The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from March 1997

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from March 1997

Nuptiality during the first Industrial Revolution in England: explanations.
March 22, 1997... Change in the incidence of service in husbandry and the spread of rural industry are the two major explanations proposed for the rise in nuptiality during the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The...

Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted.
March 22, 1997... The development of the social and political structures out of which emerged the modem European state was a protracted process, the early stages of which are sparsely documented. The received view has long been that military arrangements were...

Vessels of Time: An Essay on Temporal Change and Social Transformation.
March 22, 1997... This essay offers a "comparative, historical, and anthropological approach to time as a category and value in different societies" and assesses "the parallel changes taking place in societies and time concepts as a result of the complex...

Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... In this trim little book, McNeill offers some of the more unusual scraps that fell to the cutting-room floor while he crafted The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963) and subsequent volumes. The subjects of dance and...

Historical Change and Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1994.
March 22, 1997... This third annual volume of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures again brings together distinguished scholars to address a broad theme related to human rights from diverse perspectives. This year's theme, historical change and human rights, constitutes...

Small Towns in Early Modern Europe.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... The small town poses a number of questions about economic and urban development. Growth appears to be the very essence of the largest cities; by contrast, the small town appears by nature to be static. But this is a misconception originating in...

Naissance et Mort des Enterprises en Europe XIXe-XX Siecles.
March 22, 1997... This volume is a follow-up to an earlier collection of essays, entitled The Birth and Death of Companies, which sought to examine the life cycle of business firms in Britain and France. The current volume contains ten essays about the growth and...

Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... Almost thirty years after Foucault questioned whether the Enlightenment had formulated a science of man, his analysis still colors our understanding of the eighteenth century as a whole and the enlightened preoccupation with the realm of the...

Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... Studies of towns and cities, along with those of county communities and the local gentry, have been among the most popular and informative topics in the recent historiography of late-medieval England. This assertion can lead easily to a listing...

Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England, 450-1500.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... Leyser provides a social history of medieval English women, based on the recent scholarship of a number of scholars in several disciplines: archaeology, history, hagiography, legal history, Latin and vernacular literature, and art and...

The World of Rural Dissenters: 1520-1725.
March 22, 1997... Reading this book is like eavesdropping on a seminar discussion among fledgling scholars and their mentor. We hear a lot of bright ideas, a few flights of fancy, several reports on research, and suggestions for further study. The work combines...

Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy Over Immigration and Population, 1660-1760.
March 22, 1997... Sometime in the 1690s, Locke made a manuscript addition to his famous discussion of property in chapter 5 of the Second Treatise of Government. His marginal note added a contemporary lesson to his seminal treatment of the relative contributions...

The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785.
March 22, 1997... Provincial cities and towns in eighteenth-century England generated a lively extraparliamentary political culture, centered upon, but not limited to, the middling ranks of their citizenry. This culture drew inspiration and energy from a range of...

Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England.
March 22, 1997... In this study, Frost employs an impressive variety of sources to explore the illusive but fascinating course of not-so-true love in Victorian England. Her focus is the breach-of-promise suit, and she provides background about Victorian attitudes...

The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... This is the second volume of Mason's unravelling of the distinctive nature of Victorian sexuality. Here he continues to elaborate his view that the "explicit anti-sensual attitudes" popularly associated with Victorianism had "secularist and...

Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism: 1834-1922.
March 22, 1997... This fine book presents a comprehensive survey and analysis of the system that moved indentured servants between continents in the period after the demise of slavery. The decline of slavery during the nineteenth century did not change the fact...

Merchants and Shopkeepers: A Historical Anthropology of an Irish Market Town, 1200-1991.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... This book, the most empirically detailed historical ethnography of Ireland to date, makes substantial contributions to both Irish studies and the anthropology/history dialogue. Thomastown is located in a region critically important to Irish...

Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.
March 22, 1997... In 1833, a commission was established in Ireland to study the condition of the poor. Three years later, a startling picture of destitution emerged in its published report.(1) The number of persons out of work and in extreme distress during thirty...

Science and Social Status: The Members of the Academie des Sciences, 1666-1750.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... The Academie des Sciences in France has long been recognized as one of early modern Europe's premier scientific institutions. Numerous historians have examined its origins, its organization, and its relationship to the state. Hahn's important...

Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France During the Nineteenth Century.
March 22, 1997... This book couples a meticulous and deftly executed quantitative historical study of data about French "peasants," broadly defined as country dwellers, with an excursion into the new cultural criticism that questions the "transparency" of the...

Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune.
March 22, 1997... This tightly reasoned monograph proposes a sweeping reinterpretation of two events that have preoccupied proponents and critics of the "class narrative" alike. In the process, it challenges the notion that the great Parisian insurrections of the...

Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers' Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization.
March 22, 1997... Maynes has turned to autobiographical testimony to understand how French and German workers constructed class identities from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Having identified roughly 400 texts by workers, she focuses on 90,...

