Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 1991"

A Job You Can't Lose: Work and Hobbies in the Great Depression

Abstract: The category of leisure activity known as hobbies appears to have experienced an unprecedented growth in public acceptance in the United States during the great depression. Municipalities, schools, and businesses sponsored hobby clubs. The media, including newspapers, magazines and radio, regularly focused on hobby activity. Several national organizations emerged to promote hobbies, and the collecting activities of the president of the United States became a model for both children and adults. Yet, there was nothing close to a consensus about what activities properly constituted a hobby or what benefits were supposed to be derived from partaking in one. In fact, there is really no way to know if more people engaged in hobbies (however they might be defined) in the Thirties than in previous decades. On the other hand, it would seem presumptuous to assume that there was no correlation at all between the great outpouring of hobby literature and hobby participation. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, and in the face of the plethora of hobby shows, hobby articles, and hobby programs that appeared during the depression, the hobby boom of the Thirties probably represented a real increase in mass participation. However, even if there were no expansion in the size of the hobby population, there was an important change in the meaning of hobbies as personal activity. Beginning in the 1920's and accelerating rapidly in the 1930's, discussions of individual hobby activities such as stamp collecting, music making, woodworking, and the like, were often linked under the more inclusive category of "hobbies."1 More exact than "leisure," which had already developed a lengthy scholarly pedigree, the new category referred to a socially sanctioned subset of leisure. The word "hobby" became a strategic term used less to be descriptive than to carry the weight of authoritative approval when applied to individual activities. In other words, the term "hobby," as used in the Thirties, was more an ideological construct created to distinguish between "good" and "bad" pastimes, than a natural category of leisure activity. A group of self-professed experts surfaced in academia and journalism to join the hobbyists themselves in a lively discussion over the definition and merits of hobbies. This dialogue may not have contributed substantially to clarifying the term, but it did serve to construct the category. The development of an animated discourse on hobbies by a group of people with a shared set of perceptions established a particular value-loaded vocabulary with which to frame the discussion. Even when they disagreed among themselves as to specific interpretations, their use of common themes delineated the parameters of the issues and thus helped to fix the meaning of the category if not its contents. This new category of leisure was so thoroughly ingrained in the cultural environment by the hobbies movement

The Vacant Land: The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

Abstract: Ironically, as race has become more muted in the discourse of the South African state a number of scholars have begun to take a fresh look at the history of race and racial ideology. In White Supremacy, his comparison of American and South African history, George Fredrickson emphasized the importance of European perceptions of Indians and Africans, though in the South African case he concentrated almost exclusively on settlers of Dutch, French and German descent, the Afrikaners. Following a tradition of earlier generations of scholars, Fredrickson returned to the early frontier of European settlement. Old wine in a new comparative bottle, White Supremacy signalled neither a fundamerltal historiographical departure in the study of the South African past nor even a new periodization of the country's history.

Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550–1650. By Ruth Martin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 282 pp.)

Abstract: The Inquisition in Venice institution, organization and procedure witchcraft and the Church witchcraft in Venice the offence witchcraft in Venice the Inquisition's response maleficium Venetian witchcraft general trends and characteristics.

“A Wryed Existence”: Attitudes Toward Children in Anglo-Saxon England

Abstract: The theory of rediscovered childhood, as it has been called, was first proposed by French historians Philippe Aries and Pierre Riche. According to Aries and Riche, although intellectuals in the ancient world were aware of the differences and the transition between childhood and adulthood, the medieval world lost this distinction. They believed that children were only 'rediscovered' in the sixteenth century.1 This popular theory of medieval childhood is still evident in such historians as Barbara Greenleaf, who summarizes the point of view:

Single Mothers, Delinquent Daughters, and the Juvenile Court in Early 20th Century Los Angeles

Abstract: In response to the mother's concerns, the court prevented her teenage daughter, Elsie, from going to Texas by sending her to Juvenile Hall, the county detention center for delinquent and dependent youth. After a short period of confinement and a stern lecture, the judge permitted Elsie to return home, but placed her under the supervision of a probation officer to see that she obeyed her mother. The court dismissed the case one year later after a satisfactory report from Elsie's probation officer:

The Center Out There, in Here, and Everywhere Else: The Nature of Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Saint Jude, 1929–1965

Abstract: A peculiar anomaly has characterized the National Shrine of Saint Jude Thaddeus, patron saint of hopeless causes and lost causes, since its founding by the Claretian Fathers, a Spanish order osf missionaries, in Chicago in 1929. On the one hand, Jude's shrine was seen by both the saint's devout and the clerical caretakers of the site clS a specific and special place of power, desire, and hope, which is how such locations have always been imagined in the Catholic tradition,l on the other hand, the devout were never encouraged nor did they feel compelled to go to that place in order to secure the benefits they sought from the saint. If Jude's shrine had been like the others founded before it on the Catholic landscape, it would have become the destination of pilgrims, but it never did, not even for the devout who lived in Chicago, although the devotion was (and remains) one of the most important and widespread expressions of twentieth century American Catholic popular piety. This paradox is evident in the way the shrine clergy have imagined, described, and administered the place. The founder of the devotion, Catalonian-born priest Sames Tort, described what he called the Chicago "throne of [lude's] mercy and compassion" in the familiar tropes of the Catholic pilgrimage tradition to the devout in 1935 The sick, the afflicted, the lame and the blind, the suffering, the erring, find solace here. An incessclnt stream of pilgrims has always come to visit the Shrine, proving the great and pwerful influence Saint Jude has in the presence of his relatives, Jesus and Mary. At the same time, Tort insisted to Jude's devout around the country that they need never come to Chicago to participate fully in the cult.3 According to a former administrator of the devotion, its founders did not want to "put a lot of emphasis on visit:ing a place" (which clearly conflicts with the paean of place just quoted), and this priest estimated that ninety-five percent of Jude's devout, who are found throughout the United States, would never made a pilgrimage to Chicago.4 In the 1950s, t-he Claretians, thinking of the shrine more traditionally as a place to be visited, considered moving it to another location in central Illinois where they could provide better parking facilities and amenities for visitorswhom they were not encouraging to visit and who were not coming in any case. But the facl- that the Claretians could even think of moving Jude out of Chicago is indicative of the anomaly of place characteristic of the cult. Writers at the shrine had been imaginatively speculating for years about Jude's choice of Chicago, of all American cities, as the site of the revival of his devotion, seeing an analogy between the long-forgotten, modest but powerful saint and Carl

