Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2015"

Leniency versus Toughening?: The Prosecution of Male and Female Violence in 19th Century Holland

Abstract: This article questions the relevance of the theory of the criminalization of men in nineteenth-century Holland compared to the situation in England. Works on English criminality show a clear gender bias in relation to the prosecution and punishment of violence in the nineteenth century but we argue that this ‘criminalization of men’ did not occur in Holland between 1750 and 1886. Quantitative and qualitative data from different cities and produced by different courts (from the police tribunal to the highest court of justice) in the province of Holland have been collected and based upon these data, our research shows the absence of a clear emphasis on the prosecution of violent men. An increase in the cases of violence prosecuted by the courts is noticeable, but the criminalization of violence targeted both men and women. No gender bias could be found in the prosecution of violent offenders; in terms of sentencing, the somewhat harsher punishments given to men relate most likely to the seriousness of the wounds inflicted rather than a gender bias. Finally, this article suggests that the English judicial system gave more leeway to the different judicial actors to dismiss female offenders before they reached trial than in a system based on the penal code.

"No Sense of Wrongdoing": Abortion in Belfast 1917–1967

Abstract: There has been limited academic research on the issue of abortion in Ireland, north or south in an historical context and this article aims to fill this historiographical lacuna, taking a comparative approach to the issue of abortion in Belfast between 1917 and 1967. The experience of women who came before the authorities for attempting to terminate a pregnancy in Belfast is located in a wider historiographical context and the article discusses vernacular understandings of the legal and medical authorities’ attitudes toward abortion. Evidence from court records is used to recreate knowledge networks and to reconstruct the medical marketplace and the options facing women with unwanted pregnancies. A study of abortion in Belfast not only offers a localized regional study, but also the religious and sectarian divisions in the city appear to have had a direct impact on networks of knowledge on how to terminate pregnancy. This article argues that Protestant women were significantly over-represented among those who appeared before the courts for abortion-related offences in comparison to their Catholic counterparts. It will also consider the high rate of single women identified in the court records for abortion-related offences in Belfast, suggesting this is an important reflection of the stigma and shame attached to illegitimacy in Ireland, north and south, in the first half of the 20th century, and the lack of support and options for unmarried mothers.

“We Want to Set the World on Fire”: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in the New Negro World, 1940–1944

Abstract: This essay explores the political ideas of black nationalist women during the 1940s, based on their writings in the New Negro World newspaper. Modeled after the Negro World, the official periodical of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the New Negro World was established by James R. Stewart, Garvey’s successor. Following Garvey’s death on June 10, 1940, Stewart was elected the new president general of the organization, which he led from his base in Cleveland, Ohio. He established the New Negro World in October of that year, providing a vehicle for UNIA members to address various issues ranging from racial violence in the Jim Crow South to decolonization in Africa. Despite the masculinist and patriarchal orientation of the UNIA, the New Negro World provided a crucial platform for nationalist women to engage in national and international political discourses. Through an array of writings including editorials and poems, black nationalist women articulated a global vision of black emancipation and promoted Pan-Africanism—the belief that African peoples, on the continent and in the diaspora, share a common past and destiny. Moreover, these women endorsed the establishment of a black nation-state in West Africa as a legitimate response to racial discrimination and global white supremacy. By recovering the history of the newspaper and foregrounding the writings of the women who graced its pages, this essay deepens our understanding of the diverse political strategies and tactics people of African descent have employed in their struggles against racial discrimination, inequality, and global white supremacy. In January 1942, Josephine Moody, a black nationalist, wrote an impassioned article entitled “We Want to Set the World on Fire,” which appeared in the New Negro World, a Pan-Africanist newspaper based in Cleveland, Ohio. In the article, Moody called for an immediate overthrow of the global white power structure in order to achieve universal black liberation. Reflecting the ethos of the “New Negro Movement”—the antiracist political and cultural awakening that swept the nation and the world during the 1920s and 1930s—Moody demanded a militant and urgent response to global white supremacy. “The bleeding wound Journal of Social History vol. 49 no. 1 (2015), pp. 194–212 doi:10.1093/jsh/shv032 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. of Africa is wide open,” Moody argued, “and the nations of the world keep the wound from healing, and we, the Negro must be our own physician to effect a healing of that wound.” The liberation of Africa, Moody continued, would only come by force: “We want to set the world on fire, we want freedom and justice and a chance to build for ourselves. And if we must set the world on fire . . . we will, like other men, die for the realization of our dreams.” Moody’s statements capture the sense of urgency brought on by World War II, a period in which “anticolonial issues acquired a new prominence and stood side by side with domestic demands” for black political and social equality. In the aftermath of Germany’s attack on Poland in September 1939, and the immediate military response from the British and French, it was apparent to Moody that a global crisis was at hand—one that would forever change the world in which she lived. Notwithstanding the fear and anxiety felt by Americans during this period, World War II signaled to Moody, and many others, that the disruption of the global color line was imminent. At its core, the global color line—which described both European colonialism in Africa and Asia and U.S. expansionism in places like Haiti and the Dominican Republic—appeared to be fixed in place despite the persistent struggles and protest movements that had emerged in the United States and abroad. Still, for black nationalists like Moody, the 1940s was a moment of possibilities; one in which black activists in the United States could forge new political alliances with people of color across the world to eradicate the global system of white supremacy and seize their individual and collective freedom. This essay examines the political ideas of black nationalist women during the 1940s, based on their writings in the New Negro World newspaper. Modeled after the Negro World, the official periodical of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)—the dominant black nationalist organization in the United States and worldwide in the immediate post-World War I era— the New Negro World was established by James R. Stewart, Garvey’s successor in the UNIA. Following Garvey’s death in London on June 10, 1940, Stewart was elected the new president general of the organization, which he led from his base in Cleveland, Ohio. He established the New Negro World in October of that year, providing a vehicle for UNIA members to address various issues ranging from racial violence in the Jim Crow South to decolonization in Africa. Reflecting the black masculinist and patriarchal orientation of the UNIA, Stewart carefully monitored the newspaper and relied heavily on men in the organization to submit articles. As a result, black nationalist male writers dominated the newspaper. Despite this limitation, the New Negro World provided a public platform for women in the UNIA to address the political and social challenges of the era, and offer critical insights into how people of African descent should respond to these developments. With limited access to the formal political process, these women, mostly rank-and-file activists, utilized the New Negro World as a space in which to engage in national and international political discourses. Through an array of writings including, editorials, reprinted speeches, and poems, black nationalist women articulated a global vision of black emancipation and endorsed Pan-Africanism— the belief that African peoples, on the continent and in the diaspora, share a common past and destiny. Moreover, these women championed the establishment of a black nation state in West Africa as a legitimate response to racial discrimination and global white supremacy. “WeWant to Set the World on Fire” 195

