Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2013"

The Sixties in the City: Avant-gardes and Urban Rebels in New York, London, and West Berlin

Abstract: This essay examines a heretofore under-studied aspect of the sixties revolution: the interplay between avant-garde artists and countercultural anarchists in the spaces of the city. Arguing that the focus on student organizations and the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist Third Worldism with which they were often associated obscures as much as it reveals about the radicalism of the 1960s, the essay examines the revival of anarchist ideas, examining how these dovetailed with the activist conceptions of artistic-political avant-gardes and the counterculture with which they were linked. Comparative in focus, the essay focuses on radical groupings in three key cities of the global 1960s: Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfucker in New York City; King Mob and the Angry Brigade in London; and the Hash Rebels/Blues in West Berlin. Transnational in orientation, the essay shows how countercultural and anarchist publications and networks (e.g., the Rebel Worker group, the Situationist International) helped synergize local rebellions inspired by the intersection of the arts, anarchism, and the counterculture, thereby opening a new perspective on the rebellion of the 1960s.

Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies

Abstract: Over the past few decades, scholars of the post-World War II civil rights movement have revisited key issues related to the goals, strategies, ideologies, participants, and periodization of black freedom struggles. As part of this conceptual remapping, historians of the African American experience have rethought how and where to locate the civil rights movement. This has geographically broadened the movement’s scope to include previously understudied struggles in the North as well as in the South during the movement’s heroic, “classical” period. Notwithstanding its significant insights, this emphasis on “nationalizing” the civil rights movement narrative carries the risk of flattening meaningful differences of historical place. Among other things, this approach can oversimplify the varying modes of white racial control and black agency across regions. This essay responds by suggesting that the task of theorizing the significance of region and place in movement narratives requires historians to more clearly delineate regional distinctions with regard to forms of black racial subordination, political and economic processes, and structures of opportunity and constraint on black mobilization and resistance during the 1960s and preceding decades. It argues in favor of the historical particularity of the South, especially the Deep South, and distinguishes this region historically from the Midwest. Finally, using St. Louis, Missouri as a focal point, the essay asserts the significance of the border South in histories of the civil rights movement more generally. Identifying this region illustrates simultaneously the instability and concreteness of regional distinctions in Black Freedom Studies. Recent scholars of twentieth-century African American social movements have reimagined key conceptual questions related to the subject, especially the content, strategies, antecedents, connections, and outcomes of the post-World War II civil rights movement. First and foremost, social historians have revisited the movement’s key objectives, focusing on multiple, expansive agendas that involved more than access to public accommodation and the acquisition of the vote. Others have questioned the language employed to describe the period, challenging the effectiveness of “Civil Rights” (1954-1965) and “Black Power” Journal of Social History vol. 47 no. 2 (2013), pp. 371–400 doi:10.1093/jsh/sht086 © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. (1966-1975) as signposts for identifying the contrasting waves of political, organizational and ideological discourses between the 1950s and 1970s. Historians such as Clayborne Carson have inspired scholars to adopt the terminology of “black freedom struggles” or the “Black Freedom Movement” to more fully encompass the scope of this activism. Second, and tied to this turn, historians have questioned the “classical” 1954-1965 movement timeline bracketed between the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court ruling, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. While scholars like Peniel E. Joseph have sought to reconceptualize the dominant ideologies, strategies and objectives of the 1954-1965 period, proponents of a “long” movement thesis have advanced new periodizing frameworks that incorporate this decade into longer heritages of black insurgency before and after this standard timeline. A few scholars, though, have criticized this approach for subsuming distinct eras into overly loose periodization, yielding undifferentiated sequences of events and undercutting meaningful historical analysis. Third, in considering the movement’s leaders and participants, researchers have shifted attention from the ministers, schoolteachers, lawyers, and other black male middle-class professionals typically presumed to have stewarded post-World War II struggles for racial equality. Instead, they have foregrounded diverse, and previously overlooked, groups of working-class African Americans and black women who openly contested for leadership and decision-making power. In addition to revising what demands emanated from black freedom struggles, who peopled and led these struggles, and when they occurred temporally, researchers have rethought where the movement took place. This is the most pertinent consideration for this essay. Conversation on this point has pivoted on what level of attention social historians should pay to the national (macro) scale in relation to the local (micro), whether the “North” or the “South” was the most significant regional theater of struggle during this epic period, and how scholars should define and distinguish between these two regions, if at all. The matter of region and place has been a current area of discourse among civil rights scholars, particularly as they have become more attentive to the previously overlooked black protest that occurred in northern cities contemporaneously with better known southern civil rights campaigns in Montgomery, Birmingham, Albany, Selma, and the Mississippi Delta. This growing awareness has been evident in the publication of Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South (2003), edited by Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, and Thomas J. Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008); the convening of the 2011 symposium, “South Meets North: The Shaping of a New Narrative of the Civil Rights Movement,” at Northwestern University; the January 2012 issue of the OAH Magazine of History devoted to the theme “Beyond Dixie: The Black Freedom Struggle Outside of the South”; and numerous academic conference panels and roundtables. As this essay contends, however, social historians have more work before them in terms of conceptualizing the role of region in 1960s movement narratives. This is a task that requires formulating lines of regional demarcation as well as continuity with regard to the conditions African Americans faced, and the structural constraints and opportunities that either facilitated or inhibited their resistance. For scholars such as Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, editors of the 2010 anthology The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, settling the matter of Journal of Social History Winter 2013 372

