Social History Approach Research Articles

Township Histories, Insurrection and Liberation in Late Apartheid South Africa

This article reviews the literature on resistance in South Africa's African townships that emerged in response to the township insurgencies of the 1980s and early 1990s. It focuses on two bodies of writing: the literature that chronicled the revolt as it unfolded on the one hand, and the historical literature that explored township politics and culture during the first half of the twentieth century on the other. It evaluates these writings’ strengths and points to the inevitable gaps and blind spots. It also highlights the disjunctures that existed between the two. The current wave of historical writing on South Africa's liberation struggle as well as the reassertion of township-based resistance and of township history gives this survey a particular salience. This article argues for the need for both a ‘joined-up’ liberation history that gives due place to the township-based rebellions (as opposed to one that is subordinated to that of the exiled ANC in contemporary public history) and one that recognises the deeper roots of, and continuities with, earlier phases of township resistance and rebellion. It also considers this body of writing in the light of subsequent critiques of the resistance paradigm and the social history approach that dominated the study of townships in the 1980s.

Charity in the Dutch Republic: an introduction

ABSTRACTThis article surveys the literature on charity in the Dutch Republic, while also presenting the principles of our social science history approach to understanding charity in past societies. We specify a threefold theory on giving in the past, looking at characteristics of donors, characteristics of charitable causes, and at the giving structure at large. We discuss the research design we employ to test this theory on Dutch charity in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Giving in the Golden Age, or GIGA, project.

Was ist Wissensgeschichte?

The following paper discusses ›history of knowledge‹ as a new approach in the field of historical research, and especially cultural history. First of all, employing Foucault's notion of ›les saviors‹, the paper shows that the concept of ›knowledge‹ enables us to conceive knowledge as always circulating back and forth, without hierarchies, between different societal spheres and institutions, through media, between scientists and the so called public. Secondly, the paper proposes to use ›knowledge‹ as a vantage point for the historical gaze into the field of modern history. It therefore asks the question whether it is sound to promote ›knowledge‹ to a rank comparable in importance to the concept ›society‹ for social history, or ›nation‹ for political history. Since the very idea of ›the‹ society has lost a lot of its influence in the last two decades, my paper investigates the possibility that the new ›history of knowledge‹ can become an heir to the already rather ›old school‹ social history approach.

Recent Trends in the Study of Medieval Canonizations

AbstractCanonization processes, inquiries into a putative saint's life, merits and miracles, are rich sources for the study of lived experiences as well as religious practices of lay Christians. Studies of this field have multiplied during the 1990s and 2000s; the focus had shifted from overall categorizations and comparison of various processes to a narrower but nuanced perspective; qualitative close reading of the depositions is an important method of analysis. Currently, social history approach, everyday life, family and gender, as well as local interaction and political motivation behind the practicalities of the proceedings are pre‐eminent themes in the study of medieval canonizations.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Social Science Approach to the Hebrew Bible

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Social Science Approach to the Hebrew Bible

Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry by James M. Rubenstein

Book Reviews131 even say "Michigan" takes on added meaning. John Sinclair, drugs, and antiwar protests signaled the collapse of society to Hayes. The University ofMichigan became the embodiment of everything he was against. Bo lived only for football and often seemed completely disengaged from the chaotic conditions around him. Even the student body's decision to convert a halftime homecoming celebration into an antiwar rally did not faze him. Bo wanted to beat Ohio State simply because theywere the perennial obstacle keeping Michigan from the Rose Bowl. As Rosenberg notes, "Bo Schembechler was one of the guys,Woody Hayes was never one of the guys" (p. 83). Rosenberg's novel prism creates bright new windows into the familiar story of Bo andWoody. His social-history approach makes for riveting reading. And forMichigan fans addled by Ohio State's recent dominance on the field, the book might serve as a reminder that the rivalrywas once very different. It might also remind them just how differentAmerica once was aswell. Scott Beekman University of Rio Grande James M. Rubenstein. Making and SellingCars: Innovationand Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 401. Bibliography. Drawings. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paperback reissue, $35.00. That symbol of twentieth-century technology, the automobile, usually warrants a subsection in historical surveys or college courses, yet rarely is automotive history treated as a category unto itself. Instead, the history of the automobile is subdivided into specialties. Even largerworks on the subject tend toward the narrow, and holistic approaches to automotive history are generally presented as encyclopedias. Making and Selling Cars is that rare work thatmanages to create a coherent general review of the automobile. To some extent, Rubenstein's book resembles the pioneering works from the 1960s that first created "automotive history." Unlike other broad assessments, however, the author avoids chronologies and narratives. Although the book is limited primarily to theAmerican market, Making and Selling Cars achieves a larger view while presenting important details to support it. 132 MichiganHistoricalReview In exploring how automobiles are made and sold, Rubenstein addresses in one volume many of the great questions of automotive history that even more specialized studies often fail to discuss. For Rubenstein, Henry Ford's storymatters not because his innovations came first, but because they had such a broad, long-term influence. With excellent use of Ford-era primary sources, Rubenstein places the common stories of Ford and Highland Park into the fuller history of making and selling cars across the entire first century of the automobile's existence. The author's insight is achieved partially because he takes the geographer's view, tracking conditions and connections, not just actors and events. Even the most knowledgeable reader will benefit from Rubenstein's conjoining of perspectives in his exploration of both "making and selling" cars. Exploring how cars are "made" broadens the history beyond themajor industry players and emphasizes all of an automobile's parts and the complexities of joining them, including labor. And seeking to explain how cars are "sold" provides insight into the broader areas of distribution, marketing, advertising, consumerism, and the laws governing these processes. My quibbles are minimal. Although Rubenstein avoids social commentary, chapter endings tend toward unnecessary characterizations that while brief, are inconsistent with the author's larger approach. And Rubenstein treats politics rather flady, thereby missing some important influences upon industry and consumer choices and actions. Finally, since this book was first published in 2001 and intended as a millennial statement about the automobile, the first decade of the twenty-first century certainly has brought more than a few answers to questions raised by Rubenstein, and proven a few of his conclusions to be wrong. Nevertheless, the reissuing of this valuable book offers the reader of 2009 a fascinating opportunity to test the author's model. Rubenstein effectively compresses the first century of the automobile, seeing it as more alike than different. He leaves the reader with themajor questions testing the industry, seeing it as being at a crossroads where changes in direction are inevitable. The book offers a brilliant summation, and one hopes thatRubenstein may add, one day, a second volume on the automobile's first decade of...

Reappraising archival practice in light of the new social history

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the relationship between historiography and archival practices. It takes the new social history approach to history as a case study for examining how historians' changing theories and methods may affect solicitation, acquisition, appraisal, arrangement, description, reference, outreach, and other aspects of archival administration.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a review of the archival and historical literature since the late 1970s.FindingsThe paper finds that many aspects of archival administration have been and continue to be affected by the new social history trend in historical scholarship. The paper suggests that archivists and archival educators be trained in historiography as a way to understand historians' craft and develop strong documentation strategies to anticipate future archival needs.Research limitations/implicationsBecause the paper is primarily a literature review, it does not test real‐life examples or case studies that would be useful in understanding the relationship between historians and archivists.Practical implicationsThe paper includes implications for the development of archival administration and education strategies.Originality/valueThe paper draws from a range of literature to consider the impact of scholarly practices on professional archival work.

On Interpreting Cofitachequi

Scholars have developed two broad approaches to researching the history of the native peoples of the American South from the sixteenth century to the present: culture history and social history. The essential task in culture history is to classify native so-called tribes into cultural and/or linguistic categories, to list defining cultural traits, and to show how these “tribes” have persisted, disappeared, or become acculturated. The essential task in social history is to reconstruct the structure of the societies and polities into which native peoples organized themselves within the context of native worlds and to show what happened to them when they came into contact with the modern world-system. Both approaches have been used to depict and explicate Cofitachequi, a native people first encountered by the Hernando de Soto expedition in 1540. Our purpose here is to point out flaws in the culture history approach and to emphasize strengths in the social history approach.

