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Motherhood, Mental Incompetence, and the Denial of Reproductive Autonomy in the Early Years of Israeli Statehood Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Marco Di Giulio
As the State of Israel defined citizenship rights for its Jewish population after independence in 1948, it also began to articulate the rights of those affected by disabilities of the mind—i.e., psychiatric, cognitive, and learning disabilities—by issuing, for example, the “Law for the Management of Institutes” (1952) and the “Law for the Treatment of the Mentally Ill” (1955). Due to haphazard state-building
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Agency’s Moral Universe Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Monica Black
Agency belongs to a distinctly moral understanding of the cosmos, buttressed by faith in an ultimately just and knowable universe. On some deep level, historians believe that the good will out. But looking at those moments when the agency concept creates cognitive dissonance—when, for example, Holocaust perpetrators’ “agency” was placed in the service of evil—reveals things about the moral universe
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Meanings of Agency, Agency of Meaning: On Synthesis and Entanglement Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Timothy Burke
Two decades later, the conceptual problems of the term “agency” identified by Walter Johnson remain largely unresolved, in particular the analytic inhibitions that follow from what the historian Lynn Thomas has described as agency-as-argument. Taking the case of the colonial Zimbabwean chief Munhuwepayi Mangwende as a reference point, this essay argues that the microhistorical tracing of agency as
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Antona’s Suit Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Tatiana Seijas
Antona, originally from Upper Guinea, raised a family in Mexico’s Black Pacific. Her story, memorialized in a freedom suit from 1597, suggests that framing survival as agency helps us reconstruct the experiences of people in a way that accounts for the complexity of power in their historical contexts.
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“Longing and Hope and Sadness and Anger”: Disentangling the Social and the Human Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Gabriel Winant
This article reconstructs the historical context in which “agency” emerged as the key concept of social history, arguing that an unstated concept of the liberal individual was smuggled into historical explanation through a humanist anthropology underlying the social history renaissance. It then asks what would be involved in salvaging social–historical explanation, including its interest in historical
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On the Agency of Environmental History Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Bathsheba Demuth
Twenty years ago, Walter Johnson warned historians not to rely on a concept that let both user and audience alike feel better without doing better. The concept in question was agency. Down the metaphorical hall and many a literal one, environmental historians were also talking about agency. The proximity is not surprising: the new social history Johnson addressed in 2003 came up alongside environmental
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The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Priya Satia
In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better:
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Agency, Politics, and the “Impossible Domestic”: A Response to Walter Johnson’s “On Agency” Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Angela Elisabeth Zimmerman
Walter Johnson’s point about “agency” can be extended to other central concepts of historical analysis: what might appear as a salutary extension of a foundational category of liberal democracy to the histories of enslaved people in fact forces those histories into frameworks that are, ultimately, those of enslavers. The interconnected insights of Black feminism and Queer theory—particularly about
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Into the Hills: Challenges of Writing Postemancipation Agency in the Caribbean Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Anne Eller
As Caribbean postemancipation scholarship has deepened so richly in recent decades, writers have been able to shake major distortions such as the progressive teleologies of freedom that lurk as the very scaffolding of congratulatory imperial records. The full dynamism of repression directed at postslavery generations still demands attention, as does the difficult task of reconstructing communities’
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The War at Home: Photography, Political Violence, and Spectacle in the Russian Revolution of 1905 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-08-15 Susan K Morrissey
In early twentieth-century Russia, a disastrous war and social revolution shook the foundations of the imperial state, unleashing the press from censorship and demanding innovation in media coverage. At this very moment, new photographic technology was democratizing access and making high-quality reproductions affordable. This article explores how photography responded to and visualized the unprecedented
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“Solidarity with the Most Oppressed Peoples of the Earth”: The Boston Chronicle and Black Internationalist Print Culture, 1945–60 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Max Lewontin
This article explores transformations in the Black press during some of the most repressive years of United States and global anticommunism in the 1940s and 1950s. Centering on an examination of the editorial politics of the Boston Chronicle, a daily newspaper founded by Caribbean immigrants in the early twentieth century, it argues that Black leftist internationalism continued to be visible in print
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The Making of a Gentleman and a Detective: Tales of Crime, Respectability, and Surveillance from a Colonial Metropolis Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Anindita Ghosh
Priyanath Mukhopadhyay (also referred to as PM subsequently) enjoyed an extraordinary career in the colonial police force in Calcutta, where he served as a detective from 1878 to 1911. In his later life, he wrote as a bhadralok and a detective—both important parts of his fashioned self-identity—using narratives of crime to showcase his rare professional expertise and his responsibilities as a cultured
