The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from June 1996

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from June 1996

Naming children in early New England.
June 22, 1996... In the larger scheme of things, choosing a name for a new baby is no world-shaking matter. How, then, justify a serious study of so apparently trivial an event? Two related premises warrant it. First, small rituals reflect larger values, and,...

Irish famines and English mortality in the eighteenth century.
June 22, 1996... Life expectancy at birth in England probably rose by about two years between the periods 1700-1749 and 1750-1799, from approximately thirty-four to thirty-six years. Several explanations have been proposed for this rise, but it has been difficult...

Punishing assault: the transformation of attitudes in the English courts.
June 22, 1996... In early modern England, physical violence was regarded as an acceptable instrument of social policy and of individual and group interaction by almost all sectors of society. There were dissenting voices and differences of emphasis, but violence...

Malaria, labor, and population distribution in Costa Rica: a biohistorical perspective.
June 22, 1996... Biomedical scientists have devoted much attention to the role of the Duffy system, [Mathematical Expression Omitted] and [Mathematical Expression Omitted], and the sickle-cell trait, HbS, in resistance to malaria, and social scientists have...

Hans Memling: The Complete Works.
June 22, 1996... For the preeminent art historians of the generation that preceded ours, such as Panofsky and Gombrich, it was self-evident that no work of art can be appreciated or understood fully unless it is seen amidst the preoccupations and assumptions of...

Velazquez, Los Borrachos, and Painting at the Court of Philip IV.
June 22, 1996... For the preeminent art historians of the generation that preceded ours, such as Panofsky and Gombrich, it was self-evident that no work of art can be appreciated or understood fully unless it is seen amidst the preoccupations and assumptions of...

The King's Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait.
June 22, 1996... For the preeminent art historians of the generation that preceded ours, such as Panofsky and Gombrich, it was self-evident that no work of art can be appreciated or understood fully unless it is seen amidst the preoccupations and assumptions of...

Historians and art historians: a lowering of sights? (new perspectives in the evaluation of art and history)
June 22, 1996... For the preeminent art historians of the generation that preceded ours, such as Panofsky and Gombrich, it was self-evident that no work of art can be appreciated or understood fully unless it is seen amidst the preoccupations and assumptions of...

Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Only in recent years have archaeologists become involved in contemporary research into environmental change, providing a historical dimension to such issues as global warming. Crumley summarizes the issues of this book in her introduction:...

Protein and Energy.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Most of the accurate knowledge now available about the nutritional requirements of humans and animals has been acquired in the twentieth century, beginning with Chittenden's work on proteins and Funk's on vitamins.(1) Yet many of the most...

Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research.
June 22, 1996... Society has become so inured to frank discussions of sexual peccadillos that it is difficult to imagine a time when even serious scientific study of human sexuality was taboo. Bullough harks back to a time when scientists who dared to explore the...

Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations.
June 22, 1996... In this book, Micale has made three distinct contributions: bibliographic, interpretive, and methodological. The first borders on the exhaustive; the second is suggestive; the third sets standards for judging present and future work and, to my...

Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... The title of this work immediately orients readers to the author's point of attack. Relating the past requires a special kind of discourse; it involves a consociation of interested parties, among which the sources are to be included. Hence, there...

Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory.
June 22, 1996... This book represents a powerful, commonsense statement of the need to examine collective memory as a force in human action and understanding, and of many of the issues involved in its analysis. The author clearly recognizes the multiplicity of...

A Historian's Guide to Computing.
June 22, 1996... Authors of methodology textbooks in every discipline face the same choices: What audience should be targeted? How advanced, how technical, how comprehensive, and how closely linked to current technology should the book be? How broad and how deep...

Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millenium.
June 22, 1996... Geary - professor of history and director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles - argues that "what we think we know about the early Middle Ages is largely determined by what people of the...

Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... This book seeks to establish a direct relationship between the new philosophy of the seventeenth century and a tradition of secrets that flourished outside the university and concerned itself with utilitarian or esoteric information about nature....

Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800.
June 22, 1996... This volume of essays attacks the question of how urbanization and state formation interacted before 1800. That the rise of cities and medieval monarchies went together is an old idea, but the editors have apparently been drawn to it again...

Land, labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity.
June 22, 1996... The history of European agriculture has a long tradition of assessing economic growth simply by looking for new techniques - signs of enclosures, novel crops, and modified crop rotations - a tradition that reaches back to such agricultural...

The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century: A Privileged Moment in the History of England, Scotland, and France.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... A remarkable group of Scotsmen - Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, most notably - scrutinized the waning ethic of aristocratic society during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Convinced of the...

Poverty and Deviance in Modern Europe.
June 22, 1996... Entrusted with writing a textbook with minimal scholarly apparatus, Jutte has successfully drawn from his own work on poor relief and the German underworld. His subject is not only vast but apparently passe. The poor and poverty as well as...

Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... How do social groups take everyday objects and invest them with enough meaning to become identifying badges? This is the central question posed in Fashioning the Bourgeoisie. Perrot looks at the historical moment of the nineteenth century when...

Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers.
June 22, 1996... More than twenty years ago, in their classic work on deterrence theory and practice, George and Smoke noted the need to study the strategic and political calculations of the initiator state in order to understand the success or failure of...

Death by Government.
June 22, 1996... Death by Government is a good introduction to the general phenomena of state-sponsored mass murder or democide (Rummel's concept). The numerous case studies are a mixture of carefully wrought description of the horrendous suffering of peoples...

The Jews in the History of England: 1485-1850.
June 22, 1996... In his preface, Katz is at pains to describe this book as a contribution to English history. He has sought to avoid the "Whig History" of such Jewish historians as Roth, who argued both for Jewish pride in Jewish contributions and for a tale of...

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England.
June 22, 1996... Shapin - a leading exponent of the social construction of science has written a book which, though focusing on Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and the community of natural philosophers in seventeenth-century England, raises issues central to current...

Anglo-French Naval Rivalry: 1840-1870.
June 22, 1996... Research about theories of the causes of wars generally excludes data from situations in which wars did not occur. The Anglo-French rivalry of the midnineteenth century would certainly belong to a "control group" of this sort. The two great naval...

Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London, 1870-1939.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... By any measure, Jewish immigrants who lived in East London between 1880 and 1930 were poverty-stricken. But though they lived no better than many other groups in the area, their post-neonatal mortality rate a rate that usually reflects...

Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... During the 1970s, the older accounts of agrarian relations during the generation between the Famine and the Land War were being replaced with a new story that was sometimes caricatured as a tale of "down-trodden landlords and rapacious tenants."...

The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France Around 1200.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Baldwin offers his readers an encyclopedic array of medieval voices on the subject of sexuality and sexual practices from one particular time and place. The special contribution of this book is that Baldwin has risked bringing together traditions...

Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Bell's work may not be the first study of French barristers under the Old Regime, but it does break important new ground. Leaving to the margins, though not completely neglecting, issues of wealth acquisition, social status, and intergenerational...

The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation.
June 22, 1996... In recent years, the old, old debate about the origins of the French Revolution has twisted in a new direction. Researchers now increasingly conceptualize the problem in terms not of social breakdown and upheaval but of how a French Revolution...

The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France: 1750-1850.
June 22, 1996... The spread of medical modes of thought throughout European, and especially French, society in the latter half of the nineteenth century has inspired some of the best histories of science in the past decade. In this thoughtful and thoroughly...

Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France.
June 22, 1996... Although the rural history of early modern France has been much influenced by cultural anthropology, works on the nineteenth century have cleaved more to socioeconomic approaches. It is difficult to know precisely why, but the available...

Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism.
June 22, 1996... Who was Galileo? His has become a multiple personality. Long used to Galileo the scientist (or even Galileo the Platonist), we have recently been introduced to Galileo the epistemological anarchist, Galileo the rhetorician, Galileo the legatee of...

The Medieval Super-companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence.
June 22, 1996... The role of Florentine banking and trading companies in the international economy of late medieval Europe has long been a focus of research, since these firms have been seen as prototypes of modern capitalistic forms of organization. The roll...

The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: New Perspectives on the Economic and Social History of Seventeenth-Century Spain.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... This collection of recent studies of the social and economic history of early modern Castile draws attention to a significant, if neglected, subject - the domestic causes and consequences of the decline of Spain. Eschewing traditional...

The Danish Revolution: An Ecohistorical Interpretation.
June 22, 1996... This work is a radical revision of the understanding of the political-agrarian revolution that unfolded in Denmark at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The prevailing historiographical view sees the agrarian...

Deprivation and Disease: Mortality During the Great Finnish Famine of the 1860s.
June 22, 1996... In this monograph, Pitkanen attempts to assess the relative importance of social dislocation vis-a-vis nutritional deprivation and its synergistic relationship with infectious diseases in producing sharp increases in morbidity and mortality...

Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Milanich provides a useful survey of the 12,000-year development of Native Americans in Florida before the arrival of the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century. The book comes at a propitious time, for resurgent scholarly interest in the...

Plains Indians, A.D. 500-1500: The Archeological Past of Historical Groups.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... The question asked most frequently of North American archaeologists working on prehistoric sites is, "What tribe of Indians lived at this site"? The question may be simple, but it is difficult to answer in the absence of historic documentation....

Visions of America Since 1492.
June 22, 1996... In 1992 the University of Leicester inaugurated its American Studies Program with a series of lectures by distinguished scholars on the theme of "the evolution of American cultural identities." Visions of America presents these lectures on "the...

The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679-1749.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Contrary to previous work that emphasized how stringently the New England Puritans winnowed their cultural inheritance during their transAtlantic passage, Gildrie stresses their retention of the "indecorous and rowdy elements of traditional...

Dividing the Land: Early American Beginnings of Our Private Property Mosaic.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... This impressively researched volume is the first comprehensive analysis of the land distribution process during the European settlement of North America. Drawing on property records ranging from the land plans of the Virginia Company in 1607 to...