"A Peculiar Species of Felony": Suicide, Medicine, and the Law in Victorian Britain and Ireland

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between suicide and insanity in the eyes of both legal and medical professionals in nineteenth century Britain and Ireland. Both jurisdictions had a similar historical legacy in relation to the treatment of suicide, punishing sane suicides, those found felo de se, by ignominious burial and forfeiture. Legal changes between 1823 and 1882 negated the need for a verdict of temporary insanity as suicide essentially became a crime without legal punishment. Nevertheless, the rise of forensic psychiatry within the legal system meant that definitions of the temporary insanity of suicides became a controversial question for medical professionals. Similarly, the retention of distinctions of sanity and insanity for religious and insurance purposes ensured that there were spiritual and practical ramifications to a verdict of felo de se even if there were no legal consequences. The debate among doctors and legal professionals suggests that the process of "medicalization" of suicide was not, as MacDonald has suggested, driven by these elite professional groups, but rather by public opinion. While legal punishments for attempted suicide remained in force and in use, by the end of the nineteenth century medicine was seen as the main actor in the fight against this "social disease."

Ticketing the British Eighteenth Century: "A thing . . . never heard of before"

Abstract: During the long eighteenth century, an apparently minor and ephemeral object proliferated in Britain: the ticket. A significant and increasing proportion of the population encountered tickets of admission, lottery tickets, and pay tickets. Novel types emerged, including pawn tickets and Tyburn tickets; philanthropists discovered their potential for investigating and relieving poverty. Historians have not brought different instances together, but new applications of the term "ticket," and, more importantly, processes of elaboration and consolidation, suggest a variety of uses that bridged different registers and social settings. This extended early-modern capacities to express contractual obligation, affection, or allegiance through material objects and gave new form to techniques of identification. Crucial was the ticket's potential to flow, to encapsulate and then release information, access, possession, or chance. Study of charitable activities, plebeian experiences, and Methodist practices suggests how people learned to recognize and use tickets. Lower-class women and men were proficient agents as tickets intensified and shaped social interactions. These histories cast fresh light on eighteenth-century modes of social existence and the broader historical narratives constructed around them.

The Uses of History in the Unmaking of Modern Suicide

Abstract: This paper explores the notion that the writing of history has played a role in the making of modern suicide, and that it can have its uses in its “unmaking.” Examples of the making of modern suicide come from the writings of nineteenth century doctors concerned with formulating new medical truths of suicide, and who came to describe well-known historical “suicides” (e.g., that of Cato) in terms of pathology as part of this project. The medicalized suicide that was formed in the nineteenth century has come to dominate how the problem is conceptualized and managed. The author’s own experiences of working in a community mental health team and his involvement in suicide prevention are drawn on here, and a critique is offered of the “regime of truth” centering on the “compulsory ontology of pathology” that seems to govern so much thinking in this area. It is argued that the writing of history can provide useful tools when seeking to “denaturalize” particular ways of thinking and acting that have come to be taken as necessary, real, and true. The paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault, and examples are given of how the writing of the history of self-accomplished death can be a form of critique. Histories that seek to map the establishment and circulation of new “truths” of suicide—and the formation of objects, concepts, and subjects in relation to these “truths”—offer possibilities in terms of problematizing unquestioned contemporary assumptions and practices, enabling us “to think against the present.”

Between "Self-Murder" and "Suicide": The Modern Etymology of Self-Killing

Abstract: Suicide" is a modern concept. In English, the wording did not emerge before the 1650s and in the Romance languages not before the second half of the eighteenth century ("suicide" in French, "suicidio" in Italian). The invention of the latinized term mirrored less stringent criminal prosecution of self-killing, in the wake of harsher punishments and the creation of a statutory offense that had found their semantic expression in the nominalization of "self-murder" since the second half of the sixteenth century. The concept of "suicide"—as well as "Selbstentleibung" ("self-disembodiment") in German—reflects a historical process of pathologizing and decriminalizing the act of taking one's own life. However, regardless of new words, the social stigmatization of self-killing was not eliminated, but merely trans- formed. Criminal sanctions began to be abolished, but the a priori criticism of "self-murder" did not. In the eighteenth century, the traditional condemnation of self-killing, which had been based on religious and cosmological ideas, was turned into a moral one, in the specific Enlightenment sense of the term. What "self- murder" and "suicide" have in common is their denunciation of the act of killing oneself, not only in characterizing it as a crime, but also in pathologizing it as an expression of melancholic madness. In doing so, both of them have become key concepts for the emergent disciplines of moral statistics and suicidology in the nine- teenth century and for the modern understanding of self-killing within the dis- courses of social science, psychology, and psychiatry.

Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolutions: Challenging Notions of Race and Slavery between the Boundaries of Land and Sea

Abstract: This article considers how enslaved pilots used the coastal waters of the Anglophone-Americas during the Revolutionary Era as a cultural and political space to invert racial/social valuations and gain uncommon privileges. It examines how captives in discrete societies similarly exchanged environmental and nautical wisdom for lives of privileged exploitation. Most were owned by slaveholding-merchants, who dispatched several pilots in pilot boats to navigate vessels into port. Recognizing their inability to supervise pilots who remained aboard ship for days, sometimes weeks, and return home in pilot boats capable of carrying them beyond their grasp, slaveholders granted these trusted men considerable autonomy and geographic mobility, permitting them to cultivate semi-independent, wage-earning lives that allowed some to obtain freedom. Water was an integral element in pilots’ lives. Waterways are often treated as literary backdrops; not regions for cultural creation. Coastal waters afforded pilots with liminality between the regimes of terrestrial and maritime authority, providing shipboard privileges exceeding those received by bondpeople toiling in other capacities. Enslaved pilots became temporary ship captains, permitting them to curse and command white sailors and officers, toast white women, and assault white shipmasters even as their race and status sought to subjugate them. The Revolutionary Period enhanced pilots’ opportunities, enabling them to manipulate revolutionary rhetoric, wartime circumstances, and rapidly changing social dynamics to subvert white authority, appropriate privileges, and seize freedom and sometimes rights for themselves and their family members.

Black Caribbean Labor Radicalism in Panama, 1914–1921

Abstract: While the role of Caribbean immigrants in the “New Negro” movement in the United States is now well established, the concurrent militancy of black Caribbean workers in Panama is much less understood. The present article examines the rise and fall of Afro-Antillano militancy in both the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone and the Republic of Panama from 1914–1921. The presence of black people in the Panamanian isthmus went back centuries; West Indian migrants were especially discriminated against because they were English-speaking and Protestant. The Canal Zone authorities instituted Jim Crow style segregation (under the “Gold” and “Silver” system) to divide the work force, leaving black Caribbean workers paid less, discriminated against, and oppressed. In the face of this, these workers were not so passive or pro-British as they are often depicted. Instead, there was an outpouring of labor militancy in this period, including two massive strikes. However, the defeat of these strikes undercut the development of a united-working-class movement in Panama, caused many black Caribbean migrants to leave Panama, and made many of those remaining wary of labor radicalism. The Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey—the most prominent black Caribbean organization in Panama at the time—had originally sympathized with the labor militancy, but in the wake of working-class defeats, became increasingly anti-labor.

Expediency, Ambivalence, and Inaction: The French Protectorate and Domestic Slavery in Morocco, 1912–1956

Abstract: This article examines how the French Protectorate in Morocco enabled a defining institution of social inequality to endure and adapt. Colonial policies and the norms and evaluative beliefs surrounding domestic slavery are probed to explain the lack of political will against, and the resilience of, slavery within twentieth century Morocco. Previously unpublished archival findings are used to reconstruct how the Protectorate's association with the Moroccan monarchy and slave owning elites entailed not only the suspension of the French ideal of liberty, but also the active management and manipulation of knowledge and representations of slavery. Discussion of Protectorate policy formation, and official controls of how domestic slavery was understood in response to anti-slavery pressures, reveals that adminis- trators remained faithful to the contradictions guiding initial colonial maneuvers to satisfy French and international abolitionist expectations while simultaneously maintaining this form of non-interference in elite Moroccan affairs. The article also considers ways through which the Protectorate accomplished the work of negat- ing domestic slavery. A vague deference to Islam via "Muslim policy" became a standard means of characterizing and approaching the institution; further ambiva- lence about slavery was reinforced through ongoing selective color-blindness entail- ing official non-recognition, manipulation, and regulation of blackness. Though French officials and Moroccan slave owners were of unequal powers and fre- quently divergent interests and spheres of influence, attention to the Protectorate's handling of the problem of slavery helps illuminate the ambiguous social history within which domestic slavery in Morocco was reframed into lessened significance and transformed, before eventually ending as an institution.

“No Band of Brothers Could Be More Loving”: Enslaved Male Homosociality, Friendship, and Resistance in the Antebellum American South

Abstract: This article examines the homosocial world of enslaved men in the antebellum American South. It underscores that the lives of enslaved men were intertwined with one another, and that male interdependence was a fact of enslaved life. It examines how pursuits such as drinking, gambling, and wrestling brought enslaved men together in an all-male subculture through which they constructed their own independent notions of masculinity, friendship, solidarity, and resistance. The article claims that homosocial company was integral to the gendered identity and self-esteem of enslaved men. Through their homosocial relationships men forged strong ties of friendship. These relationships offered enslaved men a significant emotional landscape through which to resist the dehumanizing features of enslaved life. Furthermore, the article reveals how some friendships nurtured a culture of resistance among enslaved men.