American Silk, 1830–1930: Entrepreneurs and Artifacts (review)

Reviewed by: American Silk, 1830–1930: Entrepreneurs and Artifacts Laurence F. Gross (bio) American Silk, 1830–1930: Entrepreneurs and Artifacts. By Jacqueline Field, Marjorie Senechal, Madelyn Shaw. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. Pp. xxiv+326. $45. In American Silk, three authors develop a picture of the silk industry during overlapping periods. They focus on the role of “entrepreneurs [who] receive little attention because most industrial studies use a labor and social history approach and focus on factories and their effect on workers” (p. 253). Marjorie Senechal begins by describing the great interest in silk during the colonial period and the Early Republic. Enthusiasm for mulberry trees and silkworms pervaded the eastern seaboard to a degree quite out of proportion to any success in actually producing usable silk. Lack of skill and patience doomed efforts to move from cocoon to thread. Entrepreneurship and mechanical ability came together in an attempt at manufacturing in Northampton, Massachusetts, but without success until a communitarian society, the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, took over the effort. Though leading lights from Ralph Waldo Emerson to William Lloyd Garrison visited, and Sojourner Truth came to stay, the manufacturing effort attained success only after discovery of the advantages of threerather than two-ply yarn or thread for use in Singer’s sewing machines. Under the name Corticelli, machine twist or sewing-machine thread poured forth from the Nonotuck Silk Mills. Jacqueline Field carries the story forward chronologically by treating the Haskell Silk Company of Westbrook, Maine, founded in 1874.While originally a throwing (yarn)mill, as spinningmachinery improved it began turning out good-quality staple woven goods. In the late 1880s and into the new century the firm expanded steadily until it was running 250 looms and employing 300. While it had originally relied on a few skilled men in key positions on the factory floor, over time it developed a highly skilled workforce as a result of a low rate of turnover.Haskell innovated by selling direct, particularly to department stores, and eventually using selvage marking to maintain the identity of its product in the marketplace. After World War I, however, it could not cope with the volatility of silk prices, style shifts to lighter and more informal clothing, the growing role of garment-makers as ready-to-wear came to dominate, and the introduction of rayon. Labor relations deteriorated and the company declined and closed about 1930. [End Page 796] Madelyn Shaw turns to yet another aspect of the industry in her story of H. R. Malinson & Company, which operated in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. An innovative player in high-fashion design, theretofore primarily a European bailiwick, Malinson stood apart from most American manufacturers in silk. Like Haskell, Malinson hired production talent, but he applied his skills mainly to developing a modern advertising department and selling directly out of increasingly opulent New York showrooms. In 1921 Mrs. Carolyn Trowbridge Radnor-Lewis took over and fully developed the publicity department, a rare position of power and prominence in business for a woman at that time. Malinson became a leading figure in the World War I–era effort to establish an American design aesthetic and take control of style away from Europe. The extent to which he might ultimately have been successful remains unclear, as style changes, rayon, and ready-to wear made life as difficult for him as it had become for Haskell. Together these accounts cover producers representative of three different parts of the industry. None of the companies left business records (all three authors admit to struggling to create a substantial account with limited historical resources), and this leads to more of the conditional tense than one generally encounters in historical texts. Still, each author has dug up all she can to supplement the scanty data specific to each mill. Original material in the Corticelli case consists primarily in letters from the days of the communitarian society, while the story of Haskell comes from the trade and popular press and various business journals. For Malinson, a wealth of fabrics in museum collections offered a different sort of record, as did various sorts of company publicity. The authors have sought to make...

