The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from March 1998

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from March 1998

Infanticide, child abandonment, and abortion in imperial Germany.
March 22, 1998... Section 217 [[section]217] of the Imperial German Criminal Code of 1871 (StGB) defined infanticide as the killing of the illegitimate child by the mother "at or immediately after birth." It punished this crime less severely than murder or...

Getting out the vote with patronage and threat: the French and Italian Christian Democratic parties, 1944-1958.
March 22, 1998... In 1946, a member of the French Radical party stated at the party congress, "The main task of a great party is the same as that of a good stomach: not to reject, but to assimilate." That political parties do not always achieve such greatness, nor...

Migration and political conflict: precincts in the Midwest on the eve of the Civil War.
March 22, 1998... Generations of historians and political scientists have pondered the regional political divisions of the antebellum Midwest, particularly within the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. During the 1820s and the 1830s, important sectional...

Sampling history: the English population.
March 22, 1998... Thirty years ago, Wrigley published two studies about the demography of Colyton, an otherwise obscure village in the southwestern county of Devon.(1) After the publication of these landmark articles, Colyton's obscurity was ended - at least among...

English Population History from Family Reconstitution: 1580-1837.
March 22, 1998... Thirty years ago, Wrigley published two studies about the demography of Colyton, an otherwise obscure village in the southwestern county of Devon.(1) After the publication of these landmark articles, Colyton's obscurity was ended - at least among...

"Constructions" and postmodern cultural studies.
March 22, 1998... Within the last decade, ever-more finely dissected art-historical studies about canonical subjects have continued to appear, despite the prodigious amount of preexisting literature - for example, that about Edgar Degas, Georgia O'Keeffe, and even...

Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830.
March 22, 1998... Within the last decade, ever-more finely dissected art-historical studies about canonical subjects have continued to appear, despite the prodigious amount of preexisting literature - for example, that about Edgar Degas, Georgia O'Keeffe, and even...

Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America.
March 22, 1998... Within the last decade, ever-more finely dissected art-historical studies about canonical subjects have continued to appear, despite the prodigious amount of preexisting literature - for example, that about Edgar Degas, Georgia O'Keeffe, and even...

The Mammoth and the Mouse: Microhistory and Morphology.
March 22, 1998... What is one to make of a book that, in scarcely 200 pages, exposes readers to, in order, three collectors and exhibitors of giant oddities from the animal kingdom from three different centuries; to the marital crisis of a sixteenth-century Dutch...

Coping with Sickness: Historical Aspects of Health Care in a European Perspective.
March 22, 1998... Most of the papers collected in these two volumes were delivered at the first two meetings of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health. They appear in this form in order to draw attention to a new scholarly organization,...

Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World.
March 22, 1998... A revolution in the study of colonial societies has occurred in the past twenty years, reviving a field that had once seemed likely to disappear with the last vestiges of the colonial empires themselves and producing work that has great relevance...

Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems.
March 22, 1998... Rise and Demise presents a masterful, ambitious, challenging, and sophisticated approach to the exploration of social evolution, from small bands of hunter-gatherers to the complex modern world, in terms of intersocietal interactions or...

Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm.
March 22, 1998... These authors, all economists, have applied various economic theories to the organization and functioning of the medieval church at the height of its power (the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries). By utilizing a microeconomic framework,...

The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1350-1850.
March 22, 1998... In the introduction to this admirable history of the development and spread of ideas about agriculture and botany between 1350 and 1850, the author quickly reveals his goals: "The subject of this book is the elaboration and subsequent spread of...

History of Pedlars in Europe.
March 22, 1998... This useful book, based upon archival research, treats country peddling in southern France, Spain, and northern Italy from 1400 to 1900. It discusses Scotland briefly and makes incidental reference to Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland. It...

Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
March 22, 1998... This is an excellent discussion of the development of the state in medieval and early modern Europe. It is innovative theoretically; broadly but selectively comparative among western, central, and eastern Europe and Scandinavia; well grounded in...

Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross.
March 22, 1998... Given that the Red Cross is widely viewed as history's premier humanitarian association, characterized by (among other qualities) "neutrality, impartiality and independence," Hutchinson's conclusions are startling. In his account, this...

War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066-1217.
March 22, 1998... Strickland has written an important and, more significantly, a provocative book that is likely to be at the center of scholarly debate for several years to come. Strickland's aim initially is to ascertain whether a mentalite that can be...

The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century, vol. 2, Fastolf's Will.
March 22, 1998... More than 500 years after they were written and a century after they were first made widely accessible in print, the letters of the Pastons of Norfolk continue to provide a rich mine of information for historians of late medieval England. In this...

Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800.
March 22, 1998... How did tea become the British national drink by the time American colonists hurled shipments of it into Boston harbor in 1773, thereby signaling the dependence of the British empire on the consumer practices of its subjects? Walvin aims to tell...

Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change, 1775-1870.
March 22, 1998... This excellent book may at first disappoint those led by its title to expect a synoptic view of how ideas about the future evolved during an interval marked by unprecedented belief in the idea of progress, along with proliferation of new forms of...

Women's Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890-1215.
March 22, 1998... The history of the female religious experience in medieval Europe has always taken second place to that of the males. The relatively few religious institutions for women were generally less wealthy than those for men, and the documentation...

Local Hospitals in Ancien Regime France: Rationalization, Resistance, Renewal, 1530-1789.
March 22, 1998... In the 1970s and 1980s, French historians produced a dozen monographs about poverty and poor relief in Old Regime France. What more, one might ask, is to be learned about hospitals and charity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France?...

