History (4,156 posts)

The Uses and Abuses of Public Space: Urban Governance, Social Ordering and Resistance, Avenham Park, Preston, c. 1850–1901

This article contributes to scholarship on liberal governance during the nineteenth century through the much-neglected area of the public park.

“Silent sentinel” Alison T. Hopkins at the White House gates on New Jersey Day

LoC

January 30, 1917

Dangerous, divine, and marvelous? The legacy of the 1960s in the political cinema of Europe and Brazil

The experience of the 1960s had a profound influence on both politicized cinema and on the critical discourse surrounding it. This article explores that influence and its subsequent legacy in the comparative contexts of Brazil and Europe. In Europe the most striking developments were to be seen in France after 1968, most particularly in the “revolutionary cinema” of Jean-Luc Godard during his involvement with the Dziga-Vertov Group.

Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece

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Psychiatric settings have frequently provided ideal observation sites for anthropologists studying expressions of distress in relation to cultural, social and political transformations. Often the focus has been on culture-specific symptoms and diagnoses and the ways that western psychiatric systems are indigenised to non-western countries. This particular study, however, achieves more: it provides captivating and occasionally upsetting views of life and the self in the north-eastern part of Greece.

‘Constable dances with instructress’: the police and the Queen of Nightclubs in inter-war London

The Semantics of Pain in Greco-Roman Antiquity

The semantics of pain are an important and interesting aspect of any language. Ancient Greek and Latin had multiple words for pain, which makes scrutinizing different meanings problematic.

The Making of Marriage in Medieval France

Using as a case study the scandalous marriage of a twelfth-century abbess, this article will demonstrate the flaws in Duby’s argument, and also we can learn about medieval marriage, and medieval society more broadly, by applying this new approach.

International Relations in Psychiatry Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II

The decades around 1900 were crucial in the evolution of modern medical and social sciences, and in the formation of various national health services systems. The modern fields of psychiatry and mental health care are located at the intersection of these spheres. There emerged concepts, practices, and institutions that marked responses to challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and the formation of the nation-state. These psychiatric responses were locally distinctive, and yet at the same time established influential models with an international impact. In spite of rising nationalism in Europe, the intellectual, institutional, and material resources that emerged in the various local and national contexts were rapidly observed to have had an impact beyond any national boundaries. In numerous ways, innovations were adopted and refashioned for the needs and purposes of new national and local systems.

Opium: Reality’s Dark Dream

Opium is one of the most useful and complex drugs in medical history. Made from the juice of the unripe seed capsule of the opium poppy, it contains several valuable alkaloids. Three of these, morphine, codeine, and thebaine—the last when processed into semisynthetic opioids like oxycodone—have potent analgesic effects.

French Neuropsychiatry in the Great War: Between Moral Support and Electricity

In World War I, an unprecedented number of soldiers were suffering from nervous disturbances, known as war psychoneuroses. Mechanisms of commotion, emotion, and suggestion were defined in order to explain these disturbances.

Absolute divorce in Argentina, 1954–1956. Debates and practices regarding a short-lived law

This article examines the formulation, application, and effects of Article 31 of Law 14.394, which introduced absolute divorce into Argentina, albeit briefly: the law was passed in December 1954 and ‘suspended’ in March 1956.

The vocabulary of anglophone psychology in the context of other subjects.

Anglophone psychology shares its vocabulary with several other subjects. Some of the more obvious subjects that have parts of their vocabulary in common with Anglophone psychology include biology (e.g., dominance), chemistry (e.g., isomorphism), philosophy (e.g., phenomenology), and theology (e.g., mediator).

Worms as a Hook for Colonising Puerto Rico

The paper argues that medical colonisation altered social stratification on the island and participated in making Puerto Rico ‘safe’ for colonial capital.

Mirror Therapy for Facial Paralysis in Traditional South Asian Islamic Medicine

Mirror therapy has stimulated a dynamic clinical and research agenda for the treatment of poststroke hemiparesis and phantom pain.

Making Knowledge for International Policy: WHO Europe and Mental Health Policy, 1970-2008

This paper tells a rather more complex story. Looking in detail at the efforts of the WHO European Regional Office, since the 1970s, to reform mental health policy across the region, it shows that the organisation’s main policy successes in this field were achieved, not by circulating standardised data or policies, but by creating opportunities to share holistic, experience-based and context-sensitive knowledge of instances of best practice.

A Tricky Object to Classify: Evidence, Postpartum Depression and the DSM-IV

The concept of evidence has become central in Western healthcare systems; however, few investigations have studied how the shift toward specific definitions of evidence actually occurred in practice. This paper examines a historical case in psychiatry where the debate about how to define evidence was of central importance to nosological decision making.

Ireland and the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857

This article examines the reasons for and impact of Ireland’s exclusion from the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857.

Village Improvement and the Development of Small Town America, 1853-1893

This article presents a detailed historical account of the Laurel Hill Association in Stockbridge, MA, and an overview of the scope of improvement theory and practice at the national level between 1853 and 1893, the period of village improvement’s greatest impact on the development of small town America.

Inherited dimensions of infant mortality. Detecting signs of disproportionate mortality risks in successive generations

In an effort to unravel the diffusion and mechanisms of long-term fertility change, there is a growing body of literature on the intergenerational transmission of reproductive behavior.

