History (3,935 posts)

This book recounts the painful but fascinating story of attempts made by French physicians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to cure babies born with congenital syphilis by administering “mercurialized milk” through the bodies of wet-nurses.

The Office of Economic Opportunity / Population Council program is an example of a mid-twentieth-century federal government/private foundation cooperative effort to place family planning and maternal health at the center of a fight against entrenched poverty.

Mentally ill individuals have always smoked at high rates and continue to do so, despite public health efforts to encourage smoking cessation. In the last half century, the tobacco industry became interested in this connection, and conducted and supported psychiatric and basic science research on the mental health implications of smoking, long before most mental health professionals outside the industry investigated this issue.

The article argues that fresh insight into Renaissance infant feeding practices can be gained by situating maternal milk within the context of the mother’s material contributions to children in the generative narrative as a whole.

Using interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters to the Daughters of Bilitis and/or its long time leaders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, this article examines the lives of more than 160 wives who expressed lesbian desires from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Germany were extremely violent in the twentieth century. They were not alone.

This article traces the influence of post-war shifts in gender and race relations on the politics of federal welfare in the 1960s. It describes a conservative turn in the politics of welfare during this decade, driven in large part by the rising importance of race within the context of federal welfare policymaking.

In this path-breaking book, Barry Reay makes significant advances towards our understanding of human sexuality and behavior. Reay takes as his subject the history of the New York hustler or “trade” between the 1940s and 1960s.

From 1917 to 1918, Major Arthur Hurst filmed shell-shocked patients home from the war in France. Funded by the Medical Research Committee, and using Pathé cameramen, he recorded soldiers who suffered from intractable movement disorders as they underwent treatment at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley and undertook programs of occupational therapy at Seale Hayne in Devon.

Katharina Rowold provides in-depth analysis of the debates about whether women should be admitted to universities. The book is divided into three parts, one for each country, with the more familiar story of events in Britain presented first so it can provide a basis of comparison for Germany and Spain.

In 1775, 135 wives and 35 husbands filed complaints against their spouses with the Parisian commissioners of police. Most of the wives charged their husbands with verbal and physical violence, and a few of them initiated lawsuits for separation of property and/or persons.

Since the process of assimilation of Jews coincided with a fertility transition, this study examines the relation between changes in the household structure of families of Jewish origin and the process of assimilation. Data were gathered from the Amsterdam registry for 717 Jewish descendants born in Amsterdam between 1883 and 1922.

This book brings together six studies of depression and melancholy in eighteenth-century literature.

Historically, child care, in much of Africa, was a communal responsibility especially through the practice of kinship fosterage. However, as a result of recent socioeconomic changes, there is some evidence to suggest that a shift is taking place in community perceptions about the continuing benefit of kinship fosterage for children in particular.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the widespread closure of psychiatric institutions changed the face of Western psychiatry. Community mental health programmes and acute hospital ward services replaced the huge psychiatric hospitals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The results of this transformation are still being debated today. One of the less controversial consequences of this change, however, was the emergence of psychiatric museums and collections.

This article examines the role of Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s as a vessel of the Black Atlantic, what Paul Gilroy describes as the counterculture to modernity. Placed against the backdrop of The Dick Cavett Show, a newly created talk show in 1969 hosted by the white liberal Dick Cavett, this article explores the dialogue between host and guitarist in an attempt to trace the longue durée assumptions and ideological patterns of modernity and its late 1960s repercussions at the end of the American Civil Rights movement.

There exists a voluminous literature on the history of vagrancy and vagrancy legislation. However, virtually all of its focus has been on the manifestations of vagrancy as a social problem. What has not received attention is another important aspect to this history, one that finds its roots and geneses directly out of its construction as a social problem.

The nature of the relationship between mind and body is one of the greatest remaining mysteries. As such, the historical origin of the current dominant belief that mind is a function of the brain takes on especial significance. In this article I aim to explore and explain how and why this belief emerged in early 19th-century Britain.

Hull House

This article analyzes the basic characteristics of the labor and social policies of the Franco dictatorship established in Spain after the Civil War (1936–1939), and the links which existed between them.

An ambitious book written by a practising Lacanian analyst. At first glance, its refreshing approach of relating the history of hysteria to clinical vignettes of transsexual experience promises to be a welcome contribution to the field of transgender studies, which is heavily oriented towards literary theory and cultural criticism.

In Beauty Imagined, Geoffrey Jones seeks to write the history of approximately 200 years of the global beauty business. Given the sprawling, fragmented, and rather unstable state of the industry through much of that time, it seems an almost quixotic task, but the book succeeds at every level.

Exploring the career of Sophonisba Preston Breckenridge (1866-1948), a pioneering social work educator and a key figure in the professionalisation of social work in the United States, this article aims to suggest how contemporary female social workers can reclaim their historic leadership role in the profession.

archive.org

Foss & West

special.lib.umn.edu/swha

How are you spending your time?

This article proposes combining traditional family reconstitution methods using parish registers with the notary documents found in the Contrôle des Actes in early modern France. This approach enables the construction of detailed life histories that can combine and link demographic events with economic transactions and provide new insights into life course, socioeconomic hierarchy, and migration.

