Rural Modernity in an Interwar English County Magazine: Cheshire Life, 1934–39

In 1972, Martha Vicinus edited Suffer and Be Still, a groundbreaking collection that introduced Victorian women into mainstream historical scholarship. Five years later, Vicinus brought out A Widen...

Reviewed by: The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History by Richard Lyman Bushman Jacob Bruggeman Richard Lyman Bushman, The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 294 pp. $40.00 (cloth). Richard Lyman's Bushman's The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century is a comprehensive study of the farmer and farming as omnipresent parts of early American culture and society. Bushman, a historian of United States cultural and social history, is best known for his scholarship on Mormonism and, more broadly, religion in America. But American Farmer, based upon two decades of primary source research set forth in captivating, forceful writing, offers a new history far more interesting than its title may imply. Its pages provide readers of all backgrounds points of interest. Indeed, rather than a tome intended for specialists and agricultural enthusiasts, Bushman's is an accessible book that avoids jargon. It offers in its stead a cornucopia of insightful analyses about an image central to American culture and history: that of the farmer and the farm. However, scholars of the Midwest and Midwesterners in general should be particularly interested in this volume, for farming—a practice encoded in the cultures and pictures of the Midwest—remains a relatively common occupation in that place. Additionally, and for better or worse, images of farmers continue to dominate public perceptions of the region. This new history can serve as both a monument to the past and a tool for reclaiming popular images of the Midwest in the present. Bushman consumes a wide diet of sources, including correspondence, diaries, and farm records of prominent individuals such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Bushman describes his research [End Page 182] process as searching for golden nuggets—those crucial kinds of data that make up historical narratives. "But," Bushman warns, "in mining the ore and refining the gold, we may lose sight of the mountain" that represents "a cultural system, a set of routines, a vast map of social interactions and human purposes;" its complexities can neither be captured nor conveyed by the glimmer of any one nugget (23). Colonial farmers' records—principally deeds, wills, tax documents, promissory notes, and other legal documents—comprise their "crystallized experience[s]" that represent "peculiarly intense" pieces of the past. In the "focused form" of a written document, they capture both the aspirations and day-to-day, grinding goings-on of colonial farm life (24). Drawing from this diversity of sources, Bushman's history attempts to enliven and enrich academic and popular depictions and discussions of farmers and farming. Indeed, while the farmer-as-male formulation is central to the book—and the father, Bushman contends, "like the king, governed by divine right"—the author's project is, at its core, an attempt at broadening the American farmer's portrait (12). Moreover, as readers make their way through Bushman's book, its scope expands beyond portraiture to become a landscape painting. In it, he beckons readers to imagine other actors behind and beside the American farmer. Daughters and wives, toiling in the home and at the hearth, and sons, out in the fields taking cues from their fathers, figure prominently in this articulation of American farmers' lives. "Work bonds," Bushman emphasizes, "and family ties were interwoven" (10). Enslaved people and masters' vicious "techniques of control," usually placed precariously near the edge of the frame in popular culture, are center stage, their labors and profits essential components of American agriculture (244). Native Americans, whose lands were stolen and used by farmers, and whose communities faced violence from them, also figure prominently. Their story casts a shadow over the American farmer, who, in Bushman's words, was "ultimately responsible for the conquest of America and the subordination of its original inhabitants" (22). In the background, readers also see bevies of "squatter-settlers," homeless and hungry and looking for land, who were oft en "left in limbo" as they moved west "without legal rights to their lands" (61). The growing landless class, whose dreams of land and success never materialized, was a major source of social tension in the eighteenth century. The tensions surrounding...

