Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2012"

Shutt Up: Bubonic Plague and Quarantine in Early Modern England

Abstract: The outbreak of bubonic plague that struck London and Westminster in 1636 provoked the usual frenzied response to epidemics, including popular flight and government-mandated quarantine. The government asserted that plague control measures were acts of public health for the benefit of all. However, contrary to this government narrative of disease prevention there was a popular account that portrayed quarantine and isolation as personal punishment rather than prudent policy. In examining the 1636 outbreak on the parish as well as the individual level, reasons for this inconsistency between official and unofficial perspectives emerge. Quarantine and its effects were not classless, and its implementation was not always strictly in the name of public health. Government application of quarantine was remarkably effective, but it could never be uncontroversial both because of circumstances and because of misuse. The flight of the wealthiest from London and Westminster left only the more socially vulnerable to be quarantined. Though plague policy was financially sensitive to the poorest, it was costly to the middling sort. Another cause of controversy was the government's use of quarantine as a punishment to control individuals found breaking other laws. Though not widely publicized, popular narratives continually included grievances about the cruelty and inequity of quarantine and the militaristic nature of its implementation. Despite these objections, quarantine remained a staple of the government response to plague outbreaks throughout the seventeenth century.

The "Quadroon-Plaçage" Myth of Antebellum New Orleans: Anglo-American (Mis)interpretations of a French-Caribbean Phenomenon

Abstract: The intimate relationships between white men and women of color in antebellum New Orleans, commonly known by the term placage , are a large part of the romanticized lore of the city and its history. This article exposes the common understanding of placage as myth. First, it reveals the source of the myth in a collection of accounts by travelers to the city in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Next, it uses a database of information on hundreds of white male-colored female relationships during the period to provide a more accurate account of the people in and nature of these relationships. Finally, it explains the purpose served by the myth by identifying three traditions that shaped its development: the culture of Southern Honor, the Anti-Slavery movement, and the bon-ton tradition of Georgian England. In a broader sense, this paper shows how myths are created and perpetuated, the temptations and dangers of uncritically accepting them, and the value to understanding their creation.

The Social and Material Life of Colonial Hotels: Comfort Zones as Contact Zones in British Colombo and Singapore, ca. 1870-1930

Abstract: During the period 1870-1930, from the opening of the Suez Canal to the Great Depression, "European" hotels became a common fixture of the built and social landscapes of many colonial cities, and in particular of Colombo and Singapore, the two main ports-of-call along the Indian Ocean's navigational routes. Compared to travelers' lodgings previously available in the colonies, such hotels offered higher standards of comfort, and the possibility for their patrons to relive the metropolitan lifestyle, thus acting as localizers of modernity in the colonial milieu. Conversely, as sites of foreign capital accumulation that exploited indigenous labor, and as spaces of social definition where Westerners asserted their superiority over locals as much as class and national distinctions among themselves, hotels represented a microcosm of the colonial society. Colonial hotels were thus "comfort zones" as much as "contact zones" where different social, ethnic, and national groups interacted. Their history affords thus critical insights into not only the habits of consumption of a privileged colonial elite, but also the global circulation of consumer commodities and socio-cultural practices, as well as the daily interactions between colonizer and colonized, and between the different strata of the colonial society.

Points of Access: Rehabilitation Centers, Summer Camps, and Student Life in the Making of Disability Activism, 1960–1973

Abstract: This essay revises our understanding of two key movements in the late twentieth-century United States: disability rights and student protest. It locates the origins of the disability rights movement in the experiences of adolescents with disabilities at rehabilitation centers and summer camps. It traces the social roots of political activism from these institutions through higher education, where the intertwined processes of consciousness-raising and network formation transformed activists’ understanding of accessibility—both physical and social. Segregated from many aspects of campus life, disabled college students drew on their experiences and networks from their adolescence to fight for equality on their college campuses. They formed their own organizations and fraternities, took sledgehammers to inaccessible curbs, and lobbied for barrier-free environments. As disabled students graduated, they carried with them their local successes, tactics, and rights consciousness, spearheading the movement for national antidiscrimination legislation.

