The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from September 1994

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from September 1994

Capital and entrepreneurship in the Great West. (Chicago, Illinois)
September 22, 1994... Both nineteenth-century observers and modern scholars have celebrated Chicago's distinctiveness. To those who witnessed the lake city's explosive growth during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the city's ascent seemed unique and...

Loyalty, piety, or opportunism: German princes and the reformation.
September 22, 1994... The Reformation of the sixteenth century had far-reaching consequences for early modern Germany because it divided the powerful territorial princes along confessional lines. To account for the adoption or rejection of Protestantism by German...

California climatic reconstructions.
September 22, 1994... Historical records reveal that over the centuries people living in California have experienced many climatically induced events. Today's conditions of water rationing, increased electric bills, depressed segments of the agricultural economy, and...

Smallpox epidemics in cities in Britain.
September 22, 1994... Smallpox has been described as the most infectious human disease known and was greatly feared from the time of the final visitation of bubonic plague in 1666 until the end of the nineteenth century, when it ceased to be endemic in England....

European Revolutions.
September 22, 1994... These books recount the evolution of Europe and answer the questions: "Who are the Europeans? Where have they come from? Whither are they bound?" (xi, xii) One definition of Europeans might be that they are mostly white people whose ancestors...

A Concise History of World Population.
September 22, 1994... This is a bold and intelligent book. Covering the broad swath of human population history, Livi-Bacci surveys his subject from the theoretical perch provided by the Princeton Fertility Project's explanations about demographic modernization. What...

New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery.
September 22, 1994... Here is a book that announces and describes itself perfectly. Its thick paper, margins nearly as wide as the text, luxurious leading, and numerous beautiful, clear plates of frontispieces, maps, designs, and book illustrations, with frequent...

Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages.
September 22, 1994... In this brief but compelling work, Kleinberg offers a new approach to medieval sainthood. Instead of focusing on technical requirements for canonization, the social backgrounds of saints in different eras, or the cults that developed around...

Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653.
September 22, 1994... Brenner has provided a richly documented and magisterial account of the politicoeconomic foundations and alliances that governed events in early seventeenth-century England. He begins with a review of the economic transformation of the late...

The Revolution of 1688-1689.
September 22, 1994... This book reflects a reviving interest in the Revolution of 1688, helped along by the tricentennial but deriving from deeper historiographical causes, as Schwoerer makes clear in her introduction. For nearly 200 years, from the eighteenth century...

Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe.
September 22, 1994... Historians of cartography have recently been engaged in a general debate about the extent to which maps were commonly used in societies before the early modern period. Part of the debate stems from the paucity of the artifactual record. In Europe...

Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450-1650.
September 22, 1994... Of the nineteen essays in this book, five deal with the Germanies or the Imperial Court, five with England, two with France, two with the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and one each with ducal Burgundy and Spain. The essays on Burgundy...

A Measure of Wealth: The English Land Tax in Historical Analysis.
September 22, 1994... Nearly thirty years ago Mingay concluded that "detailed investigation of land tax assessments is simply not worth while." Ginter's study is a lengthy elaboration on this warning to historians who might be attracted by the rich promise of land tax...

Medical Education in the Age of Improvement.
September 22, 1994... The history of higher education has become considerably more interesting of late. Once the domain of excruciatingly boring and bulky university Festschriften devoted largely to rattling off the undistinguished occupants of professorial sinecures,...

The Decline of the English Musician, 1788-1888: A Family of English Musicians in Ireland, England, Mauritius, and Australia.
September 22, 1994... Interesting and ambitious, this work enters around the elucidation of the musical careers of an English family headed (for much of the time in absentia) by William Joseph Castell and (more practically and effectively) managed by his remarkable...

The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York.
September 22, 1994... The issues of mendicancy and exploitation of Italian child street musicians captured the attention of officials in Paris, London, and New York during the nineteenth century. Observers noticed their quaintness, railed at the noise nuisance, or...

International Banking: 1870-1914.
September 22, 1994... This book has three parts. The first details various international factors in the formation of banking systems and focuses on the major players--Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States--as well as lesser contributors such as...

Freud's Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind.
September 22, 1994... Like a determined forensic pathologist, Kitcher explores what she regards as the wreckage of psychoanalysis to discover what went wrong. Her search starts with the observation that the source of the broad intellectual appeal of Sigmund Freud's...

Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution.
September 22, 1994... An undergraduate exam recently informed me that Cartesian dualism "kicked off centuries of great thought." Rene Descartes' separation of mind and body also "kicked off" a dilemma for women intellectuals which has not only lasted into our own day,...

Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution.
September 22, 1994... The French Revolution had an urban dimension which historians have overlooked. The great merit of Margadant's book is to widen the range of questions to ask about this period from an urban perspective. Rather than look within urban society to...

The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy.
September 22, 1994... In this welcome exercise in comparative history, Cohn uses small places to ask large questions about how plague affected piety and property relations in the late medieval Italy. Building on material presented in his previous book, Death and...

Only Connect ... Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1988.
September 22, 1994... In this book, Shearman explores the dynamic, transitive relationship between art and its audience in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy. Six compelling essays elucidate the ways in which Renaissance artists inspired the beholder's...

Madonnas that Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth-Century.
September 22, 1994... The stated purpose of this book, and its achievement, is to make available to an English-language audience a mass of work in Italian on what Carroll calls "popular Catholicism" done over the last century, that is, work stretching back to Pietre,...

The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice.
September 22, 1994... Veronica Franco (1546-91) was the most famous of the cortigiane oneste, the creme de la creme of whoredom. She was born to a family of cittadini, a secondary elite in Venice; nonetheless, her mother was a courtesan. Veronica gained enormous...

A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona, 1728-1832.
September 22, 1994... The eighteenth-century English cotton industry is famous for being a leading sector of that country's industrial revolution, but the industry was also emerging on the continent. In Spain, Catalonia was having its own cotton textile boom....

The Salzburg Transaction.
September 22, 1994... The expulsion of some 20,000 Protestants (almost all of them alpine peasants) from the Archbishopric of Salzburg in 1731-32 and the resettlement of most of them as colonists in East Prussia by King Frederick William I was a celebrated event in...

Hitler's Japanese Confidant: General Oshima Hiroshi and MAGIC Intelligence, 1941-1945.
September 22, 1994... Richard Sorge and Ozaki Hotsumi, both hanged in 1944 by the Japanese government, were arguably the most important spies for any side during World War II. They worked for Joseph Stalin. They are also examples of what intelligence specialists call...

The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa.
September 22, 1994... Disease is common to us all, although different diseases have in the past inhabited different parts of the world and, to some extent, still do. When European man developed the technology and the desire first to explore and then to dominate other...

Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History.
September 22, 1994... "In some ways a disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming and responding to it" (xiii). This process of situating a disease within cultural boundaries, for which Rosenberg has chosen the metaphor of the...

The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England.
September 22, 1994... Godbeer has written an excellent survey of popular magic, witchcraft, and religion in seventeenth-century New England. It is especially notable for the degree to which it connects occult practices in early New England to the English folk...

The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization.
September 22, 1994... Over the past half dozen years, Richter has tantalized us with a series of articles and essays on the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Iroquois. One on "mourning war" as a culturally based explanation of the mid-seventeenth century...

From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America.
September 22, 1994... The battle over Indian removal pitted republican versus liberal values in a struggle to determine nothing less than the character of the soul of America. So Andrew argues in this biography of Evarts (1781-1831), a leading figure on the...

Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675-1790.
September 22, 1994... Colonial New York's leaders, Kierner notes in this valuable study of a major family, have not fared well in the hands of early American historians. They have been portrayed as factious political intriguers who sought power and patronage without...

Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840-1890.
September 22, 1994... Although the title of this book may not suggest it, the primary focus is on political ideology. Johnson is concerned with the process by which a wilderness like the Pacific Coast in the 1840s was transformed into an integral part of the nation's...

Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History.
September 22, 1994... Burnham, a productive and imaginative social historian, undertakes in this boldly argued revisionist work to describe and explain the rapid rise in the twentieth century of the "bad habits" identified in his subtitle. Although he cites the work...

The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War.
September 22, 1994... Toward the end of his book, Levine states that "neither Carl Schurz, Thomas Sowell, nor Ronald Reagan could find much room in the ethnohistorical pantheon for those nineteenth-century German-Americans who strove hard and long to transform their...

A History of Jews in America.
September 22, 1994... Sachar's thoroughly researched and elegantly written eleventh monograph establishes him as this nation's most prominent student of the full range of modern Jewish history. A product of prodigious learning and refined historical sensitivity, this...