Temperance and modernity. : Alcohol consumption as a collective problem 1885–1913.

Abstract: My aim is to analyse how the alcohol question and its responses were framed in the formative period in 1885–1913, when the international anti-alcohol conferences were taking shape. How was the alcohol problem framed in terms of current discussions on general themes such as the individual’s role in society, the challenges of modernity and the contribution of science in solving a problem that was traditionally seen as a moral issue? The anti-alcohol conferences of 1885–1913 can be seen as an arrangement for the modern state where the temperance movement placed itself in the service of the state and at the same time demanded that it be given some responsibility for the future development. These were years when the nation acted as a point of reference in several questions that were chafing within the modern project: population qualities and the condition of future generations, the notion of citizenship, industrial strength and competitiveness, the role and the strength of the state. That nation which desired industrial competitiveness, an efficient infrastructure and a strong military institution also did well to ally itself with those temperance advocates who met at the transnational anti-alcohol conferences. The nation which had such objectives and wanted to see sober and strong citizens was encouraged also by the progressive forces in the temperance movement to take up a whole host of issues from women’s political status to an individual’s sex life.

Among the Beasts of Burma: Animals and the Politics of Colonial Sensibilities, c. 1840–1940

Abstract: According to imperial writings, the Burmese were too close to animals, both physically and emotionally. It was claimed that some Burmese people had innate connections to animals, notably elephant-drivers with their elephants. British writers were also intrigued but disgusted by what they deemed to be inappropriate interactions with animals, recounting apocryphal tales of women breastfeeding orphaned non-human mammals. But despite these negative portrayals of human-animal relations, imperial texts also betray their authors’ own material and sentimental ties to animals. Their adoration of their pets and their sufferance of pests both served to embed them in the colony. Using insights drawn from animal history, sensory history, postcolonial theory and historical geography, this article explores how these felt encounters with animals were mediated in colonial discourse. I argue that uncovering these hitherto overlooked affective colonial relationships with animals is necessary to contextualize histories that have primarily focused on the emergence of scientific and bureaucratic imperial representations of nature.

Paternal Communities: Social Welfare and Immigration in Argentina, 1880–1930

Abstract: This article charts the emergence of several immigrant-run social welfare institutions in Argentina between 1880 and 1930. Using German-language organizations as an illustrative case study, it argues that immigrants played an important role in shaping the system of social welfare in Argentina over a long historical period. It focuses on the autonomy affluent immigrants sought to attain and the ideas about class, gender, and ethnicity they invoked in their pursuit of this goal. The cause of social welfare helped self-proclaimed leaders construct a specific image of their community, solidify gender and class hierarchies, and paternalistically organize workers under their leadership. These actions fostered a place for affluent immigrants within a broader system of social relations in Buenos Aires. In carving out a space for ethnic communities in a domain where the state, the Catholic Church, and Spanish-speaking philanthropists also had influence, German and other wealthy immigrants transcended the individual communities they aspired to care for and helped shape the relationship between community and society.

