Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2014"

Singing, Performance, and Lower-Class Masculinity in the Dublin Magistrates' Court, 1820–1850

Abstract: The performance of manliness was central to a legal system where men dominated as judges, juries, and lawyers, and formed a majority of plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses. The negotiation of competing visions of masculinity became central to the performance of justice and men used appearances in the court as opportunities to present and defend their particular sense of manliness. In the context of the Dublin magistrate’s court in the early nineteenth century, men from the Irish lower classes sought to present a persona of Irish manhood, rooted in Irish republicanism, a strong identification with the Dublin artisanal classes, and set against an authoritarian British “other.” In presenting this manhood for an audience, men drew on story and song to convey complex messages that fed into political and manly identity. In doing so, they turned the metaphorical theatre of the court into an actual theatre, utilising space, audience, and the potential for wider publicity in a performance that both ensured their message was heard and emphasised their manliness as masters of the stage. This article explores the use of singing and performance by Irishmen in the Dublin magistrate’s court, highlighting their use in the process of furthering lower-class manliness and political identity as Irishmen. In May 1845, John Barrett, “a very little man,” attended the Dublin police court in College Street and charged his son, James with assault. James, who was described as “comical” looking with a broken nose, the mark of smoothing-iron on his forehead and the most ludicrous hair and whiskers ever beheld, was called to the bar. John, in a dialogue replete with puns, informed the court that he had given his son the best education and apprenticed him to a shoemaker, only to be assaulted by him when they met in the street. His testimony caused great hilarity in the court as he wove his version of events. In a true case of like father, like son, James’s story was no less entertaining. The prisoner, when called on for his defense, said he was a child of misfortune from his birth. When only six years of age, he fell down a chimney, delivering a letter from a gentleman to a lady, broke his leg and nearly cracked his neck. From that day forward “all the ills that flesh is heir to attended his career.” Journal of Social History vol. 47 no. 3 (2014), pp. 746–768 doi:10.1093/jsh/sht105 © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. It was true that his father did give him an excellent education, and did bind him to a shoemaker, and a very good shoemaker I am, said he (laughter [in the court]); but if I lived to the age of Matt-Hewsalem (loud laughter), and had as many sons as there were years in that great man’s life, I would not bind one of them to a shoemaker. Mr Tyndall [the magistrate]– Why? its a good trade, and an honest man can always make out a decent livelihood by it. Mr James Barrett– An honest man indeed—there never was an honest man a shoemaker, the thing is totally impossible! Mr Tyndall– That is rather a sweeping assertion against a respectable class of tradesmen. Mr James Barrett– I will prove it—When only six months at the business my master sent me to measure a lady’s foot—she had the finest turned ankle I ever looked on—you know what Byron says about ankles—(loud laughter)—so in place of measuring the foot I began to admire the ankle and what do you think she did? Mr Tyndall–Gave you a kick of course (laughter). Mr James Barrett– Your worship has hit it exactly—(laughter)—she gave a kick —such a kick—a two year old could not have done it better; and where do you think she hit me? why right in the nose, and that’s what has made my nasal organ turn up so towards my forehead (loud laughter). Mr Tyndall– She served you right (loud laughter). Mr Barrett– She served me out at any rate, my master lost her custom, and I nearly lost my place. My next adventure was with a lady’s maid at Surgeon –––’s and she gave me a welt of a smoothing iron—(laughter)—on my forehead— here’s the mark. I got into innumerable scrapes after that, and before I was out of my time my master became a bankrupt, for I managed to ease him of all his customers (laughter). I next fell in with a dress-maker who lived near Old Dunleary, but she cut me shortly after, and ran off with a sailor; and being a bit of a poet I wrote the following verses about her: When charming Kitty took her way, And parted from Dunleary, Poor Barrett wandered near the sat, And sighed till he was weary, His eyes were fastened to the car Which held the fair deluder, In vain he gazed and from afar His longing heart pursued her (loud laughter) At Kitty now no more I look, Nor through the shutters peep-inNor singing at her window knock To interrupt her sleeping, Oh haste! Return, ye minutes fair, Which passed away so gaily; Or give me back the heart which there I parted with too freely. (roars of laughter) James continued with his tale of woe, explaining that he had decided to give up women and let them woo him; a comment that caused great laughter in the court and a lesson he presumably learned from Lord Byron’s satire Don Juan. This Singing, Performance, and Lower-Class Masculinity 747

“Active and Conscious Builders of Communism”: State-Sponsored Tourism for Soviet Adolescents in the Early Cold War, 1945–53

