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History (4,044 posts)

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.

Stamp out syphilis

LoC | Work Projects Administration Poster Collection

Every baby is entitled to be born healthy : Blood test & examination should be made before marriage by your doctor or Bureau of Social Hygiene Clinic, 51 Stuyvesant Place, Staten Island

Paternal power: the pleasures and perils of ‘indulgent’ fathering in Britain in the long eighteenth century

Historical and literary studies have identified shifts in paternal power in Britain from authoritative and patriarchal to benign and affectionate during the long eighteenth century. This article re-examines the power of fathers through the prism of paternal indulgence with insights gained from histories of masculinities.

A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649. By David Rollison

This unusually bold and thought-provoking book offers a new interpretation of the course of English history. While it focuses on the period from the twelfth century to the seventeenth, and especially on the later middle ages of c.1300-c.1550, its story of the “commoning” of the English political system—the rise of the common people and their concerns to the centre of politics—has very wide resonances, extending to the industrial revolution, the British Empire and beyond.

The nature of King James VI/I’s medical conditions: new approaches to the diagnosis

The life of James is reviewed and previously-proposed diagnoses are considered. James’s medical history is
discussed in detail and, where possible, examined with validated symptom scales. Using an online database
of neurological diseases, the authors show that James’s symptomatology is compatible with a diagnosis of
Attenuated (mild) Lesch-Nyhan disease; no evidence was found to support a diagnosis of acute porphyria.
In addition, there is evidence of associated Asperger traits which may explain some of the King’s unusual
behavioural and psycho-social features.

“I’ve Got Some Lovin’ To Do”

Murphy, the daughter of noted architect Luther R. Bailey, grew up in Portland, Ore. and attended Reed College. She later made her way to the Bay Area, where she became a social worker and married Joe Murphy, a labor activist and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”).

Getting miles away from Terman: Did the CRPS fund Catharine Cox Miles’s unsilenced psychology of sex?

Psychologist Catharine Cox Miles (1890–1984) is often remembered as the junior author, with Lewis Terman, of Sex and Personality. Written with support from the Committee for Research on the Problems of Sex (CRPS), Sex and Personality introduced the “masculinity-femininity” personality measure to psychology in 1936. Miles has been overlooked by some historians and constructed as a silent, indirect feminist by others.

‘Looking as Little Like Patients as Persons Well Could’: Hypnotism, Medicine and the Problem of the Suggestible Subject in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain

During the late nineteenth century, many British physicians rigorously experimented with hypnosis as a therapeutic practice. Despite mounting evidence attesting to its wide-ranging therapeutic uses publicised in the 1880s and 1890s, medical hypnosis remained highly controversial.

One for the Road: Drunk Driving since 1900

Remarkably little has been written about the history of traffic accidents—a strange omission since, as numerous commentators have pointed out, many more people died in the twentieth century as a result of road crashes than combined fatalities, military and civilian, during two world wars.

The Construction of Shell Shock in New Zealand, 1919-1939: A Reassessment

This article explores the competing constructions of shell shock in New Zealand during and after the Great War. It begins by considering the army’s construction of shell shock as a discipline problem, before going on to consider the medical profession’s attempts to place it within a somatic and then psychogenic paradigm. While shell shock was initially viewed as a psychogenic condition in New Zealand, within a few years of the end of the war it had become increasingly subject to medical understandings of the psychiatric profession, who dominated the treatment of the mentally ill.

The Death of the Sick Role

The concept of the sick role was introduced into sociology in 1951 and was widely used in medical sociology. A sick person at that time would assume a special social role that permitted him or her to deviate from his or her normal social roles.