The Park and the People: A History of Central Park.
September 22, 1994... The debate over the proper uses of public space in American cities has raged throughout the course of planning history. These debates have often centered around the meaning of "the public." Who constitutes the public? For whose benefit should...

Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870-1922.
September 22, 1994... "The hard lessons of progressive-era Illinois," writes Pegram in this important study, "was that 'state-building' on the basis of the public interest does not work" (11). Instead, this pivotal state and its pivotal industrial city of Chicago...

Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930.
September 22, 1994... Settlement Folk combines social and intellectual history to provide a fresh interpretation of the settlement movement and its place in American reform culture. Carson's study is primarily an intellectual biography of the most prominent settlement...

Independent Intellectuals in the United States: 1910-1945.
September 22, 1994... The question of independence has perennially agitated commentators on the state of modern intellectual life. In the 1920s, Mannheim described "free-floating intellectuals" as a group of thinkers, having diverse social origins, who could stand...

Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States.
September 22, 1994... The eight essays presented here, half of them previously published, represent a historiographical odyssey of some fifteen years that takes the author from the lofty climes of intellectual culture to the public culture of bustling streets seeking...

The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s.
September 22, 1994... This volume contains seven essays produced between 1957 and 1991 which Sklar attempts to link as studies in the United States as a developing country. Although that vague theme fails to give the book a satisfying coherence, the separate essays...

America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.
September 22, 1994... That the telephone has been one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is undisputed. In 1875 Americans wishing to send messages had to travel themselves or have someone travel for them, and their messages...

Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations.
September 22, 1994... Hall's book is coherent, original, provocative, and learned. With unnecessary humility, he presents it as a collection of essays he has written and revised over almost a decade. Hall's thesis is in his title. In the third quarter of the...

Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony.
September 22, 1994... The environmental problems created by the methods used to maintain American lawns have been a prominent issue in the popular press for at least five years. Keeping a lawn green, weed-free, and evenly cut calls for regular watering, fertilizer,...

The Crooked Ladder: Gangsters, Ethnicity, and the American Dream
September 22, 1994... The Crooked Ladder analyzes the process by which, over the last century and a half, various newcomers to American cities have used organized crime as a path of social mobility. The book examines the Irish, Jews, and Italians for the period before...

The Vital South: How Presidents are Elected.
September 22, 1994... Earl and Merle Black have constructed an unusually lucid and accessible examination of the role of the South in party politics, national issues, and presidential elections. A sweeping examination of the political life of the South over a long...

The Christie Seigneuries: Estate Management and Settlement in the Upper Richelieu Valley, 1760-1854.
September 22, 1994... Noel has written a formidably detailed study of a block of five Canadian seigneuries straddling the Richelieu River just north of the American border. Scarcely settled before the British conquest and as much a timber reserve as an agricultural...

Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century.
September 22, 1994... During the past several years, the hype and opportunism surrounding the Columbian quincentenary has tended to overshadow the ongoing work of historians and anthropologists who have spent the past twenty years rethinking Europocentric approaches...

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaiba, 1580-1822.
September 22, 1994... This book offers a clear, vivid, and graceful description of frontier society in a locality of colonial Sao Paulo--the social history behind the slave-hunting, pathfinding bandeirantes who did so much to extend Portuguese influence into the...

Los trabajadores de Buenos Aires: La experiencia del mercado, 1850-1880.
September 22, 1994... The period that is covered by this work has not hitherto been the focus of social or economic historians. The periodicity of Argentina's historiography has emphasized eras prior and subsequent to the time span covered by Sabato and Romero. The...

Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico.
September 22, 1994... During the boom in Mexican historiography, which has occurred in the last twenty years, it has been the colony (especially the eighteenth century) and the twentieth century that have received the most attention; in addition, recent research has...

Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's 'Urabi Movement.
September 22, 1994... Few countries in the Arab world have been studied as intensively as modern Egypt. Thus, finding new and stimulating insights on one of the most fully researched major events in the nineteenth-century history of that country is unexpected. Cole's...

Verbal Arts in Madagascar: Performance in Historical Perspective.
September 22, 1994... Both of these authors rely to some extent on literary theory for their analysis of ethnographic materials. Apter, an anthropologist writing about the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, analyzes the incantations that express the power of ritual...

Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands.
September 22, 1994... On several occasions during the year that I spent at the Institute for Advanced Study, sociological colleagues asked me (in what I took to be an innocent spirit of methodological curiosity) to explain to them the mysteries of ethnographic method....