The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from September 1997

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from September 1997

Flowers and fruits: two thousand years of menstrual regulation.
September 22, 1997... Despite recent historical speculations that Western couples in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modem period purposely regulated their fertility through early abortion with the help of a number of plant substances, a review of the...

"Tyranny" in nineteenth-century American legal discourse: a rhetorical analysis.
September 22, 1997... The writing of history has undergone a major change in the last two decades. Many historians have turned their attention to how language generally, and certain discursive systems in particular, are used to construct reality. The "linguistic turn"...

Political culture: genealogy of a concept.
September 22, 1997... A cursory glance at new titles in U.S. political history may give the impression that "all the past is political culture," and that this intuitively sensible formula is "casually invoked" by writers casting about for theoretical support....

Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy.
September 22, 1997... A cursory glance at new titles in U.S. political history may give the impression that "all the past is political culture," and that this intuitively sensible formula is "casually invoked" by writers casting about for theoretical support....

The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest.
September 22, 1997... A cursory glance at new titles in U.S. political history may give the impression that "all the past is political culture," and that this intuitively sensible formula is "casually invoked" by writers casting about for theoretical support....

Revolution and War.
September 22, 1997... Concomitant with increases in internal conflicts within states are the increased likelihood of revolution and violence on an international scale. Walt challenges the conventional argument that revolutionaries try to export their ideological...

The Sources of Economic Growth.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... This is an interesting collection of nontechnical essays from a thoughtful and insightful economist. Yet, it is unlikely to attract much attention from readers of this journal. The problem is that Nelson is more a heterodox economist than an...

Rural Images: Estate Maps in the Old and New Worlds.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... In early modern Europe, different modes of control and/or revenue extraction required different varieties of record making and record preservation. Princes and others in power found it useful to add to their verbal and accounting documents the...

Drugs and Narcotics in History.
September 22, 1997... This book comprises eleven essays about widely disparate topics in the history of drugs and narcotics. Although the essays vary in depth, coverage, and value, a number of them are useful reviews of specific topics. For example, John Scarborough's...

History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... Dohrn-van Rossum has drawn on an astonishingly broad array of primary and secondary sources to construct a fresh interpretation of the Western European societal changes brought on by the invention and diffusion of various time-keeping...

Databases in Historical Research: Theory, Methods and Applications.
September 22, 1997... A properly assembled database is to a historian what a properly equipped laboratory is to a chemist. Not all laboratories need be elaborate to achieve their purpose; and neither need all properly assembled databases be extensive or complex for...

Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge.
September 22, 1997... Postmodernist critiques of social science now constitute the rule rather than the exception; readers may confidently predict their form, method, and language. Michel Foucault replaces Karl Marx for chapter and verse; deconstruction reveals the...

Crossing Frontiers: Gerontology Emerges as a Science.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... Crossing Frontiers traces the evolution of the multi-, if not transdisciplinary, field of aging. The book begins by describing Juan Ponce de Leon's expeditions to find the fountain of youth. It ends by acknowledging Betty Friedan's popular book,...

The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600.
September 22, 1997... This is big-picture history for a big audience. Like his previous work, Crosby's Measure of Reality expresses his "lifelong search for explanations for the amazing success of European imperialism." But where Ecological Imperialism (New York,...

European Proto-Industrialization.
September 22, 1997... It has been more than twenty-five years since Mendels published the paper that launched the concept of proto-industrialization on the scholarly world.(1) Its success was considerable, if not immediate, and greater in Europe than in North America....

The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain.
September 22, 1997... This is Hutton's third book about the English calendar year, and he has directly incorporated portions of the first two, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (New York, 1991) and The Rise and Fall of Merry England (New York, 1994),...

Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600.
September 22, 1997... Bennett has written a wonderful book. Combining large questions and lively prose with an impressive archival base and an eclectic methodology, she takes on diverse tasks. The simplest is a variation on a classic social history - an examination of...

Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England: 1500-1800.
September 22, 1997... It has been twenty years since the first publication of Lawrence Stone's influential and controversial The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1977). Stone's pioneering study of the family in early modern England, although...