Abstract: This article examines state-sponsored tourism for Soviet adolescents during the post-World War II years of Stalin’s rule, 1945–1953, a topic not explored in any depth within scholarship on the USSR, despite the surprising degree of importance ascribed to this area by the authorities. Through adopting the lens of tourism studies and childhood and youth studies, the essay enriches our understanding of Soviet postwar society, particularly the overt official endeavors to forge model young citizens and the covert efforts to legitimize the political system, encourage natalism, and spread the Soviet model throughout the world via Cold War public diplomacy. Finding striking convergences and illuminating disparities between the approaches of different political and social structures to young people and their leisure time, this piece advances our understanding of the ways that modern societies maintain and reproduce themselves, or fail to do so. Furthermore, the essay considers matters of broader humanistic relevance, such as the mobilization of emotions for government purposes and the politicization of childhood and youthhood. It compares the Soviet case study to authoritarian and democratic western states and uses the socialist context of the postwar Soviet Union to enrich and add nuance to current scholarly models, based overwhelmingly on case studies of western settings that undercount the importance of state organs.

Captive Audiences: Sound, Silence, and Listening in Civil War Prisons

Abstract: This article listens to the role played by sound and silence in Civil War prisons. Applying the methodology of sensory history, it argues that the experience of captivity cannot be understood without considering the aural environment of prisons, including patterns of listening, conflicting interpretations of the same sounds, and the role of sound in resistance. Although war was noisy for participants in general, prisoners had good reason to infuse the aural environment with meaning. Amid the confusion of captivity, prisoners actively listened for clues to help interpret their current circumstances and future prospects. Echoes of battle, voices of civilians, and rumors allowed prisoners to listen beyond the guards and slightly empower themselves. Sound also entwined with how prisoners perceived the passage of time, especially on days they infused with acoustic importance such as Sundays and national holidays. Focusing on listening as a methodology is important because it has the flexibility to incorporate competing interpretations. Keepers and captives attached different patterns of meaning to the same sounds and this is useful to consider in examining lived-experience. Preserving acoustic harmony was part of prison guards’ larger task of maintaining order. Conversely, effective use of noise offered prisoners a unique method of resistance because it utilized one of the few advantages of a weak but numerically superior population. The aural world was a channel of practical knowledge and captivity experience, a point of disagreement between prisoners and guards, and a method of resistance.

Kindness and Reciprocity: Liberated Prisoners and Christian Charity in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract: This article interrogates historiographical debates over discipline and charity in the penal reform era We cannot evaluate philanthropy solely in terms of class discipline or normalization, it argues, if we wish to understand the often intimate relationships binding agents and recipients of charity, even in the prison While deconstructing the language of sympathy employed by penal reformers, historians have been sceptical of purportedly grateful prisoner testimony This article proposes we re-consider such evidence to ask how “kindness” was understood and felt by benefactors and recipients Drawing on new scholarship, it explores the active role of prisoners and their families in negotiating the philanthropic exchange The article investigates a pioneering rehabilitation programme run by Sarah Martin, prison visitor at Great Yarmouth Borough Gaol, 1818–1843 Scrutinizing her accounts of working with offenders, it analyzes immediate and longer-term reactions by prisoners and their families to Christian instruction and welfare Reconstructing the post-discharge experiences of forty-three “liberated prisoners,” it assesses the role played by Christian reclamation in desistance from crime, alongside employment and family ties Testimony from former offenders and their relatives suggests many did not see Christian ideals of duty and fellowship as alien to their values; rather, these corresponded with a laboring-class ethics of kinship and neighborliness If we want to appreciate the agency of the poor in the wider charity economy, we must examine how recipients acted in accordance with their own social and moral codes

Morality and the Middle Class: The European Pattern and the Norwegian Singularity

Abstract: The article presents one of the main findings from a recent study of the culture of the highly educated middle class in Norway; namely, the significance of morality in their discourse and the composition of this value universe, and suggests elements of cultural-historical continuity to explain the pattern observed. Such a result diverges in certain ways from the conventional wisdom of social theory. In the article, we argue for the existence of a Nordic case of middle class culture, by examining our evidence in the light of some central contributions to Western, comparative social history and cultural sociology. Our point of departure is the project on the European Burgertum led by German historians, and the study by Michele Lamont comparing the upper middle classes in France and the United States. In a methodological argument, we suggest that the question of what constitutes classes historically in existing social formations needs to be revisited in terms of cultural processes as well as forms of societal interaction. The content of Norwegian middle-class morality emerges as different cultural repertoires that can be represented by two ideal, moral types: “The Good Samaritan” and “the socially responsible citizen.” In the last part of the article, we discuss a set of hypotheses to explain such findings in terms of moral repertoires historically embedded in Norwegian culture, and suggest the existence of a specific regime of moral action.