Full-Text Databases and Historical Research: Cautionary Results from a Ten-Year Study

Abstract: Full-text electronic searching of books, periodicals, and government documents is providing historians with the ability to survey unprecedented amounts of historical material for references traditionally not associated with those sources. Yet because the research conducted with these new tools is often not possible or practical using other methods, the shortcomings of the results are not always evident. This article highlights some of those shortcomings through a detailed discussion of a ten-year study that spanned the development of some of the main databases now used in nineteenth-century British history. The study was designed to uncover the number of newspaper reports discussing sex between men in three major London newspapers between 1820 and 1870, ultimately detecting over one thousand such reports. The study was designed in 1999 using the Palmer's Index to the Times on CD ROM in conjunction with archival sources, and those results were contrasted in later years to the results from the Times Digital Archive , the Palmer's Index to the Times within C19: The Nineteenth Century Index , and the British Library Newspapers 1800-1900 databases. The inability of newer tools to detect large amounts known material sparked a systematic crosschecking of the results of these databases to map the extent of the discrepancies. The article discusses some major shortcomings of these new tools, demonstrates methodologies for working around the limitations, and highlights some of the new findings related to the public discussion of sex between men obtained through this study.

Everyday Struggles against Franco's Authoritarian Legacy: Pedagogical Social Movements and Democracy in Spain

Abstract: The historiography of the Spanish transition to democracy is going through exciting times. After years in which the importance of civic organizations has been relatively downplayed, we are wit- nessing a growing interest in their contribution to the process. The most important foci of social resistance to the dictatorship were the workers' organizations, the student and nationalist move- ments. They contributed to the regime's destabilization and pressured Franco's successors to move towards liberalization. Nevertheless, this article argues that examining everyday areas of cultural practices reveals that social mobilization in Spain in the 1970s was more extensive than currently believed and had interesting cultural consequences in important social sectors. By ana- lyzing the movements for pedagogical renovation, the article shows the intensity of a cultural cam- paign to influence the country's future that was carried out in the workplace. Within a framework that sees democratization as a process of mutual transformation of state and society, this piece explores the channels through which these movements contributed to the transformation of Spain from an authoritarian society controlled by a dictatorial state to a pluralistic polity sus- taining democratic procedures. The movements for pedagogical renovation initiated a quiet, yet determined endeavour to modify workplace practices and procedures in order to ensure the democratization of the everyday lives of citizens. If, from the outside, it seemed the Spanish public was not actively involved in bringing about Spanish democracy, entering the classrooms reveals the struggle was at its height. The historiography of the Spanish transition to democracy is going through exciting times. Its thirtieth anniversary has been accompanied by a wave of aca- demic conferences and publications. For many years the most salient characteris- tic of the studies dedicated to the period was a celebration of its peaceful progression and successful ending. Later, it became fashionable to criticize its shortcomings and emphasize the faults of its outcome. In both cases most of the attention was dedicated to the newly-created state institutions and the political leaders, considered the main protagonists of the process. In fact the mere exis- tence and the importance of social mobilization during Spain's transition to democracy has been a source of extensive debate. 1 With the passage of time the debate has intensified, and recently it has become clear that the old dominant narrative focusing on the political elite has gradually been replaced by a new one assigning more importance to the activities of civic initiatives. 2 Thus, after

Swept up from the Streets or Nowhere Else to Go? The Journeys of Dutch Female Beggars and Vagrants to the Oegstgeest State Labor Institution in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Women officially designated as vagrants and beggars and confined in the Oegstgeest State Labor Institution ( Rijkswerkinrichting ) at the end of the nineteenth century originated almost exclusively from the lower and most vulnerable ranks of the labor population. Their professions and those of their parents and husbands were low and ill-paid. Most of them were relatively old women, single, and a quarter had children out of wedlock. Disease was prevalent, mortality was high and many of them had physical or psychological handicaps. One in five was convicted for, mostly minor, offending. It is argued that their confinement is due to their lack of family support and access to other informal support networks while, at the same time, their “unruly” behavior and status of unwed mother made that they were considered to be “undeserving” of formal poor relief or support from charitable institutions. To beg and get convicted to placement in a State Labor Institution may have been an explicit survival strategy once they were old, ill, and alone.

Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government: The Example of the Mediterranean

Abstract: This article shows that the condemnation of organized crime stems from a simplistic explanation that obscures mechanisms and practices (such as subcontracting and badly managed invitations to tender) that are much more problematic, albeit difficult to condemn. The article demonstrates that current modalities of denunciation of economic crime are representative of the neoliberal modes of government. Through the analysis of the fight against illegal migration, money-laundering, fakes, smuggling and trafficking of goods, this essay shows that resorting to the criminalization and reification of the figures of "evil" (the terrorist, the smuggler, the mafia member, organized crime) becomes an opportunity to organize the field of possible state interventions, the condition of new state actions, an opportunity, thus, to strengthen political domination through intermediaries and private actors. The fight against crime appears more like the province of the imaginaire, where fear reigns, and the search for scapegoats deemed to catalyze this fear. It is also the province of a commitment to State action in a context that actually limits such commitment.

The Corporate Campaign against Homelessness: Class Power and Urban Governance in Neoliberal Atlanta, 1973–1988

Abstract: This article deals with the efforts of Atlanta's business community to remove homeless people from the downtown area during the 1970s and 1980s. The corporate sector pursued a two-pronged strategy in rolling out this removal project. First, it attempted to define homelessness as a public safety problem requiring a beefed-up police presence in the central city. Second, it attempted to leverage social services in such a way as to physically displace homeless people from the downtown area. The corporate campaign against homelessness culminated in the Central Area II Study of 1986-1988, a blueprint for downtown revitalization that targeted homeless people for removal. The corporate campaign against homelessness illuminates the "roll out phase" of neo-liberalism when the "right hand" and "left hand" of the state underwent a significant reconfiguration.

Almshouses in England and the Dutch Republic circa 1350–1800: A Comparative Perspective

Abstract: I. In May 1650 tragedy struck Sir John Conyers and his wife Maria de Pottere. Maria's nephew, Captain Henry Hume, an officer in the Dutch army, whom she had raised after the early death of her sister, died in the Dutch city of Delft, aged only 27. Maria de Pottere and Sir John had no children, nor, apparently, any other close heirs. Maria herself died less than two months later, in July 1650, spending the remaining few months of her life, inter alia, on the construction of a splendid tomb for her parents and for her nephew in the parish church of Zierikzee, on the island of Schouwen. The town council gave permission for this elaborate funerary monument on 5 July 1650—ten days before Maria gave up the ghost, leaving completion of the tomb and construction and placement of two memorial slabs for herself and Henry to her aged husband, who did not follow her into the grave until he died, 72 years old, in 1658. With his own memorial slab attached, the tomb was now ready, an eloquent and resplendent memorial which would have lasted centuries were it not for the destructive fire in October 1832 which completely destroyed Zierikzee's medieval church. However, Maria de Pottere and Sir John Conyers had not just wished to crown the earthly glory of their family—about to become extinct—with a splendid monument; they also spent a considerable amount of their capital on the construction of an almshouse in the village of Noordgouwe, close to Zierikzee, where the De Pottere family possessed landed estates. Maria and her husband had lived there themselves, in a small castle. Unlike their splendid tomb, this almshouse, called the Conyershuisjes or the Pottershofje, has survived until the present day, still bearing evidence of their charity and still bringing to local memory their name, as no doubt was their intention. What Maria and Sir John did after their bereavement was a not unusual phenomenon. Although the form of charitable endowments differed through time and by place, for this seventeenth-century couple the choice of an

Men of Steel? The Masculinity of Metal Industry Workers in Finland after World War II

