ARTICLES

Trade in Runaway Peasants and "The Chichikov Phenomenon" in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Andrey V Gornostaev

Pages 715–740

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz108

This article examines the trade in fugitive serfs in eighteenth-century Russia. This trade emerged from two interrelated phenomena—the sale of individual serfs and peasant flight—and was practiced by nobles, merchants, factory owners, and government officials. The acquisition of absent peasants, although seemingly absurd, represented a risky investment from which the new owners could profit upon discovery and reclamation of the fugitives. According to several eighteenth-century decrees, individuals found guilty of accepting fugitives were required to pay monetary compensation to the peasants' legal owners for each year of harboring. In some instances, the sum of compensation reached staggering amounts of several thousand rubles. Exploiting this legal opportunity, eighteenth-century nobles or "Chichikovs"—named after the protagonist of Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls—purchased serfs on the run for the specific purpose of making a significant profit by collecting compensation. This article argues that the trade in runaways and "Chichikov schemes" reveals a yet unexplored dimension of Russian serfdom and its influence, both beneficial and ruinous, on the interactions between nobles, and between nobles and other members of imperial society. The article additionally advances the understanding of serfdom as a social framework based on practices and customs rather than on legislation alone.

Naming Plantations: Toponyms and the Construction of the Plantation System in the English Atlantic

Paul Musselwhite

Pages 741–774

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa020

This essay pioneers a critical approach to place naming in early America, which offers new insight into the evolving definition of plantation. In early seventeenth-century England, planting was understood as a public effort to establish new commonwealths. Only gradually around the Atlantic world did plantations become predominantly associated with private places producing staple crops with enslaved labor. This essay uses the radically underutilized evidence of place-names to explore how this slippage occurred on the ground, and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of "planter." The names that individuals gave to the places they called plantations reveal how they perceived the plantation and the political, economic, and social relations it structured. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 named tracts of land patented in four Maryland counties between 1634 and 1750, this essay charts the changing popularity of distinct elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, affects of the landowner, and European place-names. It reveals there was no straightforward rush to carve up the land into privatized commercial units. Instead, individuals initially structured plantations around communal frameworks defined variously by manorialism, urban civic traditions, and shared geographic lexicons. As the tobacco economy consolidated into the hands of a slave-owning class, plantation names reframed places as subjective manifestations of planter identities. These conclusions adjust our understanding of the transition to capitalism and slavery in Maryland and they also offer a blueprint for a broader toponymy of the plantation in the Atlantic world.

"Health is Wealth": Valuing Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Melanie A Kiechle

Pages 775–798

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz104

This essay traces the evolution of the motto "health is wealth" from its origins as an anticapitalist argument made by antebellum sanitary reformers to its acceptance as a fundamental principle of organized public health in the United States. Sanitarians originally coined the phrase "health is wealth" to counter the capitalist maxim "labor is wealth." Because city leaders were businessmen who understood economic arguments, public health reformers increasingly gave health a monetary value in order to win over this audience and change urban governance. Although "health is wealth" momentarily co-opted the logic of capitalism in order to successfully make the case for institutionalizing public health within municipal and state governments, the phrase ultimately wrote economic values into the purpose and functions of public health boards and departments. In the course of advancing a proactive public health that prevented both endemic and epidemic diseases, sanitarians reduced the perception of health from a common good to a commodity. The economic logic employed by early reformers is critical, not only for understanding how the long reach of early American capitalism touches us today but also for recognizing that modern public health functions in the way it was created, as a capitalist system.

Money, Death, and Agency in Catholic Ireland, 1850–1921

Patrick Doyle and Sarah Roddy

Pages 799–818

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz112

Between the end of the Great Famine and the end of the union with Britain, the Irish Catholic Church was almost exclusively funded by ordinary lay people. This article examines the financial relationship between clergy and laity, focusing on payments related to death. In doing so, it argues three main points. First, it suggests that previous conceptions of lay people coerced into giving their money to the church are too simplistic and deny the complex agency of the people of many social classes who gave the money. Second, it argues that using the financial transactions of ordinary people gives historians a much-needed methodology for recovering lives about which the archives are otherwise silent. Third, it posits that the mediation of faith through money, specifically, must be added to the growing body of work on "material religion."

