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We are living in a time of “memorial mania,” in popular culture as much as in academic publishing. This is not to say that all traumatic deaths are seen as warranting attention, let alone public displays of grief.
Fifty years ago civil servant John Vassall was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment for espionage. Vassall was homosexual, and whilst working at the British Embassy in Moscow, was caught in a Soviet Secret Service ‘honeytrap’, and blackmailed into passing secrets to the Soviet Union, receiving payments for his efforts.
Advances in the History of Psychology
In the summer of 1954 psychologist Muzafer Sherif, along with a group of research assistants posing as camp personnel, brought a group of twenty-two eleven and twelve year old boys to Camp Tom Hale in Robbers Cave State Park.
Has there been a specifically Scandinavian way of dealing with venereal disease (VD)? This is one of the central questions asked by Norwegian historian Ida Blom in her recent monograph.
This study examines the intergenerational transmission of fertility patterns from mothers who had their first birth at young ages to their daughters using nationally representative longitudinal data from from population registers in Sweden, 1986–2009.
This article uses a mixed method approach to analyse whether urban domestic service functioned as a diffusion channel in the fertility decline. The central hypothesis is that nineteenth century female, rural-born domestic servants were influenced by the reproductive habits of their middle and upper-class employers, who were vanguards in the adoption of family size limitation within marriage.
The term “half-caste” had its origins in nineteenth century British colonial administrations, emerging in the twentieth century as the quotidian label for those whose ancestry comprised multiple ethnic/racial groups, usually encompassing “White”.
Based upon studies of thousands of couples, this podcast explains how, when and where people in past centuries married. Family historians just starting out will find advice on where ‘missing’ marriages are most likely to be found, while those already well advanced in tracing their family tree will be able to interpret their discoveries to better understand whether their ancestors actions and choices made them exceptional or normal for their day.
Among those physicians and scientists who pioneered the study of the nervous system and its diseases in Victorian Britain, few were as significant as William Richard Gowers (1845–1915). Although he is most famous for his two-volume Manuel of Nervous Diseases, his studies in spinal diseases and epilepsy still elicit the admiration of neurologists, psychiatrists, and medical psychologists today.
The treatment of Caster Semenya, the South African athlete whose victory in the 800m at the World Championships in 2009 ended in acrimony after she was accused of being ‘a man’, once again raises the issue of how intersexed athletes are treated by the various international sports bodies.
This paper examines the effects of household social class called ‘mibun’ on the likelihood of migration among peasant men and women from their residing communities, focusing on two farming villages in preindustrial northeastern Japan.
This article examines alienist explanations for fracture among British asylum patients in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries
The myth of neglected sick children in the past was deconstructed during the last few decades by diverse authors of both medical and social history. Families saw children as worthwhile members, and assisted them in sickness and misery. Hannah Newton’s book The Sick Child in Early Modern England stands in this tradition. But she achieves more than to affirm the results of earlier research.
This article investigates Swedish drug treatment as an ideological project, from the establishment of the first treatment centres in the late 1960s up until the change in legislation and management in the early 1980s.
W.B. Gay/Gazetteer of Hampshire County, Mass. | UMass Amherst Libraries
The Northampton State Hospital was opened in 1858 to provide moral therapy to the “insane,” and under the superintendency of Pliny Earle, became one of the best known asylums in New England. Before the turn of the century, however, the Hospital declined, facing the problems of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate funding. The push for psychiatric deinstitutionalization in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a steady reduction of the patient population, the last eleven of whom left Northampton State in 1993.
This paper analyzes the impact of individuals’ socialization in a given demographic context on their later reproductive behavior in 19th century Geneva.
“What is human about human beings? How did they get that way? How can they be made more so?” These three questions formed the basis of a fifth-grade social studies curriculum project developed in the 1960s called Man: A Course of Study, or MACOS.
This article argues that the meaning of the word ‘autism’ experienced a radical shift in the early 1960s in Britain which was contemporaneous with a growth in epidemiological and statistical studies in child psychiatry.
The present paper investigates the methodology involved in Jaspers’ psychopathology and compares it with Husserl’s phenomenology and with Dilthey’s cultural science.
The men and women dedicated to building an alternative society in the United States in the Sixties era began without a blueprint.
While numerous historiographical works have been written to shed light on Freud’s early theoretical education in biology, physiology, and medicine and on the influence of that education on psychoanalysis, this paper approaches Freud’s basic comprehension of science and methodology by focusing on his early research practice in physiology and neuranatomy.
Discussions regarding the use of hypnotism in dentistry featured prominently in dental journals and society proceedings during the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Many dentists used hypnotic suggestion either as the sole anesthetic for extractions or in conjunction with local and general anesthetics for excavation and cavity filling.
The law on abortion in present-day Ireland was recently described as ‘medieval’; a word intended to convey the meaning that the law was unsophisticated and insufficiently considerate of the interests of pregnant women. This book, however, shows clearly that medieval law on abortion was far from unsophisticated, and nor was it always as ‘pro-life’ as one might have imagined.
The history of San Francisco’s Chinatown following the 1906 earthquake and fire and New Orleans’ public housing following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 reveal how powerful class interests collude with the fog of disaster to lay claim to the urban spaces of the poor and marginal.
Over the last few years the gender history of Renaissance Europe has increasingly turned to the malleability of the body and its connection to unstable gender identities.
This article studies the attitudes and significance of violence between parents and children as they appear in court records of lower courts and Courts of Appeal in early modern Finland.
Chinese labour heroes represent an idiosyncratic expression of a broader twentieth-century phenomenon of promoting worker emulation through the hailing of model labourers.
Perceptions of hospitalization for children shifted from late nineteenth-century care designed to uplift poor children and create better citizens to mid-century attention to children’s emotional and medical needs.
