The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from June 1998

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from June 1998

Electing popes: approval balloting and qualified-majority rule.
June 22, 1998... Social choice theory has explored the puzzles and paradoxes of voting since 1951. Among its main findings are that no choice system can satisfy all of the apparently minimal conditions of fairness and logicality; that every reasonable electoral...

Ground rents against populist historiography: Mid-Atlantic land tenure, 1750-1820.
June 22, 1998... As part of his reinterpretation of America's early national economic development, Wood attacked large landlords as a moneyed "gentry" who opposed economic growth because their "static proprietary wealth" was "vulnerable to inflation." In other...

Reason and passion in the public sphere: Habermas and the cultural historians.
June 22, 1998... During the past decade, the examination of the public domain, broadly conceived, has emerged as a central agenda in the practice of cultural history. Reacting both to political history's priority of the law-making powers of the nation-state and...

Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America.
June 22, 1998... By David S. Shields (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 347 pp. $49.95 cloth $17.95 paper During the past decade, the examination of the public domain, broadly conceived, has emerged as a central agenda in the practice of...

In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism.
June 22, 1998... By David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 364 pp. $45.00 cloth $16.95 paper During the past decade, the examination of the public domain, broadly conceived, has emerged as a central agenda in the practice of...

Parades and Politics of the Streets: Festive Culture in the Early Republic.
June 22, 1998... By Simon P. Newman (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) 271 pp. $39.95 During the past decade, the examination of the public domain, broadly conceived, has emerged as a central agenda in the practice of cultural history....

Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century.
June 22, 1998... By Mary P. Ryan (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997) 376 pp. $27.50 During the past decade, the examination of the public domain, broadly conceived, has emerged as a central agenda in the practice of cultural history. Reacting both...

Arguing About Slavery.
June 22, 1998... By William L. Miller (New York, Knopf, 1996) 577 pp. $35.00 cloth $17.00 paper During the past decade, the examination of the public domain, broadly conceived, has emerged as a central agenda in the practice of cultural history. Reacting both...

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy.
June 22, 1998... By Jurgen Habermas (trans. William Rehg) (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1996) 631 pp. $42.00 cloth $22.50 paper During the past decade, the examination of the public domain, broadly conceived, has emerged as a central agenda in the practice...

Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
June 22, 1998... By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (New York, Knopf, 1996) 622 pp. $30.00 cloth; (New York, Vintage, 1997) 634 pp. $16.00 paper In the words of Le Bon, "Ce n'est nullement par l'evident, l'immediat, le clair et le simple que s'expliquent les phenomenes...

People and the Land Through Time: Linking Ecology and History.
June 22, 1998... By Emily W. B. Russell (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) 306 pp. $35.00 Russell has written a splendid guide to the new historical ecology, which approaches the landscape as a biota ceaselessly in motion. Forests shift in species...

Making Faces: Using Forensic and Archaeological Evidence.
June 22, 1998... By Jon Prag and Richard Neave (College Station, Texas A&M Press, 1997) 256 pp. $39.95 Facial reconstructions from the shape of recovered skulls is of interest to forensic scientists and historians, and it holds a fascination for the general...

Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis.
June 22, 1998... Edited by David I. Kertzer and Tom Fricke (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) 294 pp. $18.95 This excellent collection focuses on two tasks: contrasting and comparing the disciplines of anthropology and demography, while appraising...

Ethnic Conflict: Commerce, Culture, and the Contact Hypothesis.
June 22, 1998... By H. D. Forbes (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) 291 pp. $30.00 This book has both a substantive and a methodological objective. Substantively, it aims to provide new ways of thinking about particular aspects of ethnic conflict....

The Reformation of the Twelfth Century.
June 22, 1998... By Giles Constable (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 411 pp. $64.95 The primary methodology of this magisterial book is easy to summarize, but it is difficult to explain why it is so effective. Constable analyzes works from the...