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“The Dregs of the Mau Mau Barrel”: Permanent Exile and the Remaking of Late Colonial Kenya, 1954–61 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-05-26 Niels Boender
This article seeks to illustrate the emergence and significance of permanent exile in the latter years of British rule in Kenya. Drawing on concepts of the “state of exception” in the imperial context, the analysis places Kenyan policy into a longer history of penal practice. Exile as a mode of punishment was a permanent fixture in the repertoire of the British Empire as a method of controlling rebellious
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Hot on the Trail: Pilgrimage and Crime in Early Modern Spain Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-05-25 Amanda L Scott
Though pilgrims were purportedly sacred travelers, their actual identities and motivations for travel were far from certain. Connotations with criminality and fraud also ran deep. Beginning with a strange case in which an epileptic French priest traveling to Santiago de Compostela was arrested and investigated as an alleged spy, this article considers the ambiguities surrounding pilgrim identity and
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On Choice and Freedom in Transnational Migrations: The Soviet Jewish Migrants in Europe Who Were Left Behind Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-05-13 Denis Kozlov
This article discusses the experiences of several thousand Jewish migrants from the Soviet Union who failed to adapt to life in Israel and moved to Western Europe during the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to gain immigrant admission to Western countries. The difficult multi-year sojourn of these people in Europe (mainly in the Roman Metropolitan Area in Italy) highlights the nonlinear and precarious
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Inventing Young Offenders: The Legal and Medical Categorization of Juvenile Delinquency in Hashemite Iraq, 1921–1958 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Sara Farhan, Pelle Valentin Olsen
This article traces the emergence of juvenile delinquency as a legal and medical category in Hashemite Iraq (1921–58). We argue that as children and youth became increasingly visible through actions and inactions that highlighted the weaknesses of political and social structures, state institutions adopted international frameworks and vernaculars concerning the participation of youth in labor. Medicine
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Enslaved Litigants, Emotions, and a Shifting Legal Landscape in Cauca, Colombia (1825–1831) Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-04-01 Ángela Pérez-Villa
This article reconstructs judicial practice in Cauca, Republic of Colombia, through the close reading of two criminal court cases involving enslaved litigants during the early transition from colony to independent state. In 1825, the enactment of laws that created new courts, judgeships, and procedures aimed to restructure and strengthen judicial practice in a nascent republic convulsed by internal
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Introduction: Social Histories of the Security State Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-02-13 Sam Lebovic
This introduction sketches the common themes of the five articles in this special section, outlines the importance of studying the security state as a central feature of modern social history, and suggests future avenues for research and analysis of security institutions devoted to policing, surveillance, violence, and control. It focuses particularly on: the globalization of security practices; the
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Why Early Modern Mass Incarceration Matters: The Bamberg Malefizhaus, 1627–31 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Spencer J Weinreich
In 1627, at the height of the Bamberg witch-hunt (1595–1631), the prince-bishopric erected the Malefizhaus (“witchcraft-house”), the first cellular prison purpose-built for solitary confinement. This article recovers the history of the Malefizhaus to establish the importance of imprisonment and carceral institutions to the early modern witch-craze. The prison at once concretized the ideology of the
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Coin Diving, Tourism, and Colonialism in the Caribbean, 1890–1940 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-12-27 Stanley Fonseca
Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, the ongoing crises of the late-colonial Caribbean mingled with an emerging trend: white American and European tourists who flocked in growing numbers to the tropics in search of pleasure, leisure, and adventure. As these travelers arrived in port in the era before commercial flight, they encountered a ubiquitous scene: boys and young men in small
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Terrestrial Enlightenment: Ruin and Revolution in an Eighteenth-Century Climate Crisis Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Patrick Anthony
Some scholars and scientists identify the eighteenth century as an inflection point in the Anthropocene, a geologic age in which humans act as a planetary force. This article suggests that this inflection point was characterized not only by new means and scales of environmental manipulation, but also by the development of climate politics. Where forests have been the focus of considerable scholarship
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The Right to a Favor: International Scholarships, Clientelism, and the Class Politics of Merit in Post-Revolutionary Mexico Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Rachel Grace Newman
This article considers the ways that middle-class and elite citizens in post-revolutionary Mexico pursued access to exclusive favors from the state in the 1920s and 1930s and emphasizes the overlooked role of merit as political logic in this era. Examining political discourse within clientelist exchanges through the close reading of petitions, I explore ideas about class and nation as articulated by
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Social Stratification and Career Choice Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-08-03 Orel Beilinson
