The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from September 1995

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from September 1995

Meeting needs and suppressing desires: consumer choice models and historical data.
September 22, 1995... "Is Economics a subject like physics, true for all time, or are its laws historically conditioned?" So asked Arrow at the 1984 meetings of the American Economic Association. He answered the first half of his question in the negative, but his...

Forging Revolution: Metalworkers, Managers, and the State in St. Petersburg, 1890-1914.
September 22, 1995... Until now, the history of Russian and Soviet society has been uncertain. Today, however, its prospects seem more secure and more interesting. The most obvious reason is the greater accessibility of archives and other materials essential for...

Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861-1914.
September 22, 1995... Until now, the history of Russian and Soviet society has been uncertain. Today, however, its prospects seem more secure and more interesting. The most obvious reason is the greater accessibility of archives and other materials essential for...

Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia.
September 22, 1995... Until now, the history of Russian and Soviet society has been uncertain. Today, however, its prospects seem more secure and more interesting. The most obvious reason is the greater accessibility of archives and other materials essential for...

World Trade Since 1431: Geography, Technology and Capitalism.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Hugill's masterful synthesis must be placed alongside James Vance's monumental Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation Since the Transportation Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore, 1990). World Trade Since...

Conceptualizing Global History.
September 22, 1995... As we approach the end of the twentieth century, Mazlish and Buultjens suggest that historians must start making sense of what they call the Age of Globalization. The effects of new factors in human existence, such as nuclear power, satellite...

Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Admirers of Bairoch's previous work - and I am one - will be disappointed in this book. Bairoch promises to expose twenty "myths" - defined as "incorrect knowledge of the economy shared by many economists, social scientists and the general...

History, Historians, and the Dynamics of Change.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Green examines alternate models of secular change, along with their implications for periodization, during the early modern period. He treats the following "governing dynamics": (1) The "commercial model" of economic growth, which originated...

Children in Time and Place: Developmental and Historical Insights.
September 22, 1995... Ever since the demise of psychohistory, historians and psychologists have had little to do with each other. The goal of Children in Time and Place is nothing less than to overcome this diffidence by offering an alternative to psychoanalytical...

Constitutionalism and Democracy: Transitions in the Contemporary World.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... This collection of twenty-five essays deals mainly with the subject of constitutionalism in various parts of the world.(1) The essays concern constitutions and constitutional regimes in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Conspicuously,...

Centuries of Darkness.
September 22, 1995... Revisionist histories can be categorized as serious, thought-provoking challenges to received historical wisdom, as alternative, viable interpretations of the historical record, or, when poorly done, as tendentious, superficial "readings" of...

Egypt in Late Antiquity.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Among the ancient provinces that were subject to Rome and, later, Constantinople, Egypt is exceptional in several ways. First, it had a glorious antiquity of its own, and under alien rule it maintained the architecture, images, and religion of...

Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition.
September 22, 1995... In the middle of the first century B.C., Roman armies invaded Gaul and incorporated it into the Roman empire. During the next century, Gallic elites responded in different ways to this threat to their local prominence. Some held priesthoods in...

Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Cadden's learned study of the definitions of "male" and "female," as elaborated in medieval medical and scientific literature, is a welcome and much-needed addition to the vast scholarship on the roles of women in the Middle Ages that has been...

Just a Sack of Potatoes? Crisis Experiences in European Societies, Past and Present.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... The title of this collected volume on historical subsistence crises comes from a stray comment that Karl Marx made regarding the political effectiveness of the French peasantry, comparing them to "a sack of potatoes." The implication is that,...

Birth Weight and Economic Growth: Women's Living Standards in the Industrializing West.
September 22, 1995... Some working-class women in five European and North American cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth century suffered undernourishment. They gave birth to infants substantially smaller than other patients of lying-in hospitals, and...

Die Epidemiologie der Pest: Der Konzeptwandel in der Erforschung der Infektionsketten seit der Entdeckung des Pesterregers in Jahre 1894.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Describing the evolution of modern plague research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Kupferschmidt provides a valuable contribution to the history of infectious disease research. As indicated by its subtitle, this book deals...

Living and Dying in England, 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... This series of interlocking essays is based on Harvey's detailed knowledge of the ample fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and early-sixteenth-century sources from the Abbey of Westminster. Monastic officials kept careful records of their receipts and...

The Creation of a Community: The City of Wells in the Middle Ages.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Scholarly progress through the towns and cities of late medieval England is comparable to the journey of a few years ago through the early settlements in British North America. In each case, we have a general model of development and...

