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National Archives
How was the concept of obscenity governed in the absence of specific statutes that defined what was and was not obscene? To what extent was this governance an effect of the time and place in which it emerged? Drawing on early twentieth century case studies, all of which are compiled from files in the National Archives, Dr Louise Chambers investigates these questions in relation to the banning of novels whose narratives featured same sex relations between women.
This paper explores the notion that the writing of history has played a role in the making of modern suicide, and that it can have its uses in its “unmaking.” Examples of the making of modern suicide come from the writings of nineteenth century doctors concerned with formulating new medical truths of suicide, and who came to describe well-known historical “suicides” (e.g., that of Cato) in terms of pathology as part of this project.
Smith College Sophia Smith Collection | Frances Fox Piven Papers
Vol.1, No. 1
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, venereal diseases were seen not only as a problem in Germany, but also in its colonial empire. In Germany, doctors believed that through their scientific training and education they could be successful in fighting VD through the use of a biopolitics aimed to educate and regulate the bodies of targeted groups.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the view that “[e]very case of melancholia should be looked upon as having a suicidal tendency” dominated among British asylum physicians. However, a generation earlier medical texts on melancholia contained only sporadic references to “suicide” and fewer still to the adjective “suicidal.”
This text develops three interwoven issues: first, a succinct comparative analysis of medical and psychiatric semiology, which proposes that the lack of referring relations between psychiatric symptoms and brain/psychic dysfunction is a fundamental distinction between medical and psychiatric semiology.
This paper explores the usage of suicide statistics and the emergence of suicidology in nineteenth-century Scandinavia and Finland. Drawing upon texts from Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—with a focus on Swedish language sources—it illustrates the significance that suicide statistics gained during this period, and pays attention to the question of how the Scandinavian discussion on suicide was linked to ideas from outside the geographic area.
1833
This article analyses representations of bourgeois femininity in early twentieth century newspaper coverage of the ceremonial Opening of the Legislature in Ontario, Canada’s largest and most populous province.
Since the 1980s, rates of unionization have been declining in Mexico, as they have in many Anglo- and Latin American countries, contributing to the marginalization of a once powerful political actor. It has been argued that labor revitalization in Mexico will require institutional reforms to the Federal Labor Law.
After suggesting that all psychologies contain indigenous qualities and discussing differences and commonalities between German and North American historiographies of psychology, an indigenous reconstruction of German critical psychology is applied. It is argued that German critical psychology can be understood as a backlash against American psychology, as a response to the Americanization of German psychology after WWII, on the background of the history of German psychology, the academic impact of the Cold War, and the trajectory of personal biographies and institutions.
This article charts the history of suicide statistics in Russia, exploring how multilayered associations between suicide and civilization were mapped upon perceived geographical, historical, and social fissures, both within Russia and between Russia and an abstract “west.”
The common image of a female wage earner in the U.S. in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is that of a young, single woman: the daughter of her family. However, the wives and mothers of these families also made important economic contributions to their families’ economies. This paper argues that we need to rethink our evaluation of the economic roles played by ever-married women in working-class families.
‘Deliberate self-harm’, ‘self-mutilation’ and ‘self-injury’ are just some of the terms used to describe one of the most prominent issues in British mental health policy in recent years.
From the onset, moral statistics were influenced by religious discourse. During the nineteenth century, Adolf Wagner discovered the “One Law” of sociology: Protestants always kill themselves more often than Catholics.
Charles MacKay (1852)
When “antipsychotic” drugs were introduced into psychiatry in the 1950s, they were thought to work by inducing a state of neurological suppression, which reduced behavioral disturbance as well as psychotic symptoms. This view was reflected in the name “neuroleptic.”
TS Arthur (1845)
Initially formed by Buffalo businessmen to monitor the region’s sizeable German population, by Fall 1917, the NFDL turned its attention to tackling the region’s labor problems, developing an array of covert mechanisms designed to stop unionization and regain control over Buffalo’s wartime labor market.
Historians have castigated the British medical profession for endorsing forcible feeding during the suffragette hunger strike campaigns of 1909 to 1914. This article reconsiders the importance of medical opposition to forcible feeding by closely analysing its agendas and, importantly, by positing that the medico-ethical debates sparked in that period set the stage for ethical discourses that have recurrently resurfaced ever since.
Two revolutionary drugs were introduced into psychiatry in the early 1950s for the treatment of agitated mental patients — reserpine and chlorpromazine. These drugs initiated the modern era of drug treatment for schizophrenia and other psychoses. Early research revealed that, although the pharmacological profiles of the two drugs overlapped considerably, they had different mechanisms of action.
