The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from June 1997

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from June 1997

The "low-country advantage" for African-Americans in Georgia, 1880-1930.
June 22, 1997... Social historians interested in the slave South have made much of a set of social, economic, and cultural distinctions between the lowcountry coastal region and the interior sections of South Carolina and Georgia. The basis for these distinctions...

Bastardy in South Germany revisited: an anthropometric synthesis.
June 22, 1997... Twenty years ago, in these pages, a debate proceeded concerning the status of children who were born to unmarried parents in nineteenth-century Bavaria. The disputants associated the causes and effects of the well-established increase in bastardy...

States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... This volume of essays offers welcome recognition of the importance of ideas and ideological production to the history of bureaucratized modernity and its social policies. Most scholarship on the origins of modern social policy, the editors...

Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies.
June 22, 1997... In this important book, Liberman asks whether conquered industrial societies can be exploited in a cost-effective manner by an occupying force. Liberman addresses an issue about which liberal and realist thinkers have long disagreed. From Tom...

Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry.
June 22, 1997... There are two central messages in this volume for demographers, and one for anthropologists. The introduction (and, to a lesser extent, the chapter by David Kertzer) sternly criticizes demographers' ways, whereas the succeeding chapters...

The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century.
June 22, 1997... As we commemorate the last of the great European famines, the one that devastated Ireland 150 years ago, Jordan reminds us that the last one was not the first. Between 1315 and 1322, famine visited most of Europe north and west of the Alps,...

Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages.
June 22, 1997... In this novel exploration of intercommunal relations in the medieval Crown of Aragon, Nirenberg sets out to oppose the view that Christian violence against Jews was inevitable and followed a steadily rising trend, pushed by anti-Jewish ideology,...

European Women and Preindustrial Craft.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... The ten essays in this collection explore the persistence and transformation of women's occupations during the first century of industrialization. The essays focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, but not exclusively. Both the...

Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1943.
June 22, 1997... "From the completion of the Babylonian Talmud down to the publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia in America in 1906, hardly a single major cultural product originated outside Europe." Thus wrote Roth, the distinguished Anglo-Jewish historian, in...

City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution.
June 22, 1997... City of Capital demonstrates that economic institutions and actions are embedded in political and social contexts and that they cannot be fully understood by relying solely on economic models of human behavior. Carruthers' use of econometrics,...

Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British of the British Community, 1735-1785.
June 22, 1997... This is a detailed study of the business and social climbing of a group of eighteenth-century British merchants active in the Atlantic world. The merchants, Augustus Boyd, Richard Oswald, John Sargent II, and Alexander Grant, together with...

Popular Contention in Great Britain: 1758-1834.
June 22, 1997... A decade ago, Tilly published The Contentious French, a brilliant account of the history of collective action in modern France.(1) In his most recent book, Tilly has taken the analytical framework hammered out in his work on France and applied it...

Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain: 1860-1940.
June 22, 1997... The centerpiece of demographic theory, the explanation of fertility decline, has been the subject of great controversy for two decades. Classic demographic transition theory has come under relentless attack, although a widely accepted alternative...

Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750-1945.
June 22, 1997... This grandly researched and thoughtful study achieves a difficult goal - an integrated comparative study, rather than several unconnected national histories bound in a single volume. Throughout the Western world, the late eighteenth century...

Labour, Science and Technology in France: 1500-1620.
June 22, 1997... Twelve years after Goldsmith's call to rethink the agrarian history of preindustrial France, and contemporaneous with Philip T. Hoffman's Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside 1450-1815 (Princeton, 1996), here comes another...

Growth in a Traditional Society. The French Countryside, 1450-1815.
June 22, 1997... This book is full of virtue. It seeks to cleanse historical scholarship of a hardy strain of academic folk wisdom, precisely where it is most deeply entrenched. The folk wisdom is the belief that preindustrial peasants were wedded to communal...

Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... Gager's reconstruction of adoption practices recovers a long-elided aspect of family life in early modern France. Historians have accepted contemporary legal treatises and other prescriptive literature that condemned adoption and insisted that it...

Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.
June 22, 1997... The Marquis de Lafayette remains among the most famous figures in history, yet few scholars consider him worthy of this acclaim. In attacking this common view, Kramer begins with a discussion of Lafayette's self-identification with the cause of...

Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790).
June 22, 1997... In the historiography of the French Revolution, schools of thought have often been associated with different sources and methods. The older class-based interpretation typically drew on the sources and methods of social history, quantifying social...

The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France.
June 22, 1997... Most historical assessments of the French Third Republic are written from the vantage point of its rapid, "strange defeat" in 1940, and the ease with which it relinquished democracy for fascism. Nord does not seek to overturn these assessments,...

Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground: Art, Science, and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France.
June 22, 1997... This book takes as its object the work and theories of Neo-Impressionist painters during the late 1880s and 1890s. As the author clearly acknowledges, he is examining these objects through the general social art-historical methodology developed...

Nimes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in the Gard, 1938-1944.
June 22, 1997... Sixty years after the Liberation, the politics of wartime France remain shrouded in controversy and often willful obfuscation. Charles de Gaulle, that supreme realist, never lost sight of the true line-up in World War II. "The Allies, or rather...

From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... The last few years have seen a vast increase in the number of books appearing in English devoted to the history of medieval Iberia and the relationship of Muslim and Christian peoples within the peninsula. Glick was one of the initiators of this...

Spain, Europe, and the "Spanish Miracle": 1700-1900.
June 22, 1997... Almost without exception, scholars have allowed negative assumptions to shape their analyses of the Spanish economy from the sixteenth century onward: Spain failed to develop, failed to have an effective entrepreneurial class, failed to have...

Spanish Agriculture: The Long Siesta, 1765-1965.
June 22, 1997... Ever since the Enlightenment, Spanish thinkers have struggled with their own peculiar Sonderweg (special path). Why has Spain not matched the political and economic modernization of northern Europe? For a long time, the answers invoked Spain's...

Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ.
June 22, 1997... Were it not for the author's life-long exploration of popular religion in Spain, it would be tempting to suggest that the title is misleading. In itself, this book says more about religious visions and visionaries than about the Spanish Republic....

Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... As the death penalty grows in popular support and political legitimacy in this country, it recedes into the past in Western Europe and becomes a fit subject for the historian. With the exception of the history of the death penalty in England...

Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden.
June 22, 1997... Herzog's aims in this monograph are to reassert the importance of religious issues in an era often seen as one of secularization, and to challenge the view that the decade preceding the revolutions of 1848 saw continuous progress in extending the...

People in Transit: German Migration in Comparative Perspective, 1820-1930.
June 22, 1997... The historical study of international migrations lends itself particularly well to approaches that are comparative and interdisciplinary. This collection of articles on migrations within, out of, and into Germany during the century of industrial...

Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897-1927.
June 22, 1997... This stimulating and elegantly conceived book skillfully links three major themes - the history of German finance (especially of the German inflation), an analysis of the role of Hamburg in German political and economic life, and an examination...

"Folatrer avec le demons": Sabbat et chasse aux sorciers a Vevey (1448).
June 22, 1997... The Alpine districts around Lake Geneva continue to provide valuable clues about the creation of the witches' sabbath and related aspects of late-medieval persecutions. These two pieces of meticulous Swiss research help to solidify one line of...

Juger les vers: Exorcismes et proces d'animaux dans le diocese de Lausanne (XVe-XVIe siecles).
June 22, 1997... The Alpine districts around Lake Geneva continue to provide valuable clues about the creation of the witches' sabbath and related aspects of late-medieval persecutions. These two pieces of meticulous Swiss research help to solidify one line of...

Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons: Social Order and Political Language in a Swiss Mountain Canton, 1470-1620.
June 22, 1997... Head's main goal in this meticulous examination of early modern Rhaetian political culture is to portray the Freestate as a sizable well-ordered democratic polity, that is, a territorial state comprised of politically conscious citizens...

Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia: 1934-1941.
June 22, 1997... One of the sad things about the polarized state of what we might call the question of Joseph Stalin and the terror is that everything is a grudge match. From a purely intellectual point of view, however, the polarization has an even more...

Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis.
June 22, 1997... In this huge new book about the largest city in Russia - currently containing, with the surrounding region, one-tenth of the country's population - Colton has given us the first comprehensive account of how Moscow has been governed (more often,...

Choctaw Genesis: 1500-1700.
June 22, 1997... "There are . . . many savages whose names are not known," wrote a frustrated French cartographer in 1681, explaining the blank spaces on his map of southeastern North America (230). Like others before and since, the mapmaker had a terrible time...

Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts.
June 22, 1997... The Indians of Massachusetts have a history that is seldom told beyond their defeat in King Philip's War. In this carefully researched book, Mandell takes up where other historians have left off, explaining how, in the century after 1676, these...

Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... Despite its hopeful title, this book concentrates on Pennsylvania; it is not a "comprehensive history" of German-speaking migration. The first sixty-five pages and the appendixes on demographic techniques for arriving at gross immigration figures...

The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities.
June 22, 1997... The study of British North America has entered the methodological vanguard in recent years, thanks to a growing interest in Native-American societies - societies that left little conventional source material. Using archaeological evidence,...

Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution.
June 22, 1997... America's founders were not modest about their achievement. For John Adams, the Constitution was "if not the greatest exertion of human understanding . . . the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen." Even...

Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... That Franklin had a passion for politics is well known. The contours of his conflicts with a handful of men in the public arena are equally visible in the historiography of the American Revolutionary era. What is less apparent is the role that...

The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870.
June 22, 1997... "For at least two centuries," Brown begins this concise and well-crafted book, "Americans have believed in the idea that citizens should be informed in order to be able to exercise their civic responsibilities wisely" (xiii). Although this belief...

Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of he American Social Order, 1730-1840.
June 22, 1997... This is an important book, long overdue on this side of the Atlantic. For several decades, eighteenth-century freemasonry has been a topic of intense analysis in Britain, France, and Germany. Historians and historical sociologists working...

Americans: A Collision of Histories.
June 22, 1997... This book seeks, writes Countryman, "to offer a social history of many kinds of American people before full modernity" or, alternatively, to examine "how we have produced categories to separate ourselves from one another but have nonetheless...

Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse.
June 22, 1997... John does not tell us whether he collected stamps in his youth, but the United States Postal Service would be well advised to issue a commemorative in his honor. No scholar has tried harder to treat its early history as something more than a...

Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South.
June 22, 1997... In this important, exhaustively researched study, Bardaglio argues that the Civil War and Reconstruction transformed domestic law in the South, thus changing the shape of patriarchy, the role of the state, and, ultimately, the South's claim to...

From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the United States.
June 22, 1997... Ideally, conferences are forums for the discussion of common topics from various viewpoints, and conference volumes present the conclusions and generalizations that emerge. The editor of this collection of essays reports that they probe the...

International Capital Markets and American Economic Growth: 1820-1914.
June 22, 1997... This small book - 114 pages of text and another 52 pages of supporting material - manages to cram a lot into a little, and to do it rather well. After a short introduction, the authors begin their analysis with a review of the existing data on...

Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830-1870.
June 22, 1997... In this serviceable account of American whaling culture during the mid-nineteenth century, the author contends that - unlike most mariners inured to a deep-water world of masculine hardihood - Victorian whalemen often went to sea in search of...

Slow Train to Paradise: How Dutch Investment Helped Build American Railroads.
June 22, 1997... "Emerging markets" and "globalization" are among the hot topics of modern-day finance. But they are hardly new. During the nineteenth century, the United States was the greatest emerging market, and the Dutch, along with the British, were the...