The Business Community in Seventeenth-Century England.
September 22, 1997... Grassby's detailed and intensive examination of the elements that made up the life of businessmen and women in seventeenth-century England is almost as much a work of reference as a monograph. It gives structure and approximate statistical...

Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England.
September 22, 1997... Beginning with a tabulation and graphic illustrations of illegitimacy ratios in several hundred English parishes between 1538 and 1754 (between the beginning of registration and its reform by Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act), this useful book...

Crime and Punishment in England: An Introductory History.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... The authors of this volume report that the book arose from a challenge posed to them by criminologists at their university that they put the contemporary obsession with crime in a historical context. The work that the four authors produced offers...

After the Famine: Irish Agriculture, 1850-1914.
September 22, 1997... The Irish Famine of the 1840s gave real meaning to Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal (1729). That the post-Famine recovery up to the time of the World War I put Irish growth in per capita real product ahead of every European country but Denmark...

City on the Seine: Paris in the Time of Richelieu and Louis XIV, 1614-1715.
September 22, 1997... Trout has written a book that, in his words, is "meant as a portrait of a city - more descriptive or even pictorial than analytical or quantitative" (x). He argues that, despite the apparent chaos of Paris throughout the course of the seventeenth...

Les Grammaires d'une Ville: Essai sur la genese des structures urbaines a Marseille.
September 22, 1997... This hefty volume is a slightly reworked version of Roncayolo's these de doctorat, completed in 1981, plus a new conclusion. It is a study in a venerable French tradition - the historical geography - which was an antecedent, and an important...

Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789-1799.
September 22, 1997... Although voting is considered an essential feature of modern citizenship, until recently, it has been neglected by historians of the French Revolution. Crook's work helps to fall this gap by providing a synthetic study of French elections from...

Genoa and the Genoese.
September 22, 1997... Clinging to a narrow strip of Riviera between toilsome mountains and the siren sea, Genoa lacked the land and population to dower prosperity, and yet it became, along with the Low Countries, one of the earliest European commercial centers and,...

Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1600.
September 22, 1997... On the sound basis of his 1987 study of the emergence of a hierarchical Renaissance state, Romano has completed a study of the social organization of sixteenth-century Venetian households. In domestic service Romano finds a metaphor for those...

An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... This book consists of six tales of the Florentine Renaissance, each accompanied by an essay about its social and historical background by Martines, whose detailed knowledge of these matters gives them unusual interest. The tales, more or less in...

A Provincial Elite in Early Modern Tuscany: Family and Power in the Creation of the State.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... This book is a study of the institutional basis, wealth, and family strategies of the elite in the small Tuscan provincial town of Poppi, in the high Casentino valley, from the mid-fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. Once the principal...

Repubblica per contratto: Bologna: una citta europea nello Stato della Chiesa.
September 22, 1997... Focusing on the constitutional development of Bologna from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century, this study is presented as a critique of "the Anglo-American" approach to early modern European political and constitutional history....

Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism: The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, 1906-1934.
September 22, 1997... Why Fascism took control of Italy in 1922 is one of the great puzzles of modern times. With Socialists and Catholics dominating the national Parliament, with the rapid ebb of postwar social unrest, the success of a motley band of right-wing...

The Village and the Outside World in Golden Age Castile: Mobility and Migration in Everyday Rural Life.
September 22, 1997... There is a persistent negative stereotype of Spaniards as a people condemned by traditionalist attitudes to repeated failures to modernize at each stage in their country's history. Within this myth, a preponderant role is often given to the...

The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540-1750.
September 22, 1997... The first 226 pages of this monumental study summarize the history of the Society of Jesus in the Portuguese Assistancy. The material may be useful to general readers, but adds little to what has long been known. The remaining two-thirds of the...

In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany.
September 22, 1997... This collection consists of more than twenty studies about the broad theme of Jewish-Gentile relations. The essays are written from a number of different disciplinary perspectives, and with varying degrees of comprehensiveness. They come together...

Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... Diggins has written a stimulating essay on the thought of Max Weber, or on aspects of it. His focus is on Weber's view of America; his main texts are Weber's letters about his 1904 visit to the United States, and of course the Protestant Ethic...