The Kindness of Strangers: Single Mothers and the Politics of Friendship in Interwar Cape Town

Will Jackson

Pages 819–842

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa001

Just as a friend is often defined as somebody we like, friendship is thought of as a social, moral, and emotional good. The aura of friendship is in its virtue. But the meaning of friendship depends on who claims it and who the person appears to be whom they describe as their friend. This essay investigates the meaning of friendship in the lives of single mothers in South Africa between the two world wars. The context is Cape Town, where single mothers classified as "white" or "European" attracted the attention of the state. In case records pertaining to the 1913 Children's Welfare Act, the meaning of friendship was contested between magistrates, police detectives, welfare workers, and single mothers themselves. The struggle over how a case should be resolved was to a great extent a struggle over the meaning of friendship. To the authorities, "friends" were a disturbing presence in the lives of single mothers. While the image of healthy, secure, and stable colonial family units was articulated around the relationship between a mother and a child, it was underwritten by the taken-for-granted presence of a male provider. Analyzing cases where men were in various ways absent forces our emphasis away from the normative standards that guided child welfare work and into the messier social realities against which those standards were applied.

The First Peronists: Indigenous Leaders, Populism, and the Argentine Nation-State

Christine Mathias

Pages 843–871

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz085

This article examines indigenous contributions to nation-state formation in Argentina during the first and second presidencies of Juan Perón (1946–55). Perón recognized indigenous people as Argentine citizens and attempted to reorganize the state institutions responsible for their welfare, but he did not institute special policies to improve their dismal living conditions. Moreover, state agents continued to use violence against indigenous communities, sometimes with terrifying results. Nonetheless, many indigenous leaders, known as caciques, embraced both the rhetoric of Peronism and the principles of populism. Their political engagement had mixed results, but its symbolic impact was profound. Peronist caciques made national politics relevant to indigenous communities, expanded their horizons of possibility, and helped to integrate them into the Argentine nation-state. Focusing on such understudied intermediaries helps explain populism's enduring, paradoxical appeal in the Argentine interior.

The Smile behind the Sales Counter: Soviet Shop Assistants on the Road to Full Communism

Diane P Koenker

Pages 872–896

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz118

This article explores the role of sales assistants in Soviet retail trade in the 1960s, who were overwhelmingly female. It investigates the causes of and remedies for what was widely perceived to be rude and grudging service. Soviet customers and officials felt entitled to a positive consumer experience, and managers and trade union officials agonized over the ways to promote and incentivize "service with a smile." In addition to the poor performance of Soviet manufacturing, which produced goods that were difficult to sell, other factors included poor training and minimal education, low prestige, and low pay. This article also highlights the continuities in retail sales culture from the 1920s to the 1960s but emphasizes the increasing role assigned to "emotional labor" as important and necessary work by sales workers.

A Double-Edged Pluralism: Paradoxes of Diversity in the International Institute Movement, 1945–1965

Franca Iacovetta and Erica Toffoli

Pages 897–919

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa014

As a study in US pluralism, this article examines the International Institute movement—an urban network of liberal pluralist social welfare and intercultural agencies—in the early post-1945 era. It argues that the institutes were practitioners of a double-edged, or paradoxical, pluralism, in which progressive and conservative elements coexisted in tension with each other. An assessment of Institute records from the national headquarters and several local affiliates dealing with group and cultural programs and casework methods considers the possibilities, limits, tensions, and ironic implications of institute theories and practices. The analysis highlights the challenge of attaining that ever-elusive "balance" between promoting cultural diversity (and integration) and ensuring a degree of assimilation. It sheds light on a major irony—namely, that the application of modestly relativist cultural insights often generated hypotheses of im/migrant pathology. And, in regard to processes of racialization, it illuminates a paradox: that race could inflect institute "cultural" theory and practice with respect to both ethnic and racialized im/migrants and minoritized Americans. Finally, the authors suggest their framework might be of wider applicability and that critical historical thinking about contemporary multiculturalism and its long roots is both timely and important.