“Bloody Caddo”: White Violence Against Blacks in a Louisiana Parish, 1865–1876

Abstract: Violence has always been an important component of Louisiana history and culture. Even before the Civil War, Louisiana was infamous for its frequent feuds, street fights, duels, whiskey brawls, vigilance committees and outbursts of violence.' In Reconstructed Louisiana, violence reached new highs as it took on racial and political overtone^.^ For more than a generation, Revisionist historians have acknowledged the importance and intensity of Reconstruction violence as an issue in Louisiana, as elsewhere in the South. They have shown the \"cruel and atrocious\" character of that violence to be a widespread phenomenon. They have scrutinized the different factors that divided blacks and whites and examined the rationale for the conflicts and tensions that underlined violence in the South after the Civil War. They have stressed, among other things, the social demoralization that affected the white community after the war, the conflicts over rights and status of the freedmen, the racial animosity raised by blacks' political assertiveness and their struggle for political power, the transformation of the economic structure and the indefinite condition of the workine relations, and \" the retreat of the federal government from its earlier commitments to a ~o l icv . , of civil rights. Consequently, a substantial consensus has emerged among historians regarding the mitigatory character of the radical Reconstruction policy, describing it more as an unfinished rev~lu t ion .~ And yet, despite outstanding research, most historians who have examined post-Civil War violence present a limited analysis. Their studies usually cover specific race riots or offer a general overview of political violence and race relations in a particular state or for the whole South. Their investigation~ have rarely brought them to a thorough examination of individual regional patterns, to put them in their geographical context and to explain why the level of violence was so high in some areas and not in others. The Dresent studv on Caddo Parish betweenUl865 and 1876 is drawn from a larger invistigation of crimes and violence in Reconstructed Louisiana. For Caddo Parish the end of the Civil War did not bring peace. For years after the war, the parish had little or no law and witnessed within its borders some of the most atrocious murders ever recorded. In July 1870, the Jefferson State Register declared that disorderly ruffians had given Caddo an unenviable reputation. This view was echoed by the Donaldsonville Chief which asserted in March 1875 that Caddo was living up to its name and rightly deserved to be called \"Bloody Caddo\". It went on to sav that human life was held so chea~lv there that scarcelv a L ,

Protestant Patriarchy and the Catholic Priesthood in Nineteenth Century England

Abstract: In April 1989, The Sun, a right-wing daily newspaper published the "exclusive" story of how a Catholic priest had allegedly seduced and "ran off' with the wife of a Guernsey flower-grower.2 To a modern audience with decreased sectarian sensitivities the story may have represented an unusual scenario for titillation, but a century ago the headline "PRIEST STOLE MY WIFE" was so much more likely to have been accepted by a proportion of the readership as the inevitable effect of clerical celibacy and the confessional, that even in an age which prided itself on its sensibilities, any surprise may have been affected. If the sub-title "RANDY PRIEST" would have outraged the Victorian public, for many the horror would more probably have resulted from the terminology and not its meaning. To a Victorian readership this story was old news, circulated many times over. The characters in the modern "exclusive" had all the attributes familiar to a Victorian audience; the faithless wife was "blonde" and young, the priest a sophisticate with an Italian name, and the husband, "a humble flower-grower." The plot is a forgery of a cultural currency familiar to the Victorians; the husband suspected nothing until it was too late and the couple had fled into hiding abroad, leaving him heartbroken and rueing the day he had placed his faith in the Catholic priest. To the modem press the story no doubt represented the chance for a novel angle on the prurient report, justified by a tone of mild concern, but to the historian it is an fascinating anachronism which invites further investigation of its Victorian antecedent which portrayed the Catholic priesthood as a band of opportunist seducers and the convent as a place of torture and orgy. The aim of this paper therefore is to explore the significance of the Protestant Victorian's villification of the Catholic priest.3 To a significant portion of the Victorian public the Catholic priest was the object of a mixture of hatred, fear and morbid curiosity. A professional leisure industry sprang up in the 1830's to satisfy this need for stories about the misbehaviour of the Catholic priest and his lascivious practices in confessional and convent, as a great torrent of public performers in the character of "escaped nuns" and "reformed priests" toured the British Isles lecturing to delightedly shocked audiences with accounts of their own "personal experiences."4 The basic premise for the "exposures" was that priests were a band of rapists and seducers who would stop at nothing (including kidnap and murder) to hide their true character. As a Catholic institution beyond everyday scrutiny, the convent