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.
A Conference – Infant Welfare Society
Labour repression and social justice in Franco’s Spain: the political objectives of compulsory sickness insurance, 1942–1957
Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism
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.
Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry
Relationship and leadership: Sophonisba Breckinridge and women in social work.
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.
The social worker and modern charity (1914)
Play Hard – Work Hard
Neo-liberal globalisation, the manufacturing of insecurity and the power of labour
Pushing Family Reconstitution Further: Life Course, Socioeconomic Hierarchy, and Migration in the Loudunais, 1705-1765
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.
Philip G. Zimbardo on his career and the Stanford Prison Experiment’s 40th anniversary.
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.
Organ extracts and the development of psychiatry: Hormonal treatments at the Maudsley Hospital 1923–1938
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.
Psychiatric case notes: symptoms of mental illness and their attribution at the Maudsley Hospital, 1924-35
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.
The regents versus the professors: Edward Tolman’s role in the California loyalty oath controversy
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.
Blue collars striking the Red Flag: formal and descriptive representation of the working class in the Belgian House of Representatives 1946–2007
Psychiatric illness and suicide in the heroic age of Antarctic exploration
Can’t a mother sing the blues? Postpartum depression and the construction of motherhood in late 20th-century America.
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?
A History of Intelligence and ‘Intellectual Disability’: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe
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.
Church, State and Family: The Advent of Child Guidance Clinics in Independent Ireland
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.
Between phenomenological and community psychiatry: the Comprehending Anthropology of Jurg Zutt
Extending current boundaries between the private, domestic and public display of mourning, love and visual culture in Mexico City
Interpreting “Mind-Cure”: William James and the “Chief Task…of the Science of Human Nature”
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.
The Construction of Mind, Self, and Society: The Social Process Behind G. H. Mead’S Social Psychology
The Ford Foundation and the Rise of Behavioralism in Political Science
Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914-1930
Pies and essays: women writing through the British 1984–1985 coal miners’ strike
Jan Goldstein, Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux
Psychology during the expeditions of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration
BPS Origins: The evolution and impact of psychological science
Victor Kandinsky (1849-89): A pioneer of modern Russian forensic psychiatry
The Neurological Patient in History
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, London [podcasts]
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.
That Fierce Edge: Sibling Conflict and Politics in Georgian England
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.
Keeping Sight of Social Justice: 80 Years of Building CASW
Not many of you will know of the formation recently of a new professional association…. It is the professional Association of Canadian Social Workers, and its formation will perhaps be the first indication to many that the problems of inequalities and human relationship which arise from and live to burden our social structure have evolved a profession of social workers to meet them — a professions with a technique all its own, demanding rigorous training, and a code of ethics and standards to be lived up to. (Official announcement of the establishment of the Canadian Association of Social Workers).
Historical Threads in the Development of Oncology Social Work
We begin with a description of Oncology Social Work,(Association of Oncology Social Workers, 2001) and its role in helping cancer patients and their families. Next, important historical developments are reviewed: the birth of medical social work in hospitals in the early
20th Century;(I M Cannon, 1923) the medical improvements in the 1940’s in treating cancer, and the shift to a consumer oriented American Cancer Society pushing a greater role for the federal government in funding cancer research. Oncology Social Work came to full blossom in the 1970’s, a result of the physicians’ need for a member of the health care team who understood cancer, treatment, and the patient’s need to address their psychosocial needs.
Oncology Social Work is today a fully developed profession with its national organization that provides education and support to the oncology social workers’ use of multiple psychosocial interventions for cancer patients and their families
Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill
Behind the scenes: two centuries of census-taking
National Archives Podcast. This talk takes a look at the army of civil servants, temporary clerks, registrars, enumerators and others, and the part they played in this astonishing feat of organisation once a decade.
From crime to punishment: Criminal records of our ancestors from the 18th and 19th centuries [podcast]
This podcast takes researchers through the various stages of the criminal justice system of the period and focusses on the various records created, from the commission of a crime, through the court processes and on to the records of punishment.