Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2007"

Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum

Abstract: Many contemporary museums are challenging the traditional "hands off" ethos of the museum with innovative, interactive exhibitions. Yet such exhibitions are still exceptions to the rule of sensory restraint which is generally expected to govern the behaviour of museum visitors. Artifacts for the most part are only to be seen—not felt, smelt, sounded and certainly not tasted. Yet, this rule of sensory restraint is not intrinsic to the museum. Accounts of visits to early museums indicate that visitors interacted with and learned about the exhibits on display through all of their senses. Such multisensory interaction was not simply due to lax regulations, but was motivated by a range of social customs as well as by contemporary aesthetic and scientific norms. The present exploration of the sensory life of the early museum enlarges our understanding of the social history of museums and also contributes to the developing fields of the history and anthropology of the senses.

Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History

Abstract: What is \"sensory history,\" why is it important, and what are some of the promises and pitfalls of the \"habit\" of inquiry? This article addresses these issues in an effort to initiate sustained dialogue among historians on how to investigate the history of the sensate, how to present it, and how to go beyond current conventions.

"The Crime of Survival": Fraud Prosecutions, Community Surveillance and the Original "Welfare Queen"

Abstract: \"Welfare queens\" and welfare fraud became national obsessions during the 1970s. This hysteria eroded public support for efforts to redress the racism and gender bias inherent in state programs and delegitimated the welfare state itself. This article chronicles the story of the first \"welfare queen,\" Chicago's Linda Taylor, and the context surrounding Illinois legislators' efforts to crack down on welfare fraud. In an attempt to curb welfare costs, legislators stiffened criminal penalties for fraud, accelerated random home visits, established an anonymous tip line for people to report their acquaintances, and considered plans to fingerprint all welfare recipients. This article juxtaposes legislators' fiscal and political motivations for these policies with the experiences of recipients struggling to make ends meet when neither welfare nor wage work provided sufficient income. It also examines the role of the thousands of informants who reported recipients for earning wages, sexual impropriety, or owning \"inappropriate\" consumer goods. The article argues that the spectacle of surveillance and prosecutions convinced many citizens that all welfare recipients were deceitful, undeserving, and linked to criminality. These punitive policies served to obscure poor families' material conditions while helping to construct a highly stigmatized social category outside of full citizenship.

Unacceptable Mannerisms: Gender Anxieties, Homosexual Activism, and Swish in the United States, 1945-1965

Abstract: This article analyzes gender anxieties in the post-World War II McCarthy-era gay rights movement known as the "homophile movement" in the United States. Using survey data gathered by these pioneering gay rights organizations as well as letters written to ONE magazine (the first gay magazine in the U.S., 1953-1967), "Unacceptable Mannerisms" demonstrates that homophile movement leaders worried about the negative social impact of stereotypical iconic representations of effeminate male homosexuals while rank-and-file homophiles worried about specific threats to their livelihoods caused by the visibility of effeminate male homosexuals. The homophile movement thus boldly challenged prevailing conceptualizations about sexuality during the 1950s yet simultaneously reinforced the hegemonic masculinity characteristic of broader postwar American gender patterns. Homophile anxieties regarding "swishy" behavior underscore a paradox about homosexual visibility in the 1950s. The homophile movement sought to create a positive collective homosexual image modeled on an idealized middle-class white-collar worker. At the same time, the movement discouraged individual visible markers of homosexual identity such as effeminacy. This paradox is partly explained by the increasingly middle-class character of gay identity after World War II; this trend reflects a broader shift toward middle-class identity in American society during these years.