Pioneers or Mere Labor Force? Post–World War II Italian Rural Migration to Brazil and the Legacies of Colonialism

Dario Gaggio

Pages 920–943

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa015

In the early 1950s, the Italian government experimented with organized rural settlement in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Part of a general effort to ease Italy's "overpopulation," rural settlement abroad had special meanings for both Italian and Brazilian elites. These experiments resonated with the memories of mass emigration at the turn of the twentieth century and with the legacy of colonial settlement in Libya and East Africa. These projects also fulfilled ongoing racial and eugenic aspirations in Brazil. Italian rural settlement in Brazil took the form of both employment in the coffee fazendas (estates) and the foundation of relatively homogenous "colonies." However unsuccessful on their own terms, these experiments provide evidence of the links between colonial knowledge and development practices, and they challenge the widespread assumption that Italians simply repressed their colonial past after the end of fascism and military defeat.

The Insurrection of the Middle Class: Social Mobilization and Counterrevolution during the Popular Unity Government, Chile, 1970–1973

Marcelo Casals

Pages 944–969

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz110

his article studies the political trajectory of the Chilean middle class under the Popular Unity government (1970–1973) through its representative social organizations, especially small merchant, trucker owner, and professional associations. In the context of increased political polarization, the middle class—after a brief "honeymoon" with the government—radicalized for counterrevolution. Along with political, media, and business opposition, these middle-class groups formed a powerful counterrevolutionary social bloc that challenged the Popular Unity through massive strikes and protests, including a major one in October 1972. I argue that this process was a result of the breakdown of the channels of participation and negotiation that had existed between these groups and the state since the 1930s. These channels broke down with the Left's implementation of a revolutionary, socialist project, which led both to the state's unprecedented attention to the working class and to a major economic crisis. At the same time, the very idea of the middle class was redefined in counterrevolutionary terms. While the internal contradiction of the Left prevented it from engaging with the middle class, the opposition succeeded in defining that social identity as inherently anti-Marxist. Consequently, the organizations studied here assumed a leading role in the increasingly insurrectional opposition to the Popular Unity, which culminated in enthusiastic middle-class support for the September 11, 1973, coup d'état.

REVIEWS

Slave No More: Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas. By Aline Helg

Sue Peabody

Pages 970–972

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz107

Slave No More opens with the Middle Passage and the traumas experienced by deported captives as backdrop to the growth of the populations that came to be known as "free people of color" in the Americas. A synthetic work based upon a wide array of recent scholarship, this book summarizes slaves' pursuit of freedom in the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, and Danish colonies of the Americas from the early sixteenth century to 1838, when British abolition schemes began to dismantle the institution in law. At the heart of her project, Aline Helg analyzes four principle mechanisms by which Afro-descended slaves achieved freedom: marronage, manumission, military service, and revolt. She discovers that while the brutal proto-industrialist sugar plantations were emerging in the eighteenth-century, there developed a parallel movement of fugitive slaves settling in the cities and uncolonized spaces ill-suited to commercial cultivation – there, people seeking freedom established enduring communities that persist to the present. A well organized, accessible, and current overview, the book will be especially useful to advanced undergraduate and graduate students – particularly insofar as it places the agency of enslaved peoples at the center of its synthetic story.

Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. By Caitlin Rosenthal

Jeffrey Sklansky

Pages 973–975

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz115

Amid a groundswell of struggles for workers' rights in recent years, scholars of American slavery have been reevaluating the means and methods of the most thoroughgoing mode of exploitation of labor in the history of capitalism. Caitlin Rosenthal's stunning study of the role of modern accounting practices in enabling slaveholders to manage their brutally bound workforce represents a signal contribution to that revisionist historical project. Lucidly written, carefully and compellingly argued, Accounting for Slavery is rich in vital insights into the organizational, computational, and clerical mechanisms of masters' power and profits, including the creation of complex administrative hierarchies, scientific efforts to maximize labor productivity, and financial appraisals of the value of their enslaved assets.