The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe.
June 22, 1998... By Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) 352 pp. $35.00 This study of "the Great Pox" in Renaissance Europe is an impressive scholarly achievement. The book synthesizes a vast body of...

Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950.
June 22, 1998... Edited by Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jutte (Washington, D.C., published for the German Historical Institute by Cambridge University Press, 1996) 369 pp. $59.95 Since the 1960s, the "new" social history has eclipsed an older preoccupation with...

Medieval Society and the Manor Court.
June 22, 1998... Edited by Zvi Razi and Richard Smith (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996) 709 pp. $130.00 The price of this book is up to date, but, in most other respects, this is an old-fashioned volume. Few publishers today would touch a collection of...

Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England.
June 22, 1998... By David Cressy (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997) 641 pp. $39.95 This book is based on a wonderful question: How did divines, townsfolk, and villagers react to the body of ritual outlined in the Book of Common Prayer from 1549 to 1662,...

Chronicling Poverty: the Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640-1840.
June 22, 1998... Edited by Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, and Pamela Sharpe (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997) 248 pp. $69.95 This valuable book brings to light several under-used sources about the poor from England's long eighteenth century. The volume's nine...

Agricultural Rent in England: 1690-1914.
June 22, 1998... By M. E. Turner, J. V. Beckett, and B. Afton (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 356 pp. $69.95 Few historical data matter more to modern historians than reliable price, wage, or, rent indexes. Bound within them is the experience of...

Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800-1930.
June 22, 1998... By Barry Reay (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996) 288 pp. $59.95 Reay describes this book as "an incursion across borders into territories and traditions of historical research which . . . have too long maintained artificially...

The Warp of Ulster's Past: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Irish Linen Industry, 1700-1920.
June 22, 1998... Edited by Marilyn Cohen (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997) 282 pp. $45.00 That the Irish linen industry has been the economic warp through which Ulster society can be viewed as a central thread of this collection of essays by scholars from a...

The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600-1789.
June 22, 1998... By Jay M. Smith (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996) 305 pp. $47.50 Febvre once wrote that those living before Rene Descartes differed fundamentally from those who have lived since; he warned historians not to apply to earlier times...

Imagenes de la diversidad: el mundo urbano en la Corona de Castilla.
June 22, 1998... Edited by Jose Ignacio Fortea Perez (Santander, Universidad de Cantabria and Asamblea Regional de Cantabria, 1997) 513 pp. Ptas. 2,400 This collection of sixteen articles makes an important contribution to our understanding of fifteenth- to...

Conflictividad y Disciplinamiento Social en la Cantabria Rural del Antiguo Regimen.
June 22, 1998... By Tomas Antonio Mantecon Movellan (Santander, Fundacion Marcelino Botin, Universidad de Cantabria, 1997) 517 pp. N.P. Mantecon Movellan's massive study of conflict and discipline in rural Cantabria is an ambitious attempt to untangle the...

Historia Patria: Politics, History and National Identity in Spain, 1875-1975.
June 22, 1998... By Carolyn P. Boyd (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997) 358 pp. $49.50 Boyd reaffirms the interdisciplinary nature of good history in this dazzling study of the interaction of Spanish political life, intellectual currents, and...

Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean: Remembering Fascim's Empire.
June 22, 1998... By Nicholas Doumanis (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997) 243 pp. $65.00 Historians have had little good to say in recent years about colonialism, still less about fascism. In a modest, but stimulating book, Doumanis revisits the question of...

Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1998... By Susanne Zantop (Durham Duke University Press, 1997) 292 pp. $49.95 cloth $17.95 paper Zantop finds herself confronting an unusual fantasy in the German national character before unification in 1870 - colonialism without colonies. At a time...

The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany Since 1800.
June 22, 1998... By Stefan Berger (Providence, Berghahn Books, 1997) 307 pp. $49.95 Curious observers of Germany's never-ending quarrel with its past will find much to ponder in Berger's assessments. Berger moves swiftly in two preliminary chapters to summarize...

