ARTICLES

Why Early Modern Mass Incarceration Matters: The Bamberg Malefizhaus, 1627–31

Spencer J Weinreich

Pages 719–752

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac066

In 1627, at the height of the Bamberg witch-hunt (1595–1631), the prince-bishopric erected the Malefizhaus (“witchcraft-house”), the first cellular prison purpose-built for solitary confinement. This article recovers the history of the Malefizhaus to establish the importance of imprisonment and carceral institutions to the early modern witch-craze. The prison at once concretized the ideology of the hunt and furnished a fearsome weapon of persecution, extracting the confessions without which no inquisitorial campaign could function. By reconstructing the singular architecture and internal regimen of the Malefizhaus, this article demonstrates the sophistication of early modern interrogations, a process distorted by an outsized interest in torture. Having recognized the Malefizhaus as a driver of the witch-hunt, it is possible to recognize the prison’s impact upon Bamberg’s seventeenth-century history—disrupting political and economic relationships, displacing populations, and disciplining social life. The case of the Bamberg witches’ prison counters the modernist slant of the study of the prison, proof that medieval and early modern carceral institutions shaped the history of their societies, despite smaller scales and weaker state apparatuses. In turn, the essay argues that the critical tools of carceral studies, developed to study contemporary mass incarceration, can profitably be applied to premodern practices and institutions, offering insight into patterns of violence, the development of repressive structures, and the problems of “crime” as a historical category.

Coin Diving, Tourism, and Colonialism in the Caribbean, 1890–1940

Stanley Fonseca

Pages 753–781

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac061

Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, the ongoing crises of the late-colonial Caribbean mingled with an emerging trend: white American and European tourists who flocked in growing numbers to the tropics in search of pleasure, leisure, and adventure. As these travelers arrived in port in the era before commercial flight, they encountered a ubiquitous scene: boys and young men in small rowboats, who would surround the incoming steamship and, nude or nearly nude, dive in the tropical surf for coins tossed overboard. Images and accounts of these coin divers circulated widely in travel media, and were instrumental in constructing a tourist-friendly vision of the Caribbean seaside as exotic, picturesque, erotic, and accessible. In colonial Caribbean sources, however, coin divers were viewed not as an alluring spectacle but as a criminal threat, somewhere between beggar, truant, and sex worker. The divers themselves were working-class youth inhabiting a harbor-world on the periphery of a stratified and shifting society. They experienced firsthand the transition from Caribbean colonialism to mass tourism, and used the harbor to enact a limited autonomy and demand recognition within a system that provided few meaningful alternatives. Analyzing the tensions between these contrasting modes of power—one that commodified and one that criminalized—we can better understand the complex dynamics in the transition from plantation colonialism to tourist neocolonialism in the Caribbean.

Necrophilia, Psychiatry, and Sexology: The Making of Sexual Science in Mid-Twentieth Century Peru

Paulo Drinot

Pages 782–804

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac041

In this article, I draw on two sets of sources to explore how Peruvian doctors tried to make sense of what had driven a man to engage in necrophilia in late 1942. On the one hand, I examine the case history and other related documentation that I located in Lima’s psychiatric hospital. On the other, I study a detailed article written on the case by Dr Lucio D. Castro and published in 1943. Together, these sources provide rich evidence on how Peruvian doctors addressed what they framed as an abnormality of the sexual instinct and, in turn, as a mental disorder. But the case also provides a fascinating vista on a major taboo—sex with the dead—and more generally on the history of “perversion” and therefore on the history of sexuality in Peru. I pay particular attention to how doctors mobilized an eclectic “theoretical artillery” of biomedical knowledge in trying to explain the man’s psychopathology. I argue that through their “unruly appropriation” of sexological knowledge, doctors like Castro sought to make meaningful contributions to a global sexual science while proposing means to channel sexuality away from deviant forms in a manner consonant with broader projects of sexual regulation that Peru and other countries promoted at the time.

Beyond the Victimhood Narrative: A Case Study of Unexpectedly Successful Collectivization in Communist Poland

Anna Wylegała

Pages 805–827

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac051

This article is a micro-historical study of the collectivization of agriculture carried out by the communist authorities in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. Using the example of the village of Gierczyce in the Kielce region (Central Poland), it shows under what conditions collectivization, resisted in most of the Polish countryside, was able to succeed, and it traces the long-term effects of this process on Gierczyce’s social structure and social relations. It also analyzes this rural community’s contemporary memory of the emergence and functioning of the production cooperative. Thus, it critically engages with, and questions, the “resistance paradigm” dominant in studies of collectivization. Enriched with a broader regional and national comparative context, the article is based on the analysis of archival material from central and regional archives, personal documents, and extensive field research.