Such sophisticated structures of information-gathering and record-keeping have long been associated with corporate industry rather than plantation agriculture. But Rosenthal brings a background in management consulting and business history to bear on some of the biggest businesses and most calculating capitalists before the Civil War, from the sugar estates of the British West Indies to the cotton fields of the antebellum South. She focuses on the captains of the planter class who took the lead in devising accounting practices intended to make mastery more systematic if not automatic. But her incisive study of business methods yields a broader understanding of the dual character of slaveholders' command of their predacious enterprise. Their virtually unlimited power over laborers' lives allowed planters to imagine "the plantation itself as a great machine" (69) with interchangeable human parts, fostering the invention of "paper technologies" (49) such as standardized account books and ledgers of workers' output that contemporary employers of wage labor could scarcely conceive. Reciprocally, their elaborate endeavors to record, compute, and track bondpeoples' value as repositories of abstract labor power and human capital enhanced slaveholders' control of the material instruments of mastery such as slaves' diet, sleep, and sex and overseers' constant and calibrated violence. Closely coordinated, the bookkeeper's pen and the slave driver's lash inscribed the planter's authority in ink and blood.

The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880. By Wendy Gonaver

Dennis A Doyle

Pages 976–978

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz095

Within the historiography on nineteenth century US psychiatry, Southern asylums have long been neglected by scholars focused on the Northeast. Yet as Gonaver's new book astutely points out, the lack of attention paid to Southern psychiatrists and their institutions has left us with an insufficient understanding of racial slavery's role in the development of mental health care—not only below the Mason-Dixon Line but nationwide. For decades, Gerald Grob and other stalwarts in the history of psychiatry claimed that race had been peripheral to the profession's early theory and practice. That's not the story Gonaver tells. Given that racial slavery was the era's most significant and polarizing institution, it served as a primary context framing how asylum superintendents debated the design and staffing of their hospitals, their use of restraints, and the relationship between insanity, racial segregation, religious fervor, and gender conventions.

In recovering how racial slavery influenced asylum medicine, Gonaver documents the rise and fall of the regime of Dr. John M. Gall, superintendent of the first US asylum: Virginia's Eastern Lunatic Asylum. Relying on a treasure trove of previously unseen archives, she not only reveals Gall's perspective but also the perspectives of his patients and his staff. What is so remarkable is that Eastern was the only antebellum institution in which slaves served on the staff and both blacks and whites were accepted as patients. Gonaver's Chapter Two finds evidence that the enslaved staff sometimes empathized with the patients' confinement and may have helped some escape. In Chapters Three and Four in particular, the archival record was substantial enough that Gonaver could reconstruct some patients' lives. But as any scholar of antebellum medical files knows, they are often incomplete or hard to read. To her credit, Gonaver admits when this occurs, telling the reader when gaps in the record compelled her to make an inference or speculate. For readers who expect historians to only make pronouncements backed up by incontrovertible evidence, they will be disappointed and might find some of her recovery work invalid.

China's War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842-1965. By Philip Thai

Stacie Kent

Pages 979–981

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz097

China's War on Smuggling is a well-researched and finely written first book by a historian well-versed in modern Chinese history as well as smuggling and state-building in a wider range of historical contexts. The book describes a century-long interaction between state efforts in China to regulate, tax, and constrain commercial circulation and activities by professional and petty smugglers that circumvented these efforts. Though the book nominally covers three key political regimes--the Qing Empire, Nationalist China, and Communist China--like other books with similar periodization, the bulk of this one concerns Nationalist China.

The author offers two well-supported arguments. First, that "protracted campaigns against illicit trade helped expand state capacity, centralize legal authority, and transform economic life" (272). Second, that smuggling was an economic phenomenon and political-economic problem rather than a criminal activity. Smuggling was not always intended as such, and was "often the result of more material concerns: profit, and in some cases, survival" (273).

Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850-1900. By Jessica Hinchy

Zoya Sameen

Pages 982–984

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz106

Over the past few decades, historians of empire have extensively addressed the ways in which colonial power asserted itself in relation to the intimate expressions of gender and sexuality. Yet, there still remains much to be said about this history, even as the history of gender and colonialism has become a field unto itself. Jessica Hinchy's Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India is a new and significant contribution to this field, and one that redresses the curious absence of the history of the transgender hijra community from scholarship on colonial India.

Hinchy undertakes an impressive and diligent reading of the colonial archive against the grain to articulate the ideology and implementation of the little-known colonial project to eliminate the hijra community in north India. Where previous scholars have overlooked or dismissed the significance of colonial fixation with the "eunuch problem," Hinchy seeks to explain this concern in terms of a calculated and systematic attempt to root hijras out of existence. However, the project of cultural elimination was only undertaken in the North-Western Provinces (NWP), which were known for their unique administrative culture. For Hinchy, examining the regulation of gender and sexuality in a provincialized setting can tell us a great deal about how local contexts shaped colonial concerns.

