This article recounts how I took up the ethnographic craft; stumbled upon the Chicago boxing gym that is the central scene and character of my field study of prizefighting in the black American ghetto; and designed the book Body and Soul so as to both deploy methodologically and elaborate empirically Pierre Bourdieu's signal concept of habitus. Habitus is the topic of investigation: the book dissects the forging of the corporeal and mental dispositions that make up the competent pugilist in the crucible of the gym. It is also the tool of investigation: the practical acquisition of those dispositions by the analyst serves as technical vehicle for better penetrating their social production and assembly. The apprenticeship of the sociologist is a methodological mirror of the apprenticeship undergone by the empirical subjects of the study; the former is mined to dig deeper into the latter and unearth its inner logic and subterranean properties; and both in turn test the robustness and fruitfulness of habitus ...

Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter

This article explores the relationship of historical research to contemporary family studies. Family history was influenced greatly by fields such as sociology and anthropology, leading it to make several contributions to those fields in turn. The continuing collaboration of these disciplines can significantly enrich current family research, practice, and policy making. History's specific contribution lies in its attention to context. Although historical research confirms sociologic and ethnographic findings on the diversity of family forms, for example, it also reveals that all families are not created equal. The advantage of any particular type of family at any particular time is constructed out of contingent and historically variable social relationships. Historical research allows researchers to deepen their analysis of family diversity and family change by challenging widespread assumptions about what is and what is not truly new in family life. Such research complicates generalizations about the impact of family change and raises several methodological cautions about what can be compared and controlled for in analyzing family variations and outcomes.

Historical Perspectives on Family Studies

Breaking and Remaking the Mason-Dixon Line: Loyalty in Civil War America, 1850-1900 Charles R. Welsko Between 1850 and 1900, Americans redefined their interpretation of national identity and loyalty. In the Mid-Atlantic borderland of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia this change is most evident. With the presence of a free state and slave states in close proximity, white and black Americans of the region experienced the tumult of the Civil War Era first hand. While the boundary between freedom and slavery served as an antebellum battleground over slavery, during the war, the whole region bore witness to divisions between the Union and Confederacy as well as to define what loyalty and nation meant. By exploring how ordinary men and women, Unionists or Confederates, free or enslaved persons, articulated their understanding of loyalty, this project tracks the development of identity and nationalism for over half a century. This project analyzes the rhetoric and discussions of national loyalty in order to unpack how Mid-Atlantic residents attached themselves to the idea of a nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it reveals how individuals shifted their interpretation of loyalty as a loosely held, reciprocal definition of loyalty in the antebellum period to firmer antagonistic definitions of allegiance. After the war, with the inclusion of African Americans in society, white Mid-Atlantic residents again redefined loyalty to focus on the hereditary connections between themselves and the Founding Generation, thereby excluding freedmen and women from inclusion in the nation and laying the foundations for a distorted memory of the Civil War Era.

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Breaking and Remaking the Mason-Dixon Line: Loyalty in Civil War America, 1850-1900

The single greatest political transformation of the post-Civil Rights era in the US is the joint rolling back of the stingy social state and rolling out of the gargantuan penal state that have rema...

Class, Race and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America

This article examines the Black male crisis thesis promulgated by the social science literature, public policy, and mainstream discourse, respectively. The authors contend that the stock‐story that the majority of African American males are ‘at‐risk’ for engaging in self‐destructive behavior or on the verge of extinction perpetuates a discourse of Black male pathology, which leads to over‐emphasis of behavior modification as a strategy for their collective improvement. Subsequently, de‐emphasis on the historical and structural role of race as a life opportunity‐shaping variable occurs, which renders an incomplete understanding of the social and educational status of Black males in the United States. As a result, public policies and social programs guided by this deficit discourse are unlikely to create meaningful change for this population, because society’s existing political economic structures are left unchallenged. The article concludes with the assertion that a ‘new narrative’ is needed in order to r...

Toward a new narrative on Black males, education, and public policy

The “Underclass” Debate: Views From History

Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America

Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North: Slaughter, Thomas P.: New York: Oxford University Press, 252 pp., Publication Date: October 1991

David De Leon

Papers

The “Underclass” Debate: Views From History

Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America

Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North: Slaughter, Thomas P.: New York: Oxford University Press, 252 pp., Publication Date: October 1991