The Politics of Suicide: Historical Perspectives on Suicidology before Durkheim. An Introduction

Abstract: Historically, suicide is a Western neologism. Unknown to Greco-Roman civilization, suicidium might as well have meant “swine-slaying” to a Latin speaker. The warrior culture of Germanic successor states glorified heroic self-sacrifice, celebrated in medieval literature as chansons de geste. If St. Augustine condemned Donatism for actively promoting martyrdom during the persecutions, then in part for fear of its potential to rob the early Christian movement of much-needed membership. Medieval Christians unanimously reviled the desperate act of self-killing until Renaissance humanists and artists recalled the political defiance of Cato, Seneca and, most especially, Lucretia, the original struggle of republicanism with tyranny manifest in the dagger through her heart. With their novel emphasis on the modification of human behavior, religious reformers turned their attention to the human soul and the inner temptation to self-murder. It fell to the Enlightenment to turn the activity of self-killing into a subject for scientific analysis: Suicide. Suicide became a moral affliction that was to be attended to not just by the police, but also by physicians and, subsequently, mental health care professionals. As representatives of the state, they produced actionable bureaucratic data. In a scramble to establish its scientific credentials, the emergent discipline of social physics (later to become sociology) latched on to official reports as indicators of a modern social dilemma. Hence, suicidology was born. With the expressed goals of measuring human behavior and tackling practical social issues, the earliest practitioners of social physics identified and prioritized suicide as a dramatic, but potentially soluble public health problem. For social physicists, suicide manifested a moral malaise as sensational as perhaps no other human behavior. Aptly named, moral statistics became their primary analytical tool. Two pioneering criminologists, André-Michel Guerry (who analyzed criminal data for the Parisian justice administration) and the Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quételet laid the foundations for moral statistics by studying immoral behaviors in the 1820s, with suicide chief among them. Auguste Comte harnessed social physics into a strategic theory of historical development employed to ground notions of modernity. The translator of Comte's Positive Philosophy (London, 1853), Harriet Martineau, subsequently wed his scientific positivism with the

Women Who Kill: An Analysis of Cases in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract: In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London, the number of women prosecuted for murder was quite small with only forty women reaching the felony court at the Old Bailey for trial between 1783 and 1815. Despite the small number of prosecutions, the cases do reveal important information about gender and criminal justice. Accusations demonstrate difficulties women had with a wide range of interpersonal relationships, their lives in the city, in addition to domestic and substance abuse. Sentencing patterns, too, are illuminating. For those women found guilty, the courts often hesitated to convict to the fullest extent of the law. Juries and judges presiding in homicide cases in London regularly employed discretion when making their decisions, demonstrating that they apparently heavily weighed numerous personal factors presented in trial. While the law gave judges substantial leeway in capital case sentencing, juries and judges focused their full convictions and harshest penalties, capital punishment, on women who violated important gender-based behavioral expectations.

Austerity, Neo-Liberal Economics, and Youth Suicide: The Case of New Zealand, 1980–2000

Abstract: In mid-1984 a newly-elected government in New Zealand tackled severe economic crises by abruptly adopting neo-liberal economic policies to curtail government activities and shrink the national debt. Retrenchment continued into the mid-1990s. New Zealand’s experiment, which attracted wide international attention, originated from an unexpected quarter. A Labor government moved the country from its status as the most regulated OECD economy to the least controlled. The sudden adoption of radical steps remain controversial, criticized as a “blitzkrieg” of liberalization that brought no swift improvements, or defended as an incomplete revolution that ended the circumstances of a growing number of poor exactly when national productively was falling. One indicator of social havoc is the male suicide rate. It rose for young adults, suggesting a connection between restructuring, youth pessimism, and suicide. With many jurisdictions around the world currently embarking on austerity measures, the social consequences of the New Zealand experiment warrant exposure. A straightforward argument blaming economic restructuring for the rising young male suicide rate is unachievable, because the restructuring occurred when the sexual revolution and youth autonomy were working their way through New Zealand’s domestic culture, when cannabis use was increasing, when young offenders were prominent in remand centers and prisons, and when mental health services were in upheaval. However, the qualitative evidence in the suicide inquest files suggests connections between these trends, the impact of the economic crises on young adults, and suicides.

"What Shall We Do with the Young Prostitute? Reform Her or Neglect Her?": Domestication as Reform at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, 1901–1913

Abstract: Research conducted at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford under the direction of founding superintendent Katharine Bement Davis produced some of the most influential data on prostitution in the Progressive Era. While Davis and Bedford have figured prominently in histories of the women’s prison reform movement, historical studies of the social response to prostitution in the Progressive Era, and feminist biographical accounts of women in early twentieth century reform crusades, the relationship between penal reform and the changing social organization of labor has been overlooked. This paper undertakes a critical reexamination of the Bedford data, demonstrating that while Davis advocated a social scientific approach to reform, she systematically displaced the significance of structural factors at two crucial levels: her studies of inmates and her own philosophy and practice of reform. Studies of inmates discounted the role of economic factors for women’s entry into prostitution in favor of explanations that emphasized familial and personal weakness. The institutionalization, training, and parole of inmates functioned not simply to place inmates in domestic service but to effectively disqualify them from other sources of respectable employment. Viewed through the lens of a social organization of labor perspective, a previously neglected dimension of the logic and practice of reform is illuminated.