“Humbug” or “Human Good?”: E.P. Thompson, the Rule of Law and Coercive Labor Relations Under Neoliberal American Capitalism

Abstract: E.P. Thompson maintained a steady ambivalence toward “the rule of law” in the context of early modern England, famously calling it, in Whigs and Hunters , both “humbug” and an “an unqualified human good.” Working-class people, Thompson claimed, could gain or lose ground through the legal system, as anywhere else; they could make use of the state, and embed their victories into its juridical structure, as well as be crushed by it. In this article, I argue that Thompson’s perspective serves us well in understanding legal struggles and outcomes over the terms of coerced labor, longstanding under liberal American capitalism, yet, increasingly brought into the market, privatized, or expanded in the neoliberal United States. I describe this process as the dialectic between repression, competing systems of rights, and change across a number of examples: the emergence of “workfare” in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the 1996 federal law signed by President Clinton; the privatization of the modern prison, and, forced labor within it; state control over deportable labor; and the legal regime underlying globalized production—e.g., the denial of legal standing to workers abroad to sue American interests. In each case, I note how there has been pressure exerted “from the bottom up,” as workers have engaged discourses of formal equality and norms of liberalism to make claims on a legal regime that violates such principles even as it becomes increasingly part of market processes. Neoliberalism comes into view as an amalgam of legal coercion and a struggle over rights—the Janus face of the law described by Thompson—under conditions of market-based change.

Beyond Resistance and Collaboration: Towards a Social History of Politics in Hitler's Empire

Abstract: This article argues that Europe’s seeming inability to escape from the divisive legacy of World War II is connected to the way in which the war is conceptualized almost everywhere and by almost everyone—not just by the public and politicians, but by professional historians as well. The underlying problem we identify is the dominance of a gendered resistance/collaboration paradigm in the historiography, which has both shaped and been shaped by public understandings of the war. The primacy of the resistance/collaboration paradigm has led not only to simplistic understandings of social behavior in Hitler’s Europe, it has also made the historiography vulnerable to instrumentalization. We do not argue that the concepts of “resistance” and “collaboration” should be discarded, but that they should be incorporated into a modified framework for understanding how people responded daily to Nazi rule. This framework, which we have termed the “social history of politics” model, is based upon three key principles. First, it emphasizes the interconnectedness of the political, the social, the economic and the military spheres in Nazi-controlled Europe. Second, it recognizes that, at a time of total war waged by a regime with totalitarian aspirations, all behavior had the potential to be of political significance. Third, it incorporates gender as a category of analysis in the study of all political, social, military and economic processes in Hitler’s empire.

Historicizing the Megachurch

Abstract: The dominant view of megachurches claims they represent a new religious form, born in the United States in the 1970s and 80s. Contrary to this position, this research demonstrates that megachurches enjoy a long history in Protestantism. An important example from the 16th Century Huguenot architect Jacques Perret reveals an early Protestant vision for a large, multi-functional worship space. Soon after, this vision became realized in bricks and mortar. Revivalism and the Institutional Church Movement of the 19th and early 20th Centuries provide further connections between megachurches and the past. Revivalism provided the motivation for Protestants to go out and reach the masses, and the Institutional Church Movement provided the infrastructure to attract, convert, and nurture them. The demographic shifts that occurred following WWII led to the proliferation of churches in post-war America. This meant that large churches became increasingly visible, but journalists and social commentators mistook their increase in prevalence for lack of historical precedent. Pastors and other leaders, capitalizing on the appeal of innovation, reinforced this view. This research offers an important corrective that helps situate megachurches in the United States in their proper context.

Nursing in Style: Fashion versus Socio-medical Ideologies in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract: This essay focuses on the innovative aspects of Edouard Debat-Ponsan’s painting of 1886 entitled Before the Ball . As opposed to his contemporaries, the artist chose to depict breast-feeding amid a haute-bourgeois family, a subject matter that was no longer prevalent in French art after the beginning of the nineteenth century. He thus sought to undermine the premise of medical literature, which consistently claimed that high-society women abstained from breast-feeding, as they refused to give up their social amusements. In order to transmit this message, the artist melded—in an unprecedented way—different iconographic traditions, while accentuating the juxtaposition of the suckling baby’s bare bottom and the nursing mother’s sumptuous ball gown. Through an examination of the dress, with a particular emphasis on the corset concealed beneath it, this essay illustrates the empowerment of women reclaiming ownership of their own breasts, intricately connected to consumerism and Parisian fashion in the late nineteenth century. Although the new maternal ideal was essentially a male construct, this essay claims that the enthusiasm of bourgeois women for breast-feeding at the end of the century reflected a new sense of femininity that shaped material commodities, instead of being shaped by it, thus distinguishing the “fashionable body” from the “fashioned body.”

