The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from March 1994

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from March 1994

Logic of charity: poor relief in preindustrial Europe.
March 22, 1994... To suggest that the social history of Europe is un-intelligible without an understanding of poor relief is only a slight exaggeration. The problem of poverty has recurred throughout the centuries, and was, in different ways, a problem for...

Neoclericalism and anticlericalism in Saxony, 1555 - 1675.
March 22, 1994... The popular resentment of clerical abuse as a factor assisting in the positive reception of Protestanism is a commonplace. If the Reformation succeeded in righting moral, as well as some perceived theological, wrongs, why should acute...

Social networks, kinship, and community in Eastern Europe.
March 22, 1994... How people in the past used and valued kinship in their daily lives is one of the most important and most elusive matters in contemporary social history. The largest issue is the character of community life and how that character changed in...

The family and the history of public life.
March 22, 1994... The Family and the History of Public Life since the 1960s, family history has benefited by adopting some of the problems, concepts, and methods from other disciplines in the human sciences and from other subfields in history. This article...

Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study.
March 22, 1994... Unfortunately, the topics mentioned in the title and subtitle of this slender volume are dealt with only tangentially and superficially, without sustained exposition or argument.(1) The slender volume comprises three lectures that Elton...

Beyond the Family: The Social Organization of Human Reproduction.
March 22, 1994... Robertson's Beyond the Family asks important questions: What is the connection between history and personal history; between the state and particular forms of human relationship; between any moment and the historical processes from which, and...

A History of Women: I, from Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints.
March 22, 1994... Georges Duby and Michelle Perrott announce in their introduction that they intend to chart a slow progress from antique images of women to modern active individuals through a five-volume series. Declaring, despite considerable evidence to the...

Church and City 1000-1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... The title of this festschrift indicates its unusually concentrated focus and suggests that the methodologies of urban and eccleslastical historians are meant to predominate. In a volume consisting of fourteen essays (two are general in scope,...

Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance.
March 22, 1994... A slightly more accurate title for this survey of birth control prescriptions from the ancient Egyptian to the early modern period might be "Contraceptives and Abortifacients throughout the Ages as Reflected in Literary, Medical, Legal, and...

English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study.
March 22, 1994... This book examines the position of cities and towns in broader medieval society, from roughly the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries. Although Hilton states at the outset that his purpose is to compare England, where towns were fewer...

A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe.
March 22, 1994... This ambitious survey of structural changes in the Western European family seeks to analyze and explain developments during the extraordinarily long span from roughly Carolingian times to the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Seccombe's...

The Renaissance in National Context.
March 22, 1994... Although The Renaissance in National Context frequently addresses themes explored in a number of similar essay collections published in recent years, this volume differs most significantly in the ambition of the contributors to pass beyond...

The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700.
March 22, 1994... Sacks presents The Widening Gate as an "extended essay" (xv). Actually, this book is a set of essays on Bristol's overseas trade, traders, and their place in the life of their city from 1450 to 1700. The essays show that Bristol's overseas...

The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.
March 22, 1994... Regular readers of the American Historical Review and Social Science History should be familiar with these books, as both are essentially reprints of published articles from them. Both books contain excellent articles by scholars of...

The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation.
March 22, 1994... Regular readers of the American Historical Review and Social Science History should be familiar with these books, as both are essentially reprints of published articles from them. Both books contain excellent articles by scholars of...

Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588-1603.
March 22, 1994... MacCaffrey's trilogy on Elizabeth and the story of her political, diplomatic, and military convolutions covering a reign of forty-five years has been two and a half decades in the making.(1) Despite modern revisionism and the publication of a...

The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660-1730.
March 22, 1994... Sixty years ago, Hazard provided both an account of the arrival of modern secular reason in the early Enlightenment and an argument for the critical influence of English writers on the "European mind," 1680-1715. Defining precisely what was...

Medicine and Charity Before the Welfare State.
March 22, 1994... It has often been supposed that charity declines with the rise of the welfare state. This book argues that, on the contrary, the two persist as complementary rather than contradictory forces. In their superb introduction, Barry and Jones...

The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.
March 22, 1994... Linebaugh's long-delayed study revives the historical and methodological assumptions first applied to the study of eighteenth-century crime by Thompson and his students seventeen years ago. He assumes a direct "relationship between the...

William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture.
March 22, 1994... We think of Cobbett either as the author of Rural Rides (London, 1830), that charmingly quixotic set of ruminations on the state of the English countryside in the 1820s, or as the redoubtable editor of The Political Register. A one-time...

Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England.
March 22, 1994... Whereas it is virtually a commonplace that much social history has ignored women, this insightful study of nineteenth-century prisons and attitudes toward criminality reminds us just how much attention to gender can change our perspective on...

Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris.
March 22, 1994... Beneath the Cross provides a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the French religious wars. Recently, scholars have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on political motives in these wars, stressing the struggle for power among...

