ARTICLES
“The Greatest Encouragement to Seamen”: Pay, Families, and the State in Britain during the French Wars, 1793–1815
Troy Bickham and Ian Abbey
Pages 1–31
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab072
In 1795, Britain’s Parliament passed the “Seamen’s Families Bill” which enabled sailors to allot half of their monthly pay to either their mothers or wives for the duration of their service. This article examines the significance of the bill from a number of perspectives. First is the unprecedented level of national and local bureaucratic organization needed to implement pay allotments successfully. Second, and most extensively, the article examines the records produced by the bill’s implementation, which include such information as place of residence, number and gender of children, rank, wages, and relationship to the recipient. Drawing from a considerable sample of sailors who served from 1795 to the end of the French wars in 1815, the authors created a database of 7,514 sailors, who volunteered to allot half of their pay, as means to better understand the ordinary men who made up the rank and file of the Royal Navy. Among several findings is a strong challenge to the notion of the independent and irresponsible sailor who enlisted to escape an unhappy home life. Finally, the article considers the significance of the allotments within the British system of poor relief. Highly localized since its inception two centuries earlier, poor relief varied enormously across Britain. Equating annually to roughly one-quarter of poor relief expenditure across Britain, pay allotments to sailors’ families mark an unparalleled intervention by the British central government into social welfare.
Arai Shōgo and His Global Civil War, circa 1885
Amin Ghadimi
Pages 32–57
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab070
This article explores the historical relationship between terrorism and global thought through the case of Arai Shōgo, a commoner from Tochigi, Japan. Arai was chief of operations in the 1885 Osaka Incident, a failed plot among Japanese democratic radicals to travel to Korea, detonate explosives, topple the Korean government, incite war with China, resist European imperialism, and invigorate the democratic movement back in Japan. By examining Arai’s intellectual life as well as his geopolitical and local context, the article suggests that the rise of public political terrorism in East Asia not only signaled but also resulted from the crisis of intellectual globalization in the 1880s, in which terrorism marked the historical origins of the phenomenon of global civil war.
The Other Little House: The Brothel as a Colonial Institution on the Canadian Prairies, 1880–93
L K Bertram
Pages 58–88
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac018
What role did settler bawdy houses play in Canadian colonial expansion in the 1880s? The trial of “Big Nelly” Webb, a white bawdy house madam and sex worker who shot a Mounted Police constable on the doorstep of her brothel in 1888, offers critical insight into the world of these seldom acknowledged colonial institutions and the women who ran them. Far from simply “women on the margins,” Canadian officials in the North-West Territories permitted many white madams and sex workers to operate bawdy houses in emerging prairie settlements because they viewed them as essential workers. Drawing from the archives of the North-West Mounted Police, memoirs and testimonies of bawdy house sex workers and madams, and newspaper and court reports, this article explores the networks of influence that supported these houses, including local police and high-ranking colonial officials. Beyond personal ties, the influence of women like Big Nelly reflected the colonial function of the settler brothel. The waves of migrating bawdy house madams and workers who flocked to Canada’s “Last Best West” during this period could serve a very real role in the growth and biopolitical regulation of new Canadian settlements in Indigenous territory. These workers were tasked with protecting and regulating settler sexual and reproductive health, retaining white bachelor migrants in isolated settlements, and fostering urban growth. Settler bawdy houses on the Prairies were also bastions of racial segregation and containment, built to displace (and expose) workers of color and stop the growth of Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race populations and resistance in the 1880s. Indeed, race-based hierarchies did not just exist within the settler brothel economies of Canada’s North-West Territories, they were one of the foundational justifications for their existence.
Building the Ancestral Public: Cemeteries and the Necropolitics of Property in Colonial Ghana
Sarah Balakrishnan
Pages 89–113
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac010
This essay studies changes to mortuary practices in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana) beginning with the British state’s creation of town cemeteries in the late nineteenth century. It argues that the colonial state enforced cemetery burial because they realized Gold Coast people would never sell their land if it contained the remains of their elders; cemeteries were therefore a crucial tool in the transformation of land into private property for state dispossession. However, the invention of cemeteries had a significant impact on how communities worshipped, and conceived of, ancestral spirits. By gathering ancestors from the various households into a single site, the graveyard created an “ancestral public,” a community of ancestors who protected the community collectively. Their invention changed Gold Coast communities’ relationship to spirits, the afterlife, and property. What ensued were political contestations over rightful burial places, mortuary authority, and what will be called “the necropolitics of property”—the decision of who could, or who could not, enter the afterlife, and what consequences this had for estates.