Obedience and Emotion: A Challenge in the Emotional History of Childhood

Abstract: This article deals with the emotional implications of children’s obedience, particularly in the context of significant reconsiderations of obedience in the United States from the early nineteenth century onward. Using newly-usable quantitative as well as qualitative information, the article assesses efforts to change the emotional valence of obedience, particularly by adding unprecedented emphasis on cheerful obedience (with a concomitant concern about sulkiness), and the reasons for this change. This interesting transition presaged a fuller decline of interest in obedience in favor of other childhood emotional qualities.

Prisoners Writing Home: The Functions of Their Letters c. 1680-1800

Abstract: This article examines the contents of a previously neglected source: the letters that English criminals wrote from prison c.1680-1800. These letters provide us with new insights into the experience of punishment away from the scaffold, and they give us a view of the importance of literacy as a means of communication for many ordinary men and women. Family, friendship and community ties were often strengthened by imprisonment, but could also be challenged. Many writers used letters to obtain practical support while in prison, but they also found writing was a means to reflect upon what they held to be most important. Sentiment and deeply held beliefs were expressed in their letters home.

Racial Inequality in Brazil and the United States, 1990-2010

Abstract: This essay compares statistical indicators of black/white racial inequality in Brazil and the United States from 1990 to 2010. Those indicators include racial differences in fertility, life expectancy, infant mortality, regional distribution, educational enrollment and achievement, labor force distribution, income and earnings, and poverty. From 1994 to 2010, Brazilians elected a series of presidential administrations committed to reducing the country’s very high levels of class and regional inequality. The programs enacted by those governments did reduce poverty and inequality and enabled some 30 million Brazilians to move from the poor and working class into a greatly expanded middle class. The article finds that policies intended to combat class inequality worked to reduce racial inequality as well. On most indicators, Brazil made greater progress in lowering racial disparities during those twenty years than did the United States. By 2010 the United States was still the more racially egalitarian country, in statistical terms; but Brazil’s experiments in social democracy and in class- and race-based affirmative action are producing outcomes that merit close attention from citizens and policymakers interested in reducing class and racial inequality in the United States.

Capitalism's Captives: The Maritime United States Slave Trade, 1807–1850

Abstract: The maritime interstate trade in bondspersons illustrates the contours of United States capitalism of the early nineteenth century as it developed between 1807 and midcentury. The saltwater trade between the Chesapeake and New Orleans comprised four stages corresponding to larger economic developments. An incidental slave trade rose in the context of the US ban on imported slaves, embargoes, and the growth of domestic commerce. An essential trade followed, growing in the post-War of 1812 transatlantic market for agricultural staples. It was carried on aboard vessels plying the so-called cotton triangle and also ships carrying regionally-specific goods and commodities between domestic ports. The 1830s witnessed a vertical trade exemplified by one slaving firm that responded to the swift expansion of credit and surging demand. Following the panic of 1837, market fragmentation led to a mechanical trade, which was also dependent on robust exports of slave-produced crops. Financial technologies propelled that development, and the maritime slave trade was nearly seamlessly integrated into the broader coastal trade.

Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities, 1869–1932

Abstract: The article examines an effort in the first quarter of the twentieth century to install public toilets in cities throughout the United States, especially in the prosperous industrial region of the Northeast and Midwest. The campaign illustrates the frustrated ambitions in the Progressive Era for a new relationship between public authority and the private body, a relationship in which the state would protect privacy, encourage personal care, and hence refine the inner character of the citizen. In contrast to nineteenth-century public urinals (which were few in number and intended mainly to prevent public health nuisances) twentieth-century “comfort stations” were typically large, underground structures at major public squares. They were to have replaced the privately-owned alternatives in saloons and other businesses that attracted customers by exploiting their bodily needs. Women’s groups, drawing on a long-established belief that women were the prime guardians of private wellbeing and moral discipline, were prominent in the campaign for comfort stations in Chicago, New York and other cities. Municipal governments even in the largest cities hesitated to build more than a few comfort stations because of the high cost of construction and maintenance. Comfort stations proved unsuccessful in competing with department stores, hotels and other privately owned alternatives. Women in particular opted for the consumer model of privacy, which preserved class privilege by excluding the less affluent. Almost all of the early twentieth century comfort stations have since closed, as American cities have abandoned the public role in promoting bodily privacy.