Abstract: This article examines the masculinity of metal workers in the post-WWII era of reparation and radical societal change in Finland. Young men from agrarian communities took on employment in metal industry jobs in droves after WWII. In this paper, metal workers' masculinity is explored in three areas: (a) the transitional period when young men took their first steps in the shoes of metal workers; (b) defining the personal territory of work; and (c) the men's physical capacity to bear their strenuous work. The sources we draw on are the metal workers' work-life stories and workplace narratives in which they write about their personal experiences of work and their attitude about the trade. According to our analyses, metal workers' culture was a double- edged sword. Male workers respected the skills, strength, and autonomy of their trade, but the work in itself and the habits and informal norms of the masculine industrial culture were often harmful to their health. Hence, although the masculinity of the post-war industrial era helped these men to overcome daily difficulties and to find collective strength when needed, masculinity was also connected to risk-taking, and even with illnesses and premature death.

Cruelty and Empathy, Animals and Race, in Colonial Kenya

Abstract: Colonial Kenya was, by anyone's standards, suffused with violence and cruelty. Africans suffered conquest, the cane, and counterinsurgency. Indians endured their share of bloodied noses at the hands of whites. While the European immigrant community gave better than they received—without admitting cruelty no matter the barbarity of their actions—they too believed themselves living amidst unconscionable cruelty. Mother nature, in her heartless way, oversaw a cruel realm. Leopards seemed to have a particular taste for domestic dogs, often snatching them from front porches or even leaping through open windows for their innocent prey. Settler attempts to raise fowl often failed due to pitiless hawks or other predators. Whites were most repulsed by siafu or army ants. Siafu appeared, seemingly from nowhere, marching in a line a foot wide and yards long, consuming any living thing in their path. Europeans recounted gruesome scenes of animals and even human infants killed and bodies picked clean by marauding siafu. Nothing could be done to civilize nature. Dogs could be kept out of harm's way, and ashes could be spread at the perimeter of a house to divert siafu, but leopards could not change their spots, nor ants their ravenous marches. Other parts of the African scene were potentially more amenable to change. Most whites sincerely felt a responsibility to civilize Africans. But slowly. It had taken Britons two thousand years since the Roman invasions to reach the pinnacle of civilization. Under white tutelage Africans would advance more quickly, although it would still be a centuries-long process. Moreover, too much change too quickly was ineffective, even dangerous. Africans would lose their old morality and social structure without truly imbibing modernity. They would slide

Dirty politics or "harmonie"? Defining corruption in early modern amsterdam and hamburg

Abstract: This article explores the ambiguities of corruption in the context of two early modern cities: Amsterdam and Hamburg. Both cities were, in the parlance of the time, republics and both were self-governing. In each city, as in early modern polities more generally, corruption was a fraught issue. Indeed, its very meaning defies easy definition. Nineteenth-century perceptions of "corruption" have greatly influenced the ways in which historians have located and spoken about corruption often to the detriment of grasping its contemporary significance. Even in cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg, which had much in common, politics and therefore also corruption, differed. This close study of Amsterdam and Hamburg does not necessarily produce the material for a global model to understand corruption in the early modern world, or even in early modern "republics" more generally. Instead, it proposes a flexible framework that commands an approach rather than sets conclusions or offers predictability. It is furthermore a method predicated on a meticulous probing of peculiar circumstances, local practices, unique structures, and even personalities for as long as government remained (mostly) dependent on decisions made in individual cases and on individual events. In situations where the discrete existence of "private" and "public" goods and needs remained inchoate at best, and politicking remained highly individualized, modern definitions of corruption, forcefully shaped as they are by nineteenth-century historiography, can only lead us astray and cause us to miss or misinterpret their true historical value.