Transnationalism and Filipino American Historiography

Transnationalism and Filipino American Historiography Augusto Espiritu In the last few years, filipino american historical studies seems to have emerged, propelled by the growing influence of post-colonial, Empire, and transnational studies upon this subfield.1 Indeed, there has been a great deal of talk about such influences. My own personal predilections are exactly in that direction, although I am careful that the field does not lose sight of the racial, multicultural, and social conditions from which "Asian American" history emerged. Indeed, this paper shows that it is perhaps premature to ascertain the direction the field has taken and that the labels "transnational" and "post-colonial" might have been applied a little too hastily to Filipino American historical works. Indeed, it is clear from the foregoing examination that though most historians of Filipino Americans are mindful of such developments, not everyone has adopted these paradigms. Many are continuing to draw from more traditional approaches to race, gender, and class in the American context. I argue that this is not necessarily a disadvantage so long as there is an evolving dialogue, exchange, and understanding between "old" and "new" methodologies that fosters intellectual growth. For a long time, professional historians of Filipino America were few and far between. Without counting the works of Ronald Takaki, Sucheng Chan, and other "generalists,"2 the only professionally trained historian in the field was Barbara Posadas of Northern Illinois University, whose [End Page 171] landmark studies of Filipino labor, immigration, student life, cross-racial sex, and mixed race in Chicago paved the way for many of us future historians.3 Posadas has not yet gathered these essays, published in various journals, into book form. Particularly in her studies of pensionados, students sponsored by the colonial government, it is clear that Posadas was aware of the importance of transnationality and did her research in both U.S. as well as Philippine archives, especially in English-language sources. Nonetheless, Posadas's work is concerned with explicating the emergence of Filipino American identity, and as such, her approach was typical of social historians who utilized a race, class, and gender analysis and generally saw Philippine developments in light of U.S. labor and immigration history. In the last decade, we have had the emergence of a new generation of professionally trained historians who have published important works on Filipino Americans. It might be presumptuous to say the field has attained "critical mass," but in the twenty-first century, more books have been published on Filipino American history than in the last three decades combined. These include Catherine Ceniza Choy's Empire of Care and Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony's American Workers, Colonial Power, both published in 2003. They also include my book, Five Faces of Exile, published in 2005, followed by Linda Maram's Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles' Little Manila, published in 2006. There is also Unbending Cane, a lesser-known but no less important book on Pablo Manlapit written by University of Hawaii scholar Melinda Tria-Kerkvliet (2002).4 Finally, Asian Americanists, non-specialists in Filipino American histories, have also produced works on domestic race relations and U.S. imperialism that directly address Filipino American history.5 I will focus most of my attention on the published books on Filipino American history thus far and address these "external" interventions towards the end of the paper. There are two very clear perspectives that emerge among these works, vis-à-vis the question of space and time—what has been called a simultaneous "two-shores" approach and a social historical, immigration perspective centered on Filipino America, with emphasis on the American experience. Tria-Kerkvliet's Unbending Cane, Choy's Empire of Care and my Five Faces of Exile fall into the former category, and Fujita-Rony's [End Page 172] American Workers and Maram's Creating Masculinity fall into the latter category. Since one might assume the more familiar social history approaches, I will begin with the latter first and then examine the "two-shores" approach. It should be noted here that these are heuristic divisions, not absolute ones, and indeed there are some overlapping concerns in both groups. I do not presume that one approach is greater than the...

Shaping Public Memory

When we consider the knowledge we possess about the American past, we usually credit the development of the profession, principally in the context of the academy. However, in her engaging and richly detailed study, Julie Des Jardins has examined the production of knowledge much more broadly. The historical that has shaped our understandings of our past extends far beyond the university history department. Women academics appear here in force, but the enterprise Des Jardins excavates included a large cast engaged in an array of activities including collection and archival projects, local histories, and commemorations. Cast this way, women historians emerge as prolific and influential shapers of public memory in the United States. The numerous subcultures she identifies range from African American women concerned with uplift to DAR members worried about authentic Americans to feminists trying to create a single version of the suffrage fight. The most poignant passages relate to the politics of exclusion, but Des Jardins does not write a victimology. Instead, she has created a rich, flowing, and detailed narrative that reframes our understanding of the creation of knowledge in the United States. And that is not all. Des Jardins argues that historians need to make still another adjustment in thinking about their collective past: the multicultural and social history approaches that are commonplace today originated with women innovators not normally included in our historiographies. This is not completely new ground, and Des Jardins draws on other fine scholarship, including recent biographies of women historians. She also expresses her debt to Bonnie Smith's superb study, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (1998). Yet Des Jardins's subject and approach are different from Smith's. The subject is twentieth-century U. S. history, whereas Smith included the United States and Europe. Smith's theoretical analysis probed how thinking and practice have been gendered. She pioneered in demonstrating how professionalization depended upon