Reviewed by: Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History Kevin Grant Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History By Emma Robertson . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. This well-structured and clearly written book examines the English cocoa and chocolate industry, which has long marketed the purity of its products and its ethical, beneficent employment practices. Focusing on the firm Rowntree & Co., Ltd., Robertson problematizes the paternalistic image of the industry at large by revealing the integral, subordinate roles of women in the so-called cocoa chain between a Yoruba village in Nigeria and the city of York. Robertson draws upon company archives, municipal and national archives, published sources, and a small number of oral histories to represent the daily lives of working women in the context of global capitalism and gender and racial discrimination. "This book begins with the romantic construction of chocolate," Robertson explains, "but will attempt to understand the actual human endeavors, and systematic exploitation, which have made such chocolate fantasies possible." (3) Accordingly, chapters 1 and 2 recount and critique nineteenth- and twentieth-century advertising by Rowntree and other firms, demonstrating how they blended imperial histories of chocolate into their own romantic, marketable narratives. Chapter 3 then uses oral histories to examine African women's experiences of cocoa farming, and Chapter 4 explains how Rowntree represented this colonial exploitation to its employees and the city of York in promoting an imperial culture of which the community was largely unselfconscious. Chapter 5 uses oral histories of female Rowntree factory workers to demonstrate the women's experiences of "gendered and raced labour in chocolate manufacture." (12) The study articulates York's relationship not only to imperial culture, but also to colonial labor. The third chapter on African women farmers is followed by a chapter—the strongest of the book—in which Robertson uses the Rowntree in-house publication, Cocoa Works Magazine, to offer a detailed picture of the activities through which York's working class, and especially women, engaged with an imperial world. In view of the African women's lives illuminated by the preceding chapter, the reader can appreciate the company's mediation of a colonial reality of which the Rowntree employees were dimly aware, despite the fact that the African women made their work possible. There is a productive tension in the book between local cultural and social history and global labor history. Robertson's analysis would have been given more weight by a larger number of oral histories, but she deserves credit for pushing the boundaries of the local with a creative combination of historical sources. This book is also a women's history in which the author reveals women as "active agents" who negotiated their ways between and across gendered and raced boundaries. Robertson asserts that African women "are not and never have been passive bystanders in the cocoa economy." (117) The implication that there is a prevailing perception of passivity is difficult to reconcile with fine scholarship on African women's labor history since the 1980s, such as work by Iris Berger and Elizabeth Schmidt. In addressing the activities of women in York, the author's analysis of "minority women" tends to collapse the significant cultural differences between the three women of her case study. One woman was born to Cantonese parents in Liverpool before moving to York with her family, the second was recruited by Rowntree from Malta, and the third was born to an Asian family in Zimbabwe before moving to Uganda and ultimately migrating to England as a refugee in the 1970s. (190-93) The category of minority needs nuance, as it appears equivalent here to the category of non-white. To her credit, Robertson acknowledges that the women in question sometimes do not see the same boundaries that frame her own analysis. In referring to Asian refugees from Uganda, she states, "The Rowntree firm...had a part to play in the acceptance of refugees as workers, even as they were positioned as workers within a capitalist, racist and patriarchal system." (186) She subsequently notes that the three minority women with whom she spoke "simply did not feel that they had been subjected to racial prejudice either...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War