Family Power in Southern Italy: The Duchy of Gaeta and Its Neighbors, 850-1139.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... With its focus on the offices and lands held by the noble families of the Italian city-state of Gaeta - interspersed with comparative data from Naples and Amalfi - Skinner provides a close reading of both published and unpublished documents that...

The Decline and Fall of Medieval Sicily: Politics, Religion, and Economy in the Reign of Frederick III, 1296-11337.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... This book's portentous title summarizes Backman's argument that the reign of Frederick III began the process of turning Sicily into "a ruin of poverty, violence, and bitter discontent" (5). Sicily's fate has attracted much research in recent...

La mort lente de Torcello: Histoire d'une cite disparue.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... Crouzet-Pavan's first book was justly praised as a major contribution to Venetian history and the first comprehensive ecological study of a medieval Italian city.(1) Her primary objective was to demonstrate how Venice's aquatic site dictated its...

Society and the Professions in Italy: 1860-1914.
March 22, 1997... Despite being authored by members of various disciplines, including history, sociology, and statistics, the essays in this volume on the professions in Italy address the same general issues. These issues are not new to European historiography,...

Die Asiatische Hydra: Die Cholera von 1830/31 in Berlin und den preussischen Provinzen Posen, Preussen und Schlesien.
March 22, 1997... Between 1817 and 1922, the world witnessed six major cholera pandemics. Endemic in Asia for a long time, cholera asiatica emerged in Europe in 1830 and triggered widespread panic and drastic health measures. Making its first appearance in Russia,...

Urbanization and Crime: Germany 1871-1914.
March 22, 1997... Johnson's Urbanization and Crime brings together several of his previously published articles on crime trends in Germany before World War I, and reinforces their major arguments in a broader framework. This important and often fascinating...

La Quete de la race. Une anthropologie du Nazisme(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... Conte, a French anthropologist, and Essner, a German historian, have joined to produce a book that is interdisciplinary at least by virtue of its authorship. Some of the chapters list Conte as author, some Essner, and some are unsigned and...

A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective.
March 22, 1997... The question of Dutch exceptionalism within the wider milieux of early modern Europe dates to the period of the Republic itself. It acquired a renewed vigor with the publication of Eric Hobsbawm's article, "The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,"...

Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika.
March 22, 1997... This book is more interesting than its title suggests. It is not only about corporations; it is about Russian economic development under Peter I, during the 1875-1914 period, and after 1985. The author finds striking similarities between these...

Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England.
March 22, 1997... Daniels has had the wit to see that the study of play might have a special salience for the interpretation of American Puritanism. Play provides a fresh vantage on such staple subjects as asceticism and impulse control and, more largely, on newer...

The Saving Remnant: Religion and the Settling of New England.
March 22, 1997... The Saving Remnant is an ingenious book based on industrious research in widely dispersed places. Cowing argues that large-scale differences in the religious geography of the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries help to...

Political Partisanship in the Middle American Colonies: 1700-1776.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... This valuable study examines political partisanship in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York from the early eighteenth century to independence. Using a wide array of quantitative and literary sources, the author persuasively argues that these...

Slavery in North Carolina: 1748-1775.
March 22, 1997... The modern study of early American slavery has largely bypassed North Carolina. The colony's late settlement and diversified economy meant that slavery was never as important there as it was in Virginia and South Carolina. North Carolina's...

Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience.
March 22, 1997... In this welcome volume of his collected essays, Vaughan reveals his continuing engagement with the history and historiography of early Anglo-America and the interaction of its diverse cultures. All ten focus "on the mental images that...

The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815.
March 22, 1997... Despite Edward D. Hirsch, Jr.'s inclusion of Tripoli (as in "Shores of") in his inventory of what every American needs to know to be culturally literate, the details of America's first postrevolutionary military encounter are hazy (to say the...

Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... Some essays work best in their original settings. The essays in this collection, all of them previously published, stated provocative and important ideas in their original contexts. In collections edited by Richard Beeman et al., Beyond...

Political Culture in the Nineteenth-Century South: Mississippi, 1830-1900.
March 22, 1997... This well-written study of the political culture of white, male Mississippians and their ideal notions of liberty, virtue, and independence - what Bond calls the "social ethic" (2) - synthesizes secondary sources and draws upon scores of private...

The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literary and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States.
March 22, 1997... Liberal arts and vocational skills have long been in tension in education. Stevens' book traces the history of that tension in parallel with the history of industrialization in America. In the nineteenth century, technology had to fight for its...

Catching Babies: The Professionalization of Childbirth, 1870-1920.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... This beautifully written book should be a primer for future social historians. Employing statistical analysis and historical demography, the author explores the process of professionalization in obstetrics. Equally as important is her...

Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920.
March 22, 1997... This study deals with two reforms in the legal treatment of young females' sexual activity. The first was the successful campaign in the various states, between 1885 and 1920, to raise the minimum age of sexual consent for girls from age ten or...

Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and The Model Town of Pullman.
March 22, 1997... Fear of disorder is a pervasive theme in the literature about urban growth in America. The history of Chicago, especially during the late nineteenth century, is filled with events that came to symbolize both the promise and problems of American...

Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity: A Historical Perspective on Persistent Issues.
March 22, 1997... This volume is a collection of articles, many previously published, relating to the development of schools since c. 1820. Vinovskis highlights studies of the increasing numbers of schools and school attendance in the nineteenth century, centering...

The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare state, 1917-1942.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... "They should work." So runs a central theme in current welfare reform. Ironically, recent historical scholarship now traces the origins of contemporary welfare policy to the success of maternalist women reformers who claimed that "they" do work,...

Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903-1953.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... A professor of law and American history is required to define the unique place of baseball in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. White presents a wonderfully persuasive analysis of the often irrational business...

Technological Innovation and the Great Depression.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... This is an earnest but confused book. Szostak has an ambivalent attitude toward the economic literature on the Great Depression. He pillories it as incomplete and inconsistent. But he also relies on it in constructing his arguments. The...

State and Party in America's New Deal.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... Its scope less grand than its tide, this book looks primarily at the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) to pose theoretical and empirical questions about the origins and implementation of...

Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions.
March 22, 1997... Unlike many other social-science disciplines, political science has generated critical accounts of its own history only recently and in the distant past. Perhaps, as cause and consequence of its ahistoricity, political science lacks widely...

Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790-1914.
March 22, 1997... Using travel narratives, exploration and ethnographic accounts, and promotional literature, Jasen constructs a portrait of the tourist experience in nineteenth-century Ontario. Tourism developed in response to the romantic movement, as the idle...

The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada.
March 22, 1997... The history of the Spanish conquest of New Granada (present-day Columbia) is less well known than that of the subjugation of Mexico and Peru. This book fills a significant gap by narrating the course of the six expeditions that carried out the...

The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence.
March 22, 1997... A few years ago, I read an article with a title that I vaguely remember as "Economists Like the Market, But Who Else Does?" Most people, it turns out, do not believe in the magic of the market unless they have advanced training in economics. Why...

Power and Violence in the Colonial City: Oruro from the Mining Renaissance to the Rebellion of Tupac Amaru (1740-1782).
March 22, 1997... Given the provocative prior work of this author and the importance of the book's theme, this study is best summarized as a missed opportunity. The author is well known for a challenging thesis about the causes and regional spread of revolt during...

Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890-1940.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... In this interesting, detailed study, Lavrin demonstrates that feminism was an important part of Latin America's early twentieth-century history. Especially prevalent in the more European, industrialized, and urbanized nations of Argentina, Chile,...

Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... The essays in this volume examine the varied ways that Andean peasants have participated in local and regional markets from the sixteenth century to the present.(1) The contributors use an array of methods drawn from anthropology and history to...

Rebels of Highland Guatemala: The Quiche-Mayas of Momostenango.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... Carmack first visited Momostenango in western Guatemala as an anthropology graduate student in 1963. Since that time he has returned frequently, producing literally dozens of publications as a result. The present volume constitutes a superb...

Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice, 1875-1902.
March 22, 1997... Late nineteenth-century Cape Town has generally been considered an island of urban, relatively nonracial, British liberalism situated in a sea of rural, highly racist, Afrikaner reaction. This book - part of the burgeoning field of South African...

Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande.
March 22, 1997... Many of the societies of the Western Sudan are marked by the existence of endogomous occupational groups, usually referred to as castes. The most important are smiths, leather-workers, and bards or praise-sayers. The book under review is the most...

Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... The rediscoveries that animate this book are rediscoveries of period, subject, and place. Histories of Palestine focus disproportionately on the straggle between the Arabs of Palestine and Zionist settlers that began in the late nineteenth...

Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... India and Pakistan have a common history, colonial experience, and institutional heritage. How then can one explain the emergence of democracy in India and the development of authoritarianism in Pakistan and Bangladesh? Jalal, a Pakistani...

Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia.
March 22, 1997... Cultural and economic interactions between the state, indigenous peoples, and the environment produce complex relationships. These interactions prove particularly heterogeneous when the state is imperial or colonial - representing interests...

Teachers of the Inner Chambers.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... Ko's history of women's literary communities in seventeenth-century China represents the first book-length treatment of a subject that has recently attracted much attention from scholars in both the United States and China. In a study rich with...

Native Place, City and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937.
March 22, 1997... As nationalism grows around the world these days, so do theories of its resurgence. Most of the prominent analysts of nationalism, however, substantially neglect East Asia. China, in particular, where the intertwining of nationalism with...

Urban Spaces in Contemporary China.
March 22, 1997... This volume explores the transformation of urban life that has accompanied the move to the market and reduction of state power in post-Mao China. Although it is impossible to do justice to the extraordinary range of the fifteen essays, written by...

South Pacific Oral Traditions.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1997... The ten case studies in this collection are arranged by genre and emphasize the dominance of literary analysis in this approach to oral tradition. Fully half of the essays discuss songs; two deal with narratives; one presents the transformation...