Browse

Abortion is—and always has been—an arena for contesting power relations between women and men. When in 1973 the Supreme Court made the procedure legal throughout the United States, it seemed that women were at last able to make decisions about their own bodies. In the four decades that followed, however, abortion became ever more politicized and stigmatized. Abortion after Roe chronicles and analyzes what the new legal status and changing political environment have meant for abortion providers and their patients. This book sheds light on the little-studied experience of performing and receiving abortion care from the 1970s—a period of optimism—to the rise of the antiabortion movement and the escalation of antiabortion tactics in the 1980s to the 1990s and beyond, when violent attacks on clinics and abortion providers led to a new articulation of abortion care as moral work. More than four decades after the legalization of abortion, the abortion provider community has powerfully asserted that abortion care is a moral good.

This book looks at what it means to be a multiracial couple in the United States today. It begins with a look back at a 1925 case in which a two-month marriage ends with a man suing his wife for misrepresentation of her race, and shows how our society has yet to come to terms with interracial marriage. The book examines this issue by drawing from a variety of sources, including personal experiences. It argues that housing law, family law, and employment law fail, in important ways, to protect multiracial couples. In a society in which marriage is used to give, withhold, and take away status—in the workplace and elsewhere—the book says interracial couples are at a disadvantage, which is only exacerbated by current law.

This book brings together an unprecedented volume of material to offer a fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England. The book pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts in response to questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, it is the first study of English society that fully incorporates women; that offers comprehensive coverage of the range of social groups from the gentry to the labouring poor and across the life cycle; and that represents regional variation. The book sheds new light on the conceptualization of wealth and poverty by ordinary people in the early modern past; on the operation of credit in the early modern economy; on gendered divisions of labour and people’s working lives; and on the profound consequences of widening social inequality that redrew social relations and the calculus of esteem in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

‘The 10th of June, 1854, promises to be a day scarcely less memorable in the social history of the present age than was the 1st of May, 1851’ boasted the Chronicleon 10 June 1854, comparing the opening of the Crystal Palace, newly installed on the crown of Sydenham Hill, to that of the Great Exhibition. Many contemporary commentators deemed the Sydenham Palace’s contents superior, the building more spectacular and its educative potential much greater than its predecessor. Yet their predictions proved to be a little wide of the mark, and for a long time, studies of the Great Exhibition of 1851 have marginalised the Sydenham Palace. This collection of essays will look beyond the chronological confines of 1851 and address the significance of the Crystal Palace as a cultural site, image and structure well into the twentieth century, even after it was destroyed by fire in 1936.

The Black Death of 1348–9 is the most catastrophic event in recorded history, and this study—the Ford Lectures of 2019 at Oxford University—offers a major re-evaluation of its immediate impact and longer-term consequences in England. It draws upon recent inter-disciplinary research into climate and disease; renewed interest among econometricians in the origins of the Little Divergence, whereby economic performance in parts of north-western Europe began to move decisively ahead of the rest of the continent on the pathway to modernity; a close re-reading of case studies of fourteenth-century England; and original new research into manorial and governmental sources. The Black Death is placed within the wider contexts of extreme weather and epidemiological events, the institutional framework of markets and serfdom, and the role of the law in reducing risk and shaping behaviour. The government’s response to the crisis is re-considered to suggest an innovative re-interpretation of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. By 1400 the main effects of plague had worked through the economy and society, and their implications for England’s future precocity are analysed. This study rescues the third quarter of the fourteenth century from a little-understood paradox between plague and revolt, and elevates it to a critical period of profound and irreversible change in English and global history.

In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of “modern men” emerged, the efendiyya (sg. efendi). Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals and public intellectuals, the efendis represented new middle class elites. They were the experts who drafted and carried out the state’s modernisation policies, and the makers as well as majority consumers of modern forms of politics and national culture. As simultaneously “authentic” and “modern,” they assumed key political role in the anti-colonial movement and in the building of a modern state both before and after the revolution of 1952. This book tells the story of where did these self-consciously modern men come from, and how did they come to be through multiple social, cultural, and institutional contexts. These contexts included social strategies pursued by “traditional” middling households responding to new opportunities for social mobility; modern schools as (non-exclusive) vehicles for new forms of knowledge opening possibilities to redefine social authority; but they also included new forms of youth culture, student rituals and peer networks, as well as urban popular culture writ large. Through these contexts, a historically novel experience of being an efendi emerged. New social practices (politics, or writing) and new cultural forms and genres (literature, autobiography) were its key sites of self-expression. Through these venues, an efendi culture imbued with a sense of mission, duty, and entitlement was articulated, and defined against and in relation to two main contrastive others: “traditional” society and western modernity-cum-colonial authority. Both represented the efendis’ social, cultural and political nemeses, who, in some contexts, could also become his allies.