The Transsexual Phenomenon: A Counter-History

Abstract: Within a relatively short period in US history, transsexuality, a category that had once not existed, became a widely recognized term It was named and described in the 1960s in influential publications, including Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1969) The national picture changed from one of no significant institutional support for transsexual therapy and surgery in 1965 to a situation in 1975 where about twenty major medical centers were offering treatment and some thousand transsexuals had been provided with surgery Historians of transsexuality have been somewhat dazzled by this demonstration of the making of sex One of the most perceptive observers of the twentieth-century historical sociology of sex has written of transsexualism’s “widespread public and professional acceptance” by the 1970s, “an accepted syndrome, buttressed by a vast medical armamentarium of research, publications, and treatment programs” The result is not exactly a case of hidden history but rather inattention to an important period of critique, and the implied success of systems of technology and therapy that I am going to suggest were far more tentative, contested, and fragmentary This neglected story both rethinks the early history of a new medical diagnosis and entity and sheds rather negative light on US psychiatric and surgical practices in the 1960s and 1970s

A Self-Defining "Bourgeoisie" in the Early French Revolution: The Milice Bourgeoise, the Bastille Days of 1789, and Their Aftermath

Abstract: Though recent scholars have argued that no self-defining “ bourgeois ” identities existed during the French Revolution, such perspectives do not consider the pivotal role Milice bourgeoise forces played in the Bastille insurrection and France’s broader social upheavals of mid-1789. Combatting perceived lower-class disorder, explicitly “ bourgeois ” units composed of propertied citydwellers mobilized to seize control of and direct the central uprisings that made the Revolution. In Paris, the motley insurgents of July 12 were forcibly disarmed the next day by a militia hastily organized through the city’s former Third Estate voting districts, which moved first against lower-class disorder instead of the royal forces menacing the city. Following the Bastille’s fall, in municipal revolutions across France such units formed the basis for the new National Guard, which thereafter possessed exclusive policing rights. Based upon a wide reading of participant and observer accounts from the early Revolution, this article attempts to explain the role of socially exclusionary identities in motivating collective action in 1789. The French became revolutionary not through a unified uprising of “the people,” but rather under the aegis of a socially exclusive and self-definably “ bourgeois ” force.

"Nurseries of the Poore": Hospitals and Almshouses in Early Modern Scotland

Abstract: This article examines the extent and nature of hospital and almshouse provision in early modern Scotland. It suggests that in order to understand early modern poor relief more fully, more attention needs to be paid to the variety of possible sources of welfare, not all necessarily associated with Poor Laws and compulsory or statutory provision. Hospital provision was an important component of welfare, and indeed was closely related to the wider apparatus of relief. The article argues in particular that the Protestant Reformation of 1560 was an important factor in improving both the provision of funding for hospitals, and the effectiveness of their administration. Although it initially posed a potential threat to the network of late-medieval hospitals and caused some disruption, the Reformation’s creation of a network of local church courts, and in particular the kirk session, was crucial to the operation of both surviving pre-Reformation hospitals and the new foundations which emerged in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The article also assesses the limitations of the church’s achievements, and notes that rural areas enjoyed much less secure hospital provision. Finally, the article offers a case-study of life in Glasgow hospitals, moving beyond the institutional mechanisms involved in hospital fundraising and administration to explore the experiences of inmates themselves. Future studies of early modern poverty will need to take much greater account of hospitals’ role in the ecology of relief, and of the church’s ongoing role in welfare provision, narratives of secularisation notwithstanding.

Single Women and the Rural Credit Market in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract: This article examines the strategies, actions, and meaning of the credit activities of single women in rural credit markets in eighteenth-century France. For the purpose of this article, gender and, more importantly, marital status, are considered as critical categories of historical analysis, and this approach has yielded key data in the examination of loans records from 1733 to 1790. This article concludes that not only did single women gradually become major agents in the circulation of capital within their communities but that they also gained greater social freedom and empowerment thanks to their role as creditors.

"A Dark State of Affairs": Hajj Networks, Pan-Islamism, and Dutch Colonial Surveillance during the Interwar Period

Abstract: During the 1920’s and 30’s, the Dutch colonial government worked together with the Dutch-owned shipping conglomerate Kongsi Tiga to control hajj maritime networks linking the Netherlands East Indies and the Middle East. This was a period of increasing Dutch anxiety over weakening imperial dominion in Southeast Asia and both the colonial administration and colonial businesses feared Muslim religious networks would expose colonial subjects to anti-imperial and pan-Islamic ideas while abroad. It was vital for Dutch shipping companies to maintain segregated and highly policed spaces onboard to uphold Kongsi Tiga’s monopoly over shipping between the Netherlands East Indies and Jeddah and to counter threats to Dutch hegemony more generally. Worried that “dangerous” passengers, such as Hadrami Arabs and Meccan sheikhs, would influence the general “spirit” of Indonesian pilgrims onboard by encouraging anti-colonial, nationalistic, and pan-Islamic sentiments, Kongsi Tiga systematically segregated passengers along racial, ethnic, and class lines. Racial and religious categories also informed Kongsi Tiga’ s reactions to indigenous shipping initiatives by Indonesian Muslims. Proposals put forth by Muslim organizations such as Muhammidiyah , were swiftly undermined by the combined forces of Dutch shipping companies and the colonial administration who worked together to maintain a Dutch monopoly over hajj shipping, not only for financial profit, but to foster Dutch control over transnationally mobile colonial subjects. This article reveals the unique and vital role shipping companies played in expanding colonial politics, culture, and society across transoceanic spaces and reconceptualizes our geographic understanding of empire as inhabiting the overlooked oceanic spaces between metropole and colony.

