This article examines how late medieval non-nuclear household relationships shaped the pursuit of honorable social status. It examines in detail several witness depositions from the Basel municipal court (Schultheissengericht) in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Historians have long noted the concern of householders to regulate the morality of their servants and apprentices. However

AbstractIn the historiography of slave-owning societies, manumission has been a contentious topic. Based on the assumption that manumission rates and the level of cruelty in a slave-owning society were closely related, historians have used research on manumission to rank slave societies based on a scale from “mild” to “harsh.” More recent research on manumission has eschewed this problematic approach

AbstractIn the historiography of slave-owning societies, manumission has been a contentious topic. Based on the assumption that manumission rates and the level of cruelty in a slave-owning society were closely related, historians have used research on manumission to rank slave societies based on a scale from “mild” to “harsh.” More recent research on manumission has eschewed this problematic approach

AbstractIn the historiography of slave-owning societies, manumission has been a contentious topic. Based on the assumption that manumission rates and the level of cruelty in a slave-owning society were closely related, historians have used research on manumission to rank slave societies based on a scale from “mild” to “harsh.” More recent research on manumission has eschewed this problematic approach

AbstractIn the historiography of slave-owning societies, manumission has been a contentious topic. Based on the assumption that manumission rates and the level of cruelty in a slave-owning society were closely related, historians have used research on manumission to rank slave societies based on a scale from “mild” to “harsh.” More recent research on manumission has eschewed this problematic approach

AbstractSlavery did not simply die slowly in the nineteenth century; in some parts of the world, it expanded. Engaging with the literature on slavery in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, this article explains how a rising demand for forest and sea products, pepper and rice, together with a proliferation of firearms, kindled slave raiding and trading in the Indonesian archipelago. Enslavement

AbstractDespite growing attention to the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, the debate on the nature or characteristics of slavery in these regions has been left largely unsettled. Whereas some scholars emphasize the existence of harsh forms of hereditary slavery similar to those found in the Americas, others argue that the nature of slavery in Asia was urban

AbstractThis study rethinks the patterns of slave-holding and slave trade that can be discerned in small-scale societies in the Timor region of the Indonesian archipelago, especially Timor, the Solor and Alor Islands, Rote, and Savu. It studies how European powers—the Dutch and the Portuguese—influenced the trade in enslaved human beings and how this was balanced by slaving conducted by Asian forces

AbstractRecent years have witnessed an expanding body of scholarship indicating the importance of slave trade and slavery in different parts of the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago worlds. This work has not only challenged the dominant focus of slavery scholarship on the Atlantic context but has also encouraged scholars to reassess wider perspectives on Asian and global social histories. This

AbstractThis article provides a better understanding of the volume of the French slave trade on Madagascar. Indeed, while research on the European slave trade in the Atlantic has benefitted much from statistical data, the slave trade in the Indian Ocean still lags behind, despite new scholarship. Based on detailed archival research, this article systematically analyzes different aspects of this commerce

This article explores the social history of the Birmingham Pub Bombings (UK). In addition to individual losses and injuries, the bombings triggered widespread anti-Irish prejudice and violence, wrongful convictions and community tensions. The resultant disharmony within the city of Birmingham lasted for generations, while the voices of communities not directly involved in the events of November 21

This article examines the changing nature of home for disabled ex-servicemen in the Second World War. It explores the function of institutional and domestic space in the restoration of traditional male roles. Masculinity was embodied in the long-stay institution, as men attempted to overcome their disability and be found suitable to resume a place in a traditional domestic home. Importantly, freedom

Digitization has usually been considered a facilitator of what has been called “big” history. While digital history projects increasingly make good and sensitive use of individual and granular records and use them to bring human complexity into a larger analysis, the digitization of published material and archives have mostly been discussed by historians in aggregate: they are valued chiefly for their

One of the standard objections against guilds in the premodern world has been their exclusiveness. Guilds have been portrayed as providing unfair advantages to the children of established masters and locals, over immigrants and other outsiders. Privileged access to certain professions and industries is seen as a source of inequality and a disincentive for technological progress. In this paper we examine

AbstractThis article explores popular understandings of disability, work, and gender in the context of charitable employment schemes for disabled ex-servicemen after the First World War. It offers a case study of the British Legion–funded poppy factories in Richmond and Edinburgh, which employed war-disabled men to manufacture artificial flowers from 1922 onward. In so doing, this article demonstrates

Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania. By FairLaura (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018. xv plus 452 pp. $34.95).