As industry and technology proliferate in modern society, sustainability has jumped to the forefront of contemporary political and environmental discussions. The balance between progress and the earth's ability to provide for its inhabitants grows increasingly precarious as we attempt to achieve sustainable development. This book articulates a new agrarian philosophy, emphasizing the vital role of agrarianism in modern agricultural practices. It unites concepts of agrarian philosophy, political theory, and environmental ethics to illustrate the importance of creating and maintaining environmentally conscious communities. The book describes the evolution of agrarian values in America following the path blazed by Thomas Jefferson, John Steinbeck, and Wendell Berry.

This book explores the knowledge underpinnings of agricultural change and growth in early modern Europe, building on the growing recognition among historians that ‘what people knew and believed’ had a bearing on their economic behaviour. Until recently researchers resisted arguments rooted in non-quantitative explanations of economic change which place the emphasis on cultural agents. The book focuses on the period circa 1750–1840 when an unprecedented amount of agricultural information was put into circulation which facilitated its consumption and incorporation into the practices of cereal and animal husbandry. In Scotland, England, and Denmark this precursor Agricultural Enlightenment triggered a modernization of the rural economy which can be labelled an Agricultural Revolution. Elsewhere the impact of the supply of agricultural knowledge was muted and it is hard to separate out the ingredients of the changes under way by the 1830s and 1840s. Adopting a continental perspective on agricultural growth, the book weighs up the effects of cultural factors by analysing the mechanisms governing knowledge production, diffusion, and adoption by farmers. Issues involving the transfer of knowledge and skill receive particular coverage. But equally the book explores the impact of demographic change, urbanization, and evidence that European agriculture was moving towards market-driven production by the end of the period. Governments were as influenced by the knowledge project of the Enlightenment as landlords and their tenants, and the book examines the proposition that institutional change ‘from above’ was the single most powerful catalyst of agricultural growth before industrialization transformed the European economy.

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. However, that countryside may have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine. Take today's startling yellow fields of rapeseed, seemingly more suited to the landscape of Van Gogh than Constable. They were, in fact, thoroughly familiar to fieldworkers in 17th-century England. At the same time, some features that would have gone unremarked in the past now seem like oddities. In the 15th century, rabbit warrens were specially guarded to rear rabbits as a luxury food for rich men's tables; whilst houses had moats not only to defend them, but to provide a source of fresh fish. In the 1500s Catherine of Aragon introduced the concept of a fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; and in the 1600s, artichoke gardens became a fashion of the gentry in their hope of producing more male heirs. The common tomato, suspected of being poisonous in 1837, was transformed into a household vegetable by the end of the 19th century, thanks to cheaper glass-making methods and the resulting increase in glasshouses. In addition to these images of past lives, the author reveals how the forces that drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture — a glut of meat and cereal crops, changing dietary habits, the needs of medicine — have striking parallels with earlier periods in our history.

This book explains the unbending ideal of the nuclear family and how it has seeped so deeply into American society and consciousness without ever becoming the actual norm for most people in the nation. It presents the rich diversity of family lives in American history from the American Revolution to the twenty-first century and at the same time the persistence and normative power of the nuclear family model. American society—one of the major arguments—is “governed through the family,” and to govern, in this sense, is “to structure the possible field of action.” To make this broad examination of the discourse and practice of the family in American life more accessible, this book focuses on the relations of fathers, families, and society. Throughout American history “the father” has been posed as provider and moral leader of his family, American society, and the nation. At the same time power and difference were established around “the father,” and fatherhood meant many different things for different people. To tell this history of fatherhood, families, and American society, the author presents biographical “close-ups” of twelve iconic characters, embedded in contextual “long shots” so that readers can see the enduring power of the family and father ideals along with the complexity and varieties of everyday life in American history. Each protagonist covers a crucial period or event in American history, presents a different family constellation, and makes a different argument with regard to how American society is governed through the family.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a number of states had bureaus whose responsibility was to help immigrants assimilate into American society. Often described negatively as efforts to force foreigners into appropriate molds, this book demonstrates that these programs—including adult education, environmental improvement, labor market regulations, and conflict resolutions—were typically implemented by groups sympathetic to immigrants and their cultures. The book offers a comparative history of social welfare policies developed in four distinct regions with diverse immigrant populations: New York, California, Massachusetts, and Illinois. By focusing on state actions versus national agencies and organizations, and by examining rural and western approaches in addition to urban and eastern ones, the author broadens the historical literature associated with Americanization. She also reveals how these programs, and the theories of citizenship and national identity used to justify their underlying policies, were really attempts by middle-class progressives to get new citizens to adopt Anglo-American, middle-class values and lifestyles.