A Dangerous Class: The Street Sellers of Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract: While the social research of Henry Mayhew drew attention to the street sellers of London in the nineteenth century, Mayhew only hinted at the full scope of the threat these sellers posed to Victorian capitalism and bourgeois society. Street selling was taken up by many different types of workers who had become unemployed or frustrated with their previous employment. Distinguished by the performative qualities of their work as well as by the sale of inexpensive commodities to the poor, street sellers provide a distinctive example of class conflict in London. Such sellers were frequently associated with Chartism and other radical agitation, and they often took on roles as orators or social commentators at public meetings. Many elements of their subversive potential were virtually inherent to their class. Whether in their links to a precarious commons, their commitment to socialization amidst economic transactions, or their struggle for space on the streets, these sellers posed a continual threat to the discipline, values, and rhythms of the larger capitalist economy. They provided an alternative model of social and economic life that was, in many ways, immediately visible to the public and which took on, over the course of the century, a more respected status. Street sellers harnessed public sympathy, established an important presence amid the working class, and expressed a unique vision of freedom and solidarity.

“The Law Has No Feeling for Poor Folks Like Us!”: Everyday Responses to Legal Compulsion in England's Working-Class Communities, 1871–1904

Abstract: During the late Victorian period, the role of the state increased dramatically in England's working-class urban communities. New laws on labor, health, and education, enforced by a growing bureaucracy of elected and appointed officials, extended the reach of public authority into daily life on an unprecedented scale. Everyday negotiations between these officials and working-class men and women, I argue, were key moments for determining the practical impact of new social welfare policies. This was particularly true in the contestation over children's compulsory school attendance, as I demonstrate through a close examination of the daily encounters between parents and education officials. Despite the growing size and authority of the Victorian state, working-class parents effectively mitigated the impact of the compulsory education laws on their families. They were able to do so because the categories that governed the level of enforcement—age, household economic status, health, and labor—were themselves determined through daily dialogues between parents and education officials. Parents' familiarity with the law and with the dynamics of the public education bureaucracy were key factors in these negotiations, as were internal fractures within the Victorian state itself. Working-class parents, and mothers in particular, also countered officials' moral policy justifications with their own discourse of right and wrong, which focused on the legitimacy of parental authority, an insistence on just treatment, and the elevation of household needs over the laws' requirements.

Self-sale and Voluntary Entry into Unfreedom, 300–1100

Abstract: Voluntary entry into unfreedom in late antiquity and the early middle ages has tended to be interpreted as anything but voluntary: instead, self-sales and autodeditions have been seen mostly in terms of coercion, whether by force or by necessity, and associated with particular moments of social crisis. This article argues that the sensitive nature of the topic resulted in an exceptionally misleading representation of self-sales in the legal and literary sources, albeit in divergent ways. Roman and Byzantine law treated self-sale as illegal, while at the same time leaving room for manoeuvre in practice, and took a very judgemental view of self-sellers. Early Christian sources, on the contrary, took them as emblematic of the oppression of the poor, and harnessed them for political admonishment, presenting self-sellers as passive victims of rapacious buyers and bad governance. While diametrically different in their presentation of the moral significance of self-sales, law and literary sources both therefore contribute to the impression that the distinction between free and unfree was the most important social divide. Documentary sources, by contrast, present a very different picture, suggesting a higher degree of continuity (and perhaps frequency) in this practice, but also that it could be the object of active and careful negotiation and bargaining, with people in different social and economic circumstances using free status as an asset for a variety of purposes and in a very instrumental way, far removed in its concerns from the elite discourse which took freedom as an essential value.

"Education for Citizenship in a Bi-Racial Civilization": Black Teachers and the Social Construction of Race, 1929–1954

Abstract: From the Great Depression through the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954, the way that American teachers understood and taught about race in the classroom underwent a paradigmatic shift. This article examines the distinctive experience of black teachers, whose understanding of the race concept was subtly different from the predominantly white educators in the nation’s leading educational associations. Educational discourses on race can be recovered through an analysis of teaching journals, textbooks, and conference proceedings from both white and black teaching associations. While white educators drew on anthropological models of racial diversity and cultural relativity to craft a revised way of teaching about race in the 1940s, black teachers maintained a steady conception of race as divided into only two meaningful categories: white and colored. I show that black educators taught about race in ways that directly challenged claims of white superiority and promoted a positive black racial identity. This article explores how the changing contexts of the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar era influenced the black educational discourse on race. In conclusion, I evaluate the black educational discourse on race as a subtle but potentially powerful strategy in the black freedom struggle. This study speaks to an intersection of scholarship on the social production of race, civil rights history, and educational history.

