History (4,904 posts)

States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany

Wheels of Injustice: How Medical Schools Retained the Power to Discriminate Against Applicants in Wheelchairs in the Era of Disability Rights

The Rise of the Airport Metal Detector: Colorblind Racism, Police Discretion, and Surveillance Across Borders

Westside Slugger: Joe Neal’s Lifelong Fight for Social Justice

Epistemics of the soul: Epistemic logics in German 18th‐century empirical psychology

Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City

Out Here on Our Own: An Oral History of an American Boomtown

The ‘old girls’ network’: media newsletters as feminist technologies in 1970s America

Repressing worker dissent: lethal violence against strikers in the early American labor movement

History of Theory and Method in Anthropology

Toward a Historical Sociology of COVID‐19: Path Dependence Method and Temporal Connections

Under the landlord’s thumb: municipalities and local elites in Sweden 1862–1900

Sex, sahibs and bodies: women workers in the tea plantations of colonial Assam

Volume 63, Issue 3, June 2022, Page 316-331
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The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences

Same-sex Marriage Over 26 Years: Marriage and Divorce Trends in Rural and Urban Norway

The settler colonial roots and neoliberal afterlife of Problem Behavior Theory

A fruitless exercise? The political struggle to compel corporations to justify factory closures in Canada

Volume 63, Issue 3, June 2022, Page 297-315
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‘Wars Begin in the Minds of Men’: Psychiatry and the Cold War Antinuclear Movement

Irish women’s wartime networks: care work and female agency on the first world war home front

The urge: Our history of addiction Carl Erik Fisher Penguin Press, 2022. 400 pp. $30.00 (cloth). ISBN 9780525561446.

Sensitive, Indifferent or Labile: Psychopathy and Emotions in Finnish Forensic Psychiatry, 1900s–1960s

The quest for objectivity and measurements in phrenology’s “bumpy” history.

Phrenology is based on correlating character traits with visible or palpable cranial bumps (or depressions) thought to reflect underlying brain areas differing in size and levels of activity. Franz Joseph Gall, who introduced the doctrine during the 1790s, relied heavily on seeing and feeling skulls when he formulated his theory, as did Johann Spurzheim, who served as his assistant until 1813 and then set forth on his own. But Peter Mark Roget, a British critic of the doctrine, first assailed these methods as too subjective in 1818, and never changed his mind. George Combe, a Scotsman who admired Spurzheim, introduced calipers and other measuring instruments during the 1820s, hoping to make phrenology more like the admired physical sciences. In the United States, the Fowlers also called for more numbers, including measuring distances between the cortical sites above the organs of mind. Nonetheless, phrenologists realized they faced formidable barriers when it came to measuring the physical organs of mind, as opposed to basic skull dimensions. This essay examines the subjectivity that left phrenology open to criticism and shows how some phrenologists tried to overcome it. It also shows how vision and touch remained features of phrenological examinations throughout the numbers-obsessed 19th century. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

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How disruptions happen

A riot on Nevsky Prospekt in Petrograd (St Petersburg) on 17 July 1917 after troops of the provisional government opened fire; this unrest was a precursor to the October revolution.

The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic insecurity and social welfare policy in Britain

‘It was a wonderful age’: Capturing the stories of a long gone inner-city Dublin

Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment

Social Stratification and Career Choice Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe

Patient Voices in Britain, 1840–1948

Operation Pedro Pan: The Migration of Unaccompanied Children from Castro’s Cuba

Did statutory insurance improve the welfare of Swedish workers? The statutory workplace accident insurance act of 1916

Maoism and mental illness: psychiatric institutionalization during the Chinese Cultural Revolution

The history of book bans—and their changing targets—in the U.S.

National Geographic | S Vlasic/Getty

A unique single-copy “unburnable” edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at Sotheby’s. This fireproof edition of the often-banned book was created to raise awareness about the proliferation of censorship.