13 Ab Imperio, 3/2002 From the EDITORS RUSSIAN SOCIETY: STRUCTURES AND CULTURES In this issue Ab Imperio continues the exploration of the umbrella theme of this year of paradoxes of modernization in the Russian empire and Soviet Union, turning to social and cultural dimensions of history of empire and nation. It is well known what a complex task it is to study the evolution of social structures if approached from the longue duree and societal perspective and to what extent illusory can be the self-manifested changes in culture if taken at face value. The relationship between these two modes of scholars’ encounter with the socio-cultural world stands at the core of the general historical epistemology: on the one hand historians have to deal with the self-description of social structures (institutes, groups and actors) couched in the language of the epoch, on the other hand, there is an ever present temptation to narrate the object of historical investigation (including the process of historical change) in terms of contemporary culture. The problem of reciprocal mental projections and substitutions in the encounter of scholars with the voiceless or outspoken social and cultural phenomena is a point of intersection for all the materials of the current issue. 14 From the Editors Despite the inherent contradiction between the social (structural) and cultural (introspect) perspectives, the symbiosis of social and cultural approach have endured and proved fruitful in the past decade or so, in part due to the blurring of disciplinary boundaries as a result of which cultural and social histories have occupied areas that had long been the domain of political, diplomatic or intellectual history. The explicit dynamism of culture and “representativeness” of social structures allowed to narrate the profound changes in society (in particular, the process of modernization), charting the stages of cultural transformations in relation to the corresponding changes in constellations of social actors and factors. The advance of both social and cultural histories and the fusion thereof influenced the theories of nationalism, which came to address the modern nation formation in the framework of historically emergent linguistic and cultural homogeneity of Western European nations. However, the challenge comes when the optics of social and cultural analysis is applied to history of Central and Eastern Europe. This application invites a reflection on theoretical assumptions of 20th century paradigms of social and cultural history, for it brings about the question of relationship of Central-Eastern European history to Western Europe-tied definition of modernity and the suitability of nation-centered narratives for capturing the history of interaction and encounters in what was the multinational society of a continental empire. Indeed, the very notion of imperial society pleads for critical reflection. It is to be discussed if this category is legitimate given that the boundaries of this social formation are determined by the political frontiers. These frontiers create an ostensibly unitary space, which though includes the significant variation of the nature of social collectivities and relationship as well as different national-cultural areas. Alternatively, one may turn the critical scrutiny to the analytical categories of “society” and “culture” and pose a question to what extent the social and cultural reality behind those categories can be exhausted by the analysis of solidarity, groupness, and homogeneity. The current issue of Ab Imperio is an attempt to take stock of certain new methodological approaches, which evolved in studies of social and cultural history of the Russian empire and Soviet and post-Soviet space, and to map possible directions of modification of conventional analytical concepts necessitated, respectively, by the specific contexts of multinational Russian empire and the Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Theory and Methodology section of this issue features the sequential 15 Ab Imperio, 3/2002 attempts at reflection of relationship between the categories of social sciences and the polyvalent social and cultural reality of social collectivities and cultural solidarity. The section opens by the first publication in Russian of the seminal text by Max Weber, which laid foundations for the modern debate about the formation of social groups and ethnic communities and stressed both cognitive and structural aspects of this process. The most recent attempt to amend the essentialist implications of social and...

‘Rural Modernity and the Wood Engraving Revival in Interwar England’ brings analysis of a specific kind of visual-verbal text, wood-engraved books about the English countryside, and the means of these texts' production, to bear upon debates over rural modernity -what is it, where is it, who owns it-in order to more thoroughly engage literary and arts scholars in debates over the meaning of modernity for rural England and rural England for modernity. Framed by analysis of the work of social historians and cultural critics of rural England and ‘Englishness’, it takes as its supporting case studies two mass-marketed books: A. G. Street's Farmer's Glory (1932), with wood engravings by Gwen Raverat, and Francis Brett Young's Portrait of a Village (1937), with wood engravings by Joan Hassall. I argue that these and other books with wood engravings have a special story to tell about the relation of this interwar ‘flood’ of printed matter to rural England, serving as uniquely productive meeting places for interwar writers, illustrators, publishers, and readers to participate in the paradoxical crisis of England's rural depression and modernisation.