Sociology's “One Law”: Moral Statistics, Modernity, Religion, and German Nationalism in the Suicide Studies of Adolf Wagner and Alexander von Oettingen

Abstract: From the onset, moral statistics were influenced by religious discourse. During the nineteenth century, Adolf Wagner discovered the “One Law” of sociology: Protestants always kill themselves more often than Catholics. Deployed by his colleague, the Baltic nationalist theologian Alexander von Oettingen, it became a moral-statistical plank in the modernity thesis and supported a Prussian master narrative of history. Accordingly, it justified the unification of Germany according to the small German model of a Kulturnation excluding Catholic Austria. This interpretation, in turn, influenced subsequent generations of German sociologists, who described modernity in idealist and spiritual terms. In this, they differed from the more mechanistic and materialist theories of French sociologists, in particular Emile Durkheim.

Mapping Civilization: The Cultural Geography of Suicide Statistics in Russia

Abstract: As the science of statistics emerged over the nineteenth century, it took suicide as one of its core objects and ultimately created a new domain of knowledge in suicidology. In the process, the phenomenon of suicide was transformed into a twofold symbol and symptom of modern civilization, embodying the costs and dangers of social progress, yet also hopes for the potentially transformative role of scientific knowledge in society. This dichotomy was especially important in nineteenth-century Russia, where the tensions between statistics as a governmental and a public-scientific project (Ian Hacking) were notably acute. This article charts the history of suicide statistics in Russia, exploring how multilayered associations between suicide and civilization were mapped upon perceived geographical, historical, and social fissures, both within Russia and between Russia and an abstract “west.” The transnational methods and universalizing principles of moral statistics thereby combined with local specificities—political, social, national, scientific—to produce a set of narratives about Russian tradition, backwardness, and modernity. By the early twentieth century, the suicide rate would become politicized in a very particular way, not just as a social problem, but also as an explicitly political matter implicating the fundaments of Russia’s autocratic system. The making of modern suicide, therefore, cannot be understood without attention to its multiple and particular histories.

"The Fatal Tendency of Civilized Society": Enrico Morselli's Suicide, Moral Statistics, and Positivism in Italy

Abstract: The study Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics by the Italian psychiatrist Enrico Agostino Morselli (1852–1929) is generally considered a major contribution to the European debate on suicide of the late decades of the nineteenth century and an important statistical source for Durkheim’s own Suicide . The rise of suicidology in nineteenth-century Italy as well as the political and intellectual context from which Morselli’s work emerged, however, have remained largely unexplored. This article sets out to deal with statistical studies on suicide in nineteenth-century Italy and, in particular, the political and intellectual context from which Morselli’s statistical work on suicide emerged. Until the second half of the nineteenth-century, suicide in the Italian Peninsula was an uncharted phenomenon. It became the object of statistical study in the troubled years that followed the unification of the country, within a wider context characterized by concerns for the country’s cultural and economic fragmentation, and for the high rates of violent crime and illiteracy that relegated Italy to the edge of civilized Europe. Forged in the political crucible of the newly unified Italian state, the determinism and evolutionist principles inherent in Morselli’s Suicide explain much about contemporary perceptions of Italy in particular, and notions of civilization, modernity and nationalism in general. Morselli’s Suicide remains a crucial element in the contextualization of suicidology as the direct antecedent to Durkheim’s own study of the same name.

"No Such Thing as a Night's Sleep": The Embattled Sleep of American Fighting Men from World War II to the Present

Abstract: This project aims to contribute to our understanding of the fraught relations of sleep and wakefulness in late modern America. The essay argues that the experience of sleep loss has been a widely prevalent phenomenon within the ranks of the modern American military. The study focuses on the Second World War, an inflection point in the trend toward sustained and continuous operations and other marathon activities. The nature of much combat in that global conflict demanded of fighting men unprecedented levels of stamina and resiliency, levels which often exceeded the limits of human endurance in terms of maintaining alertness and even consciousness. Under considerable pressure to perform and commonly faced with inhospitable conditions for obtaining rest, fighters struggled to meet the steep challenge of prolonged wakefulness through self-discipline and ingenuity. In this ongoing effort from the 1940s up to the present, American warriors have been aroused by fear, chemical stimulants, and a desire not to betray their comrades' trust. This essay seeks to complicate somewhat our sense of modern manhood by drawing attention to wakeful self-denial as a significant factor in gender identity formation. Acceptance, and sometimes celebration, of sleep deprivation in the armed forces reflected and reinforced cultural values and social practices of “toughguy” masculinity, and carried those hard values and practices into civil society. In a great many instances the difference between sleepiness and alertness is the difference between life and death. A man who dozes off in a jungle foxhole may never wake up again. J. D. Ratcliff, 1945 For two years on ship I think I never slept. I'd go 48 hours with no sleep. But that's a sign of endurance. The XO [executive officer] says to me, “Now there's a man.”