Law, Land and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300-1800.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Integrating legal and social history, Spring sets out to rewrite the story of inheritance among the English landed elite, rapping Bonfield and Stone on the knuckles en route.(1) The legal history of landowners is generally portrayed as...

Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Van Riper traces the crucial role played by English geologists, between 1858 and 1863, in establishing the great antiquity of the human species and the impact their discovery had on the "intellectual topography" of archaeology and geology. He...

Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life.
September 22, 1995... As the number of professional journals continues to grow, the audiences for scholarly argument multiply accordingly. This useful collection brings together new articles by Turner with others previously published in journals of British history,...

The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800-1929.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... This paperback edition of a work first published in 1990 is an intriguing mixture of feminist theory and restrained polemic about the social and cultural determinants of biomedical thought and practice, and a straightforward chronological...

Disraeli: A Biography.
September 22, 1995... When Lord Blake's Disraeli (London, 1966) appeared, it was widely praised as the best personal and political biography of a British prime minister to date. It was followed by Richard Davis's sensitive Disraeli (London, 1976), Sarah Bradford's...

British Jewry and the Holocaust.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... The author's thesis is easily stated. The organized Jewish community of Britain - especially its English leadership and members of its most numerous and prominent organizations - responded to the rise of Adolf Hitler and to news of the...

The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... This is the companion volume to The State and Economic Knowledge (1990), edited by Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple. Both books focus on historical development of the knowledge base that has intertwined with the growing activities of the modern...

Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Pederson shows that it is a mistake to view the development of the European welfare state as simply a response to class politics. Taking Max Weber as a "better guide than Marx" (20) and insisting on a complex view of "interest," she finds that...

Revolutionary Justice in Paris: 1789-1790.
September 22, 1995... Did the judicial violence of the Terror in 1793-1794 grow out of the politics and ideology of 1789? In answering this question, which has long fascinated historians of the French Revolution, Shapiro gives a resounding "No!" Revolutionary...

Political Alignment in the French National Assembly: 1789-1791.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Only in the last half-dozen years have students of the French Revolution again returned to research on the period after 1789, instead of concentrating upon causes. Lately, scholars have focused upon the formation and life of the National...

In the Theater of Criminal Justice: The Palais de Justice in Second Empire Paris.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... In 1869, the French Second Empire unveiled a new wing for its criminal courtrooms in the Palais de Justice in Paris. Instead of a soberly decorated edifice (the sort of architecture that would fit the "schema that text replaces icon" (xviii) in...

The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... It is a basic principle of the public law of Islam that the Muslim community should be ruled by a single man, variously known as the caliph, commander of the faithful, or imam. In the early history of the community, it was relatively...

The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor.
September 22, 1995... The more scholars from a variety of disciplines delve into the reign of Philip II of Spain, the more remarkable a man and ruler he becomes. The received view - Philip as an archetypal tyrant, rooted in the hostilities of his age and surviving...

Juan de Herrera: Architect to Phillip II of Spain.
September 22, 1995... The more scholars from a variety of disciplines delve into the reign of Philip II of Spain, the more remarkable a man and ruler he becomes. The received view - Philip as an archetypal tyrant, rooted in the hostilities of his age and surviving...

Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy.
September 22, 1995... This account of the durability of civic traditions in particular regions of modern-day Italy (1970s and 1980s) is flattering to a medieval historian. The potency of civic sensibilities, especially in north and central Italy, is for Putnam a...

Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia.
September 22, 1995... The triangular relation among spiritual Pietism, secular rationality, and the origins of the Prussian state is a vital and a fateful one in the history of Germany, especially when the figure is complicated by the Weberian conceptual overlap...

Hysteria Beyond Freud.
September 22, 1995... This is an ambitious book. Though the authors disclaim any intention of "compiling a complete history of hysteria," they aim to extend their "gaze to cover European civilization over three thousand years" and to conclude their "narrative with...

The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... This is a long-awaited book. It brings to culmination a quarter-century of exhaustive research on one of the key periods of twentieth-century German history. The author has previously addressed various aspects of the subject in two major...

Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Some very important issues pervade Macrakis' study: Is a relatively free society a necessary condition for the advancement of science? What was the fate of scientific research in a totalitarian country like Nazi Germany? Were some scientific...

De waardij van eene vroege opleiding: Een onderzoek naar de implicaties van het alfabetisme op het leven van inwoners van Eindhoven en omliggende gemeenten, 1800-1920.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... The title of this book (The value of an early education) is deliberately archaic in language, taken from an 1806 passage quoted in full on the dedication page. The book is a study of the relationship between the growing rate of literacy and the...

Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... For the educated reader looking for a concise, one-volume history of Russian and Soviet science, it would be difficult to improve upon this work. Graham has distilled the knowledge gained throughout a long and distinguished career and presented...

Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... In their exuberance during the early days after the October Revolution of 1917, many Bolshevik jurists and ideologues proclaimed that the family, law, and the State would all wither away under socialism. Goldman traces the origin of this...

Alexander A. Friedmann: The Man Who Made the Universe Expand.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... In 1922, Friedmann, a Russian specialist in dynamic meteorology and mathematics, published an essay that set forth equations describing a space for which the curvature was a function of time.(1) The equations applied equally to theories of the...

Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America.
September 22, 1995... Dennis has written a provocative but largely unconvincing ethnohistorical account of the Iroquois encounter with the Dutch and French in the seventeenth century. The author describes his study as "Cubist" history, since his artistic style...

The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution.
September 22, 1995... In The Privileges of Independence, Crowley describes "the shift from a de jure to a de facto commercial dependence" of the American colonies and states on Great Britain in the era of the American Revolution (xi). Skillfully blending the private...

Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Bradford's book is a conservative jeremiad of protest, written in an effort to rescue the United States Constitution from the "partisan and insupportable obscurantism" (12) of Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan and other liberal "lawyers...

American Political Cultures.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Following in the footsteps of Tocqueville, Hartz, Huntington, Bercovitch, and other historically minded political theorists, Ellis makes a fresh and ambitious effort to grasp the enduring architecture of American beliefs.(1) His illustrious...

The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... In The Politics Presidents Make, Skowronek recasts presidential history in an innovative and provocative framework that assigns relevance to all presidents and identifies the factors that distinguish them and link them together. Skowronek's...

The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... The Republic of Labor aims to reconfigure the historiography of the development of the American working class. Challenging historians' focus on the nineteenth century, Schultz suggests that nineteenth-century, working-class politics was less a...

Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... There's something for everyone in this superb retelling of Ethan Allen's life. Academics will appreciate the way Bellesiles has enriched his story by linking it to a growing body of literature about frontier communities in general, about the...

Territorial Ambition: Land and Society in Arkansas, 1800-1840.
September 22, 1995... According to Bolton, historians generally have emphasized the crudeness, lawlessness, and shiftlessness of the settlers in the Arkansas Territory instead of their economic success. He wrote Territorial Ambition to revise this depiction,...

Masters and Lords: Mid-19th Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers.
September 22, 1995... Potential readers of this fine book should not be misled by its title. It is not another contribution to the tired debate on the Prussian road to capitalism, but, rather, a comparative study of nineteenth-century East Elbian Junkers and...

Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical History of Middle-Western Agriculture.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... In the beginning chapters of Making the Corn Belt, we learn that this large, productive, and technically advanced area is largely the result of outside invasions. Glaciers from the north brought new soft material and shaped a surface of small...

Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Zukerman is both conscience and gadfly among American historians. For more than two decades, he has demonstrated that, when we consider the evidence more thoroughly or obliquely, some of our dearest categories and concepts fail to explain that...

Dimensions of Law in the Service of Order: Origins of the Federal Income Tax, 1861-1913.
September 22, 1995... Stanley is among those scholars (primarily political scientists) who have rediscovered the potential of an interdisciplinary understanding of the history of American taxation. He studies the early history of the modern income tax, from Civil...

When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia: The Emergence of the Republican Machine, 1867-1933.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression, the Republican party dominated politics in Pennsylvania, in part because its national tariff policies benefited both workers and management alike in the state's booming industries, and...

To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Old fashioned political history - strong on narrative storytelling, biographical vignette, and campaign anecdote but weak in theoretical and methodological sophistication - is making a comeback. McNickle's account of a century of mayoral...

Can Workers Have a Voice? The Politics of Deindustrialization in Pittsburgh.
September 22, 1995... Can Workers Have a Voice is a hybrid of recent (1980s) history and unabashed advocacy. According to Hathaway, the book "does not stop at merely discovering the potency of elite power [in Pittsburgh]; it seeks to undermine it. Exposing it at...

Behind the Throne: Servants of Power to Imperial Presidents, 1898-1968.
September 22, 1995... This collection - a tribute to University of Wisconsin teacher-scholar-administrator Fred Harvey Harrington - is uneven, episodic, and only loosely held together by the common theme suggested by the title. The eight essays plumb the lives and...

Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview.
September 22, 1995... Smedley states her objective plainly: "to provide an analytic framework for the study of 'race' as a sociocultural phenomenon" (8). There is little need for her to modify the description by borrowing "in North America" from her book's title,...

Between Memory and Reality: Family and Community in Rural Wisconsin, 1870-1970.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Between Memory and Reality provides an engaging, perceptive, and em-pathetic account of the culturally homogeneous "open-country communities" created by late-nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrants in two of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin's...

Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... The title of this important study is drawn from a 1935 advertisement that juxtaposes images of a gasoline-powered Maytag washing machine with a tractor plowing in the field, while proclaiming that farm women, too, "are entitled to power." For...

The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women.
September 22, 1995... This book, simply put, is terrific. The editors collected ten essays by leading biographers of modern American women that offer not only an engaging encounter with fascinating biographical subjects but an extraordinarily honest portrait of...

Racial and Ethnic Patterns of Mortality in New Mexico.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... This volume represents a detailed analysis by a team of physicians of mortality patterns in New Mexico between 1958 and 1982, broken down by race/ethnicity and gender. The authors focus on mortality patterns in three segments of New Mexico's...

The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Wohlforth tries to weigh the influence of power on world politics by comparing United States and Soviet elite perceptions of the relative distribution of power and the hierarchy of prestige between 1945 and 1989. At times, this effort seems...

The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at M.I.T. and Stanford.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Leslie has written a superb history of the Cold War's impact on science in the United States. Using MIT and Stanford as exemplars, he shows in detail how the evolution of science and technology at those institutions was affected by interaction...

The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons.
September 22, 1995... Accidents happen even when there is strong incentive to avoid them, as in operation of nuclear deterrent forces. Nuclear armed aircraft have crashed. Missile warning radars have malfunctioned. Repairmen have miswired attack alarm systems. Base...

Cancer Factories: America's Tragic Quest for Uranium Self-Sufficiency.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... This book covers an important and timely subject, especially in light of the continuing interest in the exposure to radiation by segments of the American public during the Cold War era. Ball, a well-published political scientist, focuses on the...

Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Garrow provides a blow-by-blow description of the background of the litigation leading to the Supreme Court s decisions finding unconstitutional Connecticut's ban on the use of contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965), and virtually every...

The Evolution of the Ethiopian Jews: A History of the Beta Israel (Falasha) to 1920.
September 22, 1995... The Jews of Ethiopia, variously called the Black Jews, Falasha, and Beta Israel (the last name being their preference) lived in the Gondar and Tigray regions of northwestern Ethiopia. Their number had diminished to merely 28,000 by the 1970s...

Oromia amd Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868-1992.
September 22, 1995... This book is a work of historical sociology that assesses the foundation of the Ethiopian empire of the late nineteenth century and its collapse a little over a hundred years later. The twist here is that the author sees Ethiopia's expansion...

The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire.
September 22, 1995... For centuries, the Ottoman harem has obsessed European observers. Inaccessible, it became an object of fantasy. Europeans imagined it as a place of sexual license, and also a cabal radiating a dangerous female power in affairs of state. The...

Japan in the World.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... A collection of sixteen essays - most of which are provocatively critical and enlightening - this volume nevertheless suffers from an identity crisis. Is it, as the book jacket proclaims, a work that "assesses Japan's current dealings in...

Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action.
September 22, 1995... In this book, Dalton has two main theses. He argues that Gandhi sought to develop and then to implement the idea that rule over the self was the same as political self-rule, or swaraj. Dalton also seeks to show that this philosophy led...

A culture of poverty? The St. Martin in the Fields Workhouse, 1817.
September 22, 1995... In early nineteenth-century England, it was an upper-class common place that the poor law promoted pauperism. Many in the upper classes believed that it undermined initiative and the willingness to work hard, that it bred dependency, and that...

"To die in the term": the mortality of English barristers.
September 22, 1995... The 1960s and the 1970s were the "parish register era" of English historical demography. The publication of Wrigley and Schofield's monumental Population History of England in 1981 marked the culmination of the enormous efforts that went into...

Living and Dying in England, 1100-1540.
September 22, 1995... This series of interlocking essays is based on Harvey's detailed knowledge of the ample fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and early-sixteenth-century sources from the Abbey of Westminster. Monastic officials kept careful records of their receipts and...

Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936.
September 22, 1995... In their exuberance during the early days after the October Revolution of 1917, many Bolshevik jurists and ideologues proclaimed that the family, law, and the State would all wither away under socialism. Goldman traces the origin of this...