GEOFF ELEY IS A PROMINENT NEW-LEFT SCHOLAR Of modern German and European social history. A Crooked Line is his meditation on the relationship between his intellectual biography, political transformations, and the historiographical shift from the social history of the 1960s and 1970s to the cultural turn of the 1980s and 1990s. The book is self-consciously hybrid. Its bold braiding of personal memoir, historiographical analysis, and political critique places it on the terrain of the cultural turn, making it an artifact of the shift it charts from social to cultural history. Yet its emphasis on the political context of social and cultural history remains true to the basic tenets of social history. The hybrid character of the book encapsulates its concluding, and controversial, claim that contemporary historical practices have so combined social and cultural history that they obviate any need to choose between them (181). Eley's work joins a personal and intellectual memoir with an old-school Hobsbawmian mapping of historical debates across British, German, European, and South Asian fields. The heterodox nature of the work is signaled by the affective register of the titles of its chapters-Optimism, Disappointment, Reflectiveness, and Defiance. The temporal structure of the book's narrative is similarly heterodox. The work moves between the political and existential dimension of becoming a Marxist social historian in the 1960s and 1970s, to a more sweeping historical panorama of the interchange between politics and historiographical debates in postwar Britain, Germany, and the United States, to a concluding affirmative snapshot of contemporary historical practices. This remarkable compass affords a rare demonstration of the uneven and multiple times-political, generational, and existential-that underwrite critical historiographical stocktaking. The experimental form of the book suggests that the only way to render intelligible the shift from social to cultural history is to short-circuit linear narratives in favor of Bertolt Brecht's concluding injunction, voiced by Galileo, that If there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be the crooked line. It is tempting to read A Crooked Line as the reckoning of one historian-or the post-1968 generation of historians-with the shift from social to cultural history. But while that shift was made by a specific generation, its sources and consequences extend far beyond that generation. To me, a historian of modern India trained in the midand late 1990s, when cultural studies and postcolonial history were at their peak, the force of the book lay in its explicitly political rewriting of that momentous shift. Eley offers a generous and generative reading of social and cultural history as

Provides new perspectives on women’s print media in interwar Britain This collection of new essays recovers and explores a neglected archive of women’s print media and dispels the myth of the interwar decades as a retreat to ‘home and duty’ for women. The volume demonstrates that women produced magazines and periodicals ranging in forms and appeal from highbrow to popular, private circulation to mass-market, and radical to reactionary. It shows that the 1920s and 1930s gave rise to a plurality of new challenges and opportunities for women as consumers, workers and citizens, as well as wives and mothers. Featuring interdisciplinary research by recognised specialists in the fields of literary and periodical studies as well as women’s and cultural history, this volume recovers overlooked or marginalised media and archival sources, as well as reassessing well-known commercial titles. Designed as a ‘go-to’ resource both for readers new to the field and for specialists seeking the latest developments in this area of research, it opens up new directions and methodologies for modern periodical studies and cultural history. Organised by sections devoted to the arts, modern style, domestic and service magazines, and feminist and organizationally-based media, this volume foregrounds connections between different genres of women’s periodical publishing and makes a major contribution to revisionist scholarship on the interwar period. The detailed appendix provides a valuable resource to facilitate new research on interwar women's magazines. Key Features Presents new essays on women’s print media in interwar Britain, revealing the diversity of genres addressed to women readers, from domestic magazines, pulps and women’s pages to highbrow reviews and feminist periodicals Features innovative, interdisciplinary research by recognized specialists in the fields of literary and periodical studies, and women’s and cultural history Contributes to the recent expansion of scholarship on the interwar period by recovering overlooked or marginalized media and archival sources, as well as reassessing well-known commercial titles Designed as a ‘go to’ resource both for readers new to the field and for specialists seeking the latest developments in this area of research—opening up new directions and methodologies for modern periodicals studies and cultural history

The introduction defines what is meant by rural modernity, what work has informed this understanding, and how this concept offers a new reading of early twentieth-century British literature, art, and culture. It begins with an analysis of ongoing work in social history, rural studies, and cultural geography that has engaged with ideas of rural modernity. It then considers recent work in literary studies and modernist studies that tends to polarize the writers, artists, and their works that this book brings together. Finally, it offers a rationale for the organization of this collection of essays, provides a brief summary of individual chapters, and draws out the themes explored within and developed across chapters.