Migration Past, Migration Future: Germany and the United States.
June 22, 1998... I. Edited by Klaus J. Bade and Myron Weiner (Providence, Berghahn Books, 1997) 158 pp. $29.95 This brief collection off our essays is better described as multidisciplinary than interdisciplinary, characterized (except for a brief introduction)...

National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918-1922.
June 22, 1998... By T. Hunt Tooley (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 320 pp. $56.00 This solid study explores the domestic and international politics of the Upper Silesia referendum in 1921. As part of the Versailles peace treaty, the inhabitants...

Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis.
June 22, 1998... By Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1998) 239 pp. $24.95 The tone of this book is off-putting. It is pretentious in its claim to methodological sophistication and patronizing about the work of others,...

Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred.
June 22, 1998... By Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) 366 pp. $30.00 Paranoia relieves confused helplessness and painfully deflated self-esteem by seeking plots and plotters whose elimination is supposed to make...

Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance.
June 22, 1998... By Lynne Viola (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996) 312 pp. $49.95 The violence and horror of Soviet forced collectivization has always remained something of a mystery, if only because of the scale of the state-inspired violence. Viola...

Imagining the Balkans.
June 22, 1998... By Maria Todorova (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997) 257 pp. $45.00 Todorova's book is a passionate, provocative, and necessary attempt to retrace the construction of a pejorative image of the Balkans. She bases her enterprise on the...

The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800.
June 22, 1998... By Robin Blackburn (New York, Verso, 1997) 602 pp. $35.00 "This book furnishes an account of the European systems of colonial slavery in the Americas, and seeks to illuminate their role in the advent of modernity" (3). The theme and scope of...

Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1998... By Jean M. O'Brien (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 224 pp. $49.95 This is a case study of Natick, a Praying Town founded in 1650 largely through the efforts of the missionary John Eliot. His goal was to locate in a clearly bounded...

Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800.
June 22, 1998... By Eric Hinderaker (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 299 pp. $49.95 The author paints a picture of settlement conditions in the wide regions bordering the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He highlights the interplay between American...

Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1998... By Sarah A. Binder (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 236 pp. $59.95 cloth $18.95 paper This book will strike non-political scientists as an oddity, since the minorities with which its author deals are not generally called...

The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America.
June 22, 1998... By William J. Novak (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 396 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper Novak's new book forcefully argues that generations of scholars have misunderstood nineteenth-century America. The most important...

Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States: 1820-1920.
June 22, 1998... By Suzanne M. Marilley (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997) 281 pp. $39.95 With this volume, Marilley adds another to the burgeoning number of studies about woman suffrage - a topic eclipsed in the 1980s by interest in women's...

The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Christmas That Shows How It Was Transformed From an Unruly Carnival Season Into the Quintessential American Family Holiday.
June 22, 1998... By Stephen Nissenbaum (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) 381 pp. $30.00 Nissenbaum, the well-known social historian of the colonial period, has turned his attention to the cultural history of the nineteenth century, displaying his mastery of...

Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America.
June 22, 1998... By Nicola Beisel (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997) 275 pp. $35.00 In Imperiled Innocents, Beisel provocatively argues, "Moral reform movements . . . are properly seen as struggles over class reproduction" (205). She offers...

American Astronomy: Community, Careers, and Power, 1859-1940.
June 22, 1998... By John Lankford, with the assistance of Ricky L. Slavings (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) 447 pp. $60.00 After exhaustive library and archival research, Lankford compiled a machine-readable collective biography of 1,205 American...

The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930.
June 22, 1998... By Wendy Gamber (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1997) 300 pp. $39.95 cloth $16.95 paper Stitching together themes from the new labor history, business history, gender studies, and the histories of technology and consumerism, Gamber has...

The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945.
June 22, 1998... By Cindy Hahamovitch (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 287 pp. $45.00 cloth $17.95 paper The parallel duties of commercial farmers, as both individualistic entrepreneurs and as employers of wage laborers, remains a...

