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History (3,980 posts)

Emaciated, Exhausted, and Excited: The Bodies and Minds of the Irish in Late Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Asylums

Drawing on asylum admission records, casebooks, annual reports, and notebooks recording the settlement of Irish patients, this article examines a deeply traumatic and enduring aspect of the Irish migration experience, the confinement of large numbers of Irish migrants in the Lancashire asylum system in the late nineteenth century.

Little Albert: A neurologically impaired child

Evidence collected by Beck, Levinson, and Irons (2009) indicates that Albert B., the “lost” infant subject of John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner’s (1920) famous conditioning study, was Douglas Merritte (1919–1925). Following the finding that Merritte died early with hydrocephalus, questions arose as to whether Douglas’s condition was congenital, rather than acquired in 1922, as cited on his death certificate.

From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression

Fifty years ago, the number of people diagnosed with depression was relatively modest. At present, by contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that no less than one in ten Americans suffer from this condition, or well over thirty million. What is responsible for such a far reaching transformation?

The AIDS Pandemic in Historic Perspective

Potent antiretroviral drugs (ART) have changed the nature of AIDS, a once deadly disease, into a manageable illness and offer the promise of reducing the spread of HIV. But the pandemic continues to expand and cause significant morbidity and devastation to families and nations as ART cannot be distributed worldwide to all who need the drugs to treat their infections, prevent HIV transmission, or serve as prophylaxis.

Neuro Psychiatry 1943: The Role of Documentary Film in the Dissemination of Medical Knowledge and Promotion of the U.K. Psychiatric Profession

The cinematographic skills of Wright and director Michael Hankinson, together with their reformist agenda, created a clinical presentation that emphasized achievements without acknowledging the limitations not only of the therapies offered by doctors but also the resources available to a nation at war.

Freud’s social theory: Modernist and postmodernist revisions

Acknowledging the power of the id-drives, Freud held on to the authority of reason as the ego’s best tool to control instinctual desire. He thereby placed analytic reason at the foundation of his own ambivalent social theory, which, on the one hand, held utopian promise based upon psychoanalytic insight, and, on the other hand, despaired of reason’s capacity to control the self-destructive elements of the psyche.

Tracing lines of horizontal hostility: How sex workers and gay activists battled for space, voice, and belonging in Vancouver, 1975-1985

In the mid-1970s, indoor sex workers were pushed outdoors onto the streets of Vancouver’s emergent gay West End, where a small stroll had operated for several years. While some gay activists contemplated solidarity with diversely gendered and racialized sex workers, others galvanized a campaign, alongside business owners, realtors, police, city councillors, and politicians to expel prostitution from their largely white, middle-class enclave.

Social security expenditures in Ireland, 1981-2007: An analysis of welfare state change

The analysis of welfare state change is bedevilled by controversy about how to define and measure change, and about the role of expenditure data in quantifying change. Using social security in Ireland as an illustration, this article shows that national-level expenditure data, properly decomposed and disaggregated, can identify patterns of change that are masked in highly aggregated, comparative data.

Tough love: A brief cultural history of the addiction intervention.

Popular media depictions of intervention and associated confrontational therapies often implicitly reference—and sometimes explicitly present—dated and discredited therapeutic practices. Furthermore, rather than reenacting these practices, contemporary televised interventions revive them. Drawing on a range of literature in family history, psychology, and media studies that covers the course of the last 3 decades, this paper argues that competing discourses about the nuclear family enabled this revival.

The Making of Public Labour Intermediation: Job Search, Job Placement, and the State in Europe, 1880–1940

Since the late nineteenth century, job seeking has become increasingly linked to organizations and facilities that offer information on vacancies, offer placement services, or undertake recruiting. The present article focuses on how job placement became a concern for the emerging European welfare states, and how state-run systems of labour intermediation were established between 1880 and 1940.