The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933.
September 22, 1997... In his typically whimsical way, C. S. Lewis decried the "nothing buttery" of some writers who take a single-minded approach to life's problems. For them, it is "nothing but" economics or politics or religion that rule our lives. Similarly, C....

Economic Relations Between Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain: 1936-1945.
September 22, 1997... Though it is now the subject of a lengthy bibliography - both scholarly and journalistic - in Spanish, German, English, and other languages, the complex relationship between Francisco Franco's regime and Nazi Germany is still sometimes a matter...

Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... In this volume, Arnade studies a number of cases of particular urban disturbances in Ghent to illustrate the relationship between the partricians and guildsmen of Ghent and the expanding Burgundian state. Conflict was almost inevitable, since the...

The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: The Shaping of Discovery.
September 22, 1997... In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the so-called scientific revolution in fields other than astronomy, mechanics, and mathematics. The painstaking microscopical investigations of Robert Hooke, Jan Swammerdam, Antoni van...

Francoise sauvee des flammes? Une Valaisanne accusee de sorcellerie au XVe siecle.
September 22, 1997... In 1467, in the Valais region of the Alps, a local ordinance was invoked to arrest a widow on charges of sorcery, after she was implicated by three people accused earlier that year who were pressured at court to denounce their accomplices. Texts...

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1997... In this much anticipated book, Brown extends and deepens the rich literature about the transformation of Virginia into a slave society by paying systematic attention to the uses of gender in constituting racial categories and legitimating...

Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835.
September 22, 1997... In this important and provocative book, the transformation of punishment is the barometer by which Meranze measures the changing social order, beginning with the disruption of the Revolution and ending in the third decade of the nineteenth...

The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation.
September 22, 1997... This study addresses questions frequently ignored concerning the "persistent presence" of religion in American politics. But even though the subject is framed broadly in the brief introduction, the several major chapters in the book are organized...

The Making of an American Senate: Reconstitutive Change in Congress, 1787-1841.
September 22, 1997... Swift combines the approaches of political history and political science in a fresh examination of the formative decades in the shaping of the United States Senate. Under George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, the Senate remained,...

The Worst Tax? A History of the Property Tax in America.
September 22, 1997... Americans have heaped much criticism on the property tax, but in the 1990s it still accounts for more than three-fourths of the tax revenue of all local governments. In the process of trying to understand how the property tax could have lasted so...

A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle.
September 22, 1997... How infants are fed reveals a great deal about a culture's values and sheds light upon the importance of children and the experience of women within the family. In this study, Golden explores the complex relationship between wet nurses,...

Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country.
September 22, 1997... McCurry's article in The Journal of American History in 1992 announced the arrival of a historian whose fresh perspective promised to transform familiar landscapes.(1) Masters of Small Worlds brilliantly fulfills that promise. A complex,...

Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity, and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York, 1870-1924.
September 22, 1997... Casting a sociologist's critical eye on the conceptual limitations that afflict both macro- and micro-analyses of migration, the author contends that women's "memories" of migration can be adequately accounted for only when the multiplicity of...

Rural Democracy: Family Farmers and Politics in Western Washington, 1890-1925.
September 22, 1997... In this study of community life in a small comer of western Washington, Watkins addresses two neglected aspects of agrarian radicalism in the United States - the ties between farm movements in the 1890s and the early twentieth century, and the...

City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America.
September 22, 1997... "With the ancient Greeks as my model," Miller explains at the outset of this big book on Chicago up to the 1890s, "I have tried to write a city history that gives prominence to geography and personality, to the way the natural environment and...

Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890-1940.
September 22, 1997... Morawska, a historical sociologist, assumed two tasks in this rigorously researched and precisely written study of the small (1,000 to 1,300 member) and distinctive (shaped by the dominance of the local steel factory) Johnstown, Pennsylvania,...

Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920.
September 22, 1997... Gilmore's fine book demonstrates the recent tendency among historians of women to write about gender as a principle of social organization, and therefore to embrace the history of men. Centered on middle-class African-American women in North...

Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture.
September 22, 1997... In the early 1900s, Progressive reformers hailed experts as disinterested defenders of the commonweal against the interests, and they forged ties to increasingly influential professional organizations. What these reformers rifled to anticipate...