Just Like Any Other Worker? Class and Gender in the Regulation of Domestic Service in the Early Soviet Period
Alissa Klots
Pages 114–143
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac008
In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was the site of the first state-led effort to reimagine domestic servants as workers. Yet this effort is absent from the global history of domestic service. Analysis of Soviet discourse on paid domestic labor, as well as cases of domestics challenging their employers in courts and arbitration, reveals that assumptions about class and gender informed the implementation of labor laws. While the employment of domestics did not constitute exploitation in the Marxist sense, the practice was widely viewed as petty-bourgeois in the early years after the revolution. As a result, domestic workers were very likely to win cases against their employers. By the mid-1920s, however, the state became aware of the role domestic workers played in freeing up the labor of their employers. The recognition of housework as socially useful labor led to the reimagining of domestic service as a practice compatible with socialism. Employers were no longer seen as exploiters by default, making it much harder for domestic workers to win cases against them. However, this shift did not change preferential treatment of domestics in cases involving access to housing, as Soviet courts feared that homeless women would inevitably turn to prostitution.
Crying for Flicka: Boys, Young Men, and Emotion at the Cinema in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s
Melanie Tebbutt
Pages 144–167
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac019
This article re-visits contemporary surveys of the cinema in the 1930s and 1940s to explore the implications that the cinema’s role as an “emotional frontier” between everyday life and the imagination had on the emotional lives of boys and young men. It makes a novel contribution to the history of youth and emotions, arguing that for boys and young men who were disconnected from social life, the cinema was an “emotional refuge,” a space of heightened emotional encounter, in which conventional assumptions about masculinity could be fractured and “feminine” sensibilities otherwise difficult to express publicly could receive cathartic release.
Coming of Age in Postwar Germany: Young Women’s Search for New Emotional Subjectivities, 1946–50
Tiia Sahrakorpi and Cherish Watton
Pages 168–194
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac002
During the Allied occupation of Germany, educators asked students to write about their feelings and experiences of youth before and after the Second World War. This article uses Abitur and Reifeprüfung examination essays written by young German women, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three, to explore how they performed and represented their emotional subjectivities in early postwar Berlin. First, it examines how young women used selective strategies of forgetting and remembering to repress their troubling emotional memories of the regime. Second it explores how women achieved some level of psychic comfort, through a selective remembering of their home lives and Bund Deutsche Mädel experiences by developing different emotional coping mechanisms. The article argues that young women’s emotional renegotiation was not a passive process as previously thought, but rather based on young women’s active and astute reading of the postwar emotional climate. Subjecting these emotional subjectivities to greater attention elucidates a key, but hitherto underexplored, stage in these young people’s lives.
“The Empire that Shaka Zulu was Unable to Bring About”: Ethnicizing Sovereignty in Apartheid South Africa, 1959–1970
Ashley Parcells
Pages 195–225
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac021
Arrangements of sovereignty in Africa fundamentally shifted during the era of decolonization, temporarily bringing about political possibilities beyond empire or nation-state. The apartheid state drew on this “federal moment” and attempted to save white minority rule by creating ethnically defined self-governing “homelands,” or bantustans, that could be fashioned as “independent” nation-states within a Southern African confederation. This article examines the ethnicization of sovereignty in the planning of KwaZulu, a bantustan for Zulu people. Rather than solely focusing on the central state, it explores how bureaucrats, royal family members, and other African leaders made claims to the boundaries of ethnicity and the proper arrangements of power. Initially, the government assumed that the Zulu homeland could be built atop the former Zulu kingdom. The planned bantustan, however, included both territory and populations that never recognized the Zulu monarchy before colonialism. As Zulu royal allies advocated for an expansive bantustan under a re-empowered monarchy, ethnologists and other bureaucrats clashed over the geographic limits of Zuluness and the relationship between the Zulu king and Africans across the Natal province. As the government retreated from its plan to empower the monarchy, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, an influential royal cousin, used competing historical claims to marginalize the royal house and position himself as the rightful hereditary leader of both the future bantustan and the Zulu kingdom. Ideas of a Zulu ethnic sovereignty that would shape the late apartheid period and democratic transition, I argue, initially emerged through these contingent struggles in the 1960s over territory, populations, and authority.
