History (4,591 posts)

research.ncl.ac.uk

St Martin’s Workhouse admissions ticked for Mary Snider, 16th March 1798.

At the American Civil War’s end, President Andrew Johnson affirmed the federal government’s commitment to disabled veterans, intoning that ‘a grateful people will not hesitate to sanction any measures having for their relief of soldiers mutilated . . . in the effort to preserve our national existence’ (p. 2).

This critical narrative history examines the development of sociology in the United States during what has come to be labeled as the Progressive Era, roughly the years from the 1890s to World War I.

This interdisciplinary article explores the early history of heliotherapy (natural sunlight therapy) on the Côte d’Azur through its visual culture. It concentrates on images, and the texts within which they appear, of children undergoing heliotherapy dating to the First World War, as a way into examining the significance of the cure during a period of perceived national degeneration.

D Harris | Guardian

RD Laing, the radical psychiatrist opened a centre in London in 1965 that aimed to revolutionise the treatment of mental illness. Kingsley Hall soon became notorious for drugs, wild parties, therapy and mystics. Almost five decades on, photographer Dominic Harris has tracked down former residents, visited them, photographed them and interviewed them. The result is a self-published photography book, The Residents, which includes Harris’s intimate portraits, as well as personal testimonies of those who were there.

Guardian | K Robinson

‘A radical moment’: Kingsley Hall residents, 1965.

Of special interest are the acknowledged influences of Surrealism’s leading representative. Why did André Breton, in his mythical love affair with Freudianism, systematically silence his indebtedness to the Janetian model of the mind?

In The Demographics of Empire, Dennis Cordell suggests that postmodern and postcolonial theories have led the study of African historical demography, on decline in the 1990s, into a period of renaissance. He argues that scholars are “responding to and profiting from the challenges presented by these theoretical perspectives” that have cast doubt on demographic studies of the African past.

research.ncl.ac.uk

Part of the St Martin’s Workhouse was depicted in a picture by T. H. Shepherd in 1850

SSA

When President Roosevelt submitted his Social Security proposal to Congress in January 1935, he also transmitted draft legislation, entitled the Economic Security Bill. The Administration’s bill was introduced in the House by Congressmen Doughton and Lewis and in the Senate by Senator Wagner. This draft bill was the starting point for the legislative consideration of Social Security in 1935.

Many of those considered to be insane in the past were regarded as paupers and so came within the ambit of the poor law. Little work has yet been published on the ways in which the poor law dealt with the psychologically disturbed during the era of the old poor law.

LSE | C Abbott

The history of Freemasonry in Poland is linked with the national independence movement. Masonic organizations supported its ideas, even though they were not always compliant with Masonic ethics. Polish Freemasonry was reborn in 1920, with an important role played by three psychiatrists.

Austere and prolonged fasting among Shangqing Daoist priestesses (Daogu) of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) occurred as part of a lifestyle practice to achieve a mystical state of afterlife existence, body immortality and residence in the Shangqing heavenly kingdom

Brown University Library | Boston, Mass.: Scientific Temperance Federation, 1930?

Thomas Gibson’s plan for a workhouse as included in Henry Fielding, Proposal for Making Effectual Provision for the Poor, 1753. © London Lives.

Boston, Mass.Westerville, Ohio: Scientific Temperance Federation American Issue Publishing Company, 1913 | Brown University Library

In the last quarter of the 1930s, Carney Landis, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University affiliated with the Psychiatric Institute of New York, headed a Committee for Research in Problems of Sex-funded research project in which he conducted interviews with 100 women between the ages of 18 and 35 who self-identified as physically disabled.

Johns Hopkins

1920’s Johns Hopkins Social Services Car – used to transport patients back and forth to the hospital.

This introduction to the Special Section of History of Psychology argues for greater attention to psychological research on sex in the decades before the publication of the Kinsey volumes.

LoC | Wellcome Images/Wellcome Library

A large gentleman with a walking stick

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.)

White killers of African Americans in New Orleans between 1921 and 1945, nearly half of whom were policemen, insisted that they acted in self-defense, only after their victims had threatened them, often by reaching for weapons. But many of their victims were unarmed.

The politics of Canadian left nationalism, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and critiques of US imperialism occupied shared, overlapping, and in many cases intersecting intellectual and cultural space in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This article examines the treatment of prostitution in several genres of Ottoman legal writing—manuals and commentaries of Islamic jurisprudence, fatwās (legal opinions) and kānūnnāmes (Sultanic legislation)

Firearms became a key part of boy and male youth culture in English Canada before the Great War. By the 1890s, imperialist sentiments had infused the growing interest in hunting, advocates of which celebrated the value of rifle shooting by suggesting that it made boys into ideal British men.

LSE

Written collectively by W.C. Anderson, Ramsay MacDonald, George Bernard Shaw, and the Webbs in 1912 includes a leaflet for a meeting at the Royal Albert Hall

Benjamin Sheer | Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Number: LC-USZC2-5647

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.

PRESIDENT WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT on April 9, 1912 put
his signature to a bill passed by the congress creating in the Federal Government a Children’s Bureau charged with investigating and reporting “upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people.”

The book also contributes to our understanding of Soviet youth, describing both Soviet-specific choices and cultures, and youths’ relationship to youth cultures and forces of modernity in western Europe and the United States.

LSE | J. Scur

AETC

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.

MacMillan

AJ Todd

Cynthia M. Blair uses census data, police reports, newspaper accounts, and property records to describe the Great Migration of southern Blacks to Chicago, and the contexts that they found, influenced and created in the milieu of sexual commerce.

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.

In an extraordinarily useful history that also makes for entertaining reading. Rebecca Davis traces the origins and evolution of marriage counseling and marriage promotion in the United States.

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 were the hallmark of a Catholic placing-out program begun in the 1870s by the Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity, later known as the New York Foundling Hospital.

This article deals with the efforts of Atlanta’s business community to remove homeless people from the downtown area during the 1970s and 1980s. The corporate sector pursued a two-pronged strategy in rolling out this removal project.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I taught American history at two quite different institutions of higher education: Hampton Institute (an African American college) and Vassar College (an overwhelmingly white, upper class women’s college).