Apostle of Progress: Modesto C. Rolland, Global Progessivism, and the Engineering of Revolutionary Mexico. By J. Justin Castro

Matthew Vitz

Pages 985–986

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz114

Political and cultural histories of Mexico prior to, during, and following the Revolution of 1910 abound. In most of these histories, ideas about material progress and capitalist development, as well as changes to the built environment, are present but often relegated to a tertiary position in narrative and analysis. Moreover, the historiography of the Revolution and its aftermath tends to be told from a confined national perspective, despite a recent scholarly current to globalize its actors and significance. It is for these reasons that Justin Castro's Apostle of Progress is a welcome addition to historical scholarship.

By following the life story of Modesto Rolland, one of twentieth-century Mexico's leading engineers, inventors and thinkers, this book highlights many of the most underexplored aspects of the revolution and the period of reconstruction through about 1946: the political reformism of followers of Francisco Madero, the Constitutionalist revolutionaries' progressive vision and influential reach into U.S. intellectual and political circles, the "socialist" experimentation in states such as Yucatán, the role of the technocrat in spurring post-revolutionary reconstruction, and the challenge of bringing peripheral regions into the national fold. Rolland's influence was seemingly everywhere, making him the ideal subject of such a biography. He cut his teeth in Mexico City, introducing construction with reinforced concrete and playing a pivotal role in the gradual "Mexicanization" of U.S.-controlled railways, before being driven into exile after the reactionary Victoriano Huerta ousted Madero in 1913. One of the more fascinating chapters is when Castro discusses Rolland's role in convincing U.S.-American liberals and progressives to back Venustiano Carranza and his "constitutionalists" over Villa and Zapata. This is the apex of global Progressivism, and Castro does a fantastic job situating Rolland in these discussions about governance, city planning, agrarian reform and taxation policies, as well as the early feminist movement. An acolyte of Henry George, Rolland persistently called for a land-value tax and a national land distribution to smallholders in order to resolve Mexico's obdurate "agrarian problem." He put put some of these ideas into practice under Salvador Alvarado's "socialist" experiment in Yucatán in 1916 and 1917. Learning from municipal-level progressivism emphasizing democratic referenda and public health improvements in the U.S. and Ebenezer Howard's garden city theories, Rolland tirelessly advocated for democratic municipal governance and, working in Xalapa, proposed a new city design centered on a stadium and surrounding worker neighborhoods. An unbending believer in capitalist development, albeit without an overbearing U.S. corporate presence, Rolland was instrumental in establishing the free port trading system, railroad construction connecting Yucatan to Mexico City, opening up the isthmus of Tehuantepec to extractivism, fostering the expansion of radio networks, and constructing infrastructures to peripheral areas, including his home territory (now a state) Baja California Sur.

Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing. By Jeffrey S. Adler

K Stephen Prince

Pages 987–988

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz120

In Murder in New Orleans, Jeffrey Adler explores the lethal nexus of race, violence, and policing in a twentieth-century American city. Relying on a unique and robust source base, Adler applies an innovative quantitative and qualitative research method to draw a compelling picture of criminality and law enforcement in the interwar period. The 1920 to 1945 period, Adler suggests, saw the birth of Jim Crow policing in New Orleans and across the South. These developments, he argues, "eerily portended subsequent changes in the relationship between race and criminal justice, establishing the foundations for late-century patterns of police violence, trends in mass arrest, and the mass incarceration of African American citizens" (5).

A historical riddle is at the heart of Adler's analysis. Between 1920 and 1925, the murder rate in New Orleans climbed by a staggering 139.5 percent, making the city one of the most violent in the country. Between 1925 and 1933, the city's homicide rate fell by 52.8 percent. And yet, in the early part of the decade, as murder rates spiked, police oversight remained remarkably lax, particularly where homicides among African American were concerned. After the homicide rate began its precipitous fall in the second half of the 1920s, however, a "local crime panic" prompted a militarization of the city's police. "As crime plunged, particularly African American homicide," Adler writes, "a new era of state power and criminal justice authority, dedicated to maintaining the racial order, emerged" (134). The post-1925 period saw a significant uptick in police activity, judicial prosecution, and state violence against African Americans. Responding to a variety of economic, demographic, and criminological shifts, white New Orleanians self-consciously began to use policing as a means of racial control.

Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From the Red Summer to Black Power. By Simon Balto

Lilia Fernandez

Pages 989–991

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz105

A growing body of literature has recently explored the rise of the "carceral state" in the United States and the federal government's role in shaping a "punitive turn" in urban policing and criminal justice since the 1960s. Simon Balto adds to this scholarship but distinguishes his work by demonstrating that the War on Crime (1960s), and the War on Drugs (1980s), which primarily targeted inner-city African Americans, and to a less extent, Latinos, were not new initiatives driven by federal resources, as some scholars have claimed. Instead, these policies have much deeper, local origins that have resulted in disproportionate abuse, arrest, and incarceration rates of African Americans, predating the recent trends of the past several decades.

Occupied Territory begins in the early twentieth century and covers well-known terrain in Chicago's history: the 1919 Race Riots; the labor militancy of the Great Depression; the city's Democratic Machine; white violence against black housing integration; the police murder of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark; the notorious Blackstone Rangers and other black street gangs; and the story of the Afro-American Patrolman's League. The author revisits these familiar topics, however, through the lens of policing black Chicago. Ultimately, Balto concludes that black Chicagoans were simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected. This seeming contradiction means that while law enforcement spent inordinate time and resources harassing, surveilling, and arresting black residents (whom they racially stereotyped as prone to crime), they did not provide them effective protection from actual crime, either that committed by fellow African Americans or by whites. On the contrary, Balto reviews what historians like Kevin Mumford previously established, that crime committed in black neighborhoods in the twenties and thirties—especially vice, prostitution, gambling, racketeering—was intentionally concentrated there by authorities in order to protect white districts. He also reminds us what Arnold Hirsch and others observed about the riots of 1919, the Trumbull Park riots, and other white violence over housing integration—that police offered African Americans little respite from white attacks, at times aiding and abetting them.

Corn Crusade: Khrushchev's Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union. By Aaron Hale-Dorrell

Donald Filtzer

Pages 992–994

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz117

Anyone born after the mid-1950s will have little or no personal recollection of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who, following a brief but bitter power struggle, emerged to succeed Joseph Stalin after the latter's death in March 1953. Khrushchev came across as a blustering, bullying figure, prone to taking compulsive risks, one of which—placing nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962—very nearly led to a nuclear holocaust. Yet Khrushchev was a complex figure. Yes, he was impetuous and authoritarian, but he also attempted to introduce vital reforms. He denounced Stalin and released and rehabilitated hundreds of thousands of Gulag prisoners. He embarked on a massive house-building programme that allowed millions of Soviet citizens to move out of squalid barracks and dormitories or overcrowded communal apartments into small flats with the hitherto unknown luxuries of central heating and indoor plumbing and toilets. He increased pensions, vastly improved levels of consumption, and essentially freed the agrarian population from the state of bondage in which Stalin had held it since the late 1920s. Most important of all, he removed violence from Soviet politics. When officials, whether high up or at the bottom of the pecking order, fell out of favour they might be humiliated and relieved of their post, but they were not executed or sent to a labour camp. Yet when Khrushchev was removed from power by the very officials whom he had promoted into positions of leadership, few Soviet citizens mourned his departure. The new housing blocks were often poorly built and referred to as "Khrushchev slums." People grumbled over food shortages, forgetting just how grim the food situation had been under Stalin. The promise of de-Stalinization proved highly partial: there could be no challenge to the Communist Party's monopoly of political power; censorship was eased, but not removed, and at times arbitrarily strengthened; Soviet troops suppressed the workers' revolution in Hungary in 1956; and Khrushchev ordered KGB troops to fire on striking workers who had taken over the town of Novocherkassk in 1962 in protest at rising food prices.