So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates Over Emotional Control in the Civil War North

Abstract: "So Lonesome I Could Die" seeks to historicize the emotional effects of war by analysing debates over how to manage and treat nostalgia in the Civil War North. At this time, both physicians and laypeople viewed nostalgia (or homesickness) as a deadly disease that might kill a man outright, but more frequently precipitated or exacerbated other illnesses. Focusing on the emotional distress caused by soldiers' detachment from homes and families, this diagnosis stands in contrast to modern conceptions of war trauma, which emphasize the impact of participating in or witnessing horrific violence. Whereas the diagnosis of nostalgia generated little controversy in the mid-nineteenth century, there was no such consensus over the proper treatment of homesick troops. According to certain physicians and military leaders, the best curative lay in turning soldiers' thoughts away from home through harsh discipline and active combat. Yet, there were also many in the North who believed in the medical, military, and political value of promoting, rather than repressing, strong domestic feeling in the Union ranks. Wartime debates over the treatment of nostalgic men suggest that even as some held up the detached warrior as a model, others continued to emphasize the primary importance of domestic ties in creating ideal soldiers and virtuous citizens.

"Black Magic" and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial Society in Early 19th Century Martinique

Abstract: Though poisoning by slaves has been identified and studied in many Atlantic societies, the case of Restoration era Martinique is unique for both its scale and its periodization. While Caribbean historians have argued the phenomenon was disappearing by the 19th century, in Martinique planters became obsessed with slave poisoning as a threat to the very "survival of the island" during the 1820s. Many planters believed that poisoning almost always originated with the most loyal and dutiful slaves, and that free people of color were complicit. This article argues that the terror that spread among planters was largely the result of the specific cultural, psychological, and economic pathologies of the end of French slavery. Rather than seeking a purely materialist approach, the competing cultural meanings of poison should be understood in relation to this changing context. Though many historians have tended to caricature slave resistance, the dynamic analyzed here confirms the willful agency of enslaved people. At the same time, planters' inability to come to terms with the perceived threat of poisoning undermined their demands for autonomy from the French state, and paved the way for a new metropolitan-colonial relationship.

Tidal Waves: The New Coastal History

Abstract: This essay reviews recent scholarship in oceanic and imperial history in the context of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Marcus Rediker's classic book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. It offers a critique of Atlantic History as it is currently practiced and proposes a new category, "coastal history," to describe scholarship that engages with oceans but does not center upon them. In evaluating work by N.A.M. Rodger, Paul Gilje, Kathleen Wilson, Michael Fisher, and others, the essay explores how ships and sailors both are, and are not, representative of the social history of islands and coastal regions.

Streets, Sounds and Identity in Interwar Harlem

Abstract: Harlem was never entirely a "black" neighborhood. White landlords, shopkeepers, policemen, and visitors abounded. In the 1920s and 1930s, Harlem's African American residents made it seem theirs, however, through the use of sound. What white visitors found "noisy"—whether they were excited or repelled by it—marked out the territory, as it were. Sounds ranged from special events including parades and funerals, to everyday activities such as street speaking and hanging out. This use of public space had as its analogue the formation of a black public sphere. Members of this counter-public sphere, including those associated with the Harlem Renaissance, defined themselves as aural beings, rather than as individuals oriented by sight. Debate erupted frequently within this sphere as to what was appropriate sound or noise, on the streets and especially in political and social agitation. The multiplicity of voices was ultimately the defining characteristic of the black public sphere, and of black modernity itself.

“I Did Not Want to Face the Shame of Exposure”: Gender Ideologies and Child Murder in Post-Emancipation Jamaica

Abstract: This article examines 125 court cases of infanticide and concealment of birth that were reported in a Jamaican newspaper between 1865 and 1938 and were mainly committed by lower-class women. Informed by recent medical, psychological and legal studies on child murder, it demonstrates that historians can gain a more complete understanding of child murder in the modern period if they pay attention not only to poverty and a stigma attached to illegitimacy but also to societal norms of mothering and psycho-social stress factors. And more particularly, it will show that in spite of attempts to bring them in line with the metropolitan ideal of a family of husband/breadwinner, wife/homemaker and legitimate children, most lower-class African Jamaicans continued to hold on to their own norms of family, sexuality and gender, which had been carried over from Africa and reinforced by plantation practices during slavery.

Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801–1807

Abstract: The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Caribbean was the setting for significant and far-reaching changes in long-established European political, social and economic ideals. One of the major events that resulted from the precarious times and in turn produced further transformations was the Haitian revolution. The established studies of early nineteenth-century Haiti have emphasized the significant division separating a perceived mixed-race ancient libres caste from a black nouveau libres caste. However, systematic study of Haiti's first constitutions reveals that, while this division played a significant role in political and everyday life, the articulation of a single "imagined community" also characterized official descriptions of the newly independent nation. Between 1801 and 1807 four constitutions defined Haiti in different ways, but all represented Haiti as a cohesive state. The importance of gaining a better understanding of the changing constitutional constructions of Haiti extends to research on nationbuilding efforts in both colonizing and colonized societies around the nineteenth-century world.

Drunken States: Temperance and French Rule in Cote D'Ivoire, 1908-1916

Abstract: Why, at a time when alcohol made a substantial contribution to colonial economies in West Africa, did the French governor of Cote d'Ivoire launch a temperance campaign in 1912? This question serves as the starting point for an exploration of the ways in which economic, social, and cultural ideas interacted and shaped French policies on social problems in the colonies. Linking together metropolitan and colonial histories of drink, and placing Cote d'Ivoire in a broader regional context in which British West African governors were reluctant to embrace temperance movements, the article finds that temperance was one aspect of a consolidation of state power in Cote d'Ivoire that entailed greater French intervention in Africans' daily lives. The governor's campaign benefited briefly from its appearance at the same time as an African temperance movement, but in the long run the economic and cultural imperatives that favored the importation of French wine tended to undermine the argument that alcohol was harmful to taxpaying Africans.

Sexuality and Contraception in Modern England: Doing the History of Reproductive Sexuality

Abstract: Historians of sexuality have almost completely ignored reproduction as a factor relevant to, and potentially influencing, sexual mores or sexual change. This article argues that the economic burden created by reproduction provided the major motivation for individual control of sexuality and for societal attempts to control the sexual activity of individuals in societies shaped by the NorthWest European marriage system. England is used as an example of a culture in which, prior to the late nineteenth century, effective contraception was not available, alternative sexual practices were not acceptable substitutes for coitus, and children were a major economic cost. Where these conditions existed, it was necessary to control sexual activity in order to control reproduction. This article argues that State efforts to reshape opposite-sex sexuality were not successful unless they coincided with people's own ongoing estimate of their needs and desires, which they constructed over generations in response to changing social circumstances and structures, such as urbanization and growing affluence. Further that even in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the state had the resources to restrain sexual activity seen as deviant only if majority support such for sexual repression existed.

“Deserted His Majesty's Service”: Military Runaways, The British-American Press, and the Problem of Desertion During the Seven Years' War

Abstract: During the Seven Years' War newspapers routinely published notices of desertions from the British regular and colonial forces that served in America. Evidence culled from these advertisements hints that many troops eventually deserted. Ashadowy war within a war ensued, pitting the formidable resources that elites commanded against the cunning minds and fast feet of deserters. The decisions of so many to flee their units, and the inability of officers to stop them, reveal three major points about this wartime phenomenon. First, these items show that deserters were a diverse group who differed from the overall population of troops. Many were Irish, and a disproportionate number were artisans or sailors. Second, the notices illustrate that the military used several methods to quell desertion, and when deterrence failed, officers sent out search parties and often imposed severe punishments on those they caught. Third, mutinies by New Englanders were not unique. Other provincial and regular units also revolted en masse. More commonly, however, were individuals or small groups who stole away from the army and used mobility, disguise, and aid from lovers, families, employers, fugitive slaves and sympathetic Indian communities to avoid the suspicious gaze and vigorous pace of their pursuers.

