Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2021"

Arguing with Digital History: Patterns of Historical Interpretation

Abstract: Digital history has only rarely created interpretative or argumentative scholarship that contributes back to disciplinary understandings of the past. The reasons for this are varied: digital historians have often preferred to create scholarship for public audiences, or they have pursued forms of scholarship which do not lend themselves to explicit interpretation. But we contend that digital historians have not had sufficient models of patterns of historical argumentation compatible with digital historical research. In this introduction, we read the articles by Rachel Midura and Leonardo Barleta that appear in this special section, and a series of other articles, in order to show the patterns of historical argumentation that digital historians can pursue. A companion website features versions of the articles by Midura and Barleta, as well as eight additional previously published articles, annotated by their authors to highlight how they developed their historical arguments so they can serve as models for argumentative digital history.

Money, Death, and Agency in Catholic Ireland, 1850–1921

Abstract: Between the end of the Great Famine and the end of the union with Britain, the Irish Catholic Church was almost exclusively funded by ordinary lay people. This article examines the financial relationship between clergy and laity, focusing on payments related to death. In doing so, it argues three main points. First, it suggests that previous conceptions of lay people coerced into giving their money to the church are too simplistic and deny the complex agency of the people of many social classes who gave the money. Second, it argues that using the financial transactions of ordinary people gives historians a much-needed methodology for recovering lives about which the archives are otherwise silent. Third, it posits that the mediation of faith through money, specifically, must be added to the growing body of work on “material religion.”

The Insurrection of the Middle Class: Social Mobilization and Counterrevolution during the Popular Unity Government, Chile, 1970–1973

Abstract: This article studies the political trajectory of the Chilean middle class under the Popular Unity government (1970–1973) through its representative social organizations, especially small merchant, trucker owner, and professional associations. In the context of increased political polarization, the middle class—after a brief “honeymoon” with the government—radicalized for counterrevolution. Along with political, media, and business opposition, these middle-class groups formed a powerful counterrevolutionary social bloc that challenged the Popular Unity through massive strikes and protests, including a major one in October 1972. I argue that this process was a result of the breakdown of the channels of participation and negotiation that had existed between these groups and the state since the 1930s. These channels broke down with the Left’s implementation of a revolutionary, socialist project, which led both to the state’s unprecedented attention to the working class and to a major economic crisis. At the same time, the very idea of the middle class was redefined in counterrevolutionary terms. While the internal contradiction of the Left prevented it from engaging with the middle class, the opposition succeeded in defining that social identity as inherently anti-Marxist. Consequently, the organizations studied here assumed a leading role in the increasingly insurrectional opposition to the Popular Unity, which culminated in enthusiastic middle-class support for the September 11, 1973, coup d’état.

“Health is Wealth”: Valuing Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract: This essay traces the evolution of the motto “health is wealth” from its origins as an anticapitalist argument made by antebellum sanitary reformers to its acceptance as a fundamental principle of organized public health in the United States. Sanitarians originally coined the phrase “health is wealth” to counter the capitalist maxim “labor is wealth.” Because city leaders were businessmen who understood economic arguments, public health reformers increasingly gave health a monetary value in order to win over this audience and change urban governance. Although “health is wealth” momentarily co-opted the logic of capitalism in order to successfully make the case for institutionalizing public health within municipal and state governments, the phrase ultimately wrote economic values into the purpose and functions of public health boards and departments. In the course of advancing a proactive public health that prevented both endemic and epidemic diseases, sanitarians reduced the perception of health from a common good to a commodity. The economic logic employed by early reformers is critical, not only for understanding how the long reach of early American capitalism touches us today but also for recognizing that modern public health functions in the way it was created, as a capitalist system.

Naming Plantations: Toponyms and the Construction of the Plantation System in the English Atlantic

Abstract: This essay pioneers a critical approach to place naming in early America, which offers new insight into the evolving definition of plantation. In early seventeenth-century England, planting was understood as a public effort to establish new commonwealths. Only gradually around the Atlantic world did plantations become predominantly associated with private places producing staple crops with enslaved labor. This essay uses the radically underutilized evidence of place-names to explore how this slippage occurred on the ground, and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to the places they called plantations reveal how they perceived the plantation and the political, economic, and social relations it structured. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 named tracts of land patented in four Maryland counties between 1634 and 1750, this essay charts the changing popularity of distinct elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, affects of the landowner, and European place-names. It reveals there was no straightforward rush to carve up the land into privatized commercial units. Instead, individuals initially structured plantations around communal frameworks defined variously by manorialism, urban civic traditions, and shared geographic lexicons. As the tobacco economy consolidated into the hands of a slave-owning class, plantation names reframed places as subjective manifestations of planter identities. These conclusions adjust our understanding of the transition to capitalism and slavery in Maryland and they also offer a blueprint for a broader toponymy of the plantation in the Atlantic world.