Old and New Mobility in Aix-en-Provence, 1600-1695: Portrait of an Urban Elite.
March 22, 1994... Bohanan has written an elegant little study of the nobility of Aix-en-Provence, a southern French town, in the seventeenth century. She argues convincingly that the traditional understanding of a conflict between sword, or feudal, nobles and...

Bureaucrats and Beggars: French Social Policy in the Age of the Enlightenment.
March 22, 1994... This book is an exhaustive study of how the agents of the French monarchy grappled with the problem of mendicity between 1764 and 1792, and how their policies became an essential part of the Enlightenment discussion of societal reform. Except...

The Family Romance of the French Revolution.
March 22, 1994... The title of Hunt's volume suggests a book which focuses only on family images in literature and the arts, but the scope of this work is at once broader and deeper than a slice of literary or cultural history. In her definition of "family...

The Fin-de-Siecle Culture of Adolescence.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Neubauer claims that adolescence "came of age" as a differentiated stage of life in the decade of the 1980s. According to Neubauer, adolescence in these terms emerged from nineteenth-century social and institutional changes, but it was shaped...

Contemporary Western European Feminism.
March 22, 1994... Using non-Anglophone Western Europe as the site of her investigation, Kaplan pursues an intriguing research question: Given the similarity in issues, goals, and methods of women's movements in fourteen European nations, why have women in some...

An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily.
March 22, 1994... Epstein's valuable study of Sicily, roughly covering the period 1250- 1523, makes two important arguments about economic development. First, Epstein reinterprets the "late medieval crisis" by attempting to integrate neo-Malthusian and Marxist...

Politics and Class in Milan: 1881-1901.
March 22, 1994... Two interpretive schools have dominated debates in Italy about the emergence of the trade-union movement, and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). In 1953, Manacorda maintained that the foundation of the PSI in 1892 followed the initial phase...

A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination.
March 22, 1994... In a book that will interest both general readers and a wide range of scholars, Fritzsche offers a provocative discussion of the relationship between aviation and popular culture. Utilizing a wide range of primary and secondary sources,...

The Making of the Modern Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Athens.
March 22, 1994... Making of the Modern Greek Family is an ambitious and ground-breaking work in historical anthropology. Although focusing on changing patterns of marriage, family formation, and exchange in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century...

Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
March 22, 1994... Religion dominated Russian thought and culture in the Muscovite period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In striking contrast to the West, for example, there was no secular education and little writing on nonreligious themes before...

Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870-1905.
March 22, 1994... Until recently, the overriding issue for social historians of late Imperial Russia was the development of a working-class consciousness that eventually coalesced around support for the Bolsheviks, helping to propel the latter to power....

The Soviet Administrative Elite.
March 22, 1994... For over forty years the field of "Kremlinology" was defined by its focus upon the Soviet political elite. Struggling with limited resources due to the closed nature of the Soviet system, Western scholars labored to discern the composition...

Shtetl Jews Under Soviet Rule: Eastern Poland and the Eve of the Holocaust.
March 22, 1994... Smolar made the point that Poles remember two foreign occupations during World War II, one German and one Soviet.(1) Both invasions were ruinous to the Polish nation as a whole, but the various ethnic minorities that lived within the...

Forms of Uncertainty: Essays in Historical Criticism.
March 22, 1994... More traditional than its title, the greatest value of this book lies in the challenge offered to the antireflexive, two-dimensional scientism of so much recent historical scholarship. This collection has substantive value, including closely...

Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664-1730.
March 22, 1994... New York City has long been recognized as having been one of the most culturally diverse outposts of British North America. In this deeply researched book, Goodfriend turns a historical microscope on three generations of New Yorkers following...

Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era.
March 22, 1994... This compact and well-organized book examines a body of material that historians of colonial culture too often neglect or employ for simply illustrative purposes: popular prints, newspaper mastheads, almanacs, flags, currency design,...

The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers.
March 22, 1994... This monumental study of the Shaker movement is the first general history of the United Society from its origins in eighteenth-century England to the present day. Stein's approach is avowedly revisionist: challenging the popular romanticized...

The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Since the Supreme Court's so-called "switch in time that saved nine," and the subsequent elaboration of a "double standard" of judicial review, property rights have not occupied a prominent place in American judicial decision-making.(1)...

Fair Trial: Rights of the Accused in American History.
March 22, 1994... Fair Trial is an early installment in the series, Bicentennial Essays on the Bill of Rights. Its mission is to foster better teaching about the Bill of Rights in undergraduate classrooms by providing brief, nontechnical surveys that situate...

Voting and the Spirit of American Democracy: Essays on the History of Voting and Voting Rights in America.
March 22, 1994... Despite a few imprecisions regarding black and woman suffrage, Rogers' introduction adequately sets the stage for a series of essays exploring questions relating to the right to vote, voting, and the political efficacy of the vote over the...