This article examines posthumanism and its relationship to humanism. First, it is argued that the term “posthumanism” relies upon an incomplete conception of humanism, and in a way that forecloses the possibility of looking to the humanist tradition for support.
Smith College Sophia Smith Collection
William Battie (1758)
This article points to previously undetected evidence demonstrating that Herbert Hill, labor director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from the 1950s to the 1970s, informed for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on his former political associates in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
As of spring 2011, 150 years have passed since the death of one of the most famous neurological patients of the nineteenth century. A Frenchman, “Monsieur Leborgne” also known by the nickname “Tan,” was hospitalized due to an almost complete loss of speech.
This article explores how very old people in Northern Norway supported life before economic modernization, from nineteenth-century census registrations and ethnographic sources. Very few lived alone.
Chilean Protest Murals Photograph Collection, Widener Library.
Mural depicting a man and woman in a prison cell. Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins, Santiago, Chile, ca. 1989. Andrés Romero Spethman, photographer.
Google | Daniel Defoe
Smith College Sophia Smith Collection | Boston Sunday Globe/G Vasquez
Social theorist, welfare rights activist, and political science professor Frances Fox Piven was born in 1932 in Calgary, Alberta. Raised in New York, she was naturalized in 1953, the same year she received a BA in city planning from the University of Chicago. After receiving an MA (1956) and a Ph.D. (1962) from that institution, she moved to New York where she worked as a city planner and then as a research associate for one of the country’s first antipoverty agencies, Mobilization for Youth (MFY) on New York’s Lower East Side. In 1965 Piven and her MFY colleague Richard Cloward began a career of formulating the theoretical underpinnings of anti-poverty and welfare rights movements with the publication of a paper entitled “Mobilizing the Poor: How It Can Be Done”
Personal note: I found Dr. Piven to be the most compelling presence I have ever encountered in a classroom.
New Yorker
At an Army research facility, a soldier given a powerful mind-altering drug said, “I feel like my life is not worth a nickel here.”
archives.bps.org.uk | University of Hull photographic services, Brynmor Jones Library
Grace Rawlings: British Psychological Society
D Thomas: Royal Medico Psychological Association (RMPA)
Harvey Stevens: Chair, American Committee American Assoc.on Mental Deficiency
Alan Clarke: Joint Secretary
Google | Henry George
Google | Stanford University Press
The promise of scientific history and scientifically informed history is more modest today than it was in the nineteenth century, when a number of intellectuals hoped to transform history into a scientific mode of inquiry that would unite the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and reveal profound truths about human nature and destiny.
The second chapter of Augustus’ lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis entitles the Roman father – under specific, narrowly defined circumstances – to kill his adulterous daughter and her lover. This paper focuses on three aspects.
<br.Ruling for more than six centuries over lands that spanned three continents, the Ottomans developed a system of law enforcement that initially relied on fines collected by local agents. In the sixteenth century, much of the revenue from these fines went to the local officials in charge of identifying suspects and punishing criminals.
In 1946, the Veterans Administration, now the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), underwent extensive organizational and professional changes to accommodate the health care needs of veterans returning from World War Two.
As life expectancy increases and the retirement in-come system contracts, households face an enormous challenge in ensuring a secure retirement. Working longer is often hailed as the best way to increase re-tirement incomes. But some suggest that more work by older persons reduces the job opportunities for younger persons.
archives.bps.org.uk | N.V.Int.Persefoto Bureau, Amsterdam P.H.Kade
University of Groningen, Netherlands 1926
This paper traces the formation of the German “Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung” (“Society for Psychological Research”), whose constitutive branches in Munich and Berlin were originally founded as inlets for alternatives to Wundtian experimental psychology from France and England, that is, experimental researches into hypnotism and alleged supernormal phenomena.
History of Psychology Centre
In 1913 the first applied psychologist took up his post with the London County Council. His job was to assess children for special educational programmes and develop tools to identify children who may need alternative kinds of education. With this post, the profession of educational psychology was born. The numbers of educational psychologists have steadily grown over the subsequent hundred years and the practices, roles and functions that they adopt have similarly developed.
BBC | Getty Images
Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, 1915
Prior to 1893, the Ontario government did not accept direct responsibility for the care of neglected and dependent infants. However, charitable infants’ homes received government grants for the infants and for their nursing mothers, and from 1874 were inspected annually or twice annually.
Thousands of letters proposing economic recovery plans were written by workers and by the public in general to the Roosevelt administration. A survey of the recovery plan letters indicates that almost all of the letters make sense from an economic point of view and that a large proportion made suggestions that had the possibility of having a positive effect on economic recovery.