Sex in the Archives: Writing American Sexual History. Barry Reay

Rachel Corbman

Pages 995–997

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz096

Barry Reay's Sex in the Archives: Writing American Sexual History is a collection of essays unified by a central concern with how sex is documented in U.S. based archives. As Reay clarifies in the opening chapter, contemporary scholarship after the "so-called archival turn" routinely stretches the term archive into an abstraction (7). "What," Reay asks, "isn't an archive these days?" (10). Breaking with this critical tendency, Sex in the Archives primarily focuses on collections that align with a more traditional definition of archive, that is, a corpus of material created by a particular person that is saved for its value for future research. Reay's archives span well known repositories, such as the Beinecke Library at Yale University, to the Amos Badertscher's personal collection of photographs, housed in his "basement studio/office" in Baltimore (235).

Following Reay's survey of scholarship on the archive, the remaining chapters of Sex in the Archives introduce eight distinct historical examples. While these chapters share an interest in "archival form and archival content," Sex in the Archives does not advance a singular argument about archives, and certainly does not proffer a new theory of the archive (3). Moreover, at times, Sex in the Archives even seems to drift from its rather open-ended aim. Reay's cultural history of masturbation (chapter 8), for example, draws from an assembled "archive" of cultural artifacts that document the history of masturbation rather than the "specific archives" that are the focus of the "other chapters" (205). His method here, Reay explains, is modeled after Ann Cvetkovich's An Archive of Feelings (2003), a prototypical example of a project that bends the definition of archive. Similarly, in other chapters, Reay's interest in the "form" of the archive seems to fall out of the frame of analysis in favor of a historical narrative based on its "content." For example, Reay's chapter on the history of casual sex before the coinage of the term (chapter 4) is based on research at the University of Chicago and the New York Public Library. However, rather than offering much insight into the scope or organization of these collections, the chapter moves chronologically through a series of "historical illustrations" of casual sex from the 1920s to the present (123). In other words, this chapter adopts a relatively conventional approach to writing history based on archival research rather than an "experiment" in writing about archives (3).

The Everyday Nationalism of Workers: A Social History of Modern Belgium. By Maarten Van Ginderachter

Matthew G Stanard

Pages 998–1000

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz116

Belgium is known for a language division so profound that it threatens the survival of the nation-state. The Everyday Nationalism of Workers complicates our understanding of language and nationalist sentiment in Belgium by digging into worker identity. Although the book's subtitle suggests a comprehensive social history of Belgium, its focus is squarely centered on the period from the mid-1880s through World War I. Belgium was the first country to begin to industrialize on the Continent, around independence in 1830, and by the end of the century was among the world's most industrialized. Some traditional interpretations would have industrialization translating into nationalism, but Van Ginderachter argues this was not the case in Belgium. Examining workers' expressions of identity at an almost granular level paints a more complex picture of nationalism's uneven development, with "a low degree of nationalist loyalty across linguistic lines. Many Flemish-speaking BWP [Belgian Worker Party] supporters felt a weakly developed civic allegiance to Belgium, while they did share a sense of Flemish ethnicity that at times had anti-Belgian undertones. Various French-speaking workers, by contrast, espoused a Latin, exclusively francophone interpretation of Belgian nationhood" (5).

Moments of Cooperation and Incorporation: African American and African Jamaican Connections, 1782-1996. By Erna Brodber

Janette Gayle

Pages 1001–1003

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz121

Animating Erna Brodber's study is the question of whether the collective experience of African-descended peoples could form a structure that would protect the interests of all those who comprise the black Atlantic. Brodber seeks to answer this question by examining six moments of interaction between African Americans and African Jamaicans from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Despite these moments of cooperation and incorporation, Brodber concludes that, over time, connections between these two groups of diasporic blacks have "grown slack," leaving little hope for the emergence of mutually protective political or institutional structures in the black Atlantic (149).

The book is divided into six chronologically organized, thematic chapters. Chapter 1 examines the fate of enslaved blacks brought to Jamaica at the end of the American Revolution by their owner, James Wright, the last governor of Georgia. Resettled on Wright's Palmetto estate in the parish of St. Mary, these enslaved African Americans were intended to be Wright's financial support, a policy endorsed by the British government. While many of the enslaved perished due to starvation and illness, Brodber discusses the process by which those who survived were incorporated socially and culturally into the existing enslaved and free Jamaican population. Using a combination of genealogical research and oral interviews, Brodber traces the descendants of these two groups into the present. She finds that while it is possible to identify distinct cultural retentions, incorporation and time has "blurred" the memory of this early nineteenth century black trans-Atlantic connection (149).