The Right to a Favor: International Scholarships, Clientelism, and the Class Politics of Merit in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

Rachel Grace Newman

Pages 828–855

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac056

This article considers the ways that middle-class and elite citizens in post-revolutionary Mexico pursued access to exclusive favors from the state in the 1920s and 1930s and emphasizes the overlooked role of merit as political logic in this era. Examining political discourse within clientelist exchanges through the close reading of petitions, I explore ideas about class and nation as articulated by young strivers and their families who sought scholarships for foreign study. The article argues that working within clientelism, upwardly mobile Mexicans strategically wielded merit to preserve and legitimate their status amid social tectonic shifts. Petitioners’ ideas of merit encompassed individual loyalty and patriotism, unique talents, and inherited status. I identify heritable and disciplinary merit as distinct yet compatible understandings of worthiness used by privileged citizens. These citizens claimed that exceptional Mexicans trained abroad would make an outsized contribution to the national well-being and thus deserved special rewards, an argument which anticipated rationales that the Mexican state would later embrace for its modernization policy. After 1940, the state expanded international scholarship programs and invoked the same terms that citizens had used in the early post-revolutionary period to justify socially regressive benefits providing foreign education for the already fortunate.

Rich Hairdressers and Fancy Car Repairmen: The Rise of a Service Worker Elite in the USSR and the Evolution of Soviet Society in the 1970s

Anna Ivanova

Pages 856–881

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac060

In the Soviet Union during the 1970s, many service workers, such as salespeople, hairdressers, and car mechanics who worked in the state-owned retail sector, rose to prominent financial positions. They achieved this mobility because they had access to coveted goods and services that were in short supply. Soviet citizens’ disposable incomes were growing, producing a desire to consume in a more sophisticated way. However, shortages of the planned economy meant that people often could not satisfy their growing demands for consumption. Service providers illegally sold goods and services on the side for higher prices and became wealthy by collecting a huge portion of the money that the populace could not spend in the state retail system. The Soviet state was reluctant to prosecute these dealers because it needed their services to provide for consumers and to avoid pursuing large-scale economic reform. However, the enrichment of service workers caused resentment among the broader population. The newly rich, as opposed to members of an older Soviet upper class including party and state officials and the cultural and academic elite, flaunted their wealth and created a new mass culture of luxurious lifestyle. They not only became role models for some Soviet youth, but also created a sense among many Soviet citizens that socialism was in crisis. The prominent status of this new elite and its conspicuous consumption contradicted traditional socialist values of modesty, collectivism, and the priority of spiritual over material concerns.

REVIEWS

Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe. By Julie Stone Peters

Marett Leiboff

Pages 882–884

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac052

Law is everywhere and all around us. Yet while law is overwhelmingly visible in all forms of media it is simultaneously, by virtue of the opacity of its discourses and doctrines, its principles and practices, also troublingly invisible. For those of us not inured in law, the process that moves us towards law’s invisibility is a source of immense frustration—for lawyers, it is grist to the mill. It is precisely this antonymic tension that inhabits Julie Stone Peters’ newest work, Law as Performance. It is deeply concerned with the causes, effects and consequences of this duality—law’s visibility and invisibility—using performance concepts to retrace thinking about law. Her book offers both a history and jurisprudential—or legal philosophical—rethinking of the opacity of lawyers’ law, drawing on her field of performance studies to return law to a world of visibility. She takes us through a series of stories about law as performance and in performance, taking us through stagings of law both as spectacle and contest, to audiences who observed these public displays of law, and performance’s fundamental role in the shaping and forming of law and lawyers and the courts. She brings to the fore the distorting effects that performance has on law through overacting and histrionic lawyers, and the distortion of justice and law that occur when spectators and audiences, in the form of judge and jury, and the populace at large, are swept along by rhetoric, foot stamping lying lawyers. And vice versa, where lawyers and their displays are central to obtaining justice.

Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus. By Waleed Ziad

Sana Haroon

Pages 885–886

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac036

This book explores the teachings and activities of the Mujaddidi Sufi Fazl Ahmad and his spiritual and familial descendants to construct a cultural landscape stretching from Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan in late precolonial India to Bukhara and Khoqand under imperial Russia. Mujaddidis took their identity from their training in the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624). Ziad argues that Mujaddidi sainthood constituted a “hidden caliphate” in the form of a Persianate sacro-cultural sphere; this study of Fazl Ahmad’s lineage maps out a domain of exchange and circulation of Mujaddidi “scholarly, sacred, and diplomatic goods and services.”