The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question: 1700-1775.
March 22, 1998... Deeply researched and beautifully written, this study of the bakers completes a trilogy that Kaplan began with a volume about the liberalization of the grain trade and another about the business of provisioning Paris. In this one, readers will...

Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice.
March 22, 1998... This book is a welcome addition to the historiography of the French Revolution on a number of counts. It has been well researched, utilizing both local and national archives and libraries; it is a well-conceived and well-organized study; the...

The Paradise of Association: Political Culture and Popular Organizations in the Paris Commune of 1871.
March 22, 1998... The Soviet Union embraced the Paris Commune as a revolutionary forebear, and its genealogical claim has colored interpretations of the event ever since. Was the insurrection of 1871 the harbinger of a new red dawn or the last hurrah of Parisian...

Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto.
March 22, 1998... Having discovered in Vicenza and Verona a dozen domestic chronicles (a genre considered effectively exclusive to historically and historiographically privileged Florence) and seeing that the "family history of Italy is the history of great houses...

The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama.
March 22, 1998... This brilliant, interdisciplinary study of the life and mythology of Vasco da Gama and his journeys might aptly be titled, "Voyage Round Vasco da Gama." The author, an established economic historian of the Indian Ocean region and of the early...

From Mobilization to Civil War: The Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijon, 1900-1937.
March 22, 1998... Until well into the twentieth century, Spanish politics was essentially local. Yet, apart from Madrid and Barcelona, little is known about the dynamics of local political cultures, broadly defined. Radcliff's analysis of the process of political...

Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century.
March 22, 1998... The Russian seventeenth century often gets lost in the glare of the eras that framed it: the catastrophic reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Boris Gudonov on one end and the sweeping reforms of Peter the Great on the other. Scholars have...

Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763-1776.
March 22, 1998... Any historian who writes about New York politics in the dozen years before Independence accepts a tough challenge. A long line of distinguished scholars has described the various protests, the role of the Liberty Boys, and the clashes between the...

Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana: 1718-1868.
March 22, 1998... In recent years, scholarship by Hall, Hanger, and Usner has greatly illuminated the colonial origins of Louisiana's particular tripartite racial order and its Afro-Creole elite - the gens de couleur libres.(1) Bell takes this history into the...

A Biohistory of 19th Century Afro-Americans: The Burial Remains of a Philadelphia Cemetery.
March 22, 1998... Rankin-Hill wants to show how the physical-anthropological approaches of "biocultural" and "skeletal biological" analyses can contribute to "biohistory." Scholars, she feels, concentrate too much on narrow aspects of people's health when they...

The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917.
March 22, 1998... A dictionary definition of mind identifies the word as meaning a way of thinking or feeling. In this book, Gjerde analyzes the changing minds of the immigrant and native-born settlers of the rural upper Midwest during the years 1830 to 1917. His...

Foreign Investment in American Telecommunications.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1998... This book is a lawyer's brief against Section 310(b) of the Communications Act of 1934 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that replaced it. Sidak makes his position clear on the first page, asserting that American policymakers have ignored...

The World Upside Down: Cross-Cultural Contact and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Peru.
March 22, 1998... This important book examines the indigenous perspective on the "process of conquest, accommodation, and resistance under the Spanish" in Northern Peru during the formative years of the sixteenth century (3). Piecing together evidence from a wide...

The Americas in the Age of Revolution: 1750-1850.
March 22, 1998... This ambitious comparative study examines the revolutions that produced independent nations in the United States, Haiti, and Spanish America. Langley neatly summarizes his basic assessments in the titles of the first three parts of the book. The...

The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion.
March 22, 1998... A marketing expert might have advised Paquette and Engerman to choose a different title for their collection of essays. Who would want to read about the "lesser" of anything in some vaguely defined historical age? Readers who make it as far as...

The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude: 1783-1933.
March 22, 1998... A marketing expert might have advised Paquette and Engerman to choose a different title for their collection of essays. Who would want to read about the "lesser" of anything in some vaguely defined historical age? Readers who make it as far as...

Civilizing Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889-1930.
March 22, 1998... In 1890, Rio de Janeiro was a cosmopolitan, global city. With a population greater than Rome or Madrid, it was Brazil's capital as well as its commercial, financial, industrial, and cultural center. It was not only the arena for elite sociability...

The Damascus Affair: "Ritual Murder," Politics, and the Jews in 1840.
March 22, 1998... Christian attacks on Jews under the accusation (called "Blood Libel") that they killed Christians and used their blood for ritual purposes, to which the term "ritual murder" traditionally was applied, was first invented by the Greek Orthodox...

Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan.
March 22, 1998... Shryock set out to Jordan to study patterns of tribal leadership. What he encountered there was a conundrum - tribal shaykhs who told him that there were no more shaykhs - for which he had to find an explanation. From this juncture of...

Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai.
March 22, 1998... In 400 pages of densely written text, 130 pages of detailed notes, and 28 pages of bibliography, Hershatter has written a masterful and encyclopedic history of prostitution in twentieth-century Shanghai. She utilizes a wide range of sources:...

Japanese Civilization, a Comparative View.
March 22, 1998... Sixteenth-Century Jesuits, among the earliest Western voyagers to Japan, were intrigued and, in some instances, appalled, by the customs that they witnessed. Ever since, Japan's distinctive characteristics have alternately charmed, irritated, and...