Against Multiple Hegemonies: Radical Malay Women in Colonial Malaya

Abstract: This article seeks to redress the established scholarly boundaries that have thus far characterized Malaysian historiography through a detailed analysis of a Malay radical women's movement, the Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS). Although much has been written in the last few decades about Malay political activism during post World War II Malaya, radical female groups that emerged during those eventful years, and their efforts to carve autonomous spaces within emerging projects of national liberation has suffered from considerable neglect. By blending the use of colonial and vernacular sources to contextualize the activities of AWAS within the changing social and political landscapes of its time, this article shows that female radical activists in post World War II colonial Malaya were confronted with multiple hegemonies that worked to stifle their development. These hegemonies originated, first, from within their own society in the form of customary conventions and practices associated with class differences. AWAS also had to contend with censure and disciplinary actions from their male compatriots, who regarded them as threats to male dominance in radical politics. Finally, AWAS came under the watchful eye and proscriptive measures of the colonial state that sought to regain its control over its Asian subjects in an age of decolonization. The members of this radical collective struggled to overcome these hegemonies by drawing upon a whole array of relationships and connections to advance their cause, albeit with limited success. This article attempts to fill a gap in the literature on radical activism in colonial Malaya by reconstructing the history of a women's movement, the Angkatan Wanita Sedar (hereafter AWAS). Until recently, very little attention has been paid to the activities of this select group of Malay women who struggled alongside their male comrades at the height of decolonization in Southeast Asia. The reasons from such historiographical oversight may be found in the traditional conceptualization and presentation of Malaysian and Southeast Asian history. There has been a pervasive assumption among scholars that female radical activism was often overshadowed by the grander politics of independence in the postwar era—spearheaded as it was by charismatic men—who had consciously or unconsciously subsumed women's issues within the rubric and rhetoric of nationbuilding and liberation for all previously colonized peoples. In this formulation,

The Introduction of Chocolate into England: Retailers, Researchers, and Consumers, 1640–1730

Abstract: In the mid-seventeenth century chocolate was a new and fascinating product in England, often grouped with two equally exotic drinks, coffee and tea. This article focuses on the early history of chocolate, examining how it was marketed, per- ceived, and consumed. Chocolate sellers, who included coffee-houses proprietors, frequently made use of print to educate potential customers: the 1640s and 1650s saw chocolate-drinking promoted as medicinal, excitingly foreign, and pleasurable. Further insights into the scientific, governmental, and social factors that drove interest in chocolate during the Restoration can be found in the manuscripts of the first Earl of Sandwich (1625-72). Despite evidence of considerable industry on the part of chocolate consumers, in the 1690s the success of a new breed of elite chocolate houses led to chocolate becoming strongly associated with leisure and decadence. These cultural associa- tions were promoted in succeeding decades by periodicals, drama, and satirical poems. Throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, consumers' experimentation with chocolate took place in the context of succeeding govern- ment's fiscal experiments with cacao and chocolate: new tax measures influenced the cost of chocolate and its availability. By consulting a range of sources, from customs records to recipe books, we can track the ways chocolate was used across the decades and the factors in its adoption by different groups of consumers. In 1668 the first Earl of Sandwich, lately back from Spain, gathered together knowledge on an intriguing new import: chocolate. An unpublished thirty-page section of Sandwich's journal details the manufacture of cacao beans into choco- late, assorted ways of preparing the beverage, and various "Rules" for the drink's safe consumption. Among the entries are the earliest recipes in English for making frozen chocolate treats, such as:

Thirty Kilos of Pork: Cultural Brokers, Corruption, and the “Bribe Trail” in the Postwar Stalinist Soviet Union

Abstract: Relying on recently opened Soviet justice and party archives, this article explores contested notions of "the bribe" and official corruption in the Late Stalinist USSR (1945-1953). The article highlights the efforts of the rationalizing and modernizing Soviet state to impose its vision of a perfectly professional civil service onto traditional structures that often valued personal relationships between petitioners and officials. While tracing the interaction of gifts, the law, and social practices along "bribe trails," the research examines the important role of what I call "cultural brokers." Acting as intermediaries between cultures, or between institutional and traditional arrangements, these cultural brokers moved between one set of norms and practices that dominated on the Soviet periphery, and a very different set in the Imperial center of Moscow. The article examines intermediaries who represented non-Russian clients in the courts of Moscow, focusing on the case of the Soviet republic of Georgia. Cultural brokers bridged the chasm among multiple legal cultures. Because of the multinational character of the empire, there was a great deal of demand for cultural brokers in many spheres of social and economic life. In highlighting participants' initiative the research challenges stereotypes of a paralyzed Soviet society during Stalinism, just as it questions popular caricatures of the prototypically corrupt Soviet bureaucrat.