Chapter 3 and the associated Appendix B track the reproduction of two manuals in print and manuscript form (thirteen of one and nine of the other) presenting a model for understanding the transmission of spiritual knowledge and the extension of the Mujaddidi Sufi order. These manuals served as a Mujaddidi curriculum and, repackaged with texts produced by other lineages, constitute a continuous Mujaddidi tradition from Sindh to Khoqand. Ziad tells us that these texts were demanded by disciples who carried them back to remote villages to serve as teaching aids. Commissions reveal a literate reading class, rulers, and courtiers among the audience for these texts. Ziad’s presentation of this material is highly instructive in proposing a model for understanding the regional dispersal of a spiritual tradition and undergirds his treatment of the Mujaddidi Sufi order as a unified tradition by providing evidence of Mujaddidi teachers providing spiritual services demanded by their students and other social elites.

Immigration: An American History. By Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner

Brendan A Shanahan

Pages 887–889

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac038

In co-authoring Immigration: An American History, two of the nation’s leading experts on the subject—Carl Bon Tempo and Hasia Diner—have taken on possibly their greatest challenge yet: surveying four centuries of U.S. immigration history in a captivating yet concise narrative that engages general interest, student, and academic readers alike. Their adroit organization of the book, incorporation of classic and recent works of scholarship covering a wide array of subfields and subjects, and crisp narration of major immigration policy developments alongside concrete demonstrations of representative migrant experiences combine to produce an excellent and original work of synthesis.

The Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal. By Ethan Blue

Adam Goodman

Pages 890–892

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac040

Henry Weiss was born in Constantinople in 1866. He spoke German at home and learned French, Spanish, Italian, and English, along with some Syrian, Hebrew, and Portuguese. In 1890, at age twenty-four, Weiss left the Middle East and immigrated to the United States, arriving in San Francisco. He soon made his way to New York City, where he and his wife started a family. Weiss became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1896. Seven years later, his language skills helped him land a job as an interpreter with the Immigration Bureau. Just over a decade after immigrating, Weiss had become part of the burgeoning federal bureaucracy tasked with regulating migration. He excelled in his work and in 1914 the Commissioner of Immigration made him the United States’ first chief deportation officer. Weiss spent the rest of his life coordinating the nation’s newly centralized removal system and overseeing transcontinental trains full of immigrants bound for deportation from Ellis Island or Angel Island.

Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture. By Heather Murray

Kylie M Smith

Pages 893–894

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac044

In many ways, “Asylum Ways of Seeing” by Heather Murray, is an extended riff on the term “asylum”—what it meant for psychiatry and for patients, and how this meaning changed over time. To explore this change in meaning, Murray employs a “history of emotions” framework and takes an overtly cultural and intellectual history approach to center the experiences of patients themselves. In this way, she argues not only that we need to try and understand the history of psychiatric institutions from the point of view of the people who were in them, but that there is a relationship between the way psychiatric patients made sense of their experience, and changes in institutional policy.

This is an ambitious approach and requires Murray to draw on a broad array of archival and historiographical sources. This creates a tension for the book, because it is a difficult enterprise, and reveals some of the ethical and logistical issues in any attempt to take a “history from below” approach to psychiatry. How do we get at the patient experience, given the nature of archives and laws that (rightly) protect patient privacy? And how do we make sense of those records even if we do have access to them, given they are always so heavily mediated by the clinical encounter? To try and get around this problem, Murray draws largely on patient letters contained in state archives or in personal collections, and on the extensive body of work in the domain of patient narrative. While much can be gleaned from these sources, there is an important limitation born of the fact that the people with the resources to write and publish such a memoir are almost entirely white, and usually middle or upper class. This tends to skew the whole book towards that type of patient experience, and this causes a ripple effect throughout the book that Murray herself is aware of—the idealized perception of the asylum experience.

Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow. By Brooks Hefner

Benoît Tadié

Pages 895–896

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac045

Brooks Hefner’s pioneering book deals with popular fiction written by, for, and about African American people between the 1920s and the 1950s. Seen from another angle, it is also about what the Black working- and middle class were reading during that period and how their reading may have offered “utopian solutions to the contradictions of the present” (140), particularly in the face of rampant Jim Crow racism. On these subjects, it delivers fascinating new insights, inviting readers to revise their assumptions about popular fiction and to rethink the fraught relationship between race and genre in American culture.