From Controlling Emotion to Expressing Feelings in Mid-Twentieth-Century England

Abstract: This article examines British emotional culture through the lens provided by records of group-analytic therapy sessions held in the 1940s and 1960s. Sigmund Heinrich Foulkes, a Jewish psychoanalyst trained in Germany, developed group-analytic therapy, with the aim of contributing to the creation of a democratic society in which people would operate without reliance on authority. The sessions reveal how the existing culture of rigid emotional control, stronger in Britain than elsewhere, operated in participants’ lifeworlds. They understood mental distress in terms of nerves and sought tonics as cures. Psychoanalytic or psychological concepts were largely absent from everyday working and middle class lifeworlds in the 1940s, followed by growth of awareness among the educated middle-class in 1960s London. The participants’ approach to emotional management was shaped by the demands of respectability and economic forces and opportunities, which changed radically from the early 1940s to the late 1960s. The sessions reveal the erosion of deference taking place as new ideas and economic security enabled greater autonomy. The effort involved in reshaping emotional responses and becoming more expressive is evident in the sessions. New disciplines were required of participants, but the article offers no support for a carceral interpretation of group-analytic therapy.

Class Sentiments: Putting the Emotion Back in Working-Class History

Abstract: The article argues that the unstable emotional cultures of nineteenth-century America can help explain the dynamic labor conflicts of the century. Further, it argues that the Civil War, and the strike waves of the postbellum period, be considered emotional revolutions. Drawing on examples from the history of enslavement, and the discourse surrounding wage labor strikes, particularly the Homestead strike, the article shows how workers in different settings, used their emotions to guide themselves toward the emotional liberty promised by the American Revolution. Enslaved people faced a remarkably restrictive regime, but the combination of the emotional refuge of the quarters, and the opportunities provided by sentimental culture, fuelled a resistance movement. Northern workers, who faced a regime less restrictive than twentieth-century wage workers would encounter, similarly relied on the interplay between sentimental emotional ideas and their more tempestuous emotional culture to mount a protest movement. Both movements relied on anger, but one difference was that middle-class northerners were less receptive to waged workers’ anger than they had been to enslaved anger. The article concludes by suggesting that emotions should be integrated more fully into discussions of class politics in history more broadly, with greater analysis of how emotional regimes, communities, and resistance movements, evolve along with the political economy.

"The Business of Reputations": Secrecy, Shame, and Social Standing in Nineteenth-Century French Debtors' and Creditors' Newspapers

Abstract: With the rise of industrialization and urbanization in the early nineteenth century, concerns about identity and information became increasingly pressing. At the same time, nineteenth-century society placed a high value on reputation and appearance. Secrecy was thus both deemed necessary to bourgeois notions of privacy and viewed as potentially dangerous to public order. While this dynamic has been explored for the elite primarily in terms of family life, the impact of honor and shame on economic practices of non-elites has been little considered. This article offers the first in-depth analysis of two competing types of papers in nineteenth-century France—those, like Le Tocsin and La Gazette des renseignements , which championed creditors and those, like Pauvre Jacques and La Gazette de Sainte-Pelagie , which defended the interests of debtors. Despite representing often directly opposing interests, both kinds of papers prominently employed tactics of public humiliation through the circulation of the names and personal details of specific creditors and debtors whose actions were deemed dishonorable. By examining the importance of reputation and honor in the lives of small shopkeepers and artisans at the beginning of the industrial revolution, this article shows how reputation grew rather than diminished in importance with a perceived increase in the anonymity of the market and how the commercial press could be used to describe and denounce economic and legal forces perceived as oppressive to small tradesmen and merchants.

