The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from September 1996

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from September 1996

Accounting for taste: British coffee consumption in historical perspective.
September 22, 1996... In general, the British have never eaten horses. Roast beef and sugared tea have long formed a part of the national cuisine, but horsemeat and coffee remain outside the consumption of a majority of households. We are what we eat; we are equally...

The process of reaching peaceful territorial change: the Arab-Israeli conflict in comparative perspective.
September 22, 1996... To understand the Arab-Israeli conflict and the prospects for its current peace process, we have to combine an analytical framework from political science with the insights of a more detailed historical analysis. This article examines the...

Assessing memory: twentieth-century slave narratives reconsidered.
September 22, 1996... Scholars of American slavery have faced difficult methodological problems from the very beginning. Among the thorniest is the question of how to understand a culture that left few contemporary records. Until recently, historians relied on the...

Physical exertion and stature in the Habsburg monarchy, 1730-1800. (response to John Komlos and Albrecht Ritschl, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 26)
September 22, 1996... Heights were falling precipitously in the Habsburg empire during the second half of the eighteenth century. Two alternative interpretations have been advanced to explain this peculiar trend. According to the "Austrian model," proposed by Komlos,...

The Biological Standard of Living on Three Continents: Further Explorations in Anthropometric History.
September 22, 1996... This is the second collection of essays by various scholars, dealing with the study of heights, that Komlos has edited in the past two years. As with the contents of Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric...

The Combing of History.
September 22, 1996... In this essay collection, Cohen, a historian of East Africa, provides a highly personal account of the social construction of memory. Like others who have recently explored this topic, Cohen dismisses the possibility of objective knowledge of the...

Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R.M. Hartwell.
September 22, 1996... There are three reasons why someone might want to read this book. First, it is a warm tribute to Max Hartwell, an early practitioner of what we now call interdisciplinary history. Eschewing formal models as too restrictive, Hartwell placed his...

The Antique Drums of War.
September 22, 1996... The author, a historian, exploits a number of disciplines to explain the "general characteristics" of war throughout human history. An infantry rifleman in World War II, McRandle discerned in his teaching career that the literature on war...

Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality.
September 22, 1996... Covering antiquity to the present, this collection of seventeen provocative articles examines various aspects of sexology, the allegedly scientific study of sex. Treated are topics as diverse as the Greek and Roman sex manuals that advised men...

Honor.
September 22, 1996... Stewart's aim in this book is to develop a concept of honor that can be used crossculturally and transhistorically, to make equal sense of the nature of honor in early Norse sagas, medieval chivalry, Bedouin lore, and in a host of other...

The Formation of the Medieval West: Studies in the Oral Culture of the Barbarians.
September 22, 1996... "That which is spoken passes away; that which is written endures." Although these words were written by Pope Gregory the Great c.600, they could just as well represent modern attitudes toward orality and literacy. Richter has made it his task to...

Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages.
September 22, 1996... The ideas presented in this book evolved from two earlier articles by the same author.(1) This time, however, the overall presentation, interpretation, and conclusions seem more successful. The polemical tone and tendentiousness (particularly in...

Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society.
September 22, 1996... In this relatively short book, Shatzmiller provides an excellent, eminently readable account of Jewish medical practitioners in Spain, Provence, and Italy from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The book gives detailed descriptions of the...

European on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500-1800.
September 22, 1996... Mobile populations have always posed a challenge for historians, and early modern migration patterns present sizeable challenges, given the limited and imperfect data on the phenomena. The essays of this volume attempt "to establish what can be...

Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism.
September 22, 1996... Grove's study of the origins and development of European environmentalism is an outstanding work of interpretative scholarship, even a revolutionary one. It should become required reading for students of European relations. Understated, though...

Crisis Diplomacy: The Great Powers Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century.
September 22, 1996... Richardson's Crisis Diplomacy evaluates many prominent theoretical perspectives on international crises. Its basic objectives are to identify the conditions under which crises lead to war, and to assess the importance of crisis diplomacy (as...