Black Pulp grows out of Hefner’s acute consciousness of the exclusion of Black lives from the predominantly white pulp magazines, at a time when a variety of genres, from romance and hard-boiled detective fiction to fantasy, weird menace, SF, western and hero fiction, were elaborated in and by these periodicals. Although an unknown number of Black writers did write for the pulps, they were not identified as such by the magazines and had to deal with white characters in their stories. As a consequence, Black readers “who were reading the pulps were […] trapped in a genre system that valorized whiteness above all else” (5-6) and was often underpinned by racist prejudice. But, as Hefner shows, a counter, African American, genre fiction developed in the “alternative pulp space” (46) of newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and Baltimore Afro-American, which had the largest circulation of all Black newspapers in the country. From the 1920s to the early 1950s (a period which coincides with the pulps’ heyday and decline), these two publications published over 2,500 stories and serial installments written by African American authors, featuring the exploits of African American characters.

An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North. By Zoë Burkholder

Ben Keppel

Pages 897–898

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac043

In her new book, Zoë Burkholder analyzes more than one hundred and eighty years of debates about education with deep understanding and remarkable clarity of expression. But the value of her book goes significantly beyond this particular strength. Burkholder’s mastery of both the larger social and political contexts embedded in these years is such that it is a very important history of the United States with schools—and ideas about schooling and democracy—at its center.

As Lizabeth Cohen did twenty years ago in A Consumer’s Republic, Burkholder roots her narrative in her home state of New Jersey. She uses this home base as a valuable resource for understanding locally expressed cultural patterns that, in some very sad ways, characterize the dominant features of American society. Burkholder begins this history in the 1830 s, when African-Americans in Boston began an “integrationist movement” under the leadership of William C. Neil (19-28). Boston’s Black community worked with some white benefactors to create rigorous community-based schools for their children.

How White Men Won The Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America. By Joseph Darda

David Kieran

Pages 899–901

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac037

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the celebration of military personnel and veterans continues unabated. One can hardly attend a sporting event, board an airplane, or drive through a small town without either witnessing or being asked to participate in some celebration of military service. As scholars such as Andrew Bacevich have noted, these uncritical celebrations have made it easier for the United States to engage in perpetual warfare. Appeals to veterans’ exceptionality have also, Joseph Darda explains in his important book How White Men Won The Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America, become “an unassailable method for undercutting black activism in sports” (186). This phenomenon, Darda argues, is the product of a half century or cultural work, undertaken by liberals and conservatives, that has imagined veterans as an aggrieved and, notably, white population whose needs must be privileged. In response to “the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements,” he argues, “White men discovered that they could reclaim [their] standing [by] alleging that the government had neglected them to meet the demands of people of color and women while leaving them for dead in Vietnam. . . . The legitimate suffering of some vets gave them a figure through whom they could articulate a racial grievance without acknowledging it as racial” (34).

The Riviera Exposed: An Ecohistory of Postwar Tourism and North African Labor. By Stephen L. Harp

Emily Marker

Pages 902–904

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac047

Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film “Turist” follows a rich, handsome Nordic family on vacation in the French Alps. The façade of their perfect life crumbles when pater familias Tomas abandons his wife and children during an apparent avalanche, which turns out to have been a controlled explosion to maintain the slopes. I thought about this film often as I read Stephen Harp’s engrossing environmental and social history of the French Riviera. The film satirizes luxury “nature” travel by reminding the audience of the work behind it. There is the nocturnal army of snowblowers, tractors, and cannon that make the place appealing to wealthy tourists like Tomas’s family. And then there is the figure of the janitor who always happens to be cleaning the halls whenever Tomas and his wife take their fighting out of earshot of their kids. Custodial staff may typically go unnoticed by hotel patrons, but in their unhinged state the couple see him, and the sight is a provocation. They yell at him to go away, to give them “privacy” in the public hallways that he is employed to clean. The janitor has no lines, but he is coded as an immigrant, Southern European, perhaps, or North African. That such a man would bear witness to the crisis of white European bourgeois masculinity is depicted as intolerable and makes the crisis more poignant.