The 1920s witnessed a radical approach to sexual health in Britain, and women doctors quickly capitalized on the opportunities offered by the new VD Service. Because venereology was considered to be low status, it was among the few interwar specialisms that offered footholds to women. In view of the long-standing aversion to female engagement with subjects like VD, the large numbers of women doctors

A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s. By Todd-BrelandElizabeth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 344 pp. $99.00).

Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959. By MagnúsdóttirRosa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. ix plus 240 pp. $74.00).

AbstractThis article investigates how the criminal courts and popular press depicted abortionists across key decades of political, economic, and cultural transformations in postindependence Ireland (1922–1950). It demonstrates how and why the legal system and the media highlighted those abortion-related crimes in which bad mothers, ambitious parvenus, and ethnic “others” subverted society, religion

AbstractThis article uses judicial records of suicide cases from mid-nineteenth-century Paraguay to explore how inhabitants of the country experienced postcolonial state formation. The Republic of Paraguay, founded in 1813, was a marginal, autonomous state in South America, forged from a former Spanish colonial frontier province and dominated by autocratic regimes until its near destruction in the

Brazil: A Biography. By SchwarczLilia M. and StarlingHeloisa M. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. xxvi plus 761 pp. $40.00).

Mass Violence and the Self. From the French Wars of Religion to the Paris Commune. By BrownHoward G. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. xii plus 296 pp. $50.00).

To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture. By GilburdEleanory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. ix plus 458 pp. $35.00).

Vice, Crime, and Poverty. How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld. By KalifaDominique (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. xiv plus 279 pp. $35.00).

Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America. By AndersonJ. L. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019. xiii plus 285 pp. $34.99).

AbstractConcern about the issue of forced prostitution reached its height in the Russian empire (as elsewhere in Europe and the Americas) at the turn of the twentieth century, as part of the wider international “white slave” panic. In 1909, new antiprocurement statutes were incorporated into the Russian empire’s Criminal Code to ensure that those who forced, coerced, or encouraged young women to enter

Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830. By GilmorePeter E. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. xxvi plus 222 pp. $27.95).

Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture. By MackintoshWill B. (New York: New York University Press, 2019. 272 pp. $35.00).

Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam. By BiggsDavid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. xix plus 250 pp. $34.95).

Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985. By WatersRob (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. xiii plus 303 pp. $34.95).

Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America. By GuerraDouglas A. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 264 pp. $69.95)

Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. By TaylorAmy Murrell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xv plus 349 pp. $34.95)

The Smugglers’ World. Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela. By CromwellJesse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. xvi plus 314 pp. $39.95.).

Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico. By von GermetenNicole (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. x plus 235 pp. $34.95).

AbstractFew aspects of Michel Foucault’s seminal study The History of Madness have been more widely derided and debunked than Foucault’s assertion that medieval mad persons sailed the rivers of Europe as a kind of real-world counterpart to the literary and artistic trope of the ship of fools. But while Foucault was not correct in many of his assumptions, he also was not entirely wrong to draw attention

Cold War Democracy: The United States and Japan. By MillerJennifer M. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. vii plus 356 pp. $45.00).

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. By WarrenWendy (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2016. xi plus 345 pp. $29.95).

From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945. By ParsonsAnne E. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 221 pp. $29.95).

The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires. By FraderaJosep M. and translated by MacKayRuth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 416 pp. $39.50).

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family. By SwinthKirsten (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 339 pp. $35.00).

Civilisation and Informalisation: Connecting Long-Term Social and Psychic Processes. Edited by WoutersCas and DunningMichael (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. xviii plus 390 pp.).

AbstractThis article examines the modes of time and work discipline that emerged through factory industry in colonial Bombay. Based on a wide range of archival sources, it shows that mechanized production did not invariably suggest a transition from task-based, irregular to clock-measured, rationally organized work patterns. Operating simultaneously within temporal orders constructed by the global

AbstractReading and writing became widespread in England over the course of the early modern period, with literacy expanding alongside rapid commercial development and growing economic inequality. This article shows how tradesmen and others of similar rank used reading and writing to create a powerful identity that cut across some of the sharpening divisions in wealth from the late sixteenth to the

AbstractPark Forest, Illinois, emerged as a prototype suburb in the post–World War II era. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to Park Forest but have not thoroughly explored the efforts of the American Friends Service Committee to integrate this village outside of Chicago in the 1950s. Philip Klutznick, the lead developer of Park Forest, advertised the suburb as a melting pot for a new America

