Journal of Social History back issues from March 2004:
"Lots of them did that": desertion, bigamy, and marital fluidity in late-nineteenth-century America.
Mar 22, 2004; ... Introduction In 1859, Caroline Dunkel married schoolteacher John Martin, whom she had known for two years. John was a black-haired, dark-complexioned man, as revealed in the small leather-framed tintype of him that Caroline saved. He enrolled in the service during the Civil War, ...
"You cannot fix the scarlet letter on my breast!": women reading, writing, and reshaping the sexual culture of Victorian America.
Mar 22, 2004; ... At the end of the nineteenth-century cautionary tale, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne described the ultimate fate of the central characters of his novel. After a deathbed confession and reconciliation with little Pearl, the fruit of his illicit affair with Hester Prynne, the ...
The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: gender and power in the case of Ruth Snyder.
Mar 22, 2004; ... In the wee hours of March 20, 1927, Ruth Snyder and her lover, Judd Gray, brutally murdered her husband, Albert Snyder, while her nine-year old daughter slept across the hall. The pair bludgeoned Albert with a sash weight, strangled him with picture wire, stuffed chloroform-soaked cloth in ...
Divorce, patriarchal authority, and masculinity: a case from early national Vermont.
Mar 22, 2004; ... In 1976, in a pathbreaking article on divorce in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, Nancy Cott argued that the growing willingness of late eighteenth-century women to seek divorce implied that these wives were increasingly "asserting control over the direction of their lives" and that wives ...
"The forgetfulness of sex": devotion and desire in the courtship Letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld.
Mar 22, 2004; ... In 1837, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, daughters of a South Carolina planter turned abolitionist orators, each penned a series of public letters in which they attacked the rigid distinctions that their culture drew between the masculine and the feminine. In Angelina's "Letters to Catherine ...
Down memory lane: representations of domestic workers in middle class personal narratives of colonial bengal.
Mar 22, 2004; ... If one rummages through the pages of autobiographies and memoirs left by Bengali middle-class men and women living in colonial times one cannot possibly miss the characters and activities of the domestic workers surrounding the authors as they were growing up. The repeated appearance of ...
"Mexico in his head": slavery and the Texas-Mexico border, 1810-1860.
Mar 22, 2004; ... In September 1851, six years after Texas was annexed by the United States and fifteen years after independence from Mexico, Guy M. Bryan, politician and slaveholder of Brazoria County, wrote his brother-in-law in response to a proposal to swap a tract of land for a slave. Bryan seems to ...
Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the Gateway City: the Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), 1964-75.
Mar 22, 2004; ... Introduction When construction began on the federally assisted Gateway Arch project in the early 1960s, St. Louis, Missouri's civic, business and government elite viewed it as a means of revitalizing the blighted downtown riverfront area. Located near the banks of the ...
Conquering the British Ballarat: the policing of Victorian Middlesbrough.
Mar 22, 2004; ... Introduction The creation of a policed society was one of the major developments of the nineteenth century. As recent studies have shown, there was considerable variation from town to town and, while the process was never unproblematic, there were greater difficulties to be ...
The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. By John E. Crowley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 368 pp.; 68 black and white illustrations, index. $42.00). Good books cross lines drawn in the sand by others ....
Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason. By Jessica Warner (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. xviii plus 267 pp. $24.95). Although presented as a "Tragicomedy in three acts" and in a style that occasionally descends to an arch burlesque of the eighteenth-century ...
American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience. By Arnon Gutfeld (Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2002. xx plus 252 pp.). It is hard to take this book seriously. In the preface in which Arnon Gutfeld outlines his endeavor, he draws ...
Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America. By Jennifer D. Keene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xiv plus 294 pp. $40.00). Jennifer Keene has made a noteworthy and important contribution to a growing renaissance of studies on the First World War ....
GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany. By Maria Hohn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xv plus 337 pp. $22.50). Maria Hohn provides a fascinating study of the encounter between Germans and the American military in the rural ...
Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Edited by Mark Jackson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. xiii plus 293 pp. $84.95). Mark Jackson has brought together a solid if somewhat uneven collection of twelve papers offering historical approaches ...
Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History. By James S. Olson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. x plus 302 pp.). In 1967, while touring the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Italian surgeon and art aficionado T.C. Greco noticed discoloration and swelling in the breast ...
Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History. By James C. Riley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii plus 243pp.). This book assumes that all human kind "want to live a long life" and that "society benefits from the experience and wisdom of older people".[p. 220] Yet as ...
Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China. By Michael Szonyi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. xii plus 313 pp. $49.50). The ability to do fieldwork in the People's Republic of China has enabled historians like Michael Szonyi to add historical ...
Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America. By Shawn Johansen (London: Routledge, 2001. xii plus 249 pp.). Scholars have suggested an interesting anomaly about cultural and economic changes in the antebellum North. Both women and men of the middle class ...
Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption. By Barbara Melosh (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. x + 326pp. $29.95). Strangers and Kin is a welcome addition to the spate of recent studies of the history of adoption. (1) Melosh, an adoptive mother and ...
Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. By Sherri Broder (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, vii plus 259 pp.). Sherri Broder analyzes how the tropes of waifs, tramps, fallen women, and ...
All that Makes a Man.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... All that Makes a Man. By Stephen W. Berry, II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 304pp.). In the decades after the Civil War, southern men who supported the Confederacy praised women, commemorated and otherwise storied them, for the sacrifices they had made on behalf of ...
Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America. Edited by Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2001. ix plus 308 pp.). Merril Smith's edited volume on the history of rape in Canada and America provides numerous articles that will be of great worth to ...
Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California. By Clare V. McKanna, Jr. (Reno, University of Nevada Press, 2002. xii plus 148 pp.). This book raises the perennial question "How violent was the West?" through a study of 1317 homicides committed over fifty years in seven ...
Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States 1848-82.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States 1848-82. By Najia Aarim-Heriot (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xiv plus 289 pp. $39.95). Sections of this ambitious book are well-covered in the existing historical ...
Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750. Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750. Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror. By J.M. Beattie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xx plus 491 pp. $74). John Beattie's magisterial Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1986) was the first major monograph to ...
Paris: Capital of the World.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Paris: Capital of the World. By Patrice Higonnet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 493 pp. $35.00). I think it was James M. Barrie, Peter Pan's creator, who defended George Bernard Shaw against a critic who accused him of being scattered-brained: 'At least he has ...
Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender. By Francine Muel-Dreyfus. Translated by Kathleen A. Johnson. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001. 387 pp. $21.95). Vichy and the Eternal Feminine, the translation of a book ...
Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995. By John Rodden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xxx plus 506 pp. $74.00). As the author admits in the introduction, this book is "not the straightforward, full-scale institutional ...
Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape. Edited by Paul A. Shackel (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2001. xiii plus 282 pp. $59.95). Consider these images: A country road. A marble sculpture. A reflecting pool. A rustic cabin. They are peaceful ...
What is History Now?(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... What Is History Now? Edited by David Cannadine (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xiv plus 172pp. [pounds sterling]19.99stg.). What is History Now? emerged from a two day symposium in November 2001 at the Institute of Historical Studies, in London, to mark the ...
The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850.(Reviews)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2004; ... The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850. By David Kuchta (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. x plus 303pp. $45). Although this work is not about fashion per se, it does have a lot to say about how clothes make the man. The notion here is that ...
'Lots of them did that': desertion, bigamy, and marital fluidity in late-nineteenth-century America.(Author Abstract)
Mar 22, 2004 ... Abstract: Beverly Schwartzberg, "'Lots of Them Did That': Desertion, Bigamy, and Marital Fluidity in Late-Nineteenth-Century America" Although marriage was invested with significant personal, ideological, economic, legal, and political importance in late-nineteenth-century ...
'You cannot fix the scarlet letter on my breast!': women reading, writing, and reshaping the sexual culture of Victorian America.(Author Abstract)
Mar 22, 2004 ... Abstract: Jesse F. Battan, "'You Cannot Fix the Scarlet Letter on my Breast!': Women Reading, Writing, and Reshaping the Sexual Culture of Victorian America" By the nineteenth century, privacy was increasingly valued and increasingly scarce. While some culture critics attacked ...
The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: gender and power in the case of Ruth Snyder.(Author Abstract)
Mar 22, 2004 ... Abstract: Jessie Ramey, "The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: Gender and Power in the Case of Ruth Snyder" In 1928, the state of New York sent Ruth Snyder to the electric chair for the brutal murder of her husband. The case generated enormous publicity, turning Snyder into an ...
Divorce, patriarchal authority, and masculinity: a case from early national Vermont.(Author Abstract)
Mar 22, 2004 ... Abstract: Mary Beth Sievens, "Divorce, Patriarchal Authority, and Masculinity: A Case from Early National Vermont" This article explores the effects that divorce had on patriarchal authority within early nineteenth-century marriages by analyzing the experiences and perceptions ...
'The forgetfulness of sex': devotion and desire in the courtship letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld.(Author Abstract)
Mar 22, 2004 ... Abstract: Robert K. Nelson, "'The Forgetfulness of Sex': Devotion and Desire in the Courtship Letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld" In his love letters to Angelina Grimke in 1838, Theodore Dwight Weld did something one would not expect from a man courting a woman: ...
Down memory lane: representations of domestic workers in middle class personal narratives of colonial Bengal.(Author Abstract)
Mar 22, 2004 ... Abstract: Swapna M. Banerjee, "Down Memory Lane: Representations of Domestic Workers in Middle Class Personal Narratives of Colonial Bengal" Salvaging information from the autobiographical narratives of middle-class men and women this paper explores an important aspect of ...
'Mexico in his head': slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860.
Mar 22, 2004 ... Abstract: Sean Kelley, "'Mexico in His Head': Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860" The continual redrawing of the boundaries between the United States, Texas, and Mexico in the nineteenth century prompted slaves to view the border as a symbol of liberation. When the ...
Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the gateway city: the action committee to improve opportunities for negroes (ACTION), 1964-75.(Author Abstract)
Mar 22, 2004 ... Abstract: Clarence Lang, "Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the Gateway City: The Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), 1964-75" This article discusses the origins and development of the Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes ...
Conquering the British Ballarat: the policing of Victorian Middlesbrough.(Author Abstract)
Mar 22, 2004 ... Abstract: David Taylor, "Conquering the British Ballarat: The Policing of Victorian Middlesbrough" Over the period of the reign of Queen Victoria, Middlesbrough--the British Ballarat in Asa Briggs' memorable phrase--was transformed from a rough-and-ready 'frontier' town, with ...