REVIEWS
Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance. By Guido Ruggiero
Bianca Lopez
Pages 226–228
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab064
In his latest monograph, Guido Ruggiero, historian of early modern Italy, combines literature and history to portray a fourteenth-century society grappling with epidemic disease. In his study, Ruggiero considers the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, a compendium of one hundred short tales, or novelle, published not long after the Black Death devastated Florence beginning in 1348. Ruggiero contends that through intensive close readings, which he defines as listening to Boccaccio, social and cultural historians can understand how Florentines managed grief and survival after plague.
Love and Sex provides glimpses into human desire, humor, rage, and sorrow, as well as religious transcendence. As Ruggiero argues, plague brought about changes that appeared not only in the public halls of justice and the marketplace, but in the ruminations on love by one of fourteenth-century Italy’s most significant authors. According to Boccaccio, marrying for love, rather than status, was one of the best ways to live a noble and virtuous life. However, love marriages were still uncommon in 1350, mostly existing in the idealized accounts of authors such as Boccaccio.
The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival. By Paul Conrad
Angela Pulley Hudson
Pages 229–231
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab062
Some thirty years after his confinement as a prisoner of war had ended in 1913, Eugene Chihuahua reflected on his Apache relatives long lost in Mexico. Many had crossed the border to avoid capture and confinement by the U.S. Army. Some were seized by Mexican authorities and subjected to various forms of bondage or forced assimilation. “I’ve always wanted to go down there and hunt my people,” he explained to an interviewer.1 Chihuahua had himself experienced multiple involuntary removals from his homelands and still yearned to reconnect with his scattered kin. This deeply felt longing to reunite with family pulses through Paul Conrad’s The Apache Diaspora, a study of displacement and survival that is daunting in its scope and impressive for its research. Conrad surveys 400 years of Apache history, much of which has been punctuated by experiences of banishment and incarceration.
Conrad makes an effective case for considering the longue dureé of Apache history. He argues that this approach allows the historian to follow people across time and space and challenges persistent but misleading historiographical distinctions, such as between a “Hispanic American colonialism of forced inclusion and an Anglo-American colonialism of elimination” (11). The study is organized into two parts—Part I: “Becoming Apache in Colonial North America,” Part II: “Apaches, Nations, and Empires”—and spans eight chronologically organized chapters. The first part focuses on the pre-colonial histories of people who would become known, in the colonial context, as “Apaches” and then follows the lives of these individuals as they were enveloped in systems of captivity and exploitation in North America and the Caribbean, beginning in the 16th century. Within the Spanish imperial order, the term “Apache” became a capacious one, slowly encompassing ever more diverse peoples to “facilitate the capture and acquisition of slaves under the justification that their nation had collectively resisted Spanish rule” (117). The “liberal ascription” of labels that rationalized oppression is a familiar phenomenon to historians of colonialism worldwide. Conrad shows the process playing out in multiple quarters (in the Palace of the Governors in New Mexico and the mining districts of central Mexico, for example) and with careful attention to historical contingencies, often born of Apache resistance. This section of the book is especially notable for the author’s efforts to provide “glimpses of a social world created for survival” (72). Though Conrad acknowledges the paucity of archival records on Apache life from the 15th through the 18th centuries, he is nevertheless able to sketch some contours vividly, particularly those regarding gender and family. His consistent iteration of the importance of kin networks plays an important role here. Deemed essentially “kinless” in Spanish colonial society until they were spoken for by a guardian or godparent, captives were always already enmeshed in webs and logics of Indigenous kinship (56).
Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic. By Joshua R. Greenberg
Ann Marsh Daly
Pages 232–234
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab057
The strange world of early republic paper money has long been fruitful ground for scholars of the United States’ economic past. But while most of this work focuses either on the policies and institutions responsible for creating the nation’s currency or the capitalist cultures in which it circulated, Joshua Greenberg reaches into the nation’s pockets and purses to excavate the lived experience of those using bank notes. Deeply researched and compellingly argued, Bank Notes and Shinplasters draws on newspapers, printed ephemera, fiction, manuscripts, fiction, government documents, and extant bank notes to explore how Americans deployed material practices, cultural conventions, and political debate to navigate their currency system.