Writing Upwards: How the Weak Wrote to the Powerful

Abstract: “Writing Upwards” describes a genre of letter-writing between two very unequal correspondents. Humble subjects wrote individually to monarchs and other rulers, workers wrote to factory bosses, impoverished refugees wrote to relief committees, parishioners wrote to their clergy and also to God. Often, but not always, they wrote in pursuit of some personal advantage. They trusted in the power of a personal approach to by-pass bureaucratic procedures which seemed insensitive and obstructive. In order to ingratiate themselves, they borrowed or at least crudely imitated the language of their superiors. My paper draws on published research from Italy and elsewhere to identify the principal modes of “writing upwards,” whether deferential, demanding or downright abusive. In the case of the letters of Australian Aboriginal people to their administrators, new elements emerge: an appeal to shared Christian values, and the notion of a contractual obligation yet to be fulfilled. “Deference, Demands, Supplication” “Deference, Demands, Supplication”—this was how Camillo Zadra and Gianluigi Fait summarized their collection of studies on writing to the powerful. Letters to authorities usually adopted a deferential tone which recognized their own inferior status, they often sought some personal advantage and sometimes they did so in begging or groveling language. But this was not always the case, and Zadra and Fait’s title was too short to encompass the wide range of possible attitudes expressed in the genre I will call “Writing Upwards,” to describe the multiple ways in which poor, desperate or indignant people addressed their superiors. Writings to the powerful might be abusive or obsequious, or they could denounce neighbors, traitors and corrupt officials. Occasionally they demanded nothing, but seem simply to have been a cry for attention or a plea for re-assurance. Sometimes the writer assumed a network of reciprocal obligations and reminded a superior authority of its duty to fulfill earlier promises. The underlying condition of all writing upwards was social or political inequality between the correspondents. For poor people addressing powerful forces, it was wise to be deferential and cautious. As James C. Scott has argued, however, expressions of loyalty and obedience should not be taken at their face value. Peasants deliberately assumed a Journal of Social History vol. 49 no. 2 (2015), pp. 317–330 doi:10.1093/jsh/shv038 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. strategy of self-interested dissimulation, so that deferential language might disguise a deeper insubordination. “The success of de facto resistance,” Scott wrote, “is often directly proportional to the symbolic conformity with which it is masked.” In other words, insubordination is more successful when it does not contest the symbols of power. Deception, then, could pay off, but this tactic did not necessarily mean that writers considered existing power structures to be either legitimate or permanent. Several studies, scholarly and otherwise, have enriched our understanding of the genre, in contexts ranging from early modern Europe to the present day. Thomas Sokoll studied over 750 pauper letters from early nineteenth-century Essex, in which the destitute applied to parish overseers for poor relief, in the period before the new Poor Law of 1834. These authors were humble laboring people, who wrote on the margins of written and oral culture. At the same time, studies of Russian petitions and denunciations in the twentieth century have highlighted the importance of flattering officials as well as appealing to their consciences, and they have suggested that certain paternalistic aspects of Tsarist rule were also present under Soviet rule. Letters to eminent leaders have provided a fruitful source for historians. Marten van Ginderachter analyzed thousands of letters sent between 1865 and 1934 to the Belgian royal family. Most asked for some assistance, and normally the monarch obliged by sending a small gift, which showed that the strategy could be productive. Hitler’s Reich Chancellery received thousands of letters addressed to the Fuhrer, and Hitler designated officials to reply to some of them. In Henrik Eberle’s selection aimed at a popular readership, letters of protest to the Fuhrer gradually dwindled leaving an unremitting stream of veneration and birthday congratulations. Poems of homage, birthday gifts and requests to act as godfather to the writer’s child poured in during the mid-1930s when Hitler was at the height of his epistolary popularity. In 1934 alone he received 10,000 birthday letters. Mussolini also created a special office to deal with such correspondence. Anne Wingenter studied letters sent to Mussolini by surviving families of soldiers killed in Ethiopia, in which desperate pleas mingled with crude imitations of the heroic language of fascist sacrifice, designed to demonstrate the writer’s loyalty. The regime manipulated the letters in order to nourish the personal cult of Il Duce, and published a carefully edited selection of them to confirm Italians’ devotion to their leader. Writing to French Presidents has also been scrutinized. Sudhir Hazareesingh used Charles de Gaulle’s incoming correspondence from the 1950s onwards as an important component of the cultivation of a personal myth of the national savior and the providential father of the French people. Francois Mitterrand received about 1,000 letters daily during his presidency of France, and staff replied to every one of them, although the requests they contained were not granted. According to Beatrice Fraenkel, 110 standard responses were available to the presidential secretariat. Such cases illustrate the persistence of popular belief in the personal benevolence of the ruler, and in the writer’s ability to reach him personally, in spite of the inevitable bureaucratization of official correspondence in the cases mentioned. They also show the willingness of political authorities to manipulate such correspondence for their own ends. Hence Mitterrand invited people to write to him, while Mussolini published extracts from the most edifying letters. Journal of Social History Winter 2015 318

The Poverty of (Marxist) Theory: Peasant Classes, Provincial Capital, and the Critique of Globalization in India

Abstract: This paper maps the geographical contours of socio-economic transitions that are currently underway in India that link caste and capital, rural and urban, peasants and the state in diverse ways. It explains regional variations in the emergence and impacts of provincial capital and how these affect patterns of (primitive) accumulation, and argues against common Marxist derivations of the relationship between capitalism and de-peasantization. Emphasizing the persistent significance of political and economic dominance by sections of the peasantry in India, their capacity to determine the nature and future of capitalist development in India through control of provincial capital and the state is highlighted. Political power of rural elites and a large labor force dominated by informal sector workers with persistent rural roots, impact both the spatial manifestations of capital investment and flows, and the nature of labor processes and relations. Encompassing sectors at different stages of capitalist development, and with different rural-urban demographics, the Indian social formation reflects unique class fractions and caste divides crucial for understanding the specific manifestation of ongoing economic transformations and crises. A comprehension of rural-urban connections, cleavages and conflicts is essential to humanize the history of contemporary struggles of and around the working class in India. A set of propositions are offered for theorizing provincial capital in India, in the course of discussing three inter-related themes: a) debates about current agrarian crisis, b) provincial capital and urban processes, and c) the socio-cultural and political implications of informality and informal labor.