Analyzing the History of Religious Crime: Models of "Passive" and "Active" Blasphemy since the Medieval Period

Abstract: This article examines the comparatively neglected history and historiography of blasphemy relating this to wider histories of sin, crime and criminality. It charts the history of the subject and identifies significant epochs of change altering the crime’s character in Europe and America over the last four hundred years. This history is then related to the chief paradigms associated with crime and violence, those proposed by Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias, noting the comparative strength and weaknesses of these two approaches. . The article suggests that blasphemy occurred as either a 'passive' or 'active' entity. The former was characteristic of late medieval and early modern states where the harm caused by blasphemy was visited upon the whole community and this entity was responsible for seeking restitution and redress. After the enlightenment and the rise of liberal regimes of rights this was replaced by ‘active’ blasphemy which henceforth required individuals to demonstrate the actual harm they had experienced. The article concludes that the dangerous fissures in multiculturalism and the vanishing confidence of liberal states is arguably rejuvenating the model of "passive" blasphemy.

Beyond "Voting with their Feet": Toward a Conceptual History of "America" in European Migrant Sending Communities, 1860s to 1914

Abstract: The notion that most European immigrants "voted with their feet" by fleeing oppression for the political and religious freedom of the United States endures despite the contrary findings of years of migration research. This article calls the cliche into question in two ways. First, it presents some of the main findings of immigration scholarship that emphasize the role of labor and land, rather than freedom, as the principal factors drawing migrants from Europe. Second, the article applies methodologies from Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts) to interpret linguistic and folkloric sources from across Europe, discovering very different perceptions of America among ordinary nineteenth-century migrant sending communities. While some images were positive, others ranged from metaphorical associations of America with sleep, loss, and imprisonment, to satires of the myth of unlimited abundance, and resentment of the transformation U. S. society produced in many of the emigrants who went there. Rather than celebrating American exceptionalist credos by repeating platitudes about mass popular enthusiasm for American freedoms, this article calls for a more nuanced and deeper appreciation of the wide range of symbolic meanings America held in the minds of people who often left few written records of their views.

Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (review)

Abstract: purity) resulted in animals suffering from orthopedic defects, congenital heart problems, and thyroid disorders. What is the contemporary American relationship to animals? Are pet owners truly stewards of domestic animals, or do they, instead, focus primarily on the emotional or aesthetic pleasure that the pets bring to themselves? A majority of pet owners regard their animals as friends or family members, and grieve deeply when a pet dies. But few would consider treating a friend or relation the way they treat their pets. Today, many pets are over-domesticated, over regulated, and over-controlled. It is cruel to expect a dog or cat to remain in a house or apartment much of the day without anyone to interact with. Americans may profess to love their pets, and certainly spend a great deal of money on them. Some apparently regard their pets as child substitutes. But there is extensive evidence to suggest that many pet owners are unwilling to meet the animals’ needs for companionship, interaction, and freedom.

Creating an Alternative Kinship: Slavery, Freedom, and Nineteenth-Century Afro-Cuban Hijos Naturales

Abstract: This article contributes to the histories of slavery and of African-descended families in the Americas by examining the recognition of nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban hijos naturales (or children born outside of wedlock) as a means of family formation in late colonial Cuba. With legal "recognition," men from a variety of races and classes claimed responsibility for these children. In doing so, they created a creole family form that developed to suit a very local context and that did not conform to Anglo-American standards of legitimacy or illegitimacy. This article first outlines general Afro-Cuban reproductive patterns and then reveals the social experiences of the families that include hijos naturales. Such families were valuable social agents that sought the advancement of their members and that often provided a framework through which individuals endured slavery and advanced into freedom.

Expanding the Compass of Domestic Violence in the Hanoverian Metropolis

Abstract: Recent historical scholarship has exposed the role of violence within the multiple dynamics of family life, providing important insights into gender relations and the abuse of power within domestic, conjugal relationships. With good reason, the analysis has privileged the experiences of women as victims of such violence in the past. Without denying this important characteristic of domestic violence, it may be helpful to expand the range of actions and actors to be considered when exploring its history. By scrutinizing the leading role played by women who used violence in the home, and by interrogating untapped sources such as newspaper accounts, the records of magistrates' courts or administrative records from charitable institutions, for example, for evidence of how other subordinate persons such as servants, apprentices and, of course, children, were also subjected to harsh physical correction and, in some terrible cases, systematic abuse, a clearer understanding of the eighteenth century thresholds of tolerance for such violence emerges. By expanding the compass of domestic violence, the subjective and discretionary application of the law in specific cases becomes better contextualized as the wide continuum for the role of violence in everyday life in eighteenth-century England comes more fully into focus.