The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy.
September 22, 1996... Lundestad has organized this collection into six parts.(1) It starts with a basic framework that provides a long-term historical perspective. This section includes an essay by historian William H. McNeill, who has written extensively about the...

Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century.
September 22, 1996... The subdiscipline of diplomatic history deals with the analytical categories of power, politics, and the state. For a generation, historians in other fields largely ignored diplomatic history as a variant of political history. Diplomatic...

Nationalism, Ethnicity and Identity: Cross National and Comparative Perspective.
September 22, 1996... This collection of essays is of interest for two reasons. Most of the contributors are senior scholars from Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, Ukraine, Turkey, Austria, Poland, and Croatia, as well as from the Netherlands and the United States. Thus, a...

The Culture of the English People: Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution.
September 22, 1996... This is an ambitious book. Though the "culture" of the title is reduced to "popular culture" in the text, the scope is still extremely wide. After single chapters devoted to Iron Age cultures and to the Roman occupation, the bulk of the book...

Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450-1750.
September 22, 1996... Woodward has done us all a favor by plunging into the surviving accounts of the councils, churches, and other institutions of a number of northern towns so as to bring to the surface a picture of the working life of building craftsmen and...

The Gentry in England and Wales: 1500-1700.
September 22, 1996... Heal and Holmes imaginatively and persuasively attempt to recover the lived experience of gentlemen and gentlewomen during an era of cultural transformation and redefinition. From the start they eschew the unproductive task of precisely defining...

The Family and Family Relationships, 1500-1900: England, France & the United States.
September 22, 1996... This work has two aims: to serve as an introduction to the debate-strewn field of family history, and to demonstrate the author's conviction that scholars in this area should be examining the lived experience of families as opposed to demographic...

The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868.
September 22, 1996... This is an important, often maddening, but always compelling book. Gatrell aims to deconstruct that part of Leon Radzinowicz's magisterial narrative of the English criminal code that deals with the early and midnineteenth-century reduction in...

Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women.
September 22, 1996... In Consuming Angels, Loeb reconstructs Victorian consumer culture through an examination of thousands of lavishly illustrated advertisements that appeared in the popular press between 1880-1914. This study specifically questions how the consumer...

London's Burning: Life, Death, and Art in the Second World War.
September 22, 1996... This book offers a unique contribution to our understanding of the British experience of World War II. It is a highly suggestive and exciting exploration of the ways in which tragedy became a source of inspiration for art, and art a...

The Nearest Place that Wasn't Ireland: Early Nineteenth Century Irish Migration.
September 22, 1996... Until recently, most of the historiography on the Irish diaspora in the nineteenth century has concentrated on the Irish in North America, especially those who settled in the United States. As Donald Akenson, The Irish Diaspora, A Primer...

The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration.
September 22, 1996... It is a rare privilege for a historian to discover documents in which a remote and distant rural community leaves "an articulate record of its thoughts in its own words" (7). Scally found such a set of documents in the Quit Rent Office Papers in...

Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva.
September 22, 1996... Most historical studies of divorce adopt one of two possible methodologies. They rely on broadly based statistical analyses to reach conclusions that apply to entire populations, or they use close studies of anecdotal evidence to explore...

Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime Paris: 1735-1789, vol. 1, The System of Criminal Justice.
September 22, 1996... Students of French Old Regime law, crime, and society will welcome the appearance of Andrews' study of Parisian crime and its judgment by the Chatelet and Parlement of Paris - tribunals whose vast jurisdictions in the capital and its region made...

The Flour War: Gender, Class and Community in Late Ancien Regime French Society.
September 22, 1996... Bouton's The Flour War is a meticulous analysis of the 317 riots that broke out in the area known as the Parisian bread basket in the spring of 1775, when the price of grain and flour began to rise. Bouton begins with a fine historiographical...

The Pre-Industrial Urban System: France, 1740-1840.
September 22, 1996... In this remarkably original book, Lepetit approaches the history of French towns in relation to urban economics, regional geography, cultural representations, administrative institutions, and transport networks. The most interesting feature of...