We interviewed Philip G. Zimbardo on April 19, 2011, in anticipation of the 40th anniversary of the Stanford Prison Experiment in August 2011. While Zimbardo’s name is mentioned often in tandem with the experiment, he has distinguished himself in many other areas within psychology before and after the experiment, beginning with an accomplished early career at New York University in which he took interest in social psychology research on deindividuation.

The use of organ extracts to treat psychiatric disorder in the interwar period is an episode in the history of psychiatry which has largely been forgotten. An analysis of case-notes from The Maudsley Hospital from the period 1923–1938 shows that the prescription of extracts taken from animal testes, ovaries, thyroids, and other organs was widespread within this London Hospital.

Case notes of patients treated at the Maudsley Hospital during the interwar period provided data about diagnosis, symptoms and beliefs about mental illness. In the absence of effective treatments, patients were investigated in detail in the hope that connections between disease processes might be revealed.

In 1950, the University of California Board of Regents approved a policy that all faculty members, as a condition for continued employment, were required to either sign an oath indicating that they were not members of the Communist Party or explain why they would not sign. A group of faculty members, led by psychologist Edward Tolman, refused to sign the oath and were fired. This article discusses how Tolman emerged as the leader of the faculty nonsigners and how his stature within psychology enabled him to recruit assistance from the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

In this article the effect of ideological changes in political parties (catch-all process) and in their recruitment patterns (professionalization) on the party affiliation of working-class politicians is investigated in Belgium, both for Members of Parliament (MPs) and for candidates.

During the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, a number of the early explorers developed psychiatric illness either in the Antarctic or shortly after leaving it. Most of these were psychotic illnesses and stress reactions.

Popular depictions of 20th-century American motherhood have typically emphasized the joy and fulfillment that a new mother can expect to experience on her child’s arrival. But starting in the 1950s, discussions of the “baby blues” began to appear in the popular press. How did articles about the baby blues, and then postpartum depression, challenge these rosy depictions?

In this breath-taking work of scholarly inquiry, C. F. Goodey demonstrates, and demonstrates with a forensic precision, that our modern understandings of ‘intellectual disability’ are the highly contingent, and even accidental, outcomes of various historical processes, which crystallised only around 400 years ago.

This article considers the advent of psychiatric services for children in independent Ireland through the establishment of the first state-funded child guidance clinic in the mid-1950s. Ireland was somewhat late to embrace the child guidance model which had originated in the USA at the turn of the century, mainly because it challenged traditional notions of child welfare and juvenile justice and provided an alternative to institutional care, the responsibility for which was vested in the Catholic Church.

Since both anthropological psychiatry and social psychiatry are based on a person-centred approach, it was hypothesized that common roots are to be detected in what is called humanistic psychology.

Social History

‘When I die, I want to be buried with her’

The private papers of the philosopher-psychologist, William James, indicate that he frequented several mental healers during his life, undertaking 100–200 therapeutic sessions concerning a range of symptoms from angina to insomnia. The success of the mind-cure movement constituted for James both a corroboration, and an extension, of the new research into the subconscious self and the psychogenesis of disease.

Mind, Self, and Society, the posthumously published volume by which George Herbert Mead is primarily known, poses acute problems of interpretation so long as scholarship does not consider the actual process of its construction.

How did behavioralism, one of the most influential approaches to the academic study of politics in the twentieth century, become so prominent so quickly?

Shell shock is perhaps the UK’s most evocative psychiatric diagnosis. With growing historical interest in the experience of being a soldier, it has come to represent the emotions of trench warfare.

During the 1984–1985 British miners’ strike and in its immediate aftermath, women activists produced a series of publications involving creative writing, which sought to communicate the strike from their own perspective.

Jan Goldstein’s study of an obscure medical case from 1820s France is both a fascinating micro-history and a revealing reflection on the practice of working with archival material.

The psychology of Antarctic explorers and groups in Antarctic bases has been much studied in recent years, and current knowledge has been summarized in a review by Palinkas and Suedenfeld (2008).

The Origins Project is an online interactive timeline populated with events significant to the development of psychology, particularly within the British context. A work in progress, more events and resources will be added to the timeline in the coming months.

A thorough review of nineteenth-century Russian psychiatry is presented, followed by a short biographical account of Kandinsky’s personal life.

Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Tourette’s, multiple sclerosis, stroke: all are neurological illnesses that create dysfunction, distress, and disability. With their symptoms ranging from impaired movement and paralysis to hallucinations and dementia, neurological patients present myriad puzzling disorders and medical challenges.

The Freud Museum, at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, was the home of Sigmund Freud and his family when they escaped Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938.

Using a combination of brief case studies and statistical analysis of probate disputes in eighteenth-century England, this article argues for an expanded interpretation of Georgian family life—an interpretation that understands the tugs and pulls of siblinghood. In the eighteenth century, emerging ideas about social equality based on idealized siblinghood tangled with engrained family hierarchies to produce messy, constantly shifting, sibling politics.