Describing the Life Cycle of U.S. Marine Hospital #17, Port Townsend, Washington, 1855–1933

This study was undertaken to determine why U.S. Marine Hospital #17, Port Townsend, Washington, closed at the peak of its utilization. A social history approach was taken, examining the hospital's developmental changes in the context of its role in the larger society. Both firsthand and interpretive sources were reviewed, and numerous photographs and drawings confirmed the hospital was an active participant in the economy. Regarding the hospital's transitions over time as a life cycle was a useful organizing framework. Inpatient census patterns as a measure of the hospital's growth and development informed and enlightened this study. It became clear the Marine Hospital responded to and influenced events in the Port Townsend seaport whose importance diminished when other port cities at the base of the Puget Sound began and sustained rapid growth.

Looking good: college women and body image, 1875-1930

Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930 By Margaret A. Lowe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) (212 pages; $40 cloth). North American women began to enroll in institutions of higher learning in significant numbers during the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Looking Good: College Women and. Body Image, 1875-1930, Margaret Lowe examines a 55 year period of shifting medical and social discourses associated with female students in the United States. She emphasizes that by 1920, going to was no longer a controversial novelty (pp.4-5). Women's participation in higher education, however, was not unproblematic, either for the women themselves, for administrators, or for society as a whole. To examine these tensions, Lowe uses the concepts of gender, race, and class as she explores the origins of body image through the lens of academia. To a lesser extent, she uses regional differences, educational mission, and coeducation policies as analytical tools. She suggests that the college campus became a critical site where modern notions of female body image were mapped out (p. 161), and where women created new spaces between youthfulness and adulthood. Looking Good contributes important perspectives to existing historical, sociological, feminist, and literary studies on the body through the addition of women's and girls' voices in the form of letters, diaries, yearbooks, scrapbooks, class surveys, fiction, newspapers, and photographs. These personal accounts counterbalance institutional records and popular literature-such as ladies' magazines, medical tracts, and circulars-to present a more nuanced understanding of how women perceived their bodies and social identities. The addition of student voices clearly demonstrates that women exercised considerable agency during this period. They were not only shaped by prevailing discourses, but they participated in shaping those discourses for their own purposes as well. Lowe uses a comparative social history approach to study women and girls at three post-secondary institutions between 1870 and 1881: Smith College (a single-sex, secular, predominantly white women's located in Massachusetts); Spelman College (a Baptist seminary for black women and girls in Georgia that became a full-fledged by 1924); and Cornell University (a secular men's university in New York that admitted female students to its ranks after 1869). Lowe uses these distinct settings to analyze the intersection of multiple variables on women's experiences. …

The persecution of German Romanies: the case of Osnabrück, 1933–46

Studies of racial persecution in Germany, particularly during the Nazi period, now appear on almost a daily basis, so that every victimized minority has received attention. Antisemitism remains the main focus of research but the Romanies have now begun to attract scholars. While historians have studied Jews in virtually every location and over short time periods, they have tended to examine the situation of the Romanies at the national level using a longer time frame, recognizing the continuities of racial persecution that link the Nazi years with the rest of the twentieth century. Panayi brings out these longer-term patterns by focusing on the case of Osnabrück. He begins with an account of the historiography of Romanies at both the local and national level, and contrasts this with the general attention that German history of the first half of the twentieth century, especially the Third Reich, has received. The narrative then moves on to use the limited information available on the Osnabrück Romanies to carry out a detailed examination of the realities of their everyday life and the attitudes of the authorities towards them in the town between 1933 and 1946. Panayi’s study falls into the German social history approach of Alltagsgeschichte, which uses the specific to draw out the realities of the general national picture.