Central Europe around 1900 was marred with anxiety around the choice of career. This article weaves histories of education, labor, bureaucracy, and the social sciences to show how families reacted to changes in the labor market, including the opening of careers to talent and the mechanization of handicrafts. Parents found themselves unable to guide their children to a safe profession. Whereas previously
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Necrophilia, Psychiatry, and Sexology: The Making of Sexual Science in Mid-Twentieth Century Peru Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-08-03 Paulo Drinot
In this article, I draw on two sets of sources to explore how Peruvian doctors tried to make sense of what had driven a man to engage in necrophilia in late 1942. On the one hand, I examine the case history and other related documentation that I located in Lima’s psychiatric hospital. On the other, I study a detailed article written on the case by Dr Lucio D. Castro and published in 1943. Together
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Of Two-Tailed Lizards: Spells, Folk-Knowledge, and Navigating Manila, 1620–1650 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-06-03 David Max Findley
Although seventeenth-century Manila has been anointed the birthplace of global trade and its diversity is well-established, how individuals navigated that milieu is only recently coming to light. To elucidate how various persons experienced Manila, this article assembles and analyzes nearly one hundred denunciations of sorcery (hechicería) made to the Philippine branch of the Inquisition between ca
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Feeding the Community: London’s Immigrants and Their Food, 1650–1800 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Charlie Taverner
Abstract Early modern London was a diverse metropolis, but we know little about the social lives of its migrant communities, especially how they fed themselves. Influenced by recent anthropology and sociology of food, migration, and ethnicity, this article examines specific communal food practices of two minority communities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sephardic Jews and French
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An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland. By Kenneth B. Moss Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-04-20 Sarah Ellen Zarrow
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Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Dwyer Erin Austin Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Sergio Lussana
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Empire and Indigeneity: Histories and Legacies. By Richard Price Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Bain Attwood
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Crying for Flicka: Boys, Young Men, and Emotion at the Cinema in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-03-31 Melanie Tebbutt
Abstract This article re-visits contemporary surveys of the cinema in the 1930s and 1940s to explore the implications that the cinema’s role as an “emotional frontier” between everyday life and the imagination had on the emotional lives of boys and young men. It makes a novel contribution to the history of youth and emotions, arguing that for boys and young men who were disconnected from social life
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The Other Little House: The Brothel as a Colonial Institution on the Canadian Prairies, 1880–93 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-03-26 L K Bertram
Abstract What role did settler bawdy houses play in Canadian colonial expansion in the 1880s? The trial of “Big Nelly” Webb, a white bawdy house madam and sex worker who shot a Mounted Police constable on the doorstep of her brothel in 1888, offers critical insight into the world of these seldom acknowledged colonial institutions and the women who ran them. Far from simply “women on the margins,” Canadian
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How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories. By Gabriel J. Loiacono Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-03-23 Nicole Schroeder
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“The Empire that Shaka Zulu was Unable to Bring About”: Ethnicizing Sovereignty in Apartheid South Africa, 1959–1970 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-03-22 Ashley Parcells
Arrangements of sovereignty in Africa fundamentally shifted during the era of decolonization, temporarily bringing about political possibilities beyond empire or nation-state. The apartheid state drew on this “federal moment” and attempted to save white minority rule by creating ethnically defined self-governing “homelands,” or bantustans, that could be fashioned as “independent” nation-states within
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Building the Ancestral Public: Cemeteries and the Necropolitics of Property in Colonial Ghana Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-03-10 Sarah Balakrishnan
Abstract This essay studies changes to mortuary practices in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana) beginning with the British state’s creation of town cemeteries in the late nineteenth century. It argues that the colonial state enforced cemetery burial because they realized Gold Coast people would never sell their land if it contained the remains of their elders; cemeteries were therefore a crucial
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Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II. By Stephanie Hinnershitz Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-25 Muller E.
Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II. By StephanieHinnershitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 254 pp. $39.95).
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The Birth Certificate: An American History. By Susan J. Pearson Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-24 Robertson C.
The Birth Certificate: An American History. By PearsonSusan J. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 392 pp. $32.95).
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Corrigendum to: White Ethnicity in the Urban Crisis: Newark’s Italian Americans Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-23
Journal of Social History (2022), first published online 5 January 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab075
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Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania. By Beverly C. Tomek Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-19 Holness L.
Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania. By Beverly C.Tomek (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021. ix plus 144 pp. $19.95).
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Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. By Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-19 Wood E.
Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. By Warren EugeneMilteerJr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021, xiii plus 363 pp. $29.95).
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Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. By Juliana Hu Pegues Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Perea J.
Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. By Juliana HuPegues (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. xvii plus 212. $32.95).
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Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics. By Rebecca L. Davis Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Stell W.
Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics. By Rebecca L.Davis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. xi plus pp. 167 pp. $30.00).
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The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic. By Bryna Goodman Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-11 Fernsebner S.
The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic. By BrynaGoodman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 352 pp. $39.95).
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The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism. By Benjamin Holtzman Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-09 Miller-Davenport S.
The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism. By BenjaminHoltzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. xii plus 335 pp. $34.95).
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A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History. By Francesca Morgan Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-02-09 Good C.
A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History. By FrancescaMorgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. xi plus 301 pp. $29.95).
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Erratum to: The Death of Molly Schultz: Race, Magic, and the Law in the Post-slavery Caribbean Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-01-27
Journal of Social History first published online May 6 2021 doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab005
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“Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain. By Charles Upchurch Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-01-25 Ross A.
“Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain. By CharlesUpchurch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021. x plus 289 pp. $39.95).
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Troublemakers: Students’ Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s. By Kathryn Schumaker Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-01-23 Miletsky Z.
Troublemakers: Students’ Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s. By KathrynSchumaker (New York: New York University Press, 2019. vii plus 288 pp. $45.00).
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Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis. By David Hugill Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-01-07 Suarez S.
Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis. By DavidHugill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. xi plus 212 pp. $25.00).
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“To Abjure Popish Heresys”: Crafting a Borderlands Gospel during Queen Anne’s War at St. James Parish, South Carolina, 1701–20 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Fritz T.
AbstractIn 1706, local authorities institutionalized the Church of England in South Carolina hoping to bring Carolinian social practice into conformity with that of the metropole. Anglican missionaries worked to install religious instruction as a pillar of community identity in this contested space. Employing the specter of war and popery—and the associated fear of slave rebellion—helped ministers
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Coming of Age in Postwar Germany: Young Women’s Search for New Emotional Subjectivities, 1946–50 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2022-01-05 Tiia Sahrakorpi, Cherish Watton
During the Allied occupation of Germany, educators asked students to write about their feelings and experiences of youth before and after the Second World War. This article uses Abitur and Reifeprüfung examination essays written by young German women, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three, to explore how they performed and represented their emotional subjectivities in early postwar Berlin.
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Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915. By Jack Daniel Webb Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-12-27 Johnhenry Gonzalez
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Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women’s Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era. By Suzanne Kahn Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-12-17 Kristin Celello
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The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-12-13 Jonathan Hall
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The Varsity Drag: Gender, Sexuality, and Cross-Dressing at the University of Cambridge, 1850–1950 Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-12-13 Janes D.
AbstractThe records of student societies show that cross-dressing was a very popular practice at Cambridge University from the second half of the nineteenth century not only in drama but at a wide range of social events. Male and female students were segregated from one another in single-sex colleges because of the perceived moral dangers of co-education. One result of this was that plays were acted
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Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. By Jessica Marie Johnson Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-12-09 Lorelle Semley
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No Globalization Without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality. By Paul Adler Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-12-09 Quinn Slobodian
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Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy. By George Sánchez Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-12-09 A K Sandoval-Strausz
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Looking through a Different Lens: Microhistory and the Workhouse Experience in Late Nineteenth-Century London Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-11-26 Peter Jones
This article uses a microhistorical approach to investigate the “workhouse experience” of a single pauper in late nineteenth-century London. Its subject is Frank Burge, a remarkably prolific (though by no means unique) correspondent who wrote several lengthy letters of complaint from the Poplar workhouse to the Local Government Board (the central poor law authority) between 1884 and 1885. It places
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Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys. By Vincent DiGirolamo Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-11-25 Philip M Glende
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White Ethnicity in the Urban Crisis: Newark’s Italian Americans Journal of Social History (IF 0.802) Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Nancy C Carnevale
Scholars have largely understood the urban crisis, including racial violence, as a matter of Black versus white, with white ethnics in possession of a largely inconsequential ethnicity. An examination of two community leaders from Newark’s North Ward reveals competing Italian American perceptions of the urban crisis. Anthony Imperiale, the race-baiting demagogue and politician, has been portrayed by