To "doe some good upon their countrymen": The Paradox of Indian Slavery in Early Anglo-America

Abstract: The enslavement of Indians by Englishmen in seventeenth-century America is often characterized by historians as an inconsequential phenomenon that either presaged the large scale enslavement of African peoples or, conversely, resulted from the expansion of the plantation complex. The early enslavement of Indians, however, was neither closely related to emerging labor demands nor an accident of Anglo-American colonialism. Indian slavery was purposeful and rationalized, often, by pointing to the need to punish natives for their crimes and by emphasizing that bondage might serve to rehabilitate recalcitrant individuals. Eventually, the enslavement of Indians would be almost indistinguishable from the enslavement of Africans, but throughout much of the seventeenth century Indian slavery was a distinct practice. African slavery was accepted, in part, because the English viewed them as fundamentally different. Indian slavery was accepted, paradoxically, because the English allowed that the indigenous inhabitants of North America were not unlike themselves. Indian slavery was premised on social and cultural assumptions that appear contradictory in retrospect. Yet, by retelling the story of Indian slavery in the context of the early modern Atlantic world, including Anglo-Spanish relations, this essay reveals that human bondage was both more important to the English inhabitants of colonial America than is generally appreciated and more complicated than historians have admitted.

Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (review)

Abstract: the Democratic Party or the CIO, which makes the impact of ethnic mixing in this story more uncertain. At times, Wild portrays inter-ethnic and inter-racial mixing primarily as a threat to the powers-that-be. This sometimes leads him to exaggerate its importance, as when he asserts that street speaking before mixed crowds “represented the ultimate threat to the white spots of America” (149). At other times, Wild presents the ethnic mixing of the early twentieth century as a “usable past” for our own multi-ethnic, multicultural era. To this end, he occasionally romanticizes history, as when he says of present-day Los Angeles that “ethnic communities now sometimes view each other as competitors as much as neighbors,” as if that had not been true in the past (207, italics mine). Despite these occasional lapses, Wild’s is an intriguing and at times compelling portrait of life in Los Angeles’s ethnically and racially diverse neighborhoods pre-Rodney King, pre-Watts, and even pre-Jane Jacobs.

Betting, Sport and the British, 1918–1939

Abstract: The paper argues that over the interwar period attitudes to betting were in the process of slow but steady change. Broader changes in attitudes to leisure, including increasing secularization, led to an increasingly widespread acceptance of moderate betting across all classes. Between 1920 and 1938 estimated legal gambling expenditure as a proportion of total British consumer spending rose from 1.3 per cent to 5 per cent of a much higher total consumer expenditure. The money spent on other illegal but widely popular betting on sports such as horse races further swelled such totals. Yet betting divided Britain, and a powerful stigma was attached to it in some circles. There were complex and (sometimes) contradictory social and cultural meanings attached to sports betting, and these engendered debates, disputes and divisions across the classes, churches, and political parties. Despite the range of arguments it employed, the power base of the anti-gambling groups was in decline. New betting forms were emerging, with increased impact over time. Greyhound racing and football pools betting were able to overcome their initial opposition and became legalized and widely accepted. Various locally and nationally organized sweepstakes on major horse races, whilst remaining illegal, became tacitly accepted. Even the attempts by the British government to limit the popularity of the Irish Hospitals' Trust Sweepstakes had only limited success. The only major new betting forms to fail were the British urban tote clubs, popular largely only amongst the working class, which had few powerful defenders.

Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (review)

Abstract: filtered down to the present. This is in many ways the most ambitious and the least satisfying of the chapters, though through no fault of the author. The current French preoccupation with immigration and the “politiques de la ville” makes such connections almost inevitable. Certainly readers would be asking many of the same questions Kalifa poses about connections between nineteenth-century culture and present-day attitudes toward crime while reading his chapter on the crisis of repression or the public use of such terms as “social defense.” But, of course, crime and culture in modern-day France constitute a topic which cannot be explained in a twenty page chapter at the end of a work on the nineteenth century, and so Kalifa’s thought-provoking insights and observations are of necessity suggestive rather than conclusive. As engaging as the book is, it does leave some larger analytical connections and conclusions unexplored. As a collection of previous papers and articles on varied subjects, the work feels at times disjointed. While part one is a masterful look at the cultural antecedents of such social types as the police inspector and the apache, part two is at times too narrowly focused on cultural forms, to the exclusion of any meaningful discussion of crime. In the introduction, Kalifa suggests that cultural productions render crime comprehensible to a larger public (12). Yet as readers, we are left to reconstruct his line of reasoning ourselves while perusing chapters on such diverse examples as serialized novels, journalistic exposés about prison conditions, and wartime news briefs. To a certain extent, Kalifa relies on the organization of the chapters to suggest larger connections, but we are left wishing for his authorial voice to make them more explicit throughout the work as a whole. Nevertheless, for an understanding of France’s “criminal century,” Dominque Kalifa has once more asserted himself as one of the foremost scholars of the subject. The plentiful footnotes and the bibliography of police memoirs, alone, make the work a valuable resource to historians of nineteenth-century France. In addition, this book should not be overlooked by anyone interested in the history of crime outside of France or in the French colonies. Broad enough to suggest avenues for future comparative studies, yet narrow enough to provide a clearer picture of Third Republic France, this work stands as a fine example for how to combine the methodological tools of social and cultural history in meaningful and informative ways.

Constrained Communities: Black Cleveland's Experience with World War II Public Housing

Abstract: The World War II - era housing shortage in Cleveland, Ohio was severe, and particularly so for African Americans. Black Clevelanders encountered discrimination in the private housing market and race-based tenanting policies in the city's public and so-called temporary war housing. As a result of racial discrimination— which was not only government-sanctioned but actually encouraged by the conversion of properties to multi-family occupancy with Home Owners Loan Corporation funding—African Americans faced substandard housing conditions that led to the further deterioration of housing stock in Cleveland's traditional "ghetto" section, Cedar-Central,—and in an adjacent neighborhood, Hough. However, race—based planning by the city's housing officials did have one beneficial, if unintended consequence. By siting one temporary war housing project on the southeastern outskirts of the city, adjacent to a preexisting semi-rural black enclave, the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority helped to enable subsequent African American migration into Southeast Cleveland, which became the city's preeminent black middleclass stronghold in the postwar decades. The understudied World War II era thus holds the key to understanding subsequent patterns of black population expansion in Cleveland after the war, and also helps to explain the divergent fortunes of middle- and working-class African Americans there.

Black and White and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship and Obscenity in Postwar Memphis

Abstract: Memphis, Tennessee was renowned for its restrictive censorship policies in the mid-20th century. This article argues that racial considerations overrode traditional concerns regarding sex or violence in the formulation of those policies. More specifically, the article outlines three stages of race-based censorship. The first stage developed in the 1940s, as a censorial regime predicated upon suppressing threats to the racial status quo of white supremacy began cutting images of African Americans in non-servile roles. Beneath this lay a sexualized but unarticulated understanding of "social equality," a favored phrase of Memphis censor Lloyd Binford. This underlying meaning rose to the forefront in the 1950s, as Memphis officials responded to Supreme Court decisions and increased Hollywood frankness with a racialized construction of obscenity, this time directed toward depictions of interracial sex or romance. Finally, as overt racism lost its political cachet, New Right mayor Henry Loeb used outcries over pornography as part of a strategy to discursively displace the racial issues facing Memphis by engineering new moral crises, helping to pave the way for Nixon’s tactic of "benign neglect."