The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875.
March 22, 1994... When he first undertook this work, Scherzer hoped to contribute to "an expanding dialogue" between history and sociology, but, as he observes in his preface, "the past decade has not been kind to such interdisciplinary cross-pollination"...

The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America.
March 22, 1994... Although we know quite a bit about how attitudes toward old age have changed over the past few centuries, modern historians have given scant consideration to the "meanings of aging" (xvii). Cole seeks to remedy this neglect, and in so doing...

Robert M. La Follette, Sr: The Voice of Conscience.
March 22, 1994... Burgchardt's "rhetorical biography" of famed La Follette, governor and long-term senator from Wisconsin, is the first in a new series designed to promote scholarship in the history and criticism of American public address. His purpose is to...

Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America.
March 22, 1994... All too often the words that are most commonly used by Americans are the ones that are scrutinized and defined the least. Such terms as "pluralism," "acculturation," and "assimilation" travel through our political and social landscape with...

Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876-1938.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... The author of Bargaining for Life is a physician who has written a well-known textbook on physical examination and history taking, but this solid monograph resembles an excellent dissertation from a conventionally trained social or cultural...

Sentinel for Health: A History of the Centers for Disease Control.
March 22, 1994... The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were an outgrowth of the successful wartime agency, Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA), a unit of the United States Public Health Service (USPHS). The man largely responsible for the establishment of...

The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Is science politics prosecuted by other means? For several decades, many historians and sociologists of science have undertaken research intended to answer this question in the affirmative. They have differed considerably, however, in their...

To the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Between 1850 and 1914 some 10,000 women left homes and social conventions behind in their quest for medical education. They came from the United States, France, England, Germany, Switzerland, India, Japan, Australia, and - more than anywhere...

The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness.
March 22, 1994... Women comprise one-fourth or more of the United States adult homeless population and yet little has been written about their unique experiences and circumstances. The Women Outside holds pride of place (so far as I know) in being the first...

Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945.
March 22, 1994... For the past decade or so historians interested in the study of work and the working class have struggled with the problem of finding a theoretical framework for integrating and making sense of the large body of work produced since the 1960s...

When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture.
March 22, 1994... In this large and fully documented study, Boyer explores the extent and prominence, especially since World War 11, of what he designates as "prophecy belief" in American popular culture. Such a subject may unsettle intellectuals and scholars,...

Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America.
March 22, 1994... The proper study of economics as Aristotle tells us in Politics, begins with the study of the family.(1) Marcus and Hall give a new twist to that old dictum, showing that, in wealthy dynastic families at least, the proper study of the family...

Making Local News.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... There is good reason to commend this useful book. Although its primary audience will be journalists, it merits careful reading by historians and kindred social scientists who rely upon twentieth-century news media as primary sources. At...

The Native Son Presidential Candidate: The Carter Vote in Georgia.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Jimmy Carter's improbable rise to the presidency continues to fascinate scholars and strategists alike. Walton, a political scientist, contributes to an understanding of that remarkable event through an analysis of Carter's electoral support...

Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Any author retelling the story of the massacre which da Cunha transformed into his classic Rebellion in the Backlands runs a major risk.(1) Da Cunha's powerful book has so shaped modern understanding of these events that any subsequent author...

The Charismatic Bond: Political Behavior in Time of Crisis.
March 22, 1994... Few ideas in social science are as misunderstood as Weber's concept of "charismatic authority."(1) His fascination with the nature of political, military, or religious leadership in extraordinary situations has been seen as only marginally...

The Price of Health: Australian Governments and Medical Politics, 1910-1960.
March 22, 1994... Australia had no social insurance scheme for health care until 1953. But like Great Britain before l9i2, it did have an extensive system of friendly societies that provided medical benefits to their working-class members; it had the (mostly...

Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience.
March 22, 1994... Bloch's introduction summarizes his views on ritual and evaluates his predecessors' interpretations. The titles of the six chapters indicate the themes of his analysis: initiation, sacrifice, cosmogony and the state, marriage, millenarianism,...

Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African History, 1900-1980.
March 22, 1994... True to the title, Berger's book is a historical, economic, and ethnic map of women's lives in South Africa. In it, she comprehensively consolidates eighty years of women's advances in South African industry by examining their economic,...

Our Precious Metal: African Labour in South Africa's Gold Industry, 1970-1990.
March 22, 1994... This book, written by a sociologist, is a "sociological" history in which "original source material and historical methods of data collection are used to answer sociologically motivated questions" (vii, 15). These are: "How do we account for...

Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and History in Central Western Zambia.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... "Culture remains a lifeless and alien construct if its historical dimension . . . is not stressed above all other considerations, " writes van Binsbergen (267). His present work combines anthropology with ethnohistory in western Zambia....