The Third Sex: Historians, Consumer Society, and the Idea of the American Consumer

Abstract: Scholars have profiled the American “consumer” in myriad ways, among them: self-determining, self-destroying, morally decayed and hedonistic, gendered, “the public,” and as simple economic functionary. During the nineteenth century, Americans, influenced by republican ideals and religious ambivalence about the marketplace, did not appreciably modify long-standing associations of “consumer” with waste. Yet the imperatives of an increasingly important commercial sphere, while not significantly eroding the word’s taint, complicated its meaning. Economists and sociologists in particular sought to describe the ways in which consumers and consumerism altered American life. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that historians began to take notice. At first, the role of advertising served as their central analytical tool but, as the field of consumer history matured from the late 1960s and into the 1990s, approaches framed by other disciplines informed American historians’ explications of what had by then clearly emerged as a consumption-centered society. Notably, an uneasiness with the moral implications of consumer behavior continued to thread through scholarly work. This article considers the ways that cultural preconceptions consciously or unconsciouly have shaped our ability to imagine and evaluate “the consumer.” It concludes that such an entity may be best understood as a highly malleable, often disruptive “other” that animates a scholarship seeking to understand its dimensions, but it bears little similarity to a real being. The ubiquity and power of consumption and the consumer in modern society have attracted the attention of American scholars, essayists, moralists, ad men, and politicians, to name just a few, for decades and even centuries. Thorstein Veblen famously believed that flagrant consumption formed the basis of a good reputation in late nineteenth century. Jimmy Carter scolded, “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” The realm of wishing and buying and displaying has fascinated some of the most talented historians of several generations. They have produced a rich and sprawling literature on a subject that potentially touches every facet of personal, social, economic, institutional, and cultural life, and one fraught with salient moral, ideological, and methodological issues. Journal of Social History vol. 47 no. 3 (2014), pp. 769–786 doi:10.1093/jsh/sht109 © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Yet, perhaps because of its breadth, one would be hard-pressed to find in this literature agreement on a common meaning for the very words consumerism and consumer society. A special murkiness enshrouds characterizations of the central actor in the marketplace—the consumer. A bold agent, a problem child, and an evocative stand-in for real and complex transactions, the “consumer” sits at the epicenter of the “consumer society” that many posit as America’s principal modern and post-modern condition. Understandably, scholars have found this perplexing figure (for the purposes of this paper, a gender-adaptable “it”) more than simply a buyer of things. The consumer drifts through the literature, sometimes appearing as a singular being that acts in humanly contradictory and unpredictable ways, and sometimes as a cogent participant in the synthetic aggregate known as “consumers”—one that indexes the economy and represents the population at large. It has been portrayed as a chooser, communicator, explorer, identity seeker, hedonist, victim, rebel, activist, and citizen, in some instances made synonymous with American, and to an early theorist of consumption, known only as the general public. Lack of common definitions may not be an entirely problematic condition. Indeed, given that people buy and use things that express a variety of desires, values, and social structures, one might suggest that terms such as consumer, consumerism, and consumer society can be adequately deployed on an elastic basis, heuristically seeking those meanings particularly appropriate to a demographic group, culture, or historical period under scrutiny. Yet, this flexibility raises a question that may well defy an easy answer: How can the nature and impact of consumption on society or its identity with society be understood absent a clearer picture of cultural preconceptions consciously or unconsciously at work in the scholarly imagination? Certainly, such historically overly generalized groups as women, AfricanAmericans, or laborers, have faced somewhat similar problems of definition. Their multiple identities of class, region, ethnicity, and gender have been articulated through sometimes contentious processes of differentiation that have yielded increasingly nuanced scholarship. “Identity,” as we now know, demands appreciation as a summation and interrelation of both discrete and collective experiences, as they have been lived in recent and far past, and as they exist within changing social contexts. It also requires giving special consideration to ways in which identity has been deployed to cast an “other.” We might look at “consumer” as posing a somewhat similar puzzle, and fit it into the scholarly discourse on identity politics that prevailed especially in the 1990s. Consumers undoubtedly are persons, acting on choices created by the economic, social, technological, even geographic and spiritual structures in which they live. “Consumer” clearly is an identity. However, it is so thoroughly entwined with cultural and group identities (including the expected gender, race and ethnicity, and class, as well as “producer”) that it stymies attempts to isolate and examine it as a unique or separate entity. A disquieting sense that the consumer might not be entirely human further separates it from other historical actors. Twentieth-century magazine advertisements reveal ways in which, at least in the imagination of ad men, purchases transform people into objects and objects attain characteristics of people, prompting new models of what a consumer is and does. In its milder form, the potential buyer is drawn to identify with a glamorous image, perhaps a sleek art deco figure Journal of Social History Spring 2014 770

Freedom for Too Few: Slave Runaways in the Brazilian Empire

Abstract: Using more than 2,100 slave runaway announcements from across the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889), this article argues that the typical runaway was an atypical slave. Specifically, runaways were overwhelmingly male and of a limited range of age, worked outdoors and itinerant jobs, and possessed outward (e.g., clothing) and inward (e.g., language and literacy skills) characteristics. This unusual combination put a small minority of bondspeople into a position to flee, while flight remained unthinkable or far too dangerous to the vast majority, even at a point that slavery was presumed to be ending. This finding matters because for more than a half a century, historians have commonly used the runaway slave as the quintessential example of slave resistance. But this interpretation may transform the runaway into an unrepresentative symbol and divert our attention from the many ways that oppression within slavery was, by definition, the lack of opportunities to resist.