Citizen-Breadwinners and Vagabond-Soldiers: Military Recruitment in Early Republican Southern Mexico

Abstract: This article is about the village-internal politics of military recruitment in the largely indigenous Mixteca mountains in Oaxaca, in the southwest of Mexico, in the first decades after independence. While Indians had not been allowed to serve in New Spain's armed forces in the late colony, in the new republic the requirement that communities send some of their members for armed service became one of the principal demands by which the state inserted itself in local life. The article argues that the politics of recruitment played a crucial role in local forms of Mexican state formation. On the one hand, in petitions protesting their recruitment it forced indigenous commoners and their families to adopt a language of citizenship that abstracted notions of male individuality as expressed through hard labor and patriarchal responsibility from the communal contexts that had embedded the political self-representation of indigenous villagers in the colonial period. On the other hand, it gave rise to a discourse of exclusion that equated recruitment and, by extension, the military with wrong-doing, vagabondage, and crime. This discourse powerfully contributed to the categorical division between civilian and military life that became so pronounced a feature of postcolonialMexican society, while at the same time giving army deserters, prevented from returning to their home towns by the stigma of soldiery, little chance but to really join the ranks of vagabonds or bandits that became such an acutely felt threat to the legal sovereignty of the new nation.

Irregular Marriage: Myth and Reality

Abstract: This article examines the historiography, the law, and the practice of irregular marriage in Britain It argues that there has been a confusion of terms in the historiography of irregular marriage that has served to obscure its meaning, pattern, and incidence Using evidence from Scotland where irregular marriage continued to be legally valid until 1939 (with one form remaining legally valid until 2006), the article argues that despite its legally valid status, the interpretation of what constituted irregular marriage was extremely limited and that it served as a de facto or functional equivalent to civil marriage In the formal legal sense Scotland had stood virtually alone amongst Western European countries in enshrining simple exchange of consent as sufficient basis for marriage However, in practice Scotland was very similar to other countries in what was regarded as acceptable forms of contracting marriage and the same stigma was attached to informal or irregular unions that we see elsewhere However, as elsewhere, the majority of people conformed to the legal rules and the legal paradigms of marriage, but equally there was no neat correspondence between legal codes and social practice with ordinary people adopting a more flexible definition of marriage than the official one

Saving Self-Murderers: Lifesaving Programs and the Treatment of Suicides in Late Eighteenth-Century Europe

Abstract: The medicalization of suicide has its history. This article explores one part of this history: the implementation of eighteenth-century lifesaving programs and their ramifications for the treatment of parasuicides and suicides. These programs are contextualized within early modern population politics. It is argued that, according to lifesaving treatises, enlightened societies, and mandatory regulations, states reconfigured suicides as preventable accidents, that is tragic incidents, which could be prevented through emergency intervention. Thus suicide became a public policy issue which required positive action from the whole of society. At the same time both the stigmatization of unanticipated death and the criminalization of suicide still held sway. For these reasons, novel rescue legislation obliged common people to overcome traditional prejudices, fears, and taboos concerning the touching of apparently dead bodies. This article also reveals incentivization practices necessary to encourage people to intervene. In particular lifesaving programs addressed trained physicians. As is argued, emergency medicine discourse, the implementation of “professional” lifesaving practices, as well as the necessary treatment of suicidal individuals promoted physicians to a more important role in the treatment of suicides than ever before. Therefore both nineteenth-century medicalization of suicide and modern suicide prevention programs cannot be understood without considering the rise of the very idea that a suicide is worth being saved.

Cattle, Dearth, and the Colonial State: Famines and Livestock in Colonial India, 1896-1900

Abstract: This article looks at the two massive famines that broke out in India at the end of the nineteenth century: in 1896-7 and again in 1899. However, instead of looking at the human cost of famines, which has been the subject of most studies till now, it examines the question of cattle mortality during these disasters. The huge numbers of cattle that perished during famines not only created an ecological imbal- ance, but also had a massive impact on the livelihood of peasants, on agrarian structures, on agricultural productivity, and on cropping patterns. This is one of the issues that we will highlight throughout this article. Besides this, we will also discuss colonial famine policies and examine the various ideological motivations that lay behind the relief measures that were implemented by the state. We will look, in particular, at the ideologies of Malthusianism and free trade and argue that, together with the avowed need to maintain "fiscal prudence," they were used by the colonial state to justify minimal famine relief. Famines became a distressingly familiar occurrence in late nineteenth century India. Their frequency was such that during the half-century between 1860 and 1910 there were as many as twenty cases of major famines, apart from several minor ones. 1 As news of these terrible visitations spread, there was strong criticism from several quarters, and government measures began to be seen as not only inadequate but also, to a large extent, responsible for creating famine conditions. 2 However, despite these criticisms the state remained resolute in its decision to sidestep responsibility and reduce relief expenses. In doing so, it received strong ideological support from the reigning doctrines of free trade and Malthusianism, both of which combined to justify minimal state relief and interference. This essay will examine the role of these ideologies in fashioning relief policies and in justifying the inadequate expenditure on famine relief. More important, this study will shift the focus away from the human cost of famines and bring it to bear on the impact of scarcity on the livestock economy of rural India. 3 This is not to belittle the human cost of famines, but an attempt to add another dimension to our understanding of them. Cattle was absolutely inte- gral to the rural economy—it was an essential cultivation tool, an extremely important source of food and manure, and one of the most significant markers of

