship between nationalism and landscape art in nineteenth-century America. She is discontented with former scholars' claim that nineteenth-century landscape paintings were unequivocal statements of American...

Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston.
June 22, 1995... Farrell relates family strategies, class consolidation, and economic change in Brahmin Boston to challenge the socioeconomic theory that the transition from family proprietorship to managerial corporation divorced family control from economic...

Their Sister's Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870.
June 22, 1995... For all the official moral condemnation of prostitutes and their calling, the public has always, privately, been fascinated by the ladies of the night in their varied guises (and disguises), vicariously enjoying what they formally reproved....

Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Promey proposes an approach to the anomaly of Shaker religious art that is at once logical and innovative. To understand the appearance of art in an officially iconoclastic community, she has developed not only an interpretive framework that...

Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914.
June 22, 1995... The period from 1870 to World War I, as Nugent explains in the introduction to Crossings, was unique for its lack of formal restraints on transatlantic migration, the extensive agricultural settlement and industrial development, and the steam...

Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, 1880-1892.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Ostler addresses an interesting issue: Why did the Populist Party of the 1890s flourish in Kansas and Nebraska and not in adjoining Iowa? My own thought has been that Iowa's farmers in the 1880s successfully adjusted to corn-hog agriculture,...

Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... This study of African-American women in the Black Baptist Church is timely and strikingly original. Higginbotham accomplishes three important goals, any one of which makes this book an indispensable addition to scholarly understanding. First, she...

Crime and Punishment in American History.
June 22, 1995... This book is hard to summarize but easy to evaluate. The title is a little deceptive; it would be impossible to write a history of "crime." What Friedman has done is hard enough - a history of the social reaction to crime, of cops and courts and...

Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline.
June 22, 1995... Seccombe's new book is the second volume in his history of the northwestern European family. It examines the relationship between the family and the economy during the Industrial Revolution from an historical materialist perspective, arguing that...

The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.
June 22, 1995... As the subtitle indicates, this book attempts to lay the groundwork for "a new general synthesis" of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (11). By examining the experiences of the Klan in six western cities - Denver, Colorado; El Paso, Texas; Salt Lake...

Dirt and Diseases: Polio before FDR.
June 22, 1995... In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a mysterious illness began afflicting the children of northern Europe. A young chid would go to bed healthy, become slightly feverish during the night, and wake in the morning, legs paralyzed. By...

Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970.
June 22, 1995... Findlay's account of the involvement of the National Council of Churches in the African-American freedom struggle rests on prodigious research. He has mined nearly two dozen archives, corresponded with over a hundred ministers active in the Civil...

The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History.
June 22, 1995... Solicited and assembled with the explicit purpose of bringing "the best in contemporary historical scholarship" to the attention of policymakers and researchers, this collection of essays does so and more. Drawing on many disciplines for theories...

Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... This fascinating book analyzes the development of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), from its founding in 1923 to the mid-1940s. During that period, the Council obtained funds in the amount of $6.25 million to provide operating expenses...

Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Chafe, once again, has written a path-breaking book. Chafe - well known for his work on women's history and the civil-rights movement - offers a definitive biography of Lowenstein, the peripatetic liberal activist, that is both an old-fashioned,...

Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World.
June 22, 1995... A significant amount of recent scholarship has been devoted to the question of whether democracies are less prone to war than are states with other forms of government. The empirical record indicates that democracies fight, and even initiate,...

French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience Across the Continent.
June 22, 1995... Sixteen of the seventeen essays that make up this collection are translated from Du continent perdu a l'archipel retrouve (Quebec City, 1983), which itself was an adaptation of two special issues of the Cahiers de geographie du Quebec in 1979...

The Sky in Mayan Literature.
June 22, 1995... The field of Maya studies has long suffered from a lack of crosscultural and interdisciplinary perspective. Decipherment of the hieroglyphic writing was delayed, some argue, for perhaps half a century because the dominating scholarly authorities...

Region and State in Latin America's Past.
June 22, 1995... This slim volume, based on the 1990 James S. Schouler lectures, delivered at Johns Hopkins University, is an object lesson in the strengths and weaknesses of an established historian's moving in new directions. Morner, the dean of European Latin...

Mexico's Regions: Comparative History and Development.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... In a world where a rearmed, contentious regionalism stalks once powerful nation states, no more fascinating laboratory for the study of historical regionalism exists than Mexico, with its complex, regionally based history and surprisingly...

Political Parties and Generations in Paraguay's Liberal Era: 1869-1940.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Lewis' latest book on Paraguayan politics can be read on two levels, as a political history of Paraguay during that nation's turbulent and little studied "liberal era," and as a test case for models of generational change within political...

Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories.
June 22, 1995... Santeria is a religion that originated in West Africa and spread to Cuba, where it acquired its name, and then to the east coast of the United States. Brandon traces its passage and the new forms that it successively developed. After an...

Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana.
June 22, 1995... The setting is Akyem Abuakwa, a traditional Akan polity that had become part of the British Colony of the Gold Coast in 1874. The location is Kyebi, its capital, and the date, 28 February, 1944. The occasion is the last day of the funerary rites...

A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... The thesis of this book is that Lesotho's history during its formative years can be best understood as its people's search for security. Eldredge explores economic and political aspects of that search and adds a significant consideration of the...

Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family.
June 22, 1995... This fascinating, insightful, and poignant study describes the struggle of several generations of an African family to survive in the face of brutally disruptive colonial and postcolonial worlds. It is a sensitive, gripping history of an extended...

Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Mau Mau still fascinates. This work is the latest entry in a field that in the last six years has produced a series of thoroughly researched and cogently argued books on Kenya's Mau Mau revolt - Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau...

Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Nine historians, seven anthropologists, and nine scholars from neighboring disciplines have written the twenty-five biographies of "ordinary" modern Middle Eastern men (twenty) and women (five), which, along with the editor's introductions,...

Asia in the Making of Europe. III. A Century of Advance.
June 22, 1995... In the introduction to the first volume (1965) of a projected six volumes - two for each century between 1500 and 1800, alternating between the European image of Asia and the impact that knowledge of Asia had on European mores, institutions, and...

Changing Pacific Forests: Historical Perspectives on the Forest Economy of the Pacific Basin.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1995... Changing Pacific Forests reports on current and historical conditions in a number of Pacific Rim countries - Japan, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, New Zealand, and what was then the Soviet Union. The aim of the collection is to use historical...

The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937.
June 22, 1995... Pomeranz writes about the decline of a region in north China that he calls Huang-Yun because it was at the confluence of the Yellow River (Huang he) and the Grand Canal (Yun he), which had been China's major north-south transport route until the...

Kimono: Fashioning Culture.
June 22, 1995... The term kimono has several meanings, but in this book it refers primarily to the elegant "native" costume of present-day Japanese women and to its antecedents in earlier centuries. Dalby, an anthropologist, is especially effective in her...

Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution.
June 22, 1995... Quataert offers a fascinating survey of manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire from the late eighteenth century until World War I. As he states in the introduction, his is the first attempt to provide a discussion of a subject that has long been...