Mobility and Modernity in the Urban Transport Systems of Colonial Manila and Singapore

Abstract: Transport motorization is a critical juncture in the history of mobility, yet there is a pressing need to scrutinize and historicize it further, especially in the historiography of Southeast Asia. In this comparative study of the transport histories of early-twentieth-century Manila and Singapore, two colonial urban centers that exhibited the classical metropole-colony dynamics, I argue that the motorization of urban transportation was not simply a process of technological change. The introduction of the electric streetcar and the motor vehicle in the early twentieth century (1900–1941) led not just to the marginalization of other transport modes but also to profound changes in the formation of modern societies and the very idea of modernity. Such changes were accentuated by colonial conditions and the ideological particularities of the late-colonial era, such as the racialist discourse that informed the notion of technological modernism. Adding complexity to society–technology relations was the reality of appropriation, as the colonized began to participate either as conscious consumers or as laborers in providing transport services.

"All Men Are Entitled to Justice By the Government": Black Workers, Citizenship, Letter Writing, and the World War I State

Abstract: This article examines the letter writing of black railroad workers to the United States Railroad Administration during World War I. Engaging with scholarship on the African American experience during the war years, the article considers the ways in which ordinary African Americans acted on the opportunities presented by the mobilization for challenging Jim Crow and seeking racial justice. The article disagrees with interpretations that see the war period as one of promise but ultimately failure and disappointment for advocates of racial justice. Rather, attention to the epistolary undertakings of black railroaders reveals how letter writing itself figured as a form of political action through which black workers sought to bend the state to their purposes. The content of black railwaymen’s letters demonstrates the importance of citizenship and the centrality of economic justice to civil rights activism. Moreover, these letters illustrate how letter writing could be empowering. Not only did black workers demand fair treatment at work but in the course of writing many of them also fashioned themselves as fully endowed citizens. In Jim Crow America, in a society and culture that publicly denied African Americans agency as well as basic rights and liberties, the capacity of letter writing to facilitate “selfnarration” against dominant exclusionary definitions of citizenship helped African Americans, in the words of historian Chad Williams, “resist white supremacy, affirm their citizenship, and assert their humanity.” Like many other black workers in the industrial North during the World War I years, Lott Calloway came from the South. Born in Stokes, North Carolina, in 1886, he joined a burgeoning stream of African Americans making their way to the nation’s industrial centers in the first decades of the twentieth century. He lived in the heart of the old African American neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, just off Mt. Vernon Avenue, with his wife, Minnie, whom he had married in 1915, and their three young children, Clarence, Ruth, and Harry. When the census taker visited his home in 1920, the thirty-four year old Calloway must have felt a sense of satisfaction, if not manhood, pride, and citizenship, in setting out the details of his growing family and in the fact that over the previous decade

The Dead Belong to the Living: Disinterment and Custody of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: Historians have long noted the growing distance between the living and the dead over the course of the nineteenth century. As private control over the dead was ceded to medical experts, funeral professionals, and municipal governments, interactions with mortal remains grew increasingly rare, and the formerly intimate relationship between living and dead family members became more remote, if also more sentimental. This transformation, however, was neither instantaneous nor total. Indeed, rates of voluntary reburials undertaken by family members seem to have increased around the turn of the century. These disinterments appear in the legal record after midcentury, when American courts began adjudicating family quarrels over exhumations. Using these cases, which amounted to custody battles over dead relatives, I argue that families did not easily relinquish control over physical remains in this period. Though a preference remained for protecting the repose of the dead, both families and civil courts increasingly came to regard the disinterment of bodies as acceptable, even reverential. Living family members viewed their own emotional wellbeing as inextricably linked to the location and condition of these bodies, over which they retained a vigilant sense of proprietorship, even decades after burial. Despite emerging scientific understandings of death and decay and new institutional controls over the disposition of mortal remains, these cases suggest that a powerful desire to control and possess the dead in bodily form remained a prominent reaction to death throughout the nineteenth century.

