The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from October 1999

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from October 1999

Strikes and Solidarity: Coalfield Conflict in Britain, 1889-1966.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Roy Church and Quentin Outram (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 314 PP. $69.95 This carefully researched book uses interdisciplinary methods drawn from industrial history, sociological theory, and statistical analysis to...

Myron Weiner.(social scientist)(Obituary)
October 1, 1999... The death of Myron Weiner on June 3 is a great and tragic loss to the advancement of the comparative social sciences, to the study of political science, to the understanding of South Asia and migration, to his many students, and to the editors...

Traces of certainty: recording death and taxes in fifteenth-century Tuscany.
October 1, 1999... Official statistics do not provide neutral information, because they are always influenced by the methods and theories of those who collect them. This premise finds apt illustration in the partial death register that is contained in a set of...

Political competition and electoral fraud: a Latin American case study.
October 1, 1999... For an activity that was (or is) so central to the practice of politics in so many countries, electoral fraud remains poorly understood. Why and how politicians and parties violated (or violate) laws to falsify electoral outcomes constitute a...

Personnel policy and racial inequality in the pre-World War II North.
October 1, 1999... Between 1910 and 1940, the black population of the northern United States nearly tripled, rising from just over x million to more than 2.7 million, signaling the start of the "Great Migration" of African-Americans out of the South. As black...

Social science fiction.(Frank J. Sulloway's book entitled 'Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives')
October 1, 1999... Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. By Frank J. Sulloway (New York, Pantheon, 1996; paperback ed. 1997) 653 pp. $30.00 cloth $16.00 paper Periodically, books appear that claim to be, and are celebrated as,...

Reworking Russia's history: two steps forward, one step back.(books 'A History of Twentieth-Century Russia and A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924)
October 1, 1999... With the collapse of the bipolar world and the rigidities that it spawned, many historians have sought to reassess Russia's twentieth-century experience, some in light of the availability of new materials and others through engagement with new...

Frederick Jackson Turner, new historian.(Allan Bogue's book entitled 'Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down')
October 1, 1999... Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down. By Allen G. Bogue (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) 557 pp. $34.95 Do not be misled by the subtitle of Bogue's new biography of Turner (1861-1932). This is not another bashing...

Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (New York, Zone Books, 1998) 511 pp. $34.00 Wonder, standing at the beginning of thought (as Aristotle said), has not ceased to affect us, and so a vast history is suggested. To this largely unwritten...

The Norton History of the Human Sciences.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Roger Smith (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1997) 1036 pp. $29.95 In the second half of the eighteenth century, a "science of man," or "science of human nature," became a project in Western European thought. In that same period, the term...

Histoire de 'enfrance en occident. Tome 1. De l'antiquite au XVII siecle. Tome 2. Du XVIII siecle a nos j.urs.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Edited by Egle Becchi and Dominque Julia (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1998) 990 pp. Fr 340 As the editors of Histoire de l'enfance en occident point out in their introduction, writing a history of childhood presents particular challenges....

Ritual in Early Modern Europe.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Edward Muir (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 291 pp. $54.95 Muir builds on his own innovative work on civic rituals, vendetta, and factions in Renaissance Italy to write a synthetic, comprehensive study of the revolution in...

Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By John Bokina (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) 368 pp. $59.95 Bokina's Opera and Politics combines his academic expertise in political theory and his lifelong interest in the "visual and aural spectacle of opera" in a series of...

Durable Inequality.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Charles Tilly (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 299 pp. $29.95 Tilly is the best known and most prolific of all those who currently inhabit the niche between history and sociology. His distinguished academic standing is...

Reworking Class.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By John R. Hall (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997) 408 pp. $52.50 cloth $19.95 paper In this collection of both previously published and new essays, social scientists, historians, and economists attempt to resuscitate the study of...

Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Edited by Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1998) 348 pp. $19.50 Gender has emerged as one of the primary analytical categories in contemporary colonial studies, which have in recent years...

Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-Historical Approach.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems, and Annemarie Cottaar (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1998) 226 pp. $65.00 The central thesis of the book is straightforward: Gypsies are not descendents of travelers who came out of India centuries ago and...

World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Edited by Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 465 pp. $79.95 This suggestive and important book has two parts, an excellent introductory survey of the field by Sabel and Zeitlin, and ten essays...

Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Lesley B. Cormack (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) 281 pp. $68.00 cloth $23.95 paper In late Tudor and early Stuart England, geographical studies consisted of three strands. Mathematical geography aimed at exact mapping of...

Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Joseph P. Ward (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 202 pp. $45.00 Together with its prolonged religious strife, political upheaval, and cultural efflorescence, early modern London experienced dramatic population growth, physical...

An Atlas of Victorian Mortality.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Robert Woods and Nicole Shelton (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1997) 165 pp. [pounds]30.00 cased [pounds]15.00 paper Woods and Shelton have not only illuminated the Victorian morality experience; they have written a primer in...

Capitalism in Contention: Business Leaders and Political Economy in Modern Britain.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Jonathan Boswell and James Peters (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 251 pp. $59.95 cloth $22.95 paper This book is about recent British business leaders who spoke prose and were at least occasionally aware of it. Its authors...

The Hungry Stream: Essays on Emigration and Famine.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Edited by E. Margaret Crawford (Belfast, Institute of Irish Studies, 1997) 221 pp. [pounds]25.00 cloth [pounds]9.50 paper The bicentenary of the Great Irish Famine has been marked by both abundant new research and outrageous...

The Cult of Legislator in France, 1750-1830: A Study in the Political Theology of the French Enlightenment.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By David A. Wisner (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1997) 162 pp. N.P. In recent years, some of the best studies of French political thought have organized themselves around a unifying theme that provides a vertebrate structure: Nannerl O....

Urban Government and the Rise of the French City: Five Municipalities in the Nineteenth Century.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By William B. Cohen (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1998) 338 pp. $49.95 The basic unit of government in nineteenth-century France was the commune; the main subdivisions of the nation were the eighty-odd departments, over each of which...

A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Alice L. Conklin (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 367 pp. $55.00 Three years ago, in writing a book on slavery and French colonial rule, I was struggling with two questions. The first was the relationship between the rhetoric...

Toward the Inquisition: Essays on Jewish and Converso History in Late Medieval Spain.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By B. Netanyahu (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998) 267 pp. $32.50 Netanyahu is known for his two seminal works on Jews, conversos, and the Spanish Inquisition, the first (1966) based on Hebrew sources, the more recent (1995) on...

El credito de la Monarquia Hispanica en el reinado de Felipe IV.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Carlos Alvarez Nogal (Avila, Junta de Castilla y Leon, Consejeria de Educacion y Cultura, 1997) 398 pp. N.P. Alvarez Nogal's splendid book about the financial institutions and negotiations of the Castilian Crown, as the political core of...

He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Heidi Wunder (trans. Thomas Dunlap) (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 310 pp. $39.95 This is a masterful (gender-specific usage intended) study of all aspects of women's lives in early-modern Germany, which first...

German into Nazis.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Peter Fritzsche (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997) 269 pp. $24.95 This elegant, provocative historical essay argues against several recurring lay and scholarly explanations of how the National Socialist German Workers'...

Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Anne E. C. McCants (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1997) 281 pp. $36.95 Sometimes an economic historian can write social history with a particular clarity. In her account of an Amsterdam orphanage that took care only of children...

Through the Keyhole: Dutch Child-Rearing Practices in the 17th and 18th Century: Three Urban Elite Families.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Benjamin Roberts (Hilversum, Verloren, 1998) 223 pp. f45.00 This is a book that begins with lofty ambitions but ultimately disappoints. It raises a number of large and important questions about the history of childhood in early-modern...

Late-Imperial Russia. An Interpretation: Three Visions, Two Cultures, One Peasantry.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Adrian Jones (Berne, Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, 1997) 457 pp. $60.95 Reminiscent in tone of George Yaney's Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861-1930 (Urbana, 1982) and, in part, inspired by his notion of...

The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By John T. Noonan, Jr. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 436 pp. $35.00 To report that this is an unconventional book will not surprise anyone who knows the author's scholarship - which ranges widely throughout the history...

The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Patricia U. Bonomi (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 290 pp. $24.95 Brava to Bonomi. Her engrossing investigation of a popular early American scandal gives us, first, a demonstration of deft historical detective...

George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Edited by Warren R. Hofstra (Madison, Madison House, 1998) 265 pp. $34.95 Biographical studies of George Washington often depict him in isolation from the social and cultural context that shaped him and within which he operated, thereby...

The Bondsman's Burden: An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Jenny Bourne Wahl (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 277 pp. $49.95 Wahl's fine book makes three important contributions to the study of the legal system within which southern slavery was organized. First, she provides a...

Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Mark M. Smith (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 303 pp. $40.00 cloth $16.95 paper Mastered by the Clock is both delightfully original and somehow familiar. It is wonderful to read a work in the history of the...

White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Martha Hodes (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) 338 pp. $30.00 Sex between black men and white women was the ultimate taboo for white southerners, at least until recent decades. Its place in the culture was powerful, pervasive,...

The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Albert J. von Frank (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 409 pp. $27.95 The story of Anthony Burns, the fugitive slave, has been told many times before. The tale of his rendition to slavery, and the effect of his case upon...

Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Hal S. Barron (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 301 pp. $49.95 cloth $18.95 paper As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, Americans, rural and urban alike, faced an increasingly complex society. The new...

Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew: Minority Rights and Procedural Change in Legislative Politics.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Douglas Dion (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997) 291 pp. $49.50 It is not every social scientist who can transform a fiercely academic subject and methodology into an absorbing study of that driest of topics -...

Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By M. M. Manring (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1998) 210 pp. $47.50 cloth $14.95 paper For more than a century, Aunt Jemima has been a part of American history and culture. The name has been synonymous with images of the...

Planning War, Pursuing Peace: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1920-1939.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Paul A. C. Koistinen (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 1998) 432 pp. $45.00 The first part of this book focuses on the contingency planning for economic mobilization against the backdrop of a political environment mandating tightly...

The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Edited by Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene N. White (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998) 474 PP. $60.00 This collection of essays is a fascinating and bold exercise in conjectural history. How would United States...

Eisenhower's Heart Attack: How Ike Beat Heart Disease and Held on to the Presidency.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Clarence G. Lasby (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 1997) 384 pp. $29.95 Few, if any, medical and political studies can match the human drama and scientific comprehensiveness of Lasby's well-documented study. It is a history of...

All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s .(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 306 pp. $27.95 This sympathetic account, the best work now available on the subject, locates the Peace Corps in the context of the activism of the 1960s. Others...

The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Christopher Bracken (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) 276 pp. $40.00 cloth $16.95 paper Bracken's purpose in providing a "reading" of the potlatch papers is "to disable a particular mode of Canadian racism - one that is still...

Postconquest Coyoacan: Nahua-Spanish Relations in Central Mexico, 1519-1650.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Rebecca Horn (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 356 pp. $55.00 Horn addresses a major issue in Latin American and colonial studies - how the Spanish invasion and consequent changes affected native peoples. Horn has chosen the...

The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Matthew Restall (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 441 pp. $55.00 Native-language documentation has swept away any lingering notion that Spanish rule completely shattered the indigenous societies of Mesoamerica. In this...

The Power of God Against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Paul Vanderwood (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 409 pp. $65.00 cloth $24.95 paper The Power of God Against the Guns of Government forcefully illustrates the dynamic relationship between historic events and contemporary lives...

Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Expanded edition, edited by Daniel Nugent (Durham, Duke University Press, 1998) 384 pp. $59.95 cloth $19.95 paper The authors of the essays in this volume undertake to understand rural people in Mexico through the interplay of local,...

La politics en las calles: Entre el voto y la movilizacion: Buenos Aires 1862-1880.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Hilda Sabato (Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 1998) 290 pp. N.P. "Politics in the Streets" examines a phase in the nineteenth-century political history of Buenos Aires when elections were keenly contested and people engaged in...

Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Michael Craton (Princeton, Markus Wiener, Publishers, 1997) 520 pp. $39.95 cloth $29.95 paper Few have contributed so much as Craton to the resurgence and expansion of historical interest in the British West Indies during the last forty...

Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Philip D. Curtin (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 256 pp. $64.95 cloth $19.95 paper Curtin's latest work continues his long-standing commitment to broad, comparative, and quantitative history. It provides further evidence...

The Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement in Northern Shaanxi 1934-1945.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Pauline B. Keating (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 340 pp. $49.95 Keating's book gives a structural dimension to the Chinese Communist rural cooperative movements in Northern Shaanxi from 1934 to 1945. The main argument of...

Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Bernard S. Cohn (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996) 189 pp. $49.50 cloth $16.95 paper This book consists of four independent essays, composed mostly in the 1980s, loosely bound together with an introduction by the author and a...

Population, Gender and Politics: Demographic Change in Rural North India.(Review)
October 1, 1999... By Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 278 pp. $59.95 cloth $22.95 paper Throughout the last two decades, Roger and Patricia Jeffery's work has been instrumental in the development of our...