Postage and Power: U.S. Nationalism and the 1970s "Bicentennial" and "Americana" Stamp Series

Abstract: Since 1847, when U.S. postage stamps first were used for mail, about 5,000 different designs have been developed by the American government for mass circulation. In this essay, I explore how the state remembers the past via the medium of stamps and also exercises power by projecting these government documents across the domestic landscape. Stamps reflect what government views as important at any given time and wants to communicate to the public. In this sense, stamps aid the process of “state-making” by helping to establish historical traditions and by developing national collective memory. Postal authorities have sifted through the American experience to present diverse images and text in order to promote nationalism, patriotism, and the distinctive achievements of the nation. Overall, very little attention has been focused on the content of postage in the U.S, as opposed to postal administration and mail delivery systems.

Carrying the Pox: The Use of Children and Ideals of Childhood in Early British and Imperial Campaigns Against Smallpox

Abstract: Recent scholarship has done much to advance the history of smallpox inoculation and vaccination, but the human carriers used to convey the live lymph from place to place call for more attention. Most were children, and their histories demonstrate how new concepts of childhood proved instrumental in the extension of medical developments and global imperial networks. This essay examines the children used to transmit anti-smallpox technologies, staring with Lady Wortley Montagu’s popularization of inoculation in England in the eighteenth century and extending through British efforts to bring cowpox vaccination to South and East Asia in the early 1800s. Emerging ideals of child innocence helped establish inoculation and vaccination as safe and effective treatments across distinctions of race, class, and place. At the same time, however, medical professionals reinscribed hierarchies of class and race upon children’s bodies. Elite, white children saved from smallpox especially became associated with ideals of parental, domestic affection, while working-class, orphan, and indigenous children more often served the role of children of the state—the test subjects and global carriers of both vaccine matter and the ideals of liberal imperialism. In histories of smallpox, children are often featured as beneficiaries of vaccination, but they were also agents in the eradication of the disease. In the eighteenth century, their infected bodies provided the pustule needed to protect populations through variolation (also called inoculation or engrafting), the practice of transmitting smallpox matter from infected to healthy individuals with the goal of creating resistance to full-blown attacks. After Edward Jenner’s 1798 publication on the cowpox vaccine, human chains of children—particularly poor, orphan, and native children—served as the primary vectors for transmitting the vaccine by land and by sea over long distances. Recent scholarship has examined the routes, technologies, local adaptations, and popular resistance associated with smallpox vaccination, but the human carriers used to convey the live lymph from place to place call for more attention. Most were children, and their histories can be better

E. P. Thompson, Politics and History: Writing Social History Fifty Years after The Making of the English Working Class

Abstract: These four articles revisit crucial concepts in the work of E.P. Thompson and the debates that follow him. Each looks forward to contemporary and future scholarship, and the real and potential relationship between historiography and social movements on the left. They reopen debates on moral economy, disputing how much of the working-class past is usable in the present. Particularly given the transformed nature of the state since the period of social transition in early modern England, this question seems urgent: can (arguably) backward-looking claims of traditional rights continue to serve to guide working-class resistance movements, given that they must invoke the powers of the modern state? Can ideas of class drawn from a period in which men were understood as workers and citizens, and women were not, be made useful in a different moment? Are there class formations possible under capitalism other than the bourgeois-proletarian antagonism to which we are accustomed? Do these challenges require a thorough rethinking of the relationship between such basic categories as law and political economy, class and gender? More recent social movements—indigenous, anticolonial, antiracist, feminist, and anti-war—might not have been recognized or countenanced by Thompson as “working class,” but might they be useful in conversation with the Thompsonian legacy of class analysis? Together, these papers push the boundaries of our inheritance from Thompson, and suggest ways in which new social and political contexts—new states, new movements, and a drastically changed global economy—can reanimate the political force of Thompson’s work.

An "Imponderable Servitude": Slave versus Master Litigation for Cruelty (Maltratamiento or Sevicia) in Late Eighteenth-century Lima, Peru

Abstract: Imperial Spanish legal codes empowered slaves to accuse their masters of abuse or cruelty (sevicia or maltrato) in court and have those complaints investigated and adjudicated by colonial magistrates. Those masters found guilty of abusing a slave could, by law, be compelled to sell the offended slave to an owner who might treat them better. The consideration of such sevicia cases from late-colonial Lima, Peru, allows for the in-depth consideration of the legal culture of slavery in late-colonial Spanish America, long an area of interest for scholars of comparative slavery, and of master-slave relations more generally. The contests that animate these case files over the treatment of slaves, particularly in terms of acceptable alimentation and/or corporal punishment, and over the potential sale of slaves, reveals much about the nature of late-colonial slavery and ongoing social discourses on the acceptable treatment of the enslaved. The in-depth examination of this body of these sources reveals a compelling paradox that saw slaves expanding the types of complaints that magistrates might hear under the rubric of sevicia; a colonial judiciary ready to hear a broader array of cases brought by slaves but unwilling to expand slave legal agency at the expense of master dominion; and, slaveholders who unanimously decried the ability of slaves to bring such suits against them but generally willing, ultimately, to acquiesce to slave demands to seek new masters.