Greenberg asks what Americans knew about their money, how they knew it, and why they had to know so much in the first place. His answer begins with the hundreds of state-chartered banks that flooded the early republic with ten thousand different bank notes, which circulated alongside counterfeit bills and quasi-legal ‘shinplasters’ issued by merchants, corporations, and other institutions. These banks turned currency into a source of private profit, not economic stability, and the resulting morass of paper was hazardous to use. Each bank note’s value was always in question. Nominally, a bill represented a claim on the same amount of money in gold or silver in the issuer’s vaults. In practice, people might assess a particular dollar to be worth only ninety cents or even nothing at all, depending on their distance from the issuer, the perceived likelihood that the bank could redeem the note for coin, suspicions of counterfeiting, and any number of other subjective considerations about the bill, its issuer, and the person offering it. Each transaction involving a bank note required both parties to bargain over both the price of the item and the value of the bills. These arguments required knowing a great deal about each bill, but the amount one needed to know to protect oneself exponentially increased as banks and paper multiplied, making bank notes a risky business.
Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization. By Robert Murray
Marie Stango
Pages 235–237
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab048
Atlantic Passages is an innovative addition to the growing body of scholarship on Liberian colonization. Making a strong argument for Liberia’s place as an important node in the nineteenth century Atlantic World, Robert Murray shows the importance of understanding Liberia not as the terminal point of the journey made by Liberia’s Black American settlers but as a springboard that settlers used to refashion new identities. Critically, instead of viewing colonization as a complete severance from the United States, Atlantic Passages reveals that Black settlers remained connected with the United States via return journeys. It is through examination of this mobility that the book offers a somewhat provocative argument about early Liberia: that Black American settlers, once outside of the United States, claimed a kind of “African whiteness” that conveyed power previously unavailable to them. Building from sources that detail West Africans using the term “white” to describe Black American settlers, Murray uses the analytic of “African whiteness” to examine the complexities of race in the Atlantic World.
The Belle Époque: A Cultural History, Paris and Beyond. By Dominique Kalifa. Translated by Susan Emanuel
Jeremy F Lane
Pages 238–239
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab058
Toulouse Lautrec, the Folies-Bergère, Maxims, the Moulin Rouge, art nouveau—these are just some of the images and places we associate with the Belle Époque, those golden years in France before the outbreak of the First World War. As Dominque Kalifa points out, the term “Belle Époque” was little used during the period itself and is generally understood to have been invented immediately after the Great War, in an expression of nostalgia for a more innocent age. In fact, Kalifa argues, there is scant evidence of either the use of the term in the 1920s or of any nostalgia for the period to which it now refers. His study sets out to uncover when the “chrononym” Belle Époque actually came into general use, before anatomising “the multiple social imaginaries to which it gave rise in later decades” (6). In the main body of his book, Kalifa takes a chronological approach, tracing the gradual emergence and evolution of what he terms “the Belle Époque imaginary,” showing how its changing nature reflects a range of historical developments from the 1900s to the twenty-first century. He draws on an impressively broad corpus of material—novels, films, theatrical revues, academic and popular history, even reprinted period postcards—as evidence of the different forms taken by this “social imaginary.”
Opportunity in Crisis: Cantonese Migrants and the State in Late Qing China. By Steven B. Miles
Eric Schluessel
Pages 240–242
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab060
Opportunity in Crisis is a history of a diaspora and a frontier in nineteenth-century South China. Steven Miles follows stories of socioeconomic change through movements up and down a great river valley stretching from the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong in the east to the upper reaches of the West River in mountainous Guangxi to the west, on the edge of “Zomia” (38). Miles follows the stories of downriver Cantonese people as they sought personal transformation and familial advantage upriver while navigating the armed conflicts of this period.