Making Arms in the Machine Age: Philadelphia's Frankford Arsenal, 1816-1870.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... No military system can function without sufficient supplies of reliable munitions. The Frankford Arsenal, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, manufactured ammunition for the United States Army from 1817 through the end of the Vietnam War. Arsenal...

Misfire: The History of How America's Small Arms Have Failed Our Military.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... As its title hints, this is not a scholarly book, but a sustained polemic against the United States Army Ordnance Corps from 1794 to 1969, purporting to show that "U.S. Ordnance has been more often wrong than right" (535). The last of its forty...

The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... This book began as a study of "who participated in nineteenth-century urban politics and why," and then grew into a book about the changing nature of urban space (xiii). The briefest summary of its thesis is in the author's own words: "In 1850...

The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective.
June 22, 1996... The difficulty of doing primary research in the American Civil War - of getting at the thoughts and attitudes of the people and the period - can daunt even the most experienced researcher. There are microfilm collections to peruse and handwritten...

The Nation and its City: Politics, 'Corruption', and Progress in Washington, D.C., 1861-1902.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... The great cities of Europe, Asia, and Africa emerged during a span of centuries. Most bear distinctive marks of their national civic life. North American cities - like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Houston - by contrast, were the products...

The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reseevation, 1889-1920.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... The general history of American Indian assimilation and dispossession is probably familiar to most readers, but its variants are numerous. So are theoretical explanations for the process of culture contact and change. Meyer examines White Earth...

The Lost Promise of Progressivism.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Eisenach attempts a "reconstruction" of Progressive thought for the communitarian age in this quirky intellectual history of the Progressive Era. Positioning his book as part of what he sees as a rush to reinterpret the intellectual foundations...

Bound by our Constitution: Women, Workers and the Minimum Wage.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Bound by Our Constitution is a comparative history of minimum-wage policy for women workers in Britain and the United States and an important contribution to the growing literature on the role of women - both as policymakers and objects of policy...

Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenge to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... The Progressive Era has a special interest for political scientists, in part because their field came of age as an academic discipline during those years. Many of these early practitioners were also participants in campaigns, and some - like...

American Economic Development in Historical Perspective.
June 22, 1996... This festschrift of twelve essays by some of America's leading economic historians pays homage to Gallman, a cliometrician whose own writings have defined the cutting edge in American economic history for decades; particularly influential have...

Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal.
June 22, 1996... Weber's powerful study examines the complex political relationship between labor, the cotton industry, and the state in California's San Joaquin valley during the Depression. Particularly important to her study is the New Deal and the impact that...

Federal Policymaking and the Poor: National Goals, Local Choices, and Distributional Outcomes.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... If anybody is listening, Rich - a political scientist - has some compelling things to say about "reinventing government." He carefully traces the flow of public monies under the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program to needy places,...

American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Recipient of the Robert H. Ferrell Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations as the best book by a senior scholar in 1994, this elegant book explores America's historic ambivalence toward Europe through the lives of...

Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Shafer has mined the Louisiana Supreme Court's slave law cases to provide a useful compilation of information. Augmenting the published reports with information from the unpublished case files allows Schafer to flesh out the official reports,...

Inside Agiattors: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement.
June 22, 1996... Chappell's preface explains that, as a young northern white liberal, he was startled to learn that some white southerners had supported the civil rights movement. As a result, he seeks to answer the question, "How did a poor, disfranchised...

Nixon Reconsidered.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Hoff seeks to rescue the Nixon administration from historians who have emphasized the Watergate scandals. Although she believes that President Nixon deserved to be impeached, she does not think that his illegal behavior should be the measure of...

The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Greer draws on a vast interdisciplinary literature about revolution, rural history, peasant insurgencies, nationalism, and gender to situate the Lower Canadian insurrection within a "revolutionary crisis" that encompassed the broad "Euro-Atlantic...

The Political Economy of Spanish America in the Age of Revolution: 1750-1850.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... This well-crafted ten-essay volume is an honorable, if tardy, addition to what by now has become a virtual genre in Latin American history - the broadly defined collection on long-run "political economy" issues. (It would seem that no lone...

Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904).(Brief Article)
June 22, 1996... Clancy-Smith's remarkable microhistory of the Algerian and Tunisian pre-Saharan region illuminates French expansionism and Maghribi reactions from a radically decentered perspective - that of the remote semicolonial periphery. The enormous...

Civil Law in Qing and Republican China.
June 22, 1996... The authors of this book take a revisionist view of imperial China's legal system. Most scholars have argued that China's law codes and magistrates emphasized administrative and penal law over the "trivial" civil law. Thus, China, unlike the...

Erratum. (correction to 'The Politics of Universal Health Insurance: Lessons from the Past?' 1996 issue, vol. 26, pages 671-679)(Correction Notice)
June 22, 1996... The publishing information for the book under review in Theodore R. Marmor, "The Politics of Universal Health Insurance: Lessons from the Past?" XXVI (1996), 671-679, was inadvertently omitted beneath the title. It should read as follows: Why...