“Youth, It's Your Turn!”: Generations and the Fate of the Russian Revolution (1917-1932)

Abstract: In the last two decades the concept of generations has seen a revival in history and the social sciences. This article employs a discursive-pragmatic concept of generation in history, deduced from Karl Mannheim’s seminal concept of generation, as a theoretical framework to examine the role played by young Communists and their official youth organization, the Komsomol, during the revolutionary transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1932. It shows how both experientially and discursively a cohort of young Communists who actively took part in the Revolution and Civil War coalesced into a distinct generational unit whose ideas, attitudes, and culture found a home in the Komsomol. Contrary to the Bolsheviks’ ideas of continuity of generations in a post-revolutionary society, the youth league became an outlet in which generational tensions were nurtured and expressed throughout the 1920s. In this process, formative expectations and aspirations were generated and cultivated among the younger members who had missed out on their own revolutionary experience. By employing social theory, the article advances our understanding of the process by which young people, organized in the Komsomol, became a major constituency for the Stalinist turn of the late 1920s. The article emphasizes the agency of youth, showing how their organization became a political and social driving force that shaped the fate of the Russian Revolution. Furthermore, the case of the militant Soviet youth is used as a case study to improve our understanding of the emergence and development of generations and generational cohorts, and thus of the concept itself.

"The Present Time is Eminently Scientific": The Science of Cookery in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract: This article examines the epistemology of cookery among the middle classes in nineteenth-century Britain. Quantification, schematization, and the scientific evaluation of food and its preparation were increasingly emphasized in prescriptive cookery books and housekeeping literature. These trends are evident to some extent in manuscript cookbooks, as well. Cookery was influenced by a rise in chemists' and physicians' professional authority, and science also suggested solutions to the period's ongoing problems of food adulteration. Science and expertise, moreover, offered women and their families access to higher social status and a sense of personal and national progress. However, the scientization of cookery was an uneven and often inconsistent process, and the individual habits and knowledge systems of families, mistresses, and servants continued to play a crucial role in culinary practice.

Emaciated, exhausted and excited : the bodies and minds of the Irish in late nineteenth-century Lancashire Asylums

Abstract: Drawing on asylum admission records, casebooks, annual reports, and notebooks recording the settlement of Irish patients, this article examines a deeply traumatic and enduring aspect of the Irish migration experience, the confinement of large numbers of Irish migrants in the Lancashire asylum system in the late nineteenth century. This period saw a massive influx of impoverished Irish into the county, particularly in the post-Famine years. Asylum superintendents commented on the management problems caused by Irish patients in what rapidly became overcrowded and overstretched institutions. The article examines descriptions of Irish patients, many admitted in a poor state of health, and also depicted as violent and difficult to manage, though reporting of this may have been swayed by anti-Irish sentiment. It suggests that a hardening of attitudes occurred in the 1870s and 1880s, as theories of degeneration took hold and the Irish in Ireland exhibited exceptionally high rates of institutionalization. Continuities across this period included the ongoing association between mental illness and migration long after the massive Famine influx had abated, and claims that the Irish, at one and the same time referred to as volatile and vulnerable, were particularly susceptible to the challenges of urban life, marked by intemperance, liability to general paralysis, turbulence and immorality, and the relative isolation that led to their long-term incarceration. The article suggests that commentary about Irish asylum patients provides traction in considering broader perceptions of the Irish body, mobility and Irishness in nineteenth-century England, and a deeper understanding of institutionalization.