The State, the Unions, and the critical synthesis in labor law history: a 25-year retrospect

Public Debt in the Papal States, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century

A long-term analysis of the organization and administration of the Roman public debt, as well as the people involved in it, reveals that the central government of the Papal States established a stable financial system earlier than traditionally supposed and that, unlike that of other European states, it often used the capital raised from bond issues for charitable and productive purposes.

Dictating the Suitable Way of Life: Mental Hygiene for Children and Workers in Socialist Mexico, 1934–1940

Globalized Hopes and Disillusions

In contrast to the common tendency to see war as the result of leadership decisions based on risk assessments, and political and economic considerations about gains or losses, we use a constructivist and institutional perspective to historicize and politicize the way “nation-state interests” and “nation-state preferences” even in a decision to go to war are socially constructed and culturally embedded.

Beyond the Schools of Psychology 1: A Digital Analysis of Psychological Review, 1894–1903

Traditionally, American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century has been framed as a competition among a number of “schools”: structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc. But this is only one way in which the “structure” of the discipline can be conceived.

Abandoned and illegitimate, a double mortality penalty? Mortality of illegitimate infants in the foundling hospital of Madrid, La Inclusa (1890–1935)

This paper examines the existence of a mortality penalty for illegitimate abandoned infants in the Foundling Hospital of Madrid, La Inclusa, during the period 1890–1935, in the context of the mortality experience of the city.

Under the Guardians’ Supervision: Illegitimacy, Family, and the English Poor Law, 1870-1930

This article explores how Cambridge and Cardiff poor law unions “found” families for illegitimate children between 1870 and 1930, even when doing so meant coming into conflict with national regulations.

The cost of marriage and the matrimonial agency in late Victorian Britain

How the other half lives: Studies among the tenements of New York (Jacob Riis, 1890)

ebooks.library.cornell.edu | New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World

The history of the American birth control movement and its leader Margaret Sanger continues to intrigue historians of women, social movements, and medicine.

Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America

Mind’s historicity: Its hidden history.

Whereas psychological research can hardly accept the idea of a changing psychological architecture, mind’s historicity seems to be commonplace among historians of psychology, at least in recent decades. Attempts to promote a convergence between psychology and history have always existed, though mainly in the margins of both disciplines.

The Condition of the Working Class in England

The Condition of the Working Class in England is the best known work of Engels, and still in many ways the best study of the working class in Victorian England. What Cobbett had done for agricultural poverty in his Rural Rides, Engels did – and more – in this work on the plight of industrial workers in England in the 1840s.

Doing Time On a Southern Prison Farm

Mother Jones | B Jackson

In his new book, Inside the Wire: Photographs From Texas and Arkansas Prisons, Jackson documents a society and economy whose roots were entwined with the antebellum South.

History of the Discovery of the Antipsychotic Dopamine D2 Receptor: A Basis for the Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia

The 1975 publication of Seeman et al. (Proc Nat Acad Sci, USA), reporting the discovery of the antipsychotic receptor in the brain, is a classic example of translational medicine research. In searching for a pathophysiological mechanism of psychosis, the team sought to identify sites that bound the antipsychotic drug haloperidol….The collective work is generally viewed as providing a fundamental basis for the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia.

Abraham Flexner: “Is social work a profession in the technical and strict sense of the term?” 1915

Rockefeller Foundation | Adoption History Project

Abraham Flexner was a member of the General Education Board (GEB) and a prominent proponent of educational reform in the United States.

Organizing for partnership: the influence of the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organisations on the British Trades Union Congress 1995–2005

Scholars typically distinguish between adversarial organizing and collaborative partnership with employers as competing roads to union revitalization. This article demonstrates that the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) borrowed organizing principles, techniques and animating aphorisms from America, but not a model of trade unionism.

Runaway Mothers and Daughters: Crimes of Abandonment in Twentieth-century Guatemala

As evidenced by laws addressing abandonment of the home and children, family preservation was paramount for early twentieth-century Latin American nation builders. The judicial record of abandonment cases from Guatemala demonstrates how men attempted to enforce their authority in the home and then enlisted state officials to uphold it when their wives or daughters defied them.

The select committee, appointed on the subject of the poor laws, respectfully report [Albany, 1823]

memory.loc.gov

New Westminister (British Columbia) Mental Hospital and Penitentiary (1870)

bcarchives.gov.bc.ca

Commercialized prostitution in New York City (1916)

Rockefeller Archive Center | Bureau of Social Hygiene

The defender devoted to the protection of American labor and industries

memory.loc.gov | American protective tariff league, New York

The Roots of Insurrection: The Role of the Algerian Village Assembly (Djemâa) in Peasant Resistance, 1863–1962

While Pierre Bourdieu and other scholars have emphasized the devastating impacts that economic individualism had on peasant communalism, this study employs the djemâa as a case study of a “traditional” institution that proved flexible and enduring as rural society confronted settler land appropriations and a savage war of decolonization.

Indian Labor History

Ethnogenesis: The Case of British Indians in the Caribbean

As a concept, ethnogenesis presupposes a category of individuals that are not a group becomes a group. Most accounts of ethnogenesis exhibit two features: they confuse ethnogenesis with the resilience of ethnicity, and they describe the “emergence” of ethnic groups as a response to external circumstances.