"We Were Just Unwanted": Bussing, Migrant Dispersal, and South Asians in London

Abstract: From 1963 to 1981, the London borough of Ealing bussed South Asian students away from neighborhood schools, citing a need to assimilate migrant students into British culture. The increasing number of migrants in the area and their supposed detrimental effect on education frightened local parents, who pressured Ealing Council to implement bussing to maintain a majority of white, “native” children in each school in the borough. The bussing system and its advocates, initially supported by the Department of Education and Science, relied on ill-defined ideas of assimilation and integration that privileged British cultural authority. The practice also lent itself to American comparisons: the idea of bussing as a progressive civil rights practice across the Atlantic provideda liberal gloss that obscured how bussing worked in different political contexts. This article examines the parties involved in bussing—including educational reformers, South Asian students and parents, and race relations authorities—who invested it with their own meanings and values, making competing arguments for the merit of the practice in England. It argues that despite its liberal transatlantic veneer, bussing made South Asian children vulnerable to racism and ostracization, a position which many parents and local organizations made abundantly clear. The borough terminated the practice only after the Race Relations Board found Ealing guilty of educational discrimination. The long debate over bussing’s legitimacy in London came to represent both national and international discourses of integration and segregation, even as Ealing officials pursued drastically different goals than their counterparts in the United States.

“The Oddest Man that I Ever Saw”: Assessing Cognitive Disability on Eighteenth-Century Cape Cod

Abstract: In the eighteenth century, prior to the establishment of asylums and the rise of psychiatry in the United States, laypeople bore the onus of assessing whether community members had mental or cognitive disabilities that necessitated special treatment. This article analyzes a rare legal dossier that allows us to overhear laymen assessing and reacting to disability in an era when the words normal and abnormal were not used. Joseph Gorham lived all seventy-three years of his life in Barnstable, Massachusetts, protected by his father’s wealth and social status. Neighbors puzzled over Gorham’s unusual mix of capacities and incapacities. Some thought he was “Disordered in his Intelectuals,” but others noted that he answered questions cogently, could read, and displayed a type of savantism. For the last three decades of his life, Gorham was under guardianship. He was not allowed to bargain, had no occupation, and did not marry. Not surprisingly, the will he signed fifteen years before his death in 1762 was challenged as invalid. Witnesses who had known him for forty or more years described Gorham as singular, uncommon, different “from all mankind.” The essay explores what the puzzle of Joseph Gorham meant in his lifetime and it asks what we gain by noting the resonances between Gorham’s situation and the ways we currently understand and debate autism. Applying the prism of autism as one of several interpretive approaches brings into sharper relief certain elements we might miss, notably Gorham’s aloneness and his observers’ silence on his emotional and affective deficits.

Purses and the Charitable Gift

Abstract: The history of voluntary charity in early modern England has been characterized by teleological narratives of the gradual demise of spontaneous alms in light of increasing formal taxation. Steve Hindle has identified the Poor Laws of 1601 as a watershed in the history of charity marking a distinct move away from the interpersonal gift economy. More recently Brad Gregory has postulated a teleological explanation of morality in The Unintended Reformation which identifies a decrease in charity with a Protestant zeal finding in post Reformation England little impetus for the charitable gift. Coupled with an attack on micro historical analysis and the history of everyday life there appears little room within this framework for the discussion of the continuation and changing significance of localized spontaneous charity in the early seventeenth century. Presenting a material culture analysis of three purses from c.1630 bearing the axiom “REMEMBER THE POORE” it is argued here that the face-to-face charitable donation was far from moribund in the seventeenth century. The composition and biography of the purses all point to a shared cultural identity amongst the elite in which charity and the interpersonal exchange remained integral to displays of power and paternalism indicative of a continued culture of giving which, although with changing boundaries and emphasis, persisted despite the introduction of formal institutional relief.

Globalization, Consumerism, and the Emergence of Teens in Contemporary Vietnam

Abstract: The Doi Moi (reform) program enacted by the Vietnam Communist Party in 1986 marked the country’s transition from a subsidy to a market economy and signalled profound changes in life experiences for Vietnamese youth. The government-owned media that once indoctrinated youth into the communist ideologies became increasingly dominated by private corporations and opened the door for the rapid influx of Western cultural influences. Through analysis of newspapers directed at Vietnamese youth between 1995 and 2005, this article traces the historical emergence of teen Viet and teen culture. The concept teen broke the continuous life trajectory into discrete stages and marked the shift from an ideologically grounded youth under the Vietnam Communist Party to a market-oriented youth whose individual identities are cultivated through capitalist consumption.