Luxury & Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (review)

Abstract: pline attempting to move beyond harried preoccupations with levels of modernization and evidence of secularity. For in the daily practice of their religion at Lourdes the simple faithful were concerned with neither of these, precisely because this practice so relentlessly broke down the barriers between their traditional faith sensibilities and the apparently irresistible allurements of industrial commerce. Kaufman’s intelligent study therefore asks historians to consider how matter, when invested with spirit-bearing potential by a vividly imaginative church, might produce a lived religious experience as meaningful and genuine as it was nakedly consumerist. Richly illustrated throughout, this book is another impressive release from Cornell University Press on the complicated interdisciplinary history of modern religion and it is recommended as a provocative step forward in the study of Catholic piety.

Smoke and Mirrors: Willy Clarkson and the Role of Disguises in Inter-War England

Abstract: Questions of identity and disguise long fascinated English culture. A society made anxious by shifting class, gender, and racial relationships was naturally preoccupied by dress and role playing, by visual codes and clues. The investigation of the life of Willy Clarkson\-\-the man who probably knew more about costumes and disguises than any other individual in the early twentieth century\-\-allows us to understand why the public was at specific times particularly sensitive to the employment of certain disguises, and so provides us with a new view of the cultural preoccupations of the inter-war years. The purpose of the essay is not simply to tease out the reasons why one man led a double life, but to reveal how such disparate deviances as homosexuality, Jewishness, and criminality could be linked in the public mind and why a society, which in principle praised candor and condemned subterfuges, in practice fostered a culture of duplicity.

Layers, Flows and Intersections: Jeronymo José de Mello and Artisan Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1840s–1880s

Abstract: The social history of Rio de Janeiro's artisans is approached using an interdisciplinary methodology based on spatial data (GIS) and concepts of layers, flows, and intersections. Datasets regarding occupation, real property ownership, and slaveholding are intersected and social change experienced by artisans resident in the diverse neighborhoods of the city is analyzed. The story of one tinker in particular is pursued to illustrate the major changes affecting artisans in Rio during the second half of the nineteenth century as well as to illuminate the complex social and economic experiences of common people such as artisans in a new way based on spatial patterns and social networks. The experience of artisans in general was of gradual dispersion into more diverse and poorer neighborhoods as the city center became increasingly dominated by business and retail. This dispersion resulted in a different set of neighbors and changing social and economic environments for most artisans as they lost their hold on traditional zones in the city center.

National Endogamy and Double Standards: Sexuality and Nationalism in East-Central Europe during the 19th Century

Abstract: Members of what Carol Pateman has memorably analyzed as the "national brotherhood" attempted to nationalize sexuality during the nineteenth century. Throughout East-Central Europe, a region with many competing national concepts, patriotic authors encouraged national women to choose sexual partners from within the nation. A comparative analysis of Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, German, Hungarian, and South-Slavic patriots suggests that the rhetoric of national endogamy presupposed and reified "ethnic" nationalism. Patriotic men celebrated national sexuality as virtuous, and explicitly discouraged female chastity. Several patriot men who advocated national endogamy, finally, personally married non-national women: they believed that men nationalized foreign brides, and imagined various mechanisms of national conversion that reflect their respective linguistic, religious, spiritual, or legal definitions of the nation.

Made in Miami: The Development of the Sportswear Industry in South Florida, 1900–1960

Abstract: In a span of 50 years, sportswear in South Florida evolved from the idiosyncratic daywear of elite Northerners vacationing in Palm Beach to a nationally visible industry. This paper presents three stages in the evolution of the sportswear industry in South Florida in general and in the Miami area in particular. The first stage (c.1900-1920) relates to the founding of Palm Beach and the growth of an American market for a blossoming French industry. The second stage (c. 1920-1945) explores how a confluence of economic, social and cultural trends following World War One spurred rapid growth in Miami and gave rise to a completely new genre of clothing—one designed by Americans for Americans. The third stage (c. 1945-1960) explores how South Florida became a major producer of the very clothing it was instrumental in popularizing. Ironically, this crucial third stage was propelled by the same groups the original founders of the area sought to exclude—Jews and minorities. The interplay between South Florida and sportswear is not simply a nuanced study of a specific place and time. Rather, the evolution of the industry drastically redefined the American wardrobe. This analysis demonstrates how the study of clothing can inform our understanding of social change by adding texture and tangibility to American history.