Our understanding of Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s is being transformed. For decades, historians were locked in a narrow debate about the degree of central control over the terror process. Recent archival research is underpinning new, innovative approaches and opening new perspectives. Historians are exploring the roots of the Terror in the heritage of war and mass repression in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods; in the regime’s focus not just on former ‘oppositionists’, wreckers, and saboteurs, but also on crime and social disorder; in the common European concern to identify and isolate ‘undesirable’ elements. They are examining in much greater depth and detail the precipitants and triggers that turned a determination to protect the Revolution into a ferocious mass repression. This volume brings together the work of the leading historians of Stalinist Terror in sixteen chapters, paired on eight themes, presenting not only the latest developments in the field, but the latest evolution of the debate. Some pairings reflect the diversity of sources, methodologies, and angles of approach to a given subject. Others show stark differences of opinion. Each is briefly introduced by the authors and because no pairing can exhaust a topic, each is followed by a short list of recommended further readings. These are biased towards books and articles in English for the undergraduates, postgraduates and other students of the Stalin-era who will be the main audience of this book.

This book uncovers the history of the Colored Orphan Asylum, founded in New York City in 1836 as the nation's first orphanage for African American children — a remarkable institution that is still in the forefront aiding children. Although no longer an orphanage, in its current incarnation as Harlem-Dowling West Side Center for Children and Family Services it maintains the principles of the women who organized it nearly 200 years ago. The agency weathered three wars, two major financial panics, a devastating fire during the 1863 Draft Riots, several epidemics, waves of racial prejudice, and severe financial difficulties to care for orphaned, neglected, and delinquent children. Eventually financial support would come from some of New York's finest families, including the Jays, Murrays, Roosevelts, Macys, and Astors. While the white female managers and their male advisers were dedicated to uplifting these black children, the evangelical, mainly Quaker founding managers also exhibited the extreme paternalistic views endemic at the time, accepting the advice or support of the African American community only grudgingly. It was frank criticism in 1913 from W.E.B. Du Bois that highlighted the conflict between the orphanage and the community it served, and it was not until 1939 that it hired the first black trustee. More than 15,000 children were raised in the orphanage, and throughout its history letters and visits have revealed that hundreds if not thousands of old boys and girls looked back with admiration and respect at the home that nurtured them throughout their formative years.

Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century. This book uses a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society and culture before the Norman Conquest. Part one draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, a series of landscape studies explores how these could have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country, using place-names, maps and the landscape itself. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, because it had to be, but infinitely adaptable, to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.

Arabs and Jews are thought to inhabit the Middle East or urban areas in the United States, not Kentucky or other out of the way locales. Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity explores the untold accounts of ten Arab and Jewish women who managed in the past and currently their unique identities tending to both their religious/ethnic traditions and acculturating to Kentucky ways. In the details of women's stories, ties between Arabs and Jews not in the Middle East, but middle America, emerge. Common ground surfaces displaying Arab and Jewish women with similar tales of women openly and publicly serving their communities, of mother-daughter relations, of the agility necessitated to work, mother, and be an active community member, and of what it meant to be an Arab and Jewish mother nearly a century ago. Associations materialize in the women's tales, underscoring that lives evolve relationally between generations, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, aunts and nephews, grandmothers and granddaughters, and within and between communities. Narratives about immigrant groups becoming American traditionally spotlight one group at a time, and not in correspondence to other groups. Through the lens of women's lives, the relational links between Arabs and Jews, individuals and communities, and generations become apparent.

This book interleaves the history of post-Independence archaeology in India with the life and times of Madhukar Narhar Deshpande (1920–2008), a leading Indian archaeologist who went on to become the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India. Spanning nearly a century, this is a tale about the circumstances which brought men like Deshpande to this career path; what it was like to grow up in a family devoted to India’s freedom; the watershed moment that created a large cohort that was trained by Mortimer Wheeler, the doyen of British archaeology who headed the Archaeological Survey in the twilight years of the British Raj; the unknown conservation stories around the Gol Gumbad in Bijapur and the Qutb Minar in Delhi; the forgotten story of how the fabric of a historic Hindu shrine, the Badrinath temple, was saved; the chemistry shared by the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the archaeologist, Deshpande at historic cave shrines like Ajanta and Ellora, and; the political and administrative challenges faced by director generals of archaeology. The story is told through a main character—Deshpande himself—some of whose writings have been included here. Equally, there are others who figure in the narrative as it reconstructs and recounts the story of Indian archaeology after 1947 through those lives as also through the institutional history of the Archaeological Survey and the processes that were central to the discoveries it made and the challenges it faced.