Diffracted Diasporas: Trinidad's East Indians, Religio-Nationalism, and India's Independence

Abstract: In August 1947, the euphoria generated by the creation of newly independent India and Pakistan was celebrated by peoples far removed from the Subcontinent, including among the descendants of Indian indentured laborers in the British island colony of Trinidad. Trinidad’s East Indians reveled in the newfound freedom of their now-divided, overseas, ethnic compatriots. The masses of East Indians felt a surge of pride in the overthrow of colonial rule, evidenced by their attendance at parades, talks, and celebrations. In the months and weeks leading up to independence, East Indians debated the merits and disadvantages of partition. Some advocated firmly the idea of a unified ethnic “Indian” community in Trinidad, whereas others constructed clear boundaries between proponents of Pakistan versus India, thus fortifying tenuous and contingent divisions between Trinidad’s Hindus and Muslims. This essay demonstrates that the culmination of Indian independence and partition exacerbated the diverging identities of Hindu and Muslim Trinidadians. I argue that Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan had global ramifications for the meaning of “Indian-ness” in the British colonies including Trinidad and elsewhere. East Indians’ appeal to nationalism interrogates the construction of national and cultural identity spatially and temporally distant from the source, ultimately affirming the salience of a religio-national identity. Furthermore, the networks of communication established between Indians in places such as Trinidad, England, and the United States produced “diffracted” diasporic identities that were mediated through these interactions.

Microhistory: In General

Abstract: The most adequate book-length account on microhistory, I believe, would be a microhistory of microhistory. Nevertheless, there is a strong chance that it could not qualify as the best available one. While such an adequate account would certainly possess the merit of being self-explanatory, at the same time it would rather automatically reproduce its own possible shortcomings. On the other hand, other accounts might register these shortcomings, but most likely only at the price of presenting general views in a top-down manner, which is somewhat outlandish to a practice proud of its bottom-up stance. This, at least, seems to be the price that Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó are willing to pay in their book What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, which is, to my knowledge, the first book-length account on microhistory in English. That there is this particular price to pay does not mean that microhistory was sentenced to silence about generalities. It means only that it is supposed to have its own way to arrive at them, and whatever that way may be, in order to present general views on microhistory in the form of a comprehensive account, this supposedly specific way must be given up. In other words, it is all about the way that leads to general views. While most microhistorians, including Szijártó, are convinced that arriving at generalities is one of the most important defining characteristics of microhistory (5), the extent of agreement is significantly lessened when it comes to identifying that way. Such identification is usually regarded as the most puzzling and mysterious question one might ask about microhistory, and both authors take a shot at answering it. Szijártó’s quest for a plausible answer leads him into the world of fractals, while Magnússon has an entirely different opinion on the issue as he develops a methodological edifice he dubs “the singularization of history” with the intention to drop the general level for good. With these diverging claims, two main features of the book are already touched upon. The first is that, in one way or another, both Szijártó and Magnússon reflect on or organize their parts around this most puzzling and mysterious issue—the issue of the micro-macro link. The other main feature is that the book, instead of being written as a single coherent account, offers two general views on the issue (distributed into two parts of the book).

Shadows and Pestilence: Health and Medicine during the Second Seminole War

Abstract: This article examines the state of health and medicine during the Second Seminole War (1835–1842), a much overlooked subject that nevertheless proved central to this costly, seven-year campaign. The prevalence of malaria in subtropical Florida seriously diminished the army’s fighting abilities, demoralized the troops and presented the first major setback to Jacksonian expansionism. Despite the benefits that accrued from the groundbreaking use of quinine sulphate in field hospitals, army surgeons had yet to realize the drug’s usefulness as a prophylactic. The endemic nature of malaria contributed to Florida’s reputation as a haven for “miasmatic” illnesses and thus impeded subsequent white settlement of the territory—the primary object of the war. Paradoxically, despite the Army Medical Department’s limitations vis-a-vis malaria and indeed most battlefield casualties, the status of the department, as well as army physicians, actually grew in stature after the termination of the war, a consequence of the use of quinine, the department’s improved organization and the high opinion given to the surgeon general’s new focus on statistical data.

Community and Exclusion: The Torrey Canyon Disaster of 1967

Abstract: Oral historians have only recently begun to record the memories of communities af- fected by major oil spills. In this article we investigate how the first supertanker oil spill in 1967, the Torrey Canyon, is remembered in the coastal communities of Cornwall. Environmental disasters cause more than just environmental damage. They also challenge communities, bringing to the forefront social tensions and con- flicts. This study reveals the widespread sense of exclusion within the community as the national political, military and scientific elites took control over the clean-up op- eration. While aspects of the disaster have been successfully integrated into existing Cornish shipwreck narratives, the displacement of local hierarchies of knowledge by national elites challenged both personal and community identities revealing a subal- tern community, often economically vulnerable, whose indigenous knowledge was ignored or devalued. Connecting these dimensions of community memory is the fundamentally moral question of intent, and the resistance to imposed peripheral status enacted through processes of remembering, telling of trickster tales and black humor.