This is Miles’ third outing on these rivers, following his 2006 Sea of Learning and 2017 Upriver Journeys. Opportunity in Crisis should be considered in that context, and while a reader familiar with Chinese social history will find it a rewarding expedition, newcomers may find themselves aswim in detail. That exceptionally finely grained analysis, however, is precisely what makes Opportunity in Crisis so compelling: Miles rallies a panoply of anecdotes from fieldnotes, gazetteers, poems, depositions, family genealogies, and inscriptions to compose a mosaic of riverine life, in which we can discern even the covert activities of criminal organizations and river pirates. In a field in which scholars struggle with archival access, such thick description is an impressive and necessary achievement, and it will save future researchers significant time and effort.
Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions. By Susan Burch
Ulrike Wiethaus
Pages 243–244
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab049
Susan Burch, a professor of American Studies at Middlebury College, has published widely in the growing field of disability studies. Her new monograph, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions, offers a non-Indigenous scholarly effort to narrate multigenerational Indigenous perspectives on the traumatic history of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. Also known as Hiawatha Insane Indian Asylum, the institution was operational from 1902-1934. It confined nearly 400 inmates from across the United States under terrifying conditions with only the shoddiest of clinical diagnoses. Today, the site’s cemetery is registered with the National Park Service. Located on lands that have been repurposed as the municipal Hiawatha Golf Course in Canton, South Dakota with only minimal protection from golfers, the otherwise unmarked cemetery contains a plaque to commemorate the 121 Indigenous men, women, and children known by name who died at the institution.
Only the second federal institution dedicated to psychiatric medicine, the segregated Canton Asylum was preceded by the non-segregated Government Hospital for the Insane founded in 1853 in Washington, DC. The immigrant town of Canton was among the first white settlements in Dakota Territory. The asylum provided a steady source of income for the town, including as a tourist attraction with regular exhibitions of its Indigenous inmates for public viewings. The asylum’s history of institutionalized violence is embedded in a context of relentless anti-Indian hostilities and lawlessness across the region and nation. Canton was founded shortly before the Dakota War of 1862, which led to the largest mass execution on U.S. territory; the executed were Dakota men condemned to death without proper trial. Other anti-Indian benchmarks that provide a context for more than thirty years of forced institutionalization and abuse of Indigenous people at Canton Asylum include the Wounded Knee massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota men, women, and children in 1890, the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses that criminalized the practice of traditional American Indian lifeways, and the creation of other forced interments such as reservations (beginning in the 1830 s), boarding schools (beginning with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879), and orphanages (beginning in the 1850 s). As is true for Canton Asylum, these genocidal settler colonial interventions were met with various strategies of Indigenous resistance. At the asylum, incarcerated Native people, a Native employee, and a few white nurses and other staff regularly protested institutionalized acts of violence and abuse through letters and reports; Indigenous family members from across North America tried to achieve the release of their loved ones by writing petitions. Whistleblower staff lost their jobs, however, and families were largely unsuccessful because the institution’s corrupt and malicious superintendent was able to cover up his criminal operations with the assistance of white enablers higher up on the command chain.
White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America. By David Herzberg
Nancy D Campbell
Pages 245–247
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab050
Early in the 20th century guardians of U.S. public health set out to prevent heroin from ever entering the U.S. market, but by the end of the century they were forced to look on as another blockbuster opioid, promoted as “non-addictive,” proved an efficient gateway to heroin. White Market Drugs explores this history as it evolved through three epochal wars on dangerous drugs, showing that the white-market quest was not to prohibit addictive drugs, but to render legal pharmaceuticals safe, tamper-proof, and profitable medicines for certain categories of consumers. This well-documented book recounts the construction and maintenance of an interlinked set of gendered and racialized projects that marked out zones of protection and privilege, and that categorized some drug users as medicalized and others as criminalized.
White patients received exclusive access to “medicines” that were lightly policed by regulators and physicians. All others were consigned to markets understood as illicit, informal, nonwhite, “black,” and policed far more heavily by law enforcement, which often deployed incarceration as drug policy. Denied the privileges of patienthood, those accessing “drugs” in these markets were cast as criminal and treated as such. Deeply inscribed not only in law and policy but everyday life, that “drugs-medicines divide” was and is still entangled with the concept of addiction, about which Herzberg writes with care and respect. This gripping social history shows how entangled addiction has been with the products of formal, legal, pharmaceutical markets. White market overdose deaths from barbiturates, benzodiazepines, sedative-hypnotics such as Quaaludes, opioids, or combinations thereof, have long outstripped overdose from heroin and other illegal drugs—by something like four orders of magnitude.
Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect under Stalin. By Anna Toropova
Eleonory Gilburd
Pages 248–251
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab059
Anna Toropova has written an imaginative and innovative study of the affective world of Stalinist cinema—a world beyond verbal propaganda. She integrates analysis of filming techniques and archival documents of pre- and postproduction discussions, as well as Soviet sociology of viewership and Soviet psychology, to contend that cinema was a school of Stalinist sentimental education. This book joins the emotional turn in the historiography of Russia and the Soviet Union, but foregrounds the unspoken and the irrational, the sights and sounds of cinema. The Bolshevizing project was deeper than “speaking”; nor, of course, is “speaking” the only, or even the principal, way of internalizing ideology. Some of the films Toropova highlights are iconic; many, however, are little-known, and bringing them to the fore is among the book’s many accomplishments. In all cases, she looks for intimations beyond the narrative façade.
To determine the affective work of narrative plotlines and production plans, Toropova relies on psychoanalysis, particularly in its Lacanian variety. For example, inspired by Freud’s and Lacan’s writings on jokes and the comic, she carefully tracks how Soviet comedies overturned the apparent meanings of words, rules of sense-making, and the symbolic order of life. This disruption of unquestionable, authoritative meaning was, in Toropova’s interpretation, the source of pleasure for Soviet audiences and the source of danger for cultural authorities, who found something to grumble about in nearly every comedy. If comedies made light of the disintegration of “the narcissist ego” (anti-heroes, corrupt officials—in short, bad guys rendered ridiculous), then Soviet thrillers conflated the self and the enemy and thus threatened the unity of the ego. Toropova draws productively on the psychoanalytic theory of paranoia to argue that by splitting the self and projecting evil onto a foreign enemy, thrillers ultimately reasserted “a sense of narcissistic self-mastery” and unity. But she spotlights the fragility of a lonely, unknowing, and doomed hero, or—in a scenario that presented the enemy ambiguously and empathetically—the possibility of viewers’ identification with a hostile, foreign other. It was such possibilities of the thriller that alarmed the authorities.
Nonviolence Before King: The Politics of Being and the Black Freedom Struggle. By Anthony C. Siracusa
Nico Slate
Pages 252–254
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab053
Historians have long debated the place of nonviolence within African American freedom struggles. “Non-violence is not an invention of white intellectuals, or whites of any sort, nor was it borrowed from India,” C. Vann Woodward declared in 1965. “It saw the Negro through slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, in all of which he rejected the bloody tactics urged by well-wishers.” Woodword’s approach to nonviolence overlooked the Stono Rebellion, the German Coast Uprising, and other revolts of the enslaved; the bravery and suffering of “Colored regiments” in the Civil War; and the prevalence of guns within African American communities throughout the Jim Crow era. By contrast, many contemporary scholars have highlighted the importance of self-defense to Black freedom struggles, and have argued that nonviolence was, even during the “classic” phase of the civil rights movement, more a temporary tactic than a deeply-held philosophy.
In Nonviolence Before King, Anthony C. Siracusa traces the evolution of nonviolence within African American freedom struggles from the 1930s through the 1960s, with a focus on “the political philosophy of religious nonviolence” (2). He argues that “if nonviolent direct action proved to be an effective method for how local people might challenge Jim Crow, the philosophy of nonviolence became an answer to why people struggled in this way” (3). A sweeping synthesis that draws upon a range of archival sources and existing scholarship, Nonviolence Before King will be of great interest to scholars of the civil rights movement, nonviolent social change, or the intellectual history of social movements.
Fighting and Writing: The Rhodesian Army at War and Postwar. By Luise White
Carol Summers
Pages 255–257
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab051
Over the past several decades, historians of Africa have worked hard to understand messy wars. Luise White, in Fighting and Writing, takes this to a new level, drawing on an archive of white men’s writing to depict the storytelling, fantasies, and imagined world of the armed struggles of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. She describes her methodology as one of finding a “body of evidence” and subjecting it to meticulous reading and examination.