The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music: A Social and Cultural History. By David C. H. Wright. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013. [xi, 274 p. ISBN 9781843837343. [pounds sterling]50.] Illustrations, tables, appendices, bibliography, index. David Wright's book on the social and cultural history of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) is the first serious independent study be published and will coincide with the Board's 125th anniversary in 2014. It marks a natural development in Wright's publication record, which, in addition this, his first book, comprises a number of articles, book chapters and reviews on the social and cultural history of London's music scene from the late-nineteenth the early twenty-first century. Wright has an engaging prose style: it is colorful, witty and adroit; earlier publications illustrate a mastery that enables him make the most mundane facts palatable. An apologist for the methodology of the economic and social historian, Cyril Ehrlich (1925-2004), Wright is a revisionist whose opposition what he describes as musicology's long-favored ['life and works'] approach writing about composers and music history is well-documented. His chief criticism is that the life and works format requires from its author a degree of anaesthetic sympathy for the creative subject's output (David C. H. Wright, Situating Stainer, The Musical Times 149, no. 1903 [Summer 2008]: 99-100). He claims that the shift in discussing music in its social context has led a more authentic result in the way musicologists write about music and its history. While it may be desirable eradicate sentimentalism (and inaccuracy) from musicological methodologies, it does not follow that modern musicologists in variably conform Wright's analysis. The publication of social and cultural music histories where musical analysis is relegated a footnote or, worse still, where it is. eradicated altogether because the social historian is ill-equipped form a view, is more desirable. The musicologist and Handel scholar Winton Dean seems settle the point: is a case for a sociological study of music, but it must be written by a musician and not a sociologist ... the unimaginative application of scientific or quasi-scientific method an enquiry touching even the fringes of a living art invariably produces a tedious or ludicrous result--an admonishment that Ehrlich states no social scientist can afford ignore. (Cyril Ehrlich, Economic History and Music, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 103 [1976-1977]: 188). The concept of writing a history of all examination board, however we might seem be an act of folly, for institutions such as these are rarely the objects of the kind of loyalty or affection enjoyed by an alma mater. From a practical point of view, there would seem be a very limited market for such studies, which if published, have a tendency gather dust on library shelves; however, the Associated Board, as a subject, has the potential be something of an exception: Better known by its acronym as the ABRSM, [it] has influenced the musical lives and tastes of millions of people since it conducted its first exams in 1890 (p. ix). Founded by the Royal College of Music (RCM) and the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in 1889, the ABRSM has since become a household name in the United Kingdom and in ninety countries across the world, as the gold standard in graded practical and theoretical music exams. Wright's history is an overview of the Board's work between 1889 and 2009, set out in twelve chapters. A period of some 120 years is covered in 255 pages; consequently, little room is left tease out the more stubborn nuggets of concerning the establishment of the Board while an imperative to respect confidentiality with respect any 'live' commercial, strategic or institutional information undermines the perspective of the last three chapters (p. …