Competition Policy in America: 1888-1992.
June 22, 1997... This well-written, but idiosyncratic and uneven, book concerns the history of antitrust policy in the United States from the Congressional debates preceding passage of the Sherman Act (1890) to the policy of the Ronald Reagan and George Bush...

Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920.
June 22, 1997... The author, whose specialties are architecture history, art history, and women's studies, brings together the knowledge and methodologies of all three fields to produce a sophisticated examination of selected Carnegie public libraries built...

The Local State: Public Money and American Cities.
June 22, 1997... Few historians have tackled the subject of local government finance. Either bored or frightened by the columns of figures in comptrollers' reports, historians have preferred to chronicle local campaign rhetoric rather than consider the...

The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900-1945.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... This book will become a standard source about the economic role of the United States in Latin America during the first third of the twentieth century. O'Brien examines the spread of North American corporations and their values throughout the...

Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador.
June 22, 1997... This praiseworthy book provides a careful overview of the regional context for indigenous population declines from epidemic diseases in the North Andes (modern Ecuador) during the sixteenth century. According to Newson, the demographic impact of...

Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... This important monograph makes a significant contribution to the study of Indians, demography, migration, and politics in Ecuador in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Quito in the tide refers to the area under the jurisdiction of the royal...

Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua.
June 22, 1997... For the author, "the politics of culture" is a composite of all the uses (and misuses) of cultural symbols, heroes, and myths, made by foreign entities, governments, classes, groups, and others, as they attempt to exert cultural dominance and...

Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World.
June 22, 1997... In this political sociology of the Caribbean during slavery (1750-1900), Stinchcombe argues that the sociopolitical geography of sugar plantations established slave societies the social institutions of which consciously deprived slaves of any...

From Slavery to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930.
June 22, 1997... Sundiata's work covers a dynamic century in the history of the West African island of Fernando Po (now called Bioko and currently a part of the independent country of Equatorial Guinea), as it evolved from a thinly populated backwater to a...

In the Shadow of History: The Passing of Lineage Society.
June 22, 1997... "I have a story to tell about the unfolding and variegated impact of the spread of modernity and its effects on the everyday lives of people," writes Davidson; "like many [such] stories, it is often a sad tale told again and again by those whom...

Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in the Colonial Sudan.
June 22, 1997... Unbeknown to the general public or even those in the scholarly community, slavery in the Sudan and other parts of Africa was tolerated by European officials well into the twentieth century. When the British conquered the Sudan in 1898, they...

Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa.
June 22, 1997... Aptly described by the publisher as "the first full-length study of the history of intellectual and scientific racism in modern South Africa," Dubow's volume provides a welcome addition to the historiography of South Africa and colonialism, and...

Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400.
June 22, 1997... Ask anyone in China about his or her country's economic or legal history, and you will almost certainly be told that, before 1949, China was a "feudal" country with no tradition of private property in which contract was a concept unknown except...

Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074-1858.
June 22, 1997... Shanghai looms large in recent China scholarship. An urban site that eventually grew to mammoth proportions after opening to European and American trade in 1843 under the terms of the British treaty that marked the end of the Opium War, the city...

Policing Shanghai: 1927-1937.
June 22, 1997... Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s was China's most important city - its commercial and industrial center, the major stronghold of Western imperialism in China, the birthplace of modern Chinese culture, a hotbed of gambling, prostitution, and...

Hiroshima in History and Memory.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1997... The year 1995 has come and gone, and with it the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the renewed controversy about those events, and an appalling non-debate about what sort of history our museums should present....

The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India.
June 22, 1997... Baber has written a stimulating book that will interest historians and sociologists of science, technology, and imperialism. In recent years, the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) has grown steadily, yet few historians of imperialism know...

Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java.
June 22, 1997... This book is a magnificent and playful study of an overlooked, nineteenth-century Javanese historical manuscript, the Babad Jaka Tingkir ("The History of the Youth from Tingkir"). It is a "must read" for Indonesianists interested in Javanese...