Part I of this book is an in-depth examination of the characteristics of the Tuscan aristocracy across the first two and a half centuries of the second millennium, as studied by Italian historians and others working within the Italian tradition: their origins, interests, strategies for survival and exercise of power; the structure and the several levels of aristocracy and how these interrelated; the internal dynamics and perceptions that governed aristocratic life; and the relationship to non-aristocratic sectors of society. It will look at how aristocratic society changed across this period and how far changes were internally generated as opposed to responses from external stimuli. The relationship between the aristocracy and public authority will also be examined. Part II of the book deals with England. The aim here is not a comparative study but to bring insights drawn from Tuscan history and Tuscan historiography into play in understanding the evolution of English society from around the year 1000 to around 1250. This part of the book draws on the breadth of English historiography but is also guided by the Italian experience. The book challenges the interpretative framework within which much English history of this period tends to be written—that is to say the grand narrative which revolves around Magna Carta and English exceptionalism—and seeks to avoid dangers of teleology, of idealism, and of essentialism. By offering a study of the aristocracy across a wide time-frame and with themes drawn from Italian historiography, I hope to obviate these tendencies and to appreciate the aristocracy firmly within its own contexts.

Rundown, vermin-infested buildings; rigid, slow-to-react bureaucratic systems; children from broken homes and declining communities. How can a teacher succeed? How does a student not only survive but also come to thrive? It can happen, and this book tells the heroic stories of the author's students during her 33-year tenure as a Bronx high school teacher. In 1995, her students began a pen-pal exchange with South African teenagers who, under apartheid, had been denied an education. Almost uniformly, the South Africans asked, “Is the Bronx as bad as they say?” This dedicated teacher promised those students and all future ones that she would write a book to help change the stereotypical image of Bronx students and show that, in spite of overwhelming obstacles, they are outstanding young people, capable of the highest achievements. She walks the reader through the decrepit school building, describing the deplorable physical conditions that students and faculty navigate daily. Then, in eight chapters eight amazing young people are introduced, a small sample of the more than 14,000 students the writer has felt honored to teach. She describes her own Bronx roots and the powerful influences that made her such a determined teacher. Finally, the veteran teacher sounds the alarm to stop the corruption and degradation of public education in the guise of what are euphemistically labeled reforms. She also expresses optimism that public education and our democracy can still be saved, urgently calling on all to become involved and help save our schools.

When Kate Middleton married Prince William in 2011, watched by hundreds of millions of viewers, the wedding followed a familiar formula: ritual, vows, reception, and a white gown for the bride. Commonly known as a white wedding, the formula is firmly ensconced in popular culture, with movies like Father of the Bride or Bride Wars, shows like Say Yes to the Dress and Bridezillas, and live broadcast royal or reality-TV weddings garnering millions of viewers each year. Despite being condemned by some critics as “cookie-cutter” or conformist, the wedding has in fact progressively allowed for social, cultural, and political challenges to understandings of sex, gender, marriage, and citizenship, thereby providing an ideal site for historical inquiry. This book establishes that the evolution of the American white wedding emerges from our nation's proclivity towards privacy and the individual, as well as the increasingly egalitarian relationships between men and women in the decades following World War II. Blending cultural analysis of film, fiction, advertising, and prescriptive literature with personal views expressed in letters, diaries, essays, and oral histories, the book engages ways in which the modern wedding emblemizes a diverse and consumerist culture and aims to reveal an ongoing debate about the power of peer culture, media, and the marketplace in America. Rather than celebrating wedding traditions as they “used to be” and critiquing contemporary celebrations for their lavish leanings, the book provides a history of the American wedding and its celebrants.

When it was founded in 1824, the Athenæum broke the mold. Unlike in other preeminent clubs, its members were chosen on the basis of their achievements rather than on their background or political affiliation. Public rather than private life dominated the agenda. The club, with its tradition of hospitality to conflicting views, has attracted leading scientists, writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout its history, including Charles Darwin and Matthew Arnold, Edward Burne-Jones and Yehudi Menuhin, Winston Churchill and Gore Vidal. This book is not presented in the traditional, insular style of club histories, but devotes attention to the influence of Athenians on the scientific, creative, and official life of the nation. From the unwitting recruitment of a Cold War spy to the welcome admittance of women, this lively and original account explores the corridors and characters of the club; its wider political, intellectual, and cultural influence; and its recent reinvention.