The Journal of Interdisciplinary History articles from September 1998

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History archives from September 1998

Marriage strategy among the German nobility, 1400-1699.
September 22, 1998... Studies of family strategy among the early modern Western European elites generally assert that upward social mobility took place primarily through the marriage of daughters of "new men" to husbands of higher rank, and that women attracted much...

Commerce and conversation in the eighteenth-century Atlantic: the invention of Madeira wine.
September 22, 1998... In 1807, Madeira was the foremost luxury drink of the day - not a common beverage wine, but an expensive, exotic, status-laden, and highly processed wine produced on the Portuguese island of Madeira, 500 miles west of Morocco. By way of contrast,...

Scottish illegitimacy: social adjustment or moral economy?
September 22, 1998... Historically shifting patterns of nonmarital fertility are particularly difficult to explain, partly because so many interacting variables were at play and partly because the assessment of individual motivations is all but impossible when the...

Differing evaluations of Vietnamization. (American policy towards the 1961 Vietnamese Conflict)
September 22, 1998... You know that an attack is "just a probe" only after it is over. Tobias Wolff, In Pharoah's Army: Memories of the Lost War Research on wartime behavior has grown substantially in recent years, analyzing domestic politics and war, battlefield...

Town, countryside, and proto-industrialization in early modern Europe. (comment on the books 'Urban Decline in Modern Germany: Schwabisch Hall and Its Regions' by Terence McIntosh and 'State Corporation and Proto-Industry: The Wurttemberg Black Forest, 1580-1797' by Sheilagh Ogilvie)
September 22, 1998... "No shit-hens fly over the town wall." With this memorable eighteenth-century expression, Walker captured the fundamental antagonism between small-town and rural life in early modern Germany.(1) He argued that small towns experienced less...

Urban Decline in Early Modern Germany: Schwabisch Hall and Its Regions.
September 22, 1998... By Terence McIntosh (Chapel Hill, North Carolina University Press, 1997) 317 pp. $34.95 "No shit-hens fly over the town wall." With this memorable eighteenth-century expression, Walker captured the fundamental antagonism between small-town and...

State Corporation and Proto-Industry: The Wurttemberg Black Forest, 1580-1797.
September 22, 1998... By Sheilagh Ogilvie (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 513 pp. $80.00 "No shit-hens fly over the town wall." With this memorable eighteenth-century expression, Walker captured the fundamental antagonism between small-town and rural...

The cliometricians pursue leviathan. (comment on the book 'In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906' by Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman and Karin Gleiter)
September 22, 1998... And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of the earth, till he spouts black book and rolls fin out. (Ahab) How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest...

In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906.
September 22, 1998... By Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) 550 pp. $80.00 And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of the earth,...

The Footnote: A Curious History.
September 22, 1998... By Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997) 241 pp. $22.95 The story of the footnote is indeed a "curious" one, in Grafton's telling, especially since the protagonist is so hard to identify, except in its late and...

The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements.
September 22, 1998... By George M. Fredrickson (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997) 241 pp. $27.50 This new collection of essays proves again that Fredrickson is a master of the practice and theory of comparative history. He explores how and why to...

Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, of Europe and Europe's Encounter with the World.
September 22, 1998... By Stephen J. Pyne (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1997) 659 pp. $34.95 As every archaeologist knows, fire was a critical artifact for early humanity. Fire brought heat, protection from predators, and the ability to cook food. Pyne's...

Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400.
September 22, 1998... By Marcia L. Colish (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) 388 pp. $40.00 This volume is the first in a new series "that seeks to provide a chronological account of the intellectual life and the development of ideas in Western Europe from...

Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages.
September 22, 1998... By Andre Vauchez (trans. Jean Birrell) (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 645 pp. $95.00 This book is a translation of the 1988 classic, La saintete en Occident aux derniers siecles du Moyen Age - itself only modestly revised from...

Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of English Commonwealth, 1649-1653.
September 22, 1998... By Sean Kelsey (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 254 pp. $49.50 It has seemed easy to dismiss the posturings of the short-lived English republic and its supporters: Historians of political thought might prize the classicizing, but...

Sick, Not Dead: The Health of British Workingmen During the Mortality Decline.
September 22, 1998... By James C. Riley (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 349 pp. $58.00 Riley stands out as one of the leading researchers and authors in the growing field of studies that encompasses the history of sickness and health (as opposed...

Terminal Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles.
September 22, 1998... By Chandra Mukerji (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 393 pp. $79.95 cloth $34.95 paper "Histories of gardens," writes Mukerji, "are not usually thought to be hefty enough to carry important stories of our heritage. As supposed...

Light in the Dark Ages: The Rise and Fall of San Vincenzo al Volturno.
September 22, 1998... By Richard Hodges (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997) 232 pp. $49.95 Until now, the history of the southern Italian monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno has relied primarily on a single text - the Chronicon Vulturnense. Its...

The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine.
September 22, 1998... By Nancy G. Siraisi (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997) 361 pp. $49.50 This erudite study explores the world of one of the foremost physician - professors of sixteenth-century Italy. Siraisi explains that hers is not so much a...

Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy.
September 22, 1998... By Silvana Patriarca (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996) 280 pp. $49.95 Numbers and Nationhood traces the development of the different ways in which Italian liberals and nationalists employed statistics to constitute a new national...

Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany.
September 22, 1998... Edited by Manfred Berg and Geoffrey Cocks (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 242 pp. $59.95 The editors of this volume set themselves the task of placing Nazi medical crimes in their wider German, European, and Western context. In...

Jews in Germany After the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish-German Relations.
September 22, 1998... By Lynn Rapaport (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 325 pp. $59.95 cloth $22.95 paper This book is a major addition to the small, but growing, body of scholarship about Jewish life in post-World War II Germany. Rapaport presents a...