From Literacy to Love of Reading: The Fennomanian Ideology of Reading in the 19th-century Finland

Abstract: The article presents the Finnish nationalist or fennomanian conception of love of reading in a European cultural historical context. The fennomania movement in Finland was one of the many nationalist movements in Europe in the 19th century that emphasized the emancipation of the vernacular language and literature. Hegelian philosopher, journalist and statesman Johan Wilhelm Snellman initially constructed the fennomanian ideology. Snellman and his followers embedded literacy, reading and love of reading into the absolute inner core of their education philosophy and policy. Especially the emphasis on love of reading, i.e., that the motivation for reading must come from the spontaneous interest of the individual and not from outer coercion, connects their rhetoric to the European discourse on reading that since the 18th century sought the motivation for reading in the love of reading that inspires people to read.

Moral Economy? Popular Demands and State Intervention in the Struggle over Anti-Profiteering Laws in Greece 1914–1925

Abstract: This article examines the popular mobilization against high prices in Greece during World War I and Greco-Turkish war, and the legislation against profiteering which was adopted in the context of the rising state intervention in the economy. It focuses on the workers' action, which has been argued that was informed by per- ceptions of moral economy. I argue that we should keep a narrow definition of moral economy, in which necessary is the presence of views that are based on cus- tomary practices of market regulations. This is not our case: the Greek discourse about "shameful profit" was not the product of the meeting of a traditional society with the capitalist market, as indicates the important role played in its development by the educated lower middle class. I attempt to interpret it in terms of a combina- tion of traditional representations of the merchant, its dialectic relationship with the emerging statism, as well as strategies of the young labor movement towards workers' unification and widening of its appeal to popular strata.

A Murder in the Grove: Conceptions of Justice in an Early Zionist Colony

Abstract: This article offers a localized perspective on early Zionist settlers’ evolving responses to interethnic violence in late Ottoman Palestine. It takes as its subject the first instance of murder in the early Zionist colony of Rishon LeZion, the death of Yaakov Abramovich in 1902, presumed to have been committed by the Palestinian notable Alfred Rock from Jaffa. Drawing from local archival records and the periodical press of the Palestine Jewish community and influenced by scholarship in legal and microhistory, the article resituates this community in the context of its relations with Ottoman authorities, Arab notables and peasants, as well as its European Jewish benefactors. It argues that the community’s behavior and reactions were period and context-specific, consequences of legal assumptions about the workings of the Ottoman court system and the traditional confliction resolution mechanism of sulh but also products of evolving economic motives around land purchase and sale, and particular social dynamics among surviving family members in the colony, namely the deceased man’s widow, his father, and his brothers. It emphasizes the contingent, local nature of communal interactions with the larger, overlapping social and legal structures of Late Ottoman Palestine.

An Agro-Town Bias? Re-examining the Micro-Demographic Model for Southern Italy in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: Over the past 25 years, there has been an orthodox view established that 18th-century Southern Italy had a distinctive micro-demographic model based around a number of facets, 3 key ones being a proliferation of neo-local small nuclear households, an exceptionally low average age of first marriage for women (with low levels of life-time singles), and a low incidence of household service. This view, however, has been forged on the back of geographical biases in data selection—particularly in favor of Apulia, a region with a high incidence of large latifundist estates and agro-towns. What this article shows using a less geographically biased database compiled from the Catasto Onciario and State of Souls register is that while nuclear households and low ages of women’s marriage may have been characteristic of the agro-town areas of the Kingdom, this did not apply for everywhere in the South. In fact, some regions displayed complex household levels comparable to parts of Eastern Europe and some regions had average ages of marriage for women that would not look out of place in parts of Northwest Europe. An explanation for such regional divergences has been sought in the tenurial complexity and diversity seen in the South. The view that the South had a low incidence of service, however, does indeed still hold, with only minor variations across regions.

Radiation Secrecy and Censorship after Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Abstract: Although U.S. officials celebrated the powerful blast effects of the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, they worked hard to censor information about the radiation. This article analyzes the diverse ways that civilian and military officials worked to contain knowledge about the radiation effects. The article also explores the reasons why the radiation deaths and other residual effects elicited such censorship attempts. In particular, American officials did not want the atomic bombs linked with chemical and biological warfare and some objected to radiological warfare. The article draws on numerous archives and manuscript collections, many little known, to underscore the context for the censorship activities as the war ended and the U.S. moved into a new kind of militarized peace.

Elephants and Epistemology: Evidence of Suicide in the Gilded Age

Abstract: Evidence on the frequency of suicide in modernizing America is relatively scarce, and extant records evoke suspicions about pervasive misreporting. This essay explores death records from Massachusetts as a source for investigating suicide in the late nineteenth century. Assessments of the records indicate omissions, but the extent appears to be modest, and trends in reported suicides comport with those in the more trustworthy findings of medical examiners. The state’s death reports point to a society with an extraordinary occurrence and awareness of suicide, in which the presumed dynamics of social isolation and imitative behavior held little sway. Breadth of awareness did not, however, equate to depth: only at the nineteenth century’s end did the public seem interested in the delayed traumas of the Civil War. The essay’s findings are an invitation to pursue suicide statistics as the gateway to disparate sources of the act’s meaning.