"Russian Blonde in Space": Soviet Women in the American Imagination, 1950-1965

Abstract: This essay examines three different stereotypes of Soviet women in a variety of American publications during the early years of the Cold War. Each stereotype served a different cultural need as Americans grappled with the reality of the emerging Cold War. One prevalent discourse argued that the ills of communism were inscribed on the bodies of Soviet women, bodies inevitably described as graceless, shapeless, and sexless. The body, and the fashions and make-up that adorned it, became symbols of communism's failures and confirmed the superiority of the American free enterprise system. A second discourse centered on a real flesh-and-blood Soviet woman, Nina Khrushchev, and suggests the malleability and instability of American images of Soviet Women. American commentators transformed this ardent revolutionary into a kind of world grandmother. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, commentators constructed yet a third vision of Communist women that focused on their professional achievements and functioned as a call to expand opportunities for American women. This discourse reflected America's own ambivalence toward working women and a change in the Cold War discourse itself. Early smugness, derision, and condemnation gave way to a grudging respect for the real achievements of Soviet society—symbolized in the space flight of Valentina Tereshkova—and a call to Americans, men and women alike, to steel themselves for a long struggle with their chief rival.

“The House on the Borderland”: Lesbian Desire, Marriage, and the Household, 1950–1979

Abstract: Using interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters to the Daughters of Bilitis and/or its long time leaders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, this article examines the lives of more than 160 wives who expressed lesbian desires from the 1950s through the 1970s. Scholars have typically understood such wives as being trapped within marriage in the postwar era, before breaking free and building new lesbian lives in the midst of the women's and gay liberation movements. While I do not overturn this narrative entirely, I demonstrate the remarkable extent to which wives were able to create space for lesbian desires within their homes and marriages throughout this time period. Confined to their local communities by the responsibilities of childcare and housework, and ambivalent about publicly claiming a lesbian or bisexual identity, most wives had limited access to "out" lesbian worlds. Instead, they transformed the nuclear family household into a lesbian space. They contacted lesbian communities remotely, found lovers among female friends within the context of their "straight" lives, and engaged in affairs within their own homes. Initially, such wives carried on affairs without their husbands' knowledge, but by the 1970s they chose with greater frequency to tell their husbands directly about their lesbian relationships and to openly balance marriage and affairs. The women's experiences described here compel us to reconsider how marriage and the household have functioned, as well as what constitutes lesbian space.

Reconsidering the "Tragic" scott expedition: Cheerful masculine home-making in Antarctica, 1910-1913

Abstract: Captain Robert Scott and his "doomed" polar party's fearless march to their deaths lingers in popular memory and it continues to inspire gender historians concerned with the construction of imperial heroic masculinity in the pre-War era. Invariably described as "tragic," the expedition appears well suited to analyse British masculinity's association with the stiff upper lip, a capacity to suppress intense emotions of fear and anxiety. However, the documentary record of the entire expedition—diaries, memoirs, photographs—provides the basis for an alternative reading of this emotional community. Among these men cheerfulness was normative; it was, above all, the emotional resource they cultivated to turn a hostile world into their happy home. Though this voyage took sixty-one men to the tip of the earth, it was less a flight from domesticity than an instance of masculine home-making in extremis. Fellowship and cheerfulness were generated through shared patterns of heterosocial family living as well as the customs of homosocial adventure, seafaring and scientific endeavour. The England of Scott's time demanded dour commitment to duty in the domesticated man but he could also enjoy a music hall joke or a rollicking sea shanty. Although cheer may be a form of emotional labor, exploited by employers, historians should remain alert to the possibility of its genuine and spontaneous expression in the history of masculinity—at the poles and beyond.

American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism. By Julian Go (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. xi plus 377 pp.)

Abstract: Julian Go. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U. S. Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, xi + 377p. Author(s) Castañeda, Anna Leah Fidelis T. Citation 東南アジア研究 (2011), 49(3): 529-532 Issue Date 2011-12-31 URL http://hdl.handle.net/2433/154787 Right Type Departmental Bulletin Paper Textversion publisher

The Late Medieval "Crisis of the Nobility" Reconsidered: The Case of Flanders

Abstract: Recent historiography on the economic position of the later medieval nobility has seen a marked shift where the post-war paradigm of a "crisis of the nobility" is replaced with a tendency to stress the endurance of noblemen vis-a-vis the economic, political and social transformations of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Yet, the question of how noble elites adapted to the economic changes of the later Middle Ages remains a poignant one. Based on an analysis of the Flemish nobility, this article suggests that a study of patterns of social mobility may contribute to a better understanding of that process and that a successful re-evaluation of this issue requires more attention to the pre-Plague era.