A garden from ashes: the Post-9/11 Manhattan City-Shrine, the Triangle Fire Memorial March, and the educative value of mourning

Abstract: New York City's 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire memorial march and 2001's spontaneously erected post-9/11 city-shrine occurred during vastly different eras of Western mourning theory and practice, yet were mourned with markedly similar emotional outpourings of disbelief, grief, and outrage The Triangle factory memorial march epitomizes collective mourning richly invested in Victorian mourning traditions, reflecting how mourners of this era were willing to feel grief, remain tied to the lives of those grieved, and be reminded of the physicality of loss Beginning in 1913, Freud's work reinvents the theory and practice of loss and mourning, medicalizing and pathologizing Victorian mourning rituals, branding them uncivilized and taboo Soon thereafter post-Freudian notions of loss and mourning take firm root, stand strong today, and moreover gain strength as new mourning-based pathologies are added to the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual A direct contrast, I argue post-9/11 Manhattan city-shrine mourning practices evidence a crack in Freudian theory's armor allowing for the resurgence of pre-Freudian, Victorian mourning rituals As a result, nearly a century after the Triangle fire memorial march, the post-9/11 city-shrine reflects not the post-Freudian, sanitized, modern-day notion of mourning one might expect, but hearkens backward in time to the pre-Freudian mourning practices of Victorians I reveal, document, and analyze modern-day mourners' calling-into- question of Freudian mourning theory, arguing this questioning's significance in the present historical moment, examining the post-9/11 city-shrine's marked similarities to Victorian-era mourning practices, and offering, I argue, a distinct sign of an unsentimental cultural re-humanizing of loss

Sensation and the Making of New Zealand Adolescence

Abstract: Many historians associate adolescent pleasures and subcultures with the mid-twentieth century. Sensations and their personifications, this article suggests, also formed a focus for commentary and experience during the second half of the nineteenth century and the years leading up to the First World War. There was a noisy public discussion around adolescence in New Zealand in which notions of sensation and pleasure played a key role. In scrutinizing a number of young, sensation-loving characters—larrikins and larrikinesses, mashers, dudes and the flapper—the discussion considers the intersections of social changes (urbanization and gendered work and leisure), cultural influences (literature and language), the significance of gender, and anxieties over morality and propriety. The making of New Zealand adolescence, I suggest, involved broad social transformations as well as the local rearticulation of internationally-inflected cultural ideas about sensation and its social control.

The Gold Diggers of 1833: African American Dreams, Fortune-Telling, Treasure-Seeking, and Policy in Antebellum New York City

Abstract: This is an article about black dreams, blacks digging for buried treasure, and black fortune tellers, mostly in New York City (although Philadelphia occasionally comes up as well) in the first half of the nineteenth century. The piece is based on decades of reading court cases and newspapers and in it, I adduce a whole lot of material, much of which has not been seen by anyone else in over one hundred and seventy-five years, in order to try and disturb, just a little, the historiographies of, on the one hand, free black life in nineteenth-century New York City, and on the other, that of conjure. In contradistinction to most other scholars working on African Americans in New York City, indeed writing about the North and perhaps even African America, I am little interested in voluntary organizations, religious organizations and the like, or for that matter most of the black leaders or the black elite, all of which subjects have been examined well and extensively by other historians. My interests lie elsewhere, in finding and exploiting sources that enable us to get at, even if usually only obliquely, those who too often get omitted from historical accounts. This piece, then, is part of my long-standing effort to recover the everyday lives of ordinary African Americans living in New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Aging and Dependency in an Independent Indian Nation: Migrant Families, Workers and Social Experts (1940–60)

Abstract: This article explores several strands of ideas and tropes about age and aging that were articulated by a new and entrepreneurial rank of social experts in India. These social experts, attempted to explain the rapid changes transforming a newly independent nation. The knowledge and narratives generated by these Indian social experts and administrators will be explored in this work at specific historical conjunctures, beginning with the 1940’s when labor experts expressed anxieties about labor unrest, productivity and the breakdown of workers families; after Indian independence in the late 1940’s-1950’s amongst efforts to map, survey and regulate refugees and finally, by tracing discussions amongst Indian psychiatrists and social workers regarding the psychosocial pressures of climate and environment that were affecting various age groups in India in the 1950–60’s. This work suggests that unlike in welfare debates in the west in the 1940–50’s where aging began to be viewed as a social question and distinct social problem by itself, in India it was confounded with the lack of family, changing generational roles rather than as a distinct chronological stage and problem. Some of the key questions that inform this article are: How and why did age and aging begin to be viewed as risks that were associated with the failures of family life? How did age centered identities become more visible and begin to represent critical interests relating to productivity and socio-political control in these decades, and finally, how did social elites project these ideas and arguments?