New History in France: The Triumph of the "Annales."
September 22, 1996... This translation of a 1986 volume offers a critical history of the Annales, that pioneer journal of interdisciplinary history. Dosse traces its evolution from its 1929 founding, as the Annales d'histoire economique et sociale, by Marc Bloch and...

Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence.
September 22, 1996... The concluding sentence in Molho's book supplies a useful abstract of the new model of Florentine and, more generally, Italian social life during the fifteenth century: "The heavy and inescapable demands of family tradition, family expectations,...

The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello.
September 22, 1996... In this detailed study of the death of a fifteenth-century Venetian child, King provides her readers with a rare glimpse into the emotional and familial life of Renaissance Europeans. The Death of Valerio Marcello is less about the eight-year old...

From Freud's Consulting Room: The Unconscious in an Scientific Age.
September 22, 1996... Because psychoanalysis has had such far-reaching cultural and intellectual implications, it is easy to overlook the fact that its roots lie in clinical encounters, as Sigmund Freud struggled to understand one patient after another. This tendency...

Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany, 1900-1945.
September 22, 1996... This is the first full-scale study in English of Adolf Hitler's "euthanasia" program, which murdered 200,000 mentally ill or physically disabled people whom the Nazis considered "lives unworthy of life" (lebensunwerten Lebens). The story...

Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany.
September 22, 1996... Tatar's study provides a sweeping and compelling analysis of the obsessively frequent theme of sexual mutilation and murder that occurred in the literature, painting, films, and photography of Weimar Germany. These themes in art were matched by...

From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plains: A History of Environmental Change in Temperate North America from 1500 to the Present.
September 22, 1996... In 1954, John Weaver, chronicling the loss of the great interior prairies, lamented: "Civilized man is destroying a masterpiece of nature without recording for posterity that which he has destroyed" (261). In response, optimists could say that...

Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850.
September 22, 1996... As the title of this book suggests, Vickers deals with two different sorts of worker in one region of early New England. What follows is a beautifully balanced analysis that goes far beyond the simple connection of common time and place to locate...

The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844.
September 22, 1996... Mormonism occupies a peculiar position in American religious history and culture. Reports of counterfeiting and decisions to stop converting Holocaust victims, as well as other unseemly stories, appear periodically, contributing to an aura of...

Small Worlds, Large Questions: Explorations in Early American Social History, 1600-1850.
September 22, 1996... Rutman begins his preface by stating that this collection of essays, some written by Rutman alone and others with his wife - is an "intensely personal volume" (ix). It gathers together in one place essays written over a period of thirty years,...

Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History.
September 22, 1996... Some of Greene's most influential work over the years has appeared as chapters in edited collections or as articles in journals. To be sure, his books have had enormous impact, especially Pursuits of Happiness (Chapel Hill, 1988), a renowned...

On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773-1876.
September 22, 1996... On Jordan's Stormy Banks investigates the egalitarian side of Baptist and Methodist religion in antebellum Mississippi. A fully researched volume that makes detailed use of church minutes and the reports of yearly denominational meetings, the...

Public Archaeology in Annapolis: A Critical Approach to History in Maryland's Ancient City.
September 22, 1996... Since 1971, when Jane McWilliams and I deposited our study of land use in Annapolis with the State Archives - Annapolis Lot Histories and Maps, 2v. (MSA SC 829) - a tremendous amount of thoughtful, at times even exciting, archaeological work has...

Congressional Dynamics: Structure, Coordination, and Choice in the First American Congress, 1774-1789.
September 22, 1996... Jillson and Wilson, political scientists, force historians to take another look at the history of the first American Congress in this provocative and persuasive exercise in the "new institutionalism." Inspired by social-choice theory, the authors...

Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience.
September 22, 1996... Shefter's articles on political parties have long been cited as classic examples of interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of American political development. Political Parties and the State brings together several of these essays for the...

Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850.
September 22, 1996... For years, historians and economists have dismissed early American technology. Relatively low rates of productivity increase permitted the inference that techniques changed little. Moreover, the machines that ushered in the Industrial Revolution...

Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South.
September 22, 1996... Eugenics has fascinated historians for more than three decades. The reasons are not difficult to understand. What had begun as an effort to "improve" the genetic pool of humanity in the early twentieth century by sterilizing allegedly defective...

Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America.
September 22, 1996... Historians and demographers have long been aware that family size in the United States declined from 7.04 to 3.56 persons between 1800 and 1900. The knowledge and methods of birth control that made that decline possible is the subject of this...

Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America.
September 22, 1996... This is meant to be a reassuring book. With public concern about children without childhoods and misspent youths reaching apocalyptic proportions, Graff is determined to demonstrate the falsity of these recurring myths and images. He softens the...

Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England.
September 22, 1996... Lamoreaux begins this essay in banking history with a list of differences between banking today and banking in early nineteenth-century New England. The most important of the many differences is captured in her title. Early nineteenth-century...

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Policy, 1880-1920.
September 22, 1996... Hamm provides an important study in legal history of national prohibition legislation in the context of the evolving ideology and structures of the prohibition movement. The most important finding is that the nature of the American polity, or...

The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990.
September 22, 1996... The transformation of American agriculture from its nineteenth-century form of labor-intensive production for sufficiency and local markets to its late twentieth-century version of capital-intensive production for global markets is an important,...

The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America.
September 22, 1996... Lunbeck has written the War and Peace of psychiatric history - a vast and intricate story with hundreds of characters and events, large and small. Her study draws on and contributes to the disciplines of history (of medicine, the professions, sex...

Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900-1933.
September 22, 1996... In Regulating a New Society, Keller observes that there were some striking similarities between the central concerns of American politics during the early decades of the twentieth century and the issues of today - for example, the status of...

American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style.
September 22, 1996... Building on his previous studies of "emotionology," Stearns sets up an ambitious task for himself in American Cool. He proposes to contrast the emotional culture that developed between 1920 and 1950 with the Victorian style that it replaced. But...

After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census.
September 22, 1996... One of the major advances in American social history has been the assembling of large-scale, public-use samples of selected federal censuses. Most earlier historical works were community studies that provided important, in-depth analyses of the...

Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929.
September 22, 1996... Frank's study of the rise and fall of Seattle's labor movement during the years after World War I is a provocative and important contribution to the study of labor politics, consumer culture, and the role of gender in class relationships. She...

One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890-1990.
September 22, 1996... The art of writing a history that effectively synthesizes the vast literature produced about a particular subject is a skill that eludes all but the most adept practitioners. Just reading the monographs and scholarly articles pertaining to a...

Arms Control During the Pre-Nuclear Era: The United States and National Limitation Between the Two World Wars.
September 22, 1996... The naval limitation diplomacy of 1921-1936 has been the only concerted, sustained, comprehensive effort to put a lid on armaments, and Kaufman's book is the only systematic and unitary examination of that effort. Written in the late 1980s to...

Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980.
September 22, 1996... This analysis of industrial pollution in Gary, Indiana, seeks to integrate two historical specialties - environmental and social history - and to understand the class and racial dimensions of environmental change. Veering toward social history,...

A Particular Condition in Life: Self-Employment and Social Mobility in Mid-Victorian Brantford, Ontario.
September 22, 1996... Burley's A Particular Condition in Life uses data at ten-year intervals, from 1830 to 1881, to study the self-employed of Brantford, a community 25 miles west of the head of Lake Ontario that, by the end of this period, had reached a population...

Property and Inequality in Victorian Ontario: Structural Patterns and Cultural Communities in the 1871 Census.
September 22, 1996... Burley's A Particular Condition in Life uses data at ten-year intervals, from 1830 to 1881, to study the self-employed of Brantford, a community 25 miles west of the head of Lake Ontario that, by the end of this period, had reached a population...

The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1600-1720.
September 22, 1996... In this finely honed study, the author examines the question of the bases of social control in the multiracial society of Mexico City, which did not acquire a standing army until the mideighteenth century. The author challenges one of the...

Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacan, 1749-1818.
September 22, 1996... In 1810, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the parish priest of Dolores, New Spain, hoisted the standard of Our Lady of Guadalupe and led an angry congregation of thousands of Indians to nearby Guanajuato. The priest demanded the city's surrender, the...

Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890-1914.
September 22, 1996... During the three decades preceding World War I, Argentina and Canada emerged as two of the world's leading exporters of wheat, supplying the growing markets in the urbanizing countries of northern and western Europe. Both countries transformed...

Radicals, Reformers, and Reactionaries: The Prisoner's Dilemma and the Collapse of Democracy in Latin America.
September 22, 1996... This is a curious and unusual book. Clever, learned, and well written, it is at the same time misguided in its methodological argument, and misleading in its substantive conclusions about Latin American politics. The methodological argument is...

Orpheus and Power: The "Movimento Negro" of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988.
September 22, 1996... Orpheus and Power is a provocative text that proposes to interpret the emergence of an Afro-Brazilian "black movement" (movimento negro) between 1945 and 1988 within an analytical framework adapted from Gramsci's theory of hegemony.(1) Despite a...

State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante.
September 22, 1996... State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante represents the distillation and culmination of three decades of historical research on Asante. This intellectually ambitious and feisty book seeks to provide an alternative interpretation of Asante history...

Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa.
September 22, 1996... This book contains two comparative essays and five case studies about the use of contracts between small farmers and the firms that process or market their produce. The essays each cover unique, rather than parallel, themes. They consider the...

Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350.
September 22, 1996... Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus is a remarkable book - remarkable for its felicity of expression, its fresh use of well-known sources, and its comparative-analytical framework. Chamberlain asks how a'yan (scholarly elite)...

An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire: 1300-1914.
September 22, 1996... This great encyclopedia of a book contains a summary of the life-time scholarship of four of the most distinguished historians of the Ottoman Empire: Inalcik - the doyen of Ottoman studies - who deals with the period 1300-1600, Suraiya Faroqhi...

The Making of Early Medieval India.
September 22, 1996... This work of original scholarship will be read with interest by anyone concerned, in the author's words, with "the selection of variables which would purport to separate one historical phase from another" (2). The analysis of the historical...

Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India, Malabar: 1900-1948.
September 22, 1996... Menon argues that too little attention has been paid to the definition of community. According to Stein, notes Menon, a community should be considered as a "complex and transitory outcome of an extraordinary range of relationships."(1) Menon...

Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China.
September 22, 1996... The prevailing methodology of this collection of thirteen essays - published between 1978 and 1992 by Britain's leading scholar of the Han era (206 BC-AD 220) - is that of classical Sinology. Loewe mainly explicates primary sources or draws...

Chinese Historical Microdemography.
September 22, 1996... Despite Harrell's opening statement that the field of Chinese historical demography "is still in its infancy," the papers in this volume suggest, instead, that the field has reached a middle point in its life cycle (1). With the clever use of...

Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Trade, 1757-1937.
September 22, 1996... This extensively researched and well-crafted book illuminates the political economy of China by focusing on the tea trade from the high Qing through the end of the dynasty and into the Republican period. The years in the title delineate the onset...

To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization.
September 22, 1996... This small, learned volume takes a contemporary political issue - international disputes about intellectual property rights - and deftly transforms it into a historical inquiry of unusual breadth and elegance. Alford's analysis of contemporary...

The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto.
September 22, 1996... Berry's study of the sengoku ("warring states") era is an original and provocative work that immensely increases our understanding of late medieval Japan. The book covers the period from the Onin War (1467-1477) to 1568, roughly when...

Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era.
September 22, 1996... Since most historians seek to understand Japan on its own terms, too often resulting in the explicit or implicit view that Japan is unique, it is a pleasure to see the publication of a major collaborative study comparing Japan with a European...

Labour and Gold in Fiji.
September 22, 1996... Labour and Gold in Fiji focuses on two important and yet generally neglected areas of study in the South Pacific: the mining industry and labor history. Past and present scholarship relating to the South Pacific may be overly concerned with the...