The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present.
June 22, 1998... By Ballard C. Campbell (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995) 289 pp. $35.00 cloth $14.95 paper Campbell's book is a marvelous multidisciplinary synthesis that builds on the findings of historians of national, state, and local...

The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925.
June 22, 1998... By Elisabeth S. Clemens (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) 458 pp. $58.00 cloth $19.95 paper This book's length and its conspicuous desire to engage the nuances of sociological theory betray its origins as a doctoral dissertation. It...

Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Mulford, 1895-1995.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1998... By Louis Galambos, with Jane Elliot Sewell (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996) 274 pp. $39.95 That the history of science as a field is inherently, even dangerously, interdisciplinary is a fact that underlies the current Science Wars....

The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900-1990.
June 22, 1998... By Harry M. Marks (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 258 pp. $59.95 In the photograph on the book jacket, a young boy in denim overalls bares his ann as white-haired male physician prepared a hypodermic injection from a small vial....

Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America.
June 22, 1998... By Keith Wailoo (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 288 pp. $39.95 paper During the last decade, a new generation of historians of medicine and science have been carefully reclaiming insights from the study of emerging medical...

America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible: Race in Modern America.
June 22, 1998... By Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1997) 704 pp. $32.50 In their survey of black/white relations and the status of African-Americans in American life, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom have attempted to...

The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatan.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1998... By Don E. Dumond (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 571 pp. $57.50 This is the first comprehensive history of the "Caste War" of Yucatan (1847-1903). Several scholars in recent years, including Patch, Remmers, Gonzalez Navarro,...

Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala, 1870s-1950s.
June 22, 1998... By Deborah J. Yashar (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 319 pp. $49.50 cloth $17.95 paper Yashar has investigated the course of democracy in Costa Rica and Guatemala extensively. She aptly assesses the development of institutional and...

Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism.
June 22, 1998... By Abdellah Hammoudi (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) 195 pp. $38.00 cloth $13.95 paper Prospective readers should not be misled by this volume's slim size: This is an ambitious and difficult book. Not all readers - including, in...

Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism and the Regional Economy in the French Sudan, 1800-1946.
June 22, 1998... By Richard L. Roberts (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996) 381 pp. $55.00 This volume has been anticipated for years; readers will not be disappointed. It is the definitive work on "la politique cotonniere" - France's scheme to...

Lifebouy Men, Lux Women: Commodification and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe.
June 22, 1998... By Timothy Burke (Durham, Duke University Press, 1996) 298 pp. $49.95 cloth $17.95 paper The focus on body, commodity, and text shared by these two books urges a broad multidimensional and challenging conceptualization of historical sources...

Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa.
June 22, 1998... Edited by Hildi Hendrickson (Durham, Duke University Press, 1996) 268 pp. $49.95 cloth $16.95 paper The focus on body, commodity, and text shared by these two books urges a broad multidimensional and challenging conceptualization of historical...

A Ming Society: T'ai-ho County, Kiangsi, Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries.
June 22, 1998... By John W. Dardess (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997) 316 pp. $45.00 Just as Japan can be viewed as the critical case of a non-Western country for comparative studies in modern times, so was Ming China (1368-1644) the...

Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning, 1774-1873.
June 22, 1998... By James Z. Lee and Cameron D. Campbell (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 380 pp. $49.95 Since its publication, Ho's account of population growth in late imperial China has been the standard.(1) Few have challenged either his...

Print and Politics: 'Shibao' and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China.
June 22, 1998... By Joan Judge (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996) 298 pp. $45.00 Shibao, or as it called itself in English, The Eastern Times, was a daily newspaper published in Shanghai from 1904 to 1939. During the first eight years, when it was...

Aryans and British India.
June 22, 1998... By Thomas R. Trautmann (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997) 260 pp. $35.00 In the past few decades, the historiography of the beginnings of Indian civilization has become the subject of ever-hotter debate between indologists,...