1920’s Johns Hopkins Social Services Car – used to transport patients back and forth to the hospital.
Beyond Kinsey: The committee for research on problems of sex and American psychology.
Diets and Dieting: A History of Weight Loss in America
The Settlement Heritage
By Albert J. Kennedy
(from a speech Mr. Kennedy made in 1953 for the National Conference of Social Work. Mr. Kennedy was born in 1879 and was a chronicler of the settlement movement in the United States for which he compiled the 1911 Handbook of Settlements. He died in 1968 at the age of 89.)
Cognitive Bias: Interracial Homicide in New Orleans, 1921–1945
Draft Resisters, Left Nationalism, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism
Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963. By Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher
Prostitution, Islamic Law and Ottoman Societies
‘Every boy ought to learn to shoot and to obey orders’: Guns, Boys, and the Law in English Canada from the late Nineteenth Century to the Great War
War against poverty
Better housing: The solution to infant mortality in the slums (1936)
“Hack, Pack, Sack”: Occupational Structure, Status, and Mobility of Jews in Amsterdam 1851–1941
Until the start of the twentieth century, the occupational structure of Jews in Amsterdam can be described as an ethnic-enclave economy, heavily concentrated in the trading and diamond industries. By 1941, however, Jews had taken advantage of other occupational opportunities, increasing their presence significantly within the new middle class that had begun to emerge during the Industrial Revolution.
Five Decades of Action for Children
All his ways are those of an idiot: The admission, treatment of and social reaction to two idiot children of the Northampton Pauper Lunatic Asylum, 1877-1883
Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism. By Juliane Furst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. v plus 391 pp.)
The reform (!) of the Poor Law
History of the HIV Epidemic
Child Patients, Hospitals and the Home in Eighteenth-Century England
This article seeks to map out some of the principal pathways to medical care used by the parents of poor children. We focus on the most formal provider of healthcare in eighteenth-century towns, the voluntary general hospitals, but we use these institutions as a prism to consider the way that the treatment of child sickness was managed more generally in five local settings.
The scientific spirit and social work (1919)
I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn of the Century Chicago
Rallying for repression: police terror, “law-and-order” politics, and the decline of Maine’s prisoners’ rights movement
This essay analyzes right-wing activism in Maine’s law enforcement community in relation to the state’s prisoners’ rights movement during the early 1970s. Viewing violent political repression as central to the decline of the radical prisoners’ rights organization, Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), I argue that vigilante activity and police attacks on prison activists, including Portland Police Officer Edward Foster’s botched attempt to organize a police “death squad” to assassinate local ex-convicts during the summer of 1974, should be understood as the work of a right-wing social movement in 1970s Maine that included activist prison guards, police officers, law enforcement officials, and their supporters.
More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. By Rebecca L. Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 317 pp.)
Making Up Koro: Multiplicity, Psychiatry, Culture, and Penis-Shrinking Anxieties
Koro is a syndrome in which the penis (or sometimes the nipples or vulva) is retracting, with deleterious effects for the sufferer. In modern psychiatry, it is considered a culture-bound syndrome (CBS). This paper considers the formation and development of psychiatric conceptions of koro and related genital retraction syndromes from the 1890s to the present.
The Baby Trains: Catholic Foster Care and Western Migration, 1873-1929
Instructions on social work
The Corporate Campaign against Homelessness: Class Power and Urban Governance in Neoliberal Atlanta, 1973-1988
Recollections of activism: Hampton Institute and Vassar College, 1967–72
Female Same-sex Desires: Conceptualizing a Disease in Competing Medical Fields in Nineteenth-century Europe
Diagnosis, Therapy, and Evidence: Conundrums in Modern American Medicine
Medical historian Gerald Grob and medical sociologist Alan Horwitz provide an important and carefully crafted interdisciplinary analysis of how numerous therapies are introduced into clinical practice in the absence of clear and compelling data and kept alive by a combination of faith, analogy, tradition, ideology, inertia, and politics.
Dirty Harry’s San Francisco
This article argues that Dirty Harry (Siegel, 1971) is first and foremost a San Francisco film, a perspective that has been ignored by current literature. The article merges a close reading of the film’s narrative, iconography, and semiotics with an analysis of the film’s representation and refraction of San Francisco’s history, politics, culture, and popular image.
The Flower of the Union: Leisure, Race, and Social Identity in Bangu, Rio de Janeiro (1904-1933)
“Confinement of the Higher Orders”: The Social Role of Private Lunatic Asylums in Ireland, c. 1820–60
Infection of the Innocents: Wet Nurses, Infants, and Syphilis in France, 1780-1900
Breaking the Chain of Poverty: Family Planning, Community Involvement, and the Population Council/Office of Economic Opportunity Alliance
Scientific Research and Corporate Influence: Smoking, Mental Illness, and the Tobacco Industry
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.
Identity-Formation and the Breastfeeding Mother in Renaissance Generative Discourses and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
The House on the Borderland: Lesbian Desire, Marriage, and the Household, 1950-1979
Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World
The emergence of race in national welfare politics: the 1962 and 1967 amendments to AFDC
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.
New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America
War Neuroses and Arthur Hurst: A Pioneering Medical Film about the Treatment of Psychiatric Battle Casualties
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.
The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women’s Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865-1914
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.
Domestic Violence in Paris, 1775
The Impact of Assimilation on the Family Structure of Jews in Amsterdam, 1880-1940
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.
Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century: Before Depression, 1660-1800
From Central to Marginal? Changing Perceptions of Kinship Fosterage in Ghana
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.
Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry Through Collections and Display
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.
“Have you understood anything I’ve said?”: The Dick Cavett Show, Jimi Hendrix, and the framing of the black counterculture in 1969
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.
Vagrancy as a Penal Problem: The Logistics of Administering Punishment in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canada
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.
Do brains think? Comparative anatomy and the end of the Great Chain of Being in 19th-century Britain
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.