This produces both frustrating and fascinating results. By the end of the book the reader may know less about the war than they did when they began, pulled into uncertainty by a vivid discussion that sows doubt on basics such as what the war should be called, how it was fought, what it was about and who fought in it. Despite such disconcerting effects, Fighting and Writing offers a model for how to work with profoundly and deliberately unreliable sources. It documents complicated arguments and fantasies of race and cultural identity. It looks closely at how participants in the conflict wrote their own “fables” (109) on topics such as tracking and “bush” skills, racial passing, poisons, and mercenary adventurism. Overall, this is a book best read alongside at least some of the classic historiography of the war, such as Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock’s Rhodesians Never Die (1993), Norma Kriger’s Zimbabwe’s Guerilla War (1993) and many others.
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. By Gabriel Winant
Amy Zanoni
Pages 258–260
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab056
The Next Shift is a groundbreaking yet deeply familiar book. Revisiting well-trod themes in the history of twentieth-century U.S. labor and political economy and building on generations of feminist scholarship, historian Gabriel Winant offers an original account of how deindustrialization transformed the working class and its supporting institutions. Winant stitches together the micro details of daily life—soot maintenance, scheduling stress—and macro-level analysis of U.S. embrace of “mass low-wage private-sector employment” (3). The result is comprehensive, satisfying social history of how industrial work came to structure the U.S. welfare state and just about every aspect of life in northern cities, and how its decline paved way for the health care industry that dominates these same cities today. Care, Winant shows, is key to the story.
For years historians of race and gender have documented how the U.S. welfare state enshrined the white industrial breadwinner as provider of his family’s economic security. New Deal labor laws empowered these workers to bargain collectively; the Social Security Act promised unemployment and old age insurance. Their wives received income and benefits through their status as dependents. People of color, queer people, and many women—mostly barred from well-paid industrial work, unions, labor protections, and public benefits—remained outside social citizenship. The New Deal served the industrial worker well. But the family wage was a myth for many and the mid-twentieth century no “golden age” for non-industrial workers.
The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism. By Benjamin Holtzman
Sarah Miller-Davenport
Pages 261–263
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac006
Extract
To its critics, the plight of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s was due in no small part to the apathy and selfishness of its residents, who demanded generous public services while allowing its housing stock to decay, its parks to fill with litter, and its streets to become the domain of criminals and drug users. But, as Benjamin Holtzman makes clear in The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, New Yorkers were profoundly invested in the fate of their home town, even as it seemed to be an increasingly hopeless cause. An impressive blending of social and political history, The Long Crisis chronicles the labors of urban homesteaders, tenant organizers, neighborhood watch groups, and park volunteers who, fed up with dysfunctional city governance, worked to improve city life through sweat equity and private investment.
By highlighting the stories of working-class New Yorkers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, The Long Crisis uses a wider lens than Suleiman Osman’s The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, which focused on the gentrification efforts of white, middle-class homeowners in the leafy “urban frontiers” of Park Slope and Fort Greene. But although he emphasizes the civic activism of the city’s marginalized communities, Holtzman does not offer an aspirational history of ordinary citizens forging a more democratic and livable city. Rather, he tells a much more complicated story of how city residents at “different scales of power” together produced the neoliberal metropolis (2). This was, Holtzman argues, the consequence of a series of “imaginative remedies” and “experiments” in urban voluntarism that sought to make up for the inadequacies of an underfunded municipal government (2). Beginning in late-1960s, conditions in New York and nationally “helped narrow [New Yorkers’] conception of what government could deliver,” but did not “diminish urbanites’ sense of what their living conditions should be” (6). The neoliberal city that emerged in the late-20th century was thus not simply “imposed by a narrow set of elites,” but “took form through a process of popular marketization that involved a wide range of urbanites who transformed the political economy from the ground up” (4). Even if many New Yorkers rejected neoliberal ideology, the grassroots response to New York’s extended economic crisis aligned, often unintentionally, with the interests of real estate developers and other private actors seeking to promote market-based public policy. The result was that poor South Bronx homesteaders, affluent Park Slope brownstoners, and avaricious landlords all contributed to the rise of neoliberalism in New York, wherein once-public responsibilities—like basic park maintenance and affordable housing development—were entirely outsourced to the private sector.