The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria. By Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine

Gloria Chuku

Pages 905–907

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac046

Ironically, the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the enslaved were among the European justifications for the colonization of Africa. Yet, enslavement and pawning—a practice where children were left with creditors as loan collateral until debtors repaid their loans—persisted if not intensified under new legal, economic, political, and social conditions unleashed by European colonial rule in Africa. In The Persistence of Slavery, Chapdelaine presents a nuanced account of the complexity of economic, political, and social changes caused by colonialism that led to the persistence of child enslavement, child trafficking, and other forms of coerced labor in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century southeastern Nigeria, particularly, Igbo society. Relying on colonial, anthropological and missionary records, newspaper articles, interviews of nearly two dozen respondents conducted by research assistants, and other sources, and applying the “social economy of a child” framework, the author impressively demonstrates how children as slaves, pawns, child brides, and traffickers produced wealth for their families, communities and the colonial sate in Nigeria. Chapdelaine argues that child trafficking, child slavery, and child labor persisted in the region beyond the nineteenth-century anti-slavery movement because of their value as wealth generators. She shows that contemporary child trafficking and bondage is a continuation of the centuries of transatlantic and domestic enslavement and pawnship in Africa.

Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany. By Jennifer Allen

Jake P Smith

Pages 908–909

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac039

Rather than interpreting the 1980s in the Federal Republic of Germany as a time of fear, neoliberal retrenchment, resurgent nationalism, collapsing leftist futures, or no-future nihilism, Jennifer Allen encourages us to view these years as a period of democratic awakenings and new utopian imaginaries, an era that witnessed “a reconceptualization of the idea of utopia itself” (28). No longer was utopia singular, totalizing, or abstracted from the present; rather, over the course of the 1980s, it became something towards which one could work, a set of sustainable, everyday strategies for building a better world. In making the case for this transformation and renaissance of utopian thought, Allen focuses on three different groups: site-specific performance artists, amateur historians associated with the Berlin History Workshop, and the political activists of the nascent Green Party, all of whom engaged in practices that democratized, decentralized, and normalized utopian practices, thus making utopia sustainable.

Over the course of six chapters, Allen traces how these different groups imagined and actualized their sustainable utopian visions. She begins with an analysis of experimental artists such as Joseph Beuys and Gunter Demnig, who designed projects intended to actively intervene in and transform public space. With ventures such as Beuys’s “7000 Oaks,” in which thousands of oak trees were planted throughout the city of Kassel, these artists sought to decentralize and democratize the production of art and, in so doing, to encourage citizens to participate in the critical reconstitution of their everyday environments. The historians associated with the Berlin History Workshop sought to initiate similar changes in how people engaged with the past. Instead of simply producing written studies that challenged dominant and exclusionary interpretations of history, Workshop participants designed exhibits that allowed citizens to encounter the past in their everyday lives. For example, they organized walking tours that highlighted local resistance to Nazism, they worked to change street names, and they created the “Mobile Museum,” a bus that took historical exhibits (such as the T-4 exhibit on the Nazi euthanasia program) to neighborhoods throughout the city. By changing how people interacted with traces of the past in their everyday environments, members of the Workshop believed they could cultivate critical counter publics that would actively work towards creating utopian futures. Allen’s last example comes from the activists of the German Green Party, which emerged in the early 1980s as an attempt to actualize some of the utopian dreams of the 1960s and 1970s. More than just a party of environmentalists, the Greens were equally concerned with rejuvenating daily life by radically decentering and democratizing politics and culture. Empowering citizens to constitute their own environments would, they believed, create a sustainable, long-term foundation for utopian practices driven by local concerns and able to change with the times.

States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. By Samuel Clowes Huneke

Christopher Ewing

Pages 910–912

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac054

Despite gay liberation’s close associations with political leftism, historians have long debated whether or not political liberation is indebted to the proliferation of consumer choice in liberal capitalist democracies. Answering this question often involves making a simultaneous claim about the political merits of capitalism, and the apparent greyness of rainbow life under state socialism can put left-leaning historians in an uncomfortable position.

Samuel Clowes Huneke’s comparative look at gay life in postwar Germany, divided between a liberal capitalist West and a state socialist East, offers a unique opportunity to think through this history in more complicated ways that will resonate in many national contexts. Huneke advances a set of three, interlinking arguments: 1) homophobia is a more malleable concept than previously understood, 2) gay liberation is historically contingent and not wedded to consumer capitalism, and 3) a focus on gay men unsettles the assumption of a West German, capitalist success story. In so doing, Huneke is elegantly able to “weave together and to compare the trajectories of male homosexuality in the two German states across the span of forty years”—an ambitious project which constitutes his primary intervention (5).