Reviewed by: Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood by Cynthia A. Kierner Jamin Wells (bio) Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood cynthia a. kierner University of North Carolina Press, 2019 286 pp. Disasters are hard to avoid these days. Accounts of environmental, political, social, and technological (to name just a few) catastrophes inundate our newsfeeds with stories and images of suffering, loss, and death. Though each disaster is situated in a unique time and place, every disaster's narrative seems to follow a familiar arc. The earliest reports provide quantitative data and scientific analysis. Human interest stories about the victims and villains are then followed by accounts of rescue, resilience, and the inevitable postdisaster investigations charged with ascertaining causes and identifying interventions. Along the way, disasters as varied as warehouse fires, hurricanes, mass shootings, and global pandemics become Rorschach tests on cultural and political tensions, fueling debate and, on occasion, action. Until, that is, the next disaster captures the news cycle, and the story begins anew. Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood, Cynthia A. Kierner's sweeping new synthesis, traces the origins of these shared ideas and attitudes about the causes, consequences, and meanings of calamity in "our own disaster-ridden times" (xii). This was not the book Kierner, a noted historian of early America, set out to write. Searching for "a case study of an early American disaster, which would tell a good story in the service of reconstructing the culture and experiences of a colonial community," Kierner failed to find any "true 'disasters' in the modern sense" (xi–xii). Not only was the very term disaster rarely used, but calamities were not significant topics for public discourse. Even more, the idea that disasters were processes that people could understand, explain, and mitigate was not central to the early American experience. Nor was the notion that society had the ability and responsibility to relieve suffering and prevent future disasters. So Kierner pivoted. Instead of a focused case study, Inventing Disaster is a three-hundred-year "cultural history of the idea of disaster and of responses to calamities" in the British Atlantic (2). [End Page 308] This book could not have come at a better time. We are in a golden age of disaster history as scholars across the disciplinary spectrum mine the cauldron of calamity. Some, like Andy Horowitz in the 2021 Bancroft Prize cowinner, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Harvard UP, 2020), focus on a particular disaster, exploring calamities as contested processes, which, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, had roots in a century of social, cultural, political, technological, and environmental entanglements. Others, like Kevin Rozario in The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America (U of Chicago P, 2007), take a broader approach that foregrounds the evolving place and varied impacts of disasters on culture and society. Inventing Disaster is deeply situated in the existing scholarship. It combines the nuance of the case study with the wider perspectives that are hallmarks of macro-level histories to offer "a prequel to existing cultural histories and case studies of iconic American disasters" (9). Kierner argues the modern culture of calamity gradually emerged over three centuries as three "interrelated developments that scholars associate with modernity" reshaped how the British Atlantic thought about and responded to disasters (3). Drawing on a broad range of archival and published material, including newspapers, periodicals, correspondence, and visual images, as well as many previously published studies, Inventing Disaster shows how increased access to information, faith in science and human agency, and the rising power of sensibility to drive benevolence—"science, sentiment, and information," as Kierner summarizes—turned unheralded devastation into sensational disasters (210). If the larger thesis paints a familiar picture of the foundational changes wrought by the Enlightenment, Inventing Disaster's deft balancing of focused case studies situated in a robust framework attuned to the nuances of place, continuity, and change provides a model for an accessible, scholarly cultural history. This story is told over six chapters. The first four examine the colonial, transatlantic origins of the...

Jules David Prown The past few decades have witnessed a major shift in the study of American art. If one had to choose a single word to characterize the change, it would be contextualization. The focus has shifted from works of art and the artists who made them-often monographic studies based on primary materials establishing chronology, authorship, paths of formal and iconographic influence, exhibition records, provenance, biographies, etc.-to the social and cultural context in which the objects were produced. Art has become less the object of study than the means of study.1 To borrow from M. H. Abrams, a work of art is examined not so much as a mirror reflecting its time as a lamp illuminating it.2 This development has roots in the social history of art, a Marxist mode that has long stressed the means and conditions of artistic production. But the application of social history to the study of American art by scholars such as Patricia Hills and Alan Wallach has been only one aspect of the recent shift. The proliferation of a variety of cultural studies-popular culture, material culture, visual culture, folklore and folklife-also reveals a shift in attention toward context. A number of influential scholars pursuing cultural art history, including Roger Stein, Elizabeth Johns, Bryan Wolf, and David Lubin, have come to their study not from traditional art history backgrounds, but from other disciplines, especially literature. And many younger Americanists teaching in art history departments arrive there by way of American Studies. Although trained art historians continue to play a central role in the study of American art, their scope has expanded to include a larger vision of American social and cultural history as the subject of their investigations. In terms of publication, the single magisterial volume on American art has become less common. Much of the best recent scholarship has appeared in the form of exhibition catalogues, volumes of collected essays or serial essays by a single author, and in journals, not only those devoted to American art like this one, but in American Studies journals, such as American Quarterly, Prospects, and the William and Mary Quarterly, as well as those with a cultural or decorative arts orientation (Winterthur Portfolio, American Furniture). Efforts to produce a single textbook on American art have not been as successful, with scholarship compromised by the daunting challenge of providing comprehensive coverage of an ever-expanding field. In the classroom, the result has been an increasing reliance on course packets of photocopied readings, a procedure that achieves flexibility and relevance but poses problems of logistics, copyright, and illustration quality. Better results can be achieved through digital technology, which is increasingly easy to use.