AbstractThis article documents in detail hitherto unavailable what Shail Mayaram called an “onslaught by the modern bureaucracy of the postcolonial state” on the liminally placed Meo community in the Mewat region, comprising the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur and the Gurgaon district of the former province of East Punjab. A people well-described as “in-between Hinduism and Islam,” the

Abstract:Between the Scientific Revolution and the First World War, the preserved animal body became one of the most prominent media of the European encounter with other global regions and the natural world. Animal objects mattered in a wide range of contexts and to men and women of widely differing social rank. Before long-distance travel and television documentaries acquainted European audiences

Abstract:This article examines the ways in which conceptions of gender and the public sphere affected Mexican print journalism in the period 1940 to 1970. Though the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) opened up some spaces for female journalists to write about politics, the expansion of industrial press operations in the immediate postrevolutionary period once again cut back opportunities. After 1940, women

Abstract:Historians unanimously describe the shift from private cabinets of curiosities to public museums in the first half of the nineteenth century as a major transformation in the contents, purpose, and practices of exhibition. On closer inspection, however, this shift was far more clearly defined in the great metropolitan museums than in the hundreds of smaller museums that relied on the second-hand

Abstract:This article takes as its starting point an encounter with a preserved blue bird-of-paradise skin. Though rare, the bird became wildly famous after it perched atop the head of Carrie Bradshaw during Sex and the City: The Movie. However, where in the movie the bird-skin acted as Carrie's something blue, I mobilize it in this article as a "telling example" of near-extinction. This is because

During the late 1950s, trade unions came to be vital actors in the solidarity movements of the Global South, especially in pan-African initiatives. The case of the Union generale des travailleurs algeriens (UGTA) is particularly illustrative of this development. Algeria’s long and brutal independence struggle was championed throughout the Afro-Asian bloc, and the UGTA became an important auxiliary

Abstract:How did taxidermy develop, and how was it taught before the appearance of nineteenth-century handbooks on the subject? What role did taxidermy play in early natural history collections? How were taxidermy and taxidermists valued? What is significant about the "life" of commodified dead animal bodies? This article explores the answers to these questions. It takes a contemporary taxidermy course

Abstract:This essay takes a material culture approach to the fate of the unicorn, that ultimate symbol of irrationality and credulity, in the natural history collection of the age of enlightenment. Exploring the interplay between unicorn horns, narwhals, rhinos, and other kinds of horn present in the eighteenth-century French collection, it shows that in fact unicorns never disappeared from the cabinet

Even as the French Revolution recedes further and further into the past, its importance continues to resonate because so much of our present was first rehearsed or performed during the revolutionary decade and its Napoleonic aftermath. Nineteenth-century historians, many of whom were politicians, related its political events, but these narratives eluded any consensus. Wave after wave of contemporary

Abstract:This piece reviews recent work on women, gender, and masculinity during the French revolutionary era. The older argument that women were enclosed in a private sphere and excluded from politics has given way to a more nuanced and wide-ranging exploration of diverse groups of women, including prostitutes, Parisian market women, cross-dressed female soldiers, female school-teachers, and enslaved

Abstract:From the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, historians, politicians, and even the interested public believed radical ideas to be at the bottom of this upheaval. Upstaged by social explanations, particularly in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, intellectual accounts have regained prominence, as recent scholarship has reiterated that ideas mattered. But what ideas? This

Abstract:The French Revolution was a supremely political event. Indeed, it might be seen as marking the invention of modern politics. Broadly speaking, virtually any work of scholarship dealing with the French Revolution might be said to address revolutionary politics. This essay focuses more narrowly, however, on recent works that have explicitly addressed aspects of the political history of the Revolution

Abstract:This essay first explores two contexts that have transformed the way that the international history of the French Revolution has been written over the last thirty years and which have recently provoked so many historians to take a global turn in their research and teaching at the expense of strictly national historiography. First, political relations between France and the Anglo-American world

Abstract:A cultural approach to the study of the French Revolution took off in the 1980s as a result of the coincidence of new intellectual and political currents with celebrations of the Revolution's bicentennial. By the turn of the new century, both the study of cultural phenomena (theatre, art and architecture, fashion, etc.) before, during, and after 1789 and an approach to social and political

This article explores how gender shaped activities on British adventure playgrounds, designated abandoned spaces where children engaged in free play with urban materials under loose adult supervision. It argues that as these bold experiments emerged in post-war Britain in a period when women’s traditional roles were beginning to be scrutinized and questioned they might have been expected to develop