Faith in Diversity: The Flowering of Divergent Agendas in Recent Writing in the Social History of Religion in Late Modern Scotland

The writing of religious history has changed enormously in Scotland in the last fifty years. Early pioneers of a social history approach to the interaction of religion and society, such as L. J. Saunders in Scottish Democracy 1815–1840: the social and intellectual background (London, 1950), and the work of Stewart Mechie in his collection of essays The Church and Scottish Social development 1780–1870 (London, 1960), joined an early flowering of empirical sociology of religion under John Highet, such as his The Churches in Scotland To-day (Glasgow, 1950). By the early 1970s, the field was being strongly influenced by trends from England and Wales. On the one hand, within ecclesiastical history there was a development of social-history approaches to church and cities, most ably developed by Hugh McLeod, whose Church and Class in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974) established a new benchmark in the field. McLeod is now the doyen of the social history of religion in western Christendom, having over three decades produced an unmatched body of comparative work in monographs and articles (including his Piety and Poverty: Working-class Religion in Berlin, London and New York 1870–1914

GENDER AND RELIGION IN RECENT VICTORIAN STUDIES PUBLICATIONS

IN RECENT YEARS, literary critics and historians have become more conscious of how advantageous it can be to bring together scholarly work in religious studies and contemporary theories of gender. While the texts I will evaluate here exhibit greater or lesser degrees of awareness of current theory in its purest form, all share considerable interest in analyzing Victorian religion with respect to questions of sex. From traditional approaches of social history applied to women to specific studies of authors, from collections of critical essays to a book-length edition of the gems of a nineteenth-century sisterhood's archive, the fields of religious studies and gender studies can no longer be separated in critical practice to the degree that they had been in the past. In general, cultural studies approaches have yet to catch up with the rich scholarly possibilities offered by an exploration of Victorian Christianity. For the purpose of this essay, I have not delved deeply into works of postcolonial studies, nor have I focused on book-length inquiries into traditions outside Christianity. To be sure, there is much to investigate in those areas. But for the most part, as of this writing, book-length publications are simply not yet available.Cynthia Scheihberg's important book, Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), was released too late for full inclusion in my essay, but should be recognized as among the significant new work in the field. We are working with a field that is only twenty years old, one that has seen substantial growth and suggested numerous directions for future research.

Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870-1914.

Traditional histories of the French Third Republic often overlook the extent to which concerns about the place of women and the health of the family influenced the course of government policy, particularly the direction of welfare reform. Combining the approaches of social and political history, this book offers a new perspective on women's lives in the Third Republic by looking at the attitudes, actions, and policies of the men who held political power. Addressing themes in the newly invigorated field of welfare-state history, contributors to this volume offer evidence that social reform in France began far earlier than is usually supposed and was a response by republican politicians and social activists to a declining population growth rate. As this demographic crisis inspired efforts to improve maternal and child health and increase the birth rate, motherhood was redefined as a public mission deserving of public support.

The Quiet Revolution: Hermann Kolbe and the Science of Organic Chemistry.

Organic chemist Hermann Kolbe (1818-1884) is the subject of this vigorously contextualized biography, which combines the approaches of cognitive and social history of science. Kolbe was one of the most outstanding chemists during the remarkable period in which German science, like the wider manifestations of German industrial and political power, rose to a position of world dominance. Rocke portrays Kolbe as a leading actor in the transformation of the institutional and pedagological dimensions of the physical sciences, as well as in the rapid growth of technologically powerful pure sciences. In all these areas there was a sharp inflection point around 1860 when, as Rocke persuasively argues, the primary discipline in the drama was organic chemistry.

Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880-1940

The authors combine the methods and approaches of social anthropology historical demography and social history to examine changes in marriage the family and fertility in Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Istanbul was the first Muslim city to experience a systematic decline in fertility and major changes in family life and as such set the tone for many social and cultural changes in Turkey and the Muslim world. was the major focal point for the forces of westernization of Turkish society processes which not only transformed political and economic institutions in that country but also had a profound and lasting impact on domestic life. A chapter is included on fertility and family planning. (EXCERPT)

Rhetoric and ritual in colonial India: the shaping of a public culture in Surat City, 1852-1928

Rhetoric and ritual in colonial India: the shaping of a public culture in Surat City, 1852-1928