Where Is the Boundary? Cocoa Conflict, Land Tenure, and Politics in Western Nigeria, 1890s-1960

Abstract: This paper is about cocoa-induced conflict between the Ibadan and the Ijebu, two Yoruba sub-groups of southwestern Nigeria. Although historians have examined the socio-economic impact of cocoa, they have however downplayed how it created violent conflict. I examine the interrelatedness of the transformation of land tenure system and economics of cocoa production to show that although the colonialists, and the Ibadan and the Ijebu claimed that land/boundary was the main source of conflict, in reality it was cocoa. Cocoa conflict realigned an indigenous culture of political allegiance, created new methods of litigation and arbitration, and rendered the colonial legal system incapable of solving a conflict that had strong impact on the imperial treasury. As it turned out, the “conflict” not the “law” or “court” dictated the pattern of resolution and compromise. If crude oil is a major source of tension between the Nigerian state and the Niger Delta region since the 1970s, cocoa during the colonial period negatively impacted the colonial economy and reconfigured the pattern of relations between the natives and the British imperial authority.

“Disordered” Democracies: Gender Conflict and New York Baptist Women, 1791–1830

Abstract: In spite of numerous excellent monographs written in recent years, the status of women in early national Baptist churches in the United States remains a subject of dispute. While some historians paint a gloomy picture of female marginalization, others contend that women had a surprising amount of influence over congregational matters. Taken at face value, current research suggests that early national Baptist women may have been the most oppressed in New England, had the most power in Georgia, and held varying degrees of influence in between. Such a conclusion is counter-intuitive and suggests the need for improved methodology. This article proposes a more rigorous methodology that will help researchers investigate local conditions more precisely and also make it possible to draw comparisons among Baptist congregations over time and from region to region. The essay then implements the proposed methodology in its examination of the records of twenty-six frontier New York congregations. It argues that Baptist women in western New York played important roles in many local congregations between 1791 and 1822, only to have their contributions diminished between 1823 and 1830. This shift in the Baptist approach to female congregational participation was prompted by cultural change, by socioeconomic development, and, in large part, by male fears of ecclesiastical disorder. The article concludes with a discussion of how the proposed methodology could advance future research regarding female Baptist agency in the antebellum period.

The Battle of Whitman Park: Race, Class, and Public Housing in Philadelphia, 1956–1982

Abstract: This article traces the history of the “battle of Whitman Park,” a twenty-seven-year-long controversy over the construction of a public housing project in a white working class neighborhood in South Philadelphia. By the late 1970s, it was the longest-running housing dispute in the United States and one of the longest conflicts over a liberal welfare program in American history. Sketching white community’s development along with the racial, class, and gender politics involved in planning, protesting, and building the housing project, the article draws broader arguments about poverty and political development in postwar urban America. I argue that the grassroots politics of neighborhood and public housing led to the development of a welfare rights movement that espoused a broad commitment to race-conscious welfare liberalism. At the same time, however, the controversy produced a nominally “colorblind” neighborhood protectionist movement that adopted a populist conservatism based upon the selective rejection of welfare state entitlements. Examining the white blue collar opponents of the project along with the predominantly poor African American proponents, it shows how the interaction of both movements contributed to the decline of American liberalism as well as creation of a civil rights conscious welfare rights movement.

Shadow of the Dragon: The Convergence of Myth and Science in Nineteenth Century Paleontological Imagery

Abstract: The dinosaur—as image and concept—is a ubiquitous presence in modern culture. As noted by numerous scholars including W. J. T. Mitchell, it has garnered numerous connotations and meanings over the course of more than two centuries of paleontological exploration and the translation of scientific knowledge into public discourse. In the nineteenth century, as cultural understanding of dinosaurs and the primordial world first began to develop out of nascent scientific inquiry, a process or pattern of convergence between the ancient, mythic figure of the dragon and the new and often controversial concept of prehistoric animals helped to shape the public’s conception and acceptance of dinosaurs and their nature. This process, which was accomplished primarily through dinosaur imagery, can be traced historically. Such an investigation reveals that factors including taxonomic manipulation and the power of visual illustration brought the dragon and the dinosaur to a point of cultural convergence. Beginning with the first large-scale replicas of dinosaurs, created for the rebuilt Crystal Palace complex at Sydenham, England under the direction of the noted naturalist Richard Owen, the concept of the dragon was deliberately co-opted into both the literature and the imagery of paleontology. Our twenty-first-century understanding of the dinosaurs that routinely populate our visual and other media is highly informed by this process, which is in itself an important aspect of the history of the prehistoric beast in western culture.