Befitting Bedfellows: Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan

Abstract: Against a backdrop of labor unrest and the democratization of politics, yakuza (Japanese mafiosi) and the modern Japanese state forged in the late 1910s and 1920s a symbiotic relationship born of shared ideological concerns, financial interests, and a willingness to use violence as a tool for exerting and maintaining power. This article argues that yakuza and the state were able to join forces, as exemplified by the nationalist Dai Nihon Kokusuikai (Greater Japan National Essence Association), in part because they were operating in a world in which the boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate were fluid and porous. Struggling to define these boundaries were leftist intellectuals, who in the interwar period took a critical stance against the political violence of groups like the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai and yet were prompted by the murkiness of violent affiliations to reinforce ideas about the legitimacy of state violence. Considered too is the legacy of the yakuza-state relationship in the post-World War II era, when public impatience with political violence shifted discussions about legitimate and illegitimate behavior and affected the visibility of yakuza-state ties, but did not undo them. Taken as a whole, the article seeks to challenge the conventional view of mafias as illegitimate and states as legitimate and poses questions about the extent to which zones of ambiguous legitimacy might have contributed to transformations of Japan's political system.

Finding the Southern Family in the Civil War

Abstract: In a massive compendium Writing the Civil War, published in 1998, James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper gathered essays from numerous scholars of the American Civil War. These pieces detailed how various aspects of the field had changed over time: battlefield tactics, both northern and Confederate strategy, as well as northern and southern politics. Yet in their careful introduction, McPherson and Cooper also pointed out areas such as social history in which they saw “significant lacunae.” They noted, “We still know little about the impact of the war on families, children, and marriage patterns...Nor have Civil War historians yet come to grips with questions of sex and sexuality or rape and prostitution.” In the decade and half since that call to action, some important studies have grappled with the question of the impact of the war on black and white families. Yet their answers to the question of change, while stimulating and provocative, have in many cases also been ambiguous and contradictory. Even though the American Civil War has long illustrated the ambiguities, contradictions, and complexity of American life, it still seems surprising that historians have come so late to studying family, given the frequent invocation of the war itself as a “brothers' war” and the use of family imagery to describe the “house divided” and reunion of the North and South. Yet while historians rarely measured the influence of the Civil War on real life families, cultural commentators implicitly followed the literary depiction of the war's impact on the family. Finally, historians have begun to trace some of these elements. The last decade and a half have produced a raft of studies that increase our knowledge of family, gender relations, and sexuality for southern families, but a surprisingly small part of this new literature looks like family history. Some might argue that this small number of family histories simply parallels the low profile that family history has recently played in American history. Here a definition seems in order. By family history, I mean history that focuses on the family unit—either nuclear or extended—its members, and the basic tasks and

Rural Domestic Servants in Eighteenth-Century Burgundy: Demography, Economy, and Mobility

Abstract: While much is known about urban domestic service, a good deal less has been written about servants living and working in the countryside. This article analyzes rural domestic service in northern Burgundy during the eighteenth century. Based primarily on nominal lists from 1796 and on witness depositions in local courts, it reconstructs the profiles of both servants and masters. While several historians have chosen to see domestic service as a common life-cycle experience with an important role to play in a demographic system based on late marriage, it is important not to underestimate the economic foundation of the institution. Parents generally kept their adolescent children at home if they could afford to do so, and in northern Burgundy only a minority of young people ever worked as servants. And relatively few households had servants, even among landowning farmers. Those who worked as servants were all from poor families, as literacy rates demonstrate. The article also analyzes their mobility patterns. While servants were more mobile than any other group in society, they tended to move over short distances and remained relatively close to their place of birth even as they changed masters repeatedly throughout their short career. Female servants became increasingly mobile over the course of the century while male servants did not, which reflects changes in demand for young men and women in cities and villages.