International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods.
September 22, 1997... The challenge of making international monetary history interesting and accessible for a general audience is a daunting one. To meet that challenge without losing the attention of specialists is the rarest of accomplishments. This book achieves...

A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology.
September 22, 1997... Why is there a question mark in the title of this book when the ensuing text makes it clear that there is no one Chicago school, but several. The book might better have been titled "Some Tenuously Connected, Occasionally Juicy, Revelations and...

Race, Campaign Politics, and the Realignment in the South.
September 22, 1997... The vagaries and volatility of recent American electoral behavior has been the focus of a great deal of scholarly uneasiness, given the apparent failure of our organizing schemes to account for the way voters currently act.(1) The South, however,...

From People's War to People's Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of Vietnam.
September 22, 1997... Lomperis, author of The War Everyone Lost - and Won: America's Intervention in Viet Nam's Twin Struggles (Baton Rouge, 1984), has returned to Southeast Asia again in an attempt to draw useful lessons from that conflict by comparing it with...

The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics.
September 22, 1997... "The most influential loser in twentieth-century American politics" is the label that Carter pins on Wallace (468). This viewpoint takes a little explaining, since the loser label is inappropriate if the focus is on Wallace's gubernatorial...

The Kingdom of Quito, 1690-1830: The State and Regional Development.
September 22, 1997... Colonial Ecuador stood at some remove from the center of things in Spanish America, never quite equaling the epic violence and amassing the vast fortunes that made Mexico and Peru so famous. The Spanish focused their energies in places other than...

Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas.
September 22, 1997... This provocative study of "American homosexual practices and the male transvestism often associated with them" interrogates the significance of gender and gendered violence in power relations between men in medieval Europe and during the Spanish...

Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800-1857.
September 22, 1997... This book focuses on the rural population of the region that in 1849 became the state of Guerrero and its political and social relation to the early Mexican republic. It argues two broad points: that peasants participated in the formation of the...

Kingship and State: The Buganda Dynasty.
September 22, 1997... In Kingship and State, Wrigley sums up an outstanding career of scholarship about the history and societies of the African Great Lakes region. During the past four decades, he has presented a series of articles that were always original in their...

Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville.
September 22, 1997... African studies have long been bedeviled by the lingering suspicion, once a deeply held conviction, that the real Africa is rural and traditional. Even as history has taken precedence over anthropology, it has been most creative in its use of...

The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict.
September 22, 1997... For those who want to read a book that provides an alternative to the rational-choice, instrumentalist view of ethnic conflict, this is as good a book as one is likely to find. Kakar is a practicing psychoanalyst residing in Delhi who is well...

Rise of Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change.
September 22, 1997... Gocek's main argument is that the trajectory of the late Ottoman Empire was determined by the formation of a segmented bourgeoisie increasingly split on religious lines between a Muslim bureaucratic element and a largely Christian and Jewish...

Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700.
September 22, 1997... In this ambitious and impressively researched book, von Glahn offers an interpretation of the shifting efforts of the central administration to manage the empire's currency from the Song through the early Qing dynasties. He argues that these...

China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism.
September 22, 1997... This book employs a "modes of production approach" to a comprehensive study of Chinese society. Fully aware of "Marxism's anomalous present position" (ix), Gates is not even sure if she should acknowledge by name those who helped or inspired...

Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th-Century China: The Search for an Ideal Development Model.
September 22, 1997... With this encyclopedic study, Pepper has consolidated her position as the foremost authority on Chinese educational policies and practices. The stimulus to her two-decade study was the contrast between the favorable American educators' view of...

Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law.
September 22, 1997... Ooms has returned to an old subject in Japanese history with a fresh perspective through "insights gained from Pierre Bourdieu's writings" (2) and by focusing on the village unit from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries for his data,...

Malaysia's Democratic Transition: Rapid Development, Culture, and Politics.
September 22, 1997... Drawing on demographic theory and fifteen years' experience working with Malaysian population statistics, Leete presents a description and analysis of the demographic transition as it has occurred in Malaysia. As he points out, Malaysia is an...