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In northern Mesopotamia, the construction of shrines of martyrs on the tells of cities that were centers of imperial authority introduced a new technology with which ecclesiastical leaders could redefine relations between Christian and Zoroastrian elites. This chapter draws upon two hagiographical works that recount the histories of these martyrs, the History of Karka d-Beit Slok and Its Martyrs and the History of Mar Qardagh. These texts explicitly segment the Christian communities that gathered at the sites into aristocrats and commoners, with ecclesiastical leaders belonging to the ranks of the former almost without exception. The contemporaneous hagiographers of these works both sought to demonstrate, in Iranian terms, that Christians could be no less noble than their Zoroastrian counterparts, while rooting their claims to aristocracy in cities that were also the loci of episcopal authority. Their works thus offer an opportunity to explore some fundamental questions of Sasanian social history that have remained unanswered such as: How did provincial elites earn recognition as nobles from their Iranian peers? How did Christian and Zoroastrian elites find bases for collaboration within imperial institutions?

This chapter explores the social history of George Town and the role which civic individuality has played in its construction, explaining that the town was organized as it is because leaders have made it that way, and because ordinary townspeople have been motivated by self-interest to assist in that construction. It discusses the role of religion in the organization of Black Town society, and argues that recognizing the essential role individuality plays as a cause of organization, and as an integral feature greatly affects how Indian society is conceptualized.

This chapter examines the history of imprint in China. It questions the univocal account of printing during the Song dynasty and attempts to determine when the imprint eventually replaced the handwritten copy as the principal medium for the Chinese book. The chapter highlights the profound impact on the social, political, and intellectual history of China. It evaluates how the literate elite's world of learning evolved and what role it played in the making of Chinese culture from the eleventh to the seventeenth century.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to examine the social history of madness from the perspective of the family. It shows that a set of behaviors which can be called “domestic psychiatry” existed, and even flourished, during the Victorian period. The rise of psychiatry affected, but did not destroy, this well-established set of behaviors toward lunatics in their own families. The chapter explains the author's rationale for investigating madness at home in early nineteenth-century England. It adopts a comprehensive framework of tension and symbiosis among the three species of agencies, namely, the doctor, the family, and the forces outside the doctor–family relationship. Employing this framework, the chapter examines domestic care and control of lunatics as complex interactions among them. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Reading has not been among the rubrics of standard ethnographic research and writing. Why this should have been so is a question that should be asked, not that reading is a topic of ethnography. The first part of this chapter aims to show that answers may be found if people begin to think about the ways in which literacy has been approached in anthropology. The second part explores how ethnographic work with written texts may help us to subvert the dictates of literacy to the extent that we concentrate on reading.

This chapter analyzes the novels of Marie Chauvet to understand the social history of Haiti. Images of women, scenes of affectionate appropriation, and charades of love permeate the text of Chauvet's works. She wrote in order to refuse clarity, to attack assumptions of Haitian nationalism and historical identity, to knock down heroes, and to confront the embarrassing claims of color that plague Haitian society. The chapter also explores the ethnographic precision of Haitian novelists and explains that vodou, while often denounced as superstition, is anchored to the intelligible plot of Haitian nationalist thought.

This chapter focuses on the issues of democracy, nationalism, and socialism, which are Atlantic-wide and not strictly national. The discussion compares these three concepts within the context of the United States and as part of a larger social history of the Atlantic world. The author views nationalism, socialism, and democracy as different ways to organize the solidarities of a society. These are made important by huge social and demographic transformations, including migrations and population increase.

Existing scholarship on the history of old age displays several puzzling contradictions. Its chronological definitions of old age, which usually begin at around sixty, encompass people of enormous diversity in health, wealth, and even age. Meanwhile, older people themselves reject such definitions. Instead, elderly Britons have typically looked to their own lives in order to understand what it has meant to grow old. In the twentieth century, experiences of old age were shaped by the increasingly humane treatment of older Britons. Yet the British state simultaneously tolerated persistent poverty among the aged. This book addresses these tensions by uniting the public and private histories of aging and by putting the particular challenges of researching old age at the heart of its account.

This chapter is the first of two on the “bigger picture” of the general relations between social-science knowledge and the larger society. It deals with the sources of societal demands for such knowledge. A number of longer-term cultural changes—including religious, philosophical, and scientific changes—that made it possible for social objectification and institutionalized inquiry to become established. It also deals with the many “revolutions” over the past 250 years that increased social complexity and social instability, along with demands for understanding these phenomena. These kinds of change have continued to produce increasing numbers of “social problems” demanding societal attention and understanding. The authors introduce an account of the dynamics by which social problems are produced, recognized, and attacked, an account that differs from received positivistic approaches. Finally, they explore the implications of the proposition that social-science knowledge is forever “chasing” and trying to “catch up with” social problems, and how this process shapes the development of that knowledge.

Musicologists have contributed a considerable amount of extremely important information about the emergence and development of the various forms of public concert life during the first decades of the nineteenth century to the larger historical effort. The music of Franz Schubert, one of the glories of the canonic repertory, led another life within this bourgeois domestic culture, whose outlines can be retrieved by a fuller social history. The standard musicological account of Schubert focuses on his place within the pantheon of canonic composers. Music history shares with the histories of the other arts a heritage of concentration on the “great names” of its tradition. The development of the “culture of domesticity” is a development particularly significant for the lives of women. The Beethoven/Schubert dualism, along with the gendered language of masculine and feminine that so often accompanied or illustrated it in the nineteenth century, can be read as a symptom of the cultural struggle between romanticism and Biedermeier.

Harry Partch and Leonard Bernstein are divergent in several dimensions, including their marketability. Yet through a juxtaposition of works by these apparent musical antipodes, it is possible to illumine the pervasiveness of certain basic issues in American music theater and to suggest how both Partch's Revelation in the Courthouse Park and Bernstein's Mass reflect several developments in the social history of the 1960s. This chapter considers three primary topics raised by these two works and concentrates on cultural contextualization rather than on detailed comparison. First, they are concerned with ritual and religious expression—with a critique of established American social and religious rituals and with the creation of a new work of ritualistic or didactic status. Second, this critique and transformation is achieved musically through the use, or perhaps abuse, of American popular music and through radical musical juxtaposition. Finally, Partch and Bernstein employ ritual expression and popular music references for the purposes of parody and social criticism, focusing on the relationship of the individual to society. Created at opposite ends of a turbulent decade, but yoked together by violence, Revelation and Mass arrive at somewhat different conclusions.

This chapter investigates modern Chinese social history in a comparative light. It suggests some hypotheses about what changed and what did not change in the past 500 years of Chinese history. It presents some thoughts about how this process of change is comparable to the Western experience and how it is unique. It mentions some preconditions and shows why the sixteenth century constitutes a useful point of departure for surveying the emergence of modern Chinese society. One key factor that promoted merchant self-government was the inadequacy or temporary withdrawal of an effective regular bureaucratic administration. The rise of capitalism and of the state may be useful in interpreting modern Chinese social history. In Europe, the rise of capitalism and the modern state were very nearly synchronic, whereas in China the expansion of the state lagged by perhaps as much as three centuries behind the appearance of capitalism.