Tanya Evans has a very clear and consistent goal for this book: to persuade academic historians, especially, that family historians should be taken much more seriously, not dismissed as dilettantish hobbyists. As the director of the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University in Australia and the leader of many workshops on how to do family history, Evans is well positioned and qualified to advocate on behalf of these industrious and enthusiastic researchers. Unfortunately, this book seems unlikely to make many converts.Evans too often belabors the obvious or writes opaquely. Take this key sentence, for example: “My continued research with family historians is committed to the belief that the historiographical projects of social and cultural history, with the history of emotions, are mutually constitutive; that learning and teaching should be collaborative; and that history researchers should aim for pedagogical and political impact” (p. 26). The book is also weakened by her portrayal of family historians as uniformly progressive and sophisticated.The book’s primary source of evidence is often at the heart of its circular, unconvincing assertions. The author sent a list of thirty-seven largely open-ended questions to family-history practitioners who responded to her invitation “to share their motivations, discoveries and the impact of these [motivations and discoveries, evidently] upon their lives” (p. 21). One of the questions asks if researching your family history has “helped you to develop your interpersonal (communication, listening and empathy) skills? If so, in what ways?” (p. 155). Evans is then able to quote from, in a chapter entitled “‘I’m much more empathetic now’: Family history, historical thinking and the construction of empathy,” several people out of the 136 who had responded that, yes, as a matter of fact, this work had made them more empathetic. When Evans is more specific about what proportion of her sample responded affirmatively to her questions, the evidence does not necessarily support her argument. For example, though less than 20 percent of those surveyed answered affirmatively to the question of whether or not feminism had “informed your work at all,” she reports this as “a significant proportion” of her (largely female) sample (p. 155, p. 63). This reader wished for a much wider range of primary sources and a much fuller and more even-handed treatment of the conservative ends, political as well as cultural, that family and local history often serves.That said, Evans certainly presents extensive quotations from the survey suggesting that family historians may indeed be much more sophisticated and progressive than is commonly assumed. As she points out, academic historians lecturing to and writing for dwindling audiences can hardly afford to ignore fellow practitioners who are so numerous and enthusiastic. This book is a flawed but timely call for mutual engagement, curiosity, and respect.

The renaissance and redefinition of American social and cultural history during the past few decades sometimes occasioned concern among medical historians that their field would be resorbed into the larger narratives of American culture and society.' A glance at the field, prompted by the appearance of James Cassedy's accomplished survey, Medicine in America: A Short History, suggests another conclusion: while attracting (and benefiting from) the attention of scholars trained in fields other than medical history, the history of medicine nevertheless remains specialized, thematically distinctive, even somewhat self-contained. Judith Walzer Leavitt's review article in a 1990 American Historical Review, for example, described more than a dozen works in which major themes from cultural and social history, though prominent, mainly served to elucidate issues of longstanding in the history of medicine. The history of the medical profession, alternative practitioners, public health, hospitals, nursing, medical education, biomedical science, and therapeutics, always the core of medical history's central narratives, remain at the center of most recent work in the field. These studies, nevertheless, incorporate many newer approaches to questions of social context and discursive boundaries: the social construction or framing of notions of health, illness, and disease; the significance of race and gender in the formation of professional practices and communities of knowledge; the interpenetration of politics and policy in public health. They describe what Charles Rosenberg has called an ecology of medical knowledge and practice, a culture of medicine formed through the interaction of ideas, values,

Learning from Rivers