The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815.
September 22, 1998... By Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996) 767 pp. $89.95 cloth $29.95 paper In this impressive volume, de Vries and van der Woude have given English-speaking scholars what is sure to be the definitive...

Der Schweizerische Bauernkrieg von 1653: Politische Sozialgeschichte - Sozialgeschichte Eines Politischen Ereignisses.
September 22, 1998... By Andreas Suter (Tubingen, Bibliotheca Academica Verlag, 1997) 687 pp. N.P. This book tells two stories of the Swiss Peasants' War. The first story adopts the "perspective of slow motion" and evolves as five "distinct acts of a 'social...

Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth-through Nineteenth-Century Prague.
September 22, 1998... By Sylvie-Anne Goldberg (trans. Carol Cosman) (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997) 292 pp. $45.00 "Where are the funerals of yesterday?" - a question posed in verse by Georges Brassens, the late French chansonnier - began to...

Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606-1865.
September 22, 1998... By Paul A. C. Koistinen (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1996) 376 pp. $39.95 This book is the first in a projected five-volume study of the political economy of America's wars. Koistinen's intentions are encyclopedic. The list of topics...

Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England.
September 22, 1998... By Elizabeth Reis (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997) 212 pp. $32.50 Although witchcraft has long captured the historical imagination, during the past twenty-five years, attention has focused mainly on witches and persecutions in New...

Running on the Record: Civil War-Era Politics in New Hampshire.
September 22, 1998... By Lex Renda (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1997) 258 pp. $32.50 Renda's careful analysis extends our understanding of the complexities of voter behavior a century and a half ago. In his close examination of New Hampshire's...

The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden, 1778-1900.
September 22, 1998... By Robert Bunting (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1997) 236 pp. $29.95 In this volume, Bunting posits an edenic wilderness that covered the northwest coast of North America in the eighteenth century and then, chapter by chapter,...

Preserving Nature in National Parks: A History.
September 22, 1998... By Richard West Sellars (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) 380 pp. $35.00 When Congress established the National Park Service (NPS) in 1916, it injected into the agency's heart a dual mandate. The Service was to manage its parks "to...

Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900.
September 22, 1998... By Kathryn Kish Sklar (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995; paperback version 1997) 436 pp. $40.00 cloth $20.00 paper A great deal of history can be illuminated by a single life. In Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work, Sklar presents an...

The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls' Clubs, 1884-1928.
September 22, 1998... By Priscilla Murolo (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1997) 227 pp. $29.95 cloth $14.95 paper The major purpose of this study, Murolo explains in her introduction, is to "bring labor history and women's history together in ways that get...

Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900-1995.
September 22, 1998... By Julia Kirk Blackwelder (College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 1997) 308 pp. $39.95 cloth $17.95 paper The basic facts concerning the rise of women's market work in the twentieth century are, by now, well known. In 1900, just 21...

Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935.
September 22, 1998... By Claudia Clark (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 289 pp. $49.95 cloth $17.95 paper "I instructed them to put the brush in their mouth to get the best point on it" (17), explained Katherine Schaub, one of the New Jersey...

Designs Within Disorder: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American Economic Policy, 1933-1945.
September 22, 1998... By William J. Barber (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996) 178 pp. $44.95 Fifteen years ago, Barber began an inquiry into how the Keynesian revolution was assimilated into American economic policymaking. As a first step, he sought to...

Rebels Within the Ranks: Psychologists' Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America.
September 22, 1998... By Katherine Pandora (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997) 260 pp. $59.95 Pandora's exquisite study of three dissenting psychologists in the 1930s is the best kind of academic monograph, at once a highly specialized work and a window...

If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730.
September 22, 1998... By Donald Harman Akenson (Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997) 273 pp. $55.00 cloth $22.95 paper Looking down from an airplane, one cannot see this small Caribbean island: It is obscured by smoke from the eruption of Mount...

Not of Pure Blood: The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico.
September 22, 1998... By Jay Kinsbruner (Durham, Duke University Press, 1996) 176 pp. $44.95 cloth $15.95 paper This extremely interesting, insightful, and persuasively argued book is based on extensive local archival records supplemented by microfilm sources, and...

The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela.
September 22, 1998... By Fernando Coronil (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) 447 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper Social scientists and concerned observers have praised the character of democracy in Venezuela for nearly four decades. Moreover, all but a few...

Dar es Salaam, Tanga und Tabora: Stadtentwicklung in Tansania unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft, 1855-1914.
September 22, 1998... By Jurgen Becher (Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997) 193 pp. DM64 The new urban history of Africa is putting life and mobility into the static plans and photographs that are among the documents of the early colonial period. Dar es Salaam,...

The Agony of Algeria.
September 22, 1998... By Martin Stone (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997) 274 pp. $45.00 cloth $16.95 paper Once nearly ignored in the English-speaking world, "the agony of Algeria" in the last decade the aftermath of a military coup d'etat in January 1992....

Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843.
September 22, 1998... By Matthew H. Edney (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) 458 pp. $35.00 This book is an exquisite description of surveying and mapmaking as operations of the Enlightenment in India during the unplanned, incoherent expansion of East...

Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture.
September 22, 1998... By Susan B. Hanley (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997) 213 pp. $35.00 There was a time when historians viewed Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868) with more than a little disapproval. Its government, headed by a long line of military...

Making Health Work: Human Growth in Modern Japan.
September 22, 1998... By Carl Mosk (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996) 156 pp. $45.00 The Japanese have been getting physically bigger this century, whether measured by height, weight, or girth. Mosk's carefully researched and well-constructed book...