Emotional Echoes: Young People, Divorce, and the Public Media, 1960–2000

Abstract: The article introduces the methodological concept of emotional echoing to analyze the cultural formation of individual emotions and demonstrates its utility in an analysis of young people’s emotional experience of parental divorce in Denmark between 1960 and 2000. Drawing on recent theorizations within the history of emotions, we posit that emotional echoing is a key element in the historical processes through which emotions are configured. Individuals more or less consciously employ collective templates of emotionality to interpret and convey their own feelings, giving shape to experience and subjectivity in the process. We then present a study of a variety of Danish public media to examine how young people interpreted and described the experience of parental divorce. We argue that a new public emotionality emerged at this time and that this impacted young people’s experiences. Growing divorce rates, the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, the rising status of children and youth, and the blooming media market all helped spur this change. Echoing each other’s tropes, practices, and images, young people emphasized the difficult and painful aspects of the emotional experience of divorce. During the last decades of the century, they increasingly articulated anger toward their parents, but they also more often emphasized “bad conscience” and signaled the importance of regulating one’s own emotions to protect one’s parents. Through nonmechanical and creative echoing, young people processed their emotions by digesting and contributing anonymously to the public media.

مستويات الإجهاد الوالدي واستراتيجيات التکيف لدى أمهات الأطفال والمراهقين من ذوي الإعاقة في ضوء بعض المتغيرات الديموجرافية. دراسة مقارنة Parental stress levels and coping strategies of mothers of children and adolescents with disabilities In view of some demographic variables.

Abstract: الملخص: هدف البحث إلى تحديد مستويات الإجهاد الوالدي لدى أمهات ذوي الإعاقة العقلية، وذوي اضطراب طيف التوحد، وذوي الشلل الدماغي في مرحلتي الطفولة والمراهقة، والتعرف على استراتيجيات التکيف المختلفة المستخدمة لمواجهة الإجهاد الوالدي في ضوء بعض المتغيرات الديموجرافية، وذلک من خلال دراسة وصفية مقارنة على عينة من (150) من أمهات الأطفال ذوي الإعاقة، وأعتمد البحث على مقياس الإجهاد الوالدي ( إعداد بيري وجونز ، 1995)، الصورة المختصرة لبطارية التکيف مع الإجهاد( إعداد کارفر، 1997)، وخرج البحث بالعديد من النتائج والتي من أهمها وجود علاقة ارتباطية ذات دلالة احصائية بين مستويات الإجهاد الوالدي واستراتيجيات التکيف لدى أمهات ذوي الإعاقة، وجود فروق ذات دلالة احصائية بين متوسطات درجات الإجهاد الوالدي لدى أمهات ذوي الإعاقة تبعا لنوع الإعاقة لصالح أمهات ذوي الشلل الدماغي، وجود فروق ذات دلالة احصائية بين متوسطات درجات استراتيجيات التکيف لدى أمهات ذوي الإعاقة تبعا لنوع الإعاقة، وجود فروق ذات دلالة احصائية بين متوسطي درجات الإجهاد الوالدي لدى أمهات ذوي الإعاقة تبعا للمرحلة العمرية للإبن لصالح مرحلة المراهقة. ووجود فروق ذات دلالة إحصائية بين متوسطي درجات التکيف نحو المشکلة لدى أمهات ذوي الإعاقة لصالح مرحلة الطفولة، وبين متوسطي درجات التکيف الديني لصالح مرحلة المراهقة، ووجود فروق ذات دلالة إحصائية بين متوسطات درجات الإجهاد الوالدي لدى أمهات ذوي الإعاقة تبعا لمستوى تعليم الأمهات لصالح الأمهات ذوات التعليم المنخفض ، ووجود فروق في استخدام استراتيجيات التکيف نحو المشکلة لصالح الأمهات ذوات المستوى التعليمي المرتفع، وفي استخدام استراتيجيات التکيف الديني، والتکيف بالفکاهة لصالح الأمهات ذوات المستوى التعليمي المنخفض، وکشف البحث عن امکانية التنبؤ بالإجهاد الوالدي لدى أمهات ذوي الإعاقة بمعلومية درجاتهم على استراتيجيات التکيف، وأوصى البحث بضرورة تطوير برامج الدعم النفسي الفردية المقدمة لأسر ذوي الإعاقة، ودعم الکفاءة الذاتية للأمهات. Abstract: The current research aims to determine the stress levels of mothers of people with mental disabilities, people with autism spectrum disorder, and those with cerebral palsy with mental disability, in the stages of childhood and adolescence , identify the different coping strategies used to confront parental stress In view of some demographic. The study belongs to comparative descriptive type of studies and applies the Parental Stress Scale (Perry & Jones, 1995), Brief-COPE Inventory (Carver, 1997), and included (150) mothers of children and adolescents with disabilities. The study reached several conclusions; the most important of them was presence of statistically significant correlation between parental stress levels and coping strategies of mothers, Presence of statistically significant differences between the averages of parental stress scores for mothers according to the type of disability, presence of statistically significant differences between the averages the degrees of coping strategies of mothers according to the type of disability, presence of statistically significant differences between the mean degrees of parental stress and use of coping strategies among mothers according to the age of the son, presence of statistically significant differences between the mean degrees of parental stress and use of coping strategies among mothers according to the education level of mothers, It is possible to predict parental stress among mothers given their scores on coping strategies. The research recommended the necessity to develop individual psychological support programs provided to families of people with disabilities, and to support the self-efficacy of mothers.