Community Studies and the Investigation of Nineteenth-Century Social Relations

1986 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clyde Griffen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Study ◽  
Textile Workers ◽  
Community Studies ◽  
The Family ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
And Behavior

The recent popularity of community studies among investigators of nineteenth-century social history in the United States owes much to convergence of interests since the early 1970s among four broad groupings of historians: labor and radical historians concerned with class-formation; historians of women and the family; immigration historians; and urban historians concerned with the transformation of spatial and social structure. Stressing the importance of the interrelationships between their subjects, historians with these interests have tended to see the community study as the best means of describing the interrelationships fully and concretely. Howard Chudacoff expressed this perception when he characterized books on the artisans of Newark and on the iron and textile workers of Troy and Cohoes as “community studies of the best type, for they combine working class history with perspectives on family, ethnicity, mobility, stratification, ideology, technology, politics, and … show the importance of interactions between place and behavior” (Chudacoff, 1979: 535).

Beyond Trouillot

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-154
Author(s):  
Marlene L. Daut
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Writings

This essay explores the genealogy of historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s writings as related to broader trends in historical scholarship. The author suggests that it was through Silencing the Past’s acceptance and ascendance within the very North Atlantic “guild” that Trouillot deconstructs in his historical writings that the ideas of nineteenth-century Haitian historians such as Baron de Vastey, Hérard Dumesle, Beaubrun Ardouin, and Thomas Madiou produced an immeasurable influence on the direction of historical scholarship across the world. The author argues that the influence of these nineteenth-century Haitian authors can be seen everywhere in social history, especially in the concept of history from below, even though most historians in Europe and the United States have never even heard the names of these other Haitian authors.

Studying the Particular, Illuminating the General: Community Studies and Community in Wales

2005 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 672-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nickie Charles ◽  
Charlotte Aull Davies
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Community Studies ◽  
The Family ◽  
Community People ◽  
Work Affect ◽  
General Community

This article is inspired by Frankenberg's (1990) claim that the best way to understand general social processes is through the study of their manifestation in the details of social life. We look at how studies of community that have been carried out in Wales, particularly Village on the Border and The Family and Social Change ( Rosser and Harris, 1965 ), have accomplished this link between the particular and the general. We then consider the findings of our own research, which is a restudy of Rosser and Harris, showing how they provide a counterbalance to grand theoretical claims about the transformations that are affecting community and family life. We find that although factors such as increasing geographical mobility and women's greater participation in paid work affect people's experiences of community, people continue to place a high value on what they call communities. Such communities are spoken about and defined in different ways but all are based on local social networks of kin, neighbours and friends and/or locally-based associations. They are also gendered, with women playing a key role at both informal and formal levels of community. We suggest that the apparent resilience of local social relations evident in our research may help to explain the continued cultural and political resonance of community in Wales.

“… It Was Highly Desirable They Should Be Illustrated”

Nuncius ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catalina Valdés ◽  
Magdalena Montalbán
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Southern Hemisphere ◽  
The United States ◽  
Panoramic Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Prestige

Abstract The purpose of this article is to study the images included in the report made by the U.S. Navy Astronomical Expedition in the Southern Hemisphere between 1849 and 1852, directed by Navy lieutenant and astronomer James Melville Gilliss (1881–1865). Together with astronomical studies, the expedition addressed different aspects of the natural and social history of the Republic of Chile setting down in six volumes a pioneering panoramic vision of the young nation. Considering the different aspects of the culture of printing as it developed in the main cities of the United States in the mid nineteenth century, this article proposes general reflections concerning the impetus given in this field by scientific expeditions. In the specific case of Gilliss’s Naval Astronomical Expedition, this impulse manifests itself in terms of the technological renewal and the prestige of the lithographers taking part in the publication. This contrasts with the subsequent scarce success of Gilliss’s volumes – the books came close to being ignored – both in the United States and in Chile.

Introduction

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna L. Grossman ◽  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Family Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Family ◽  
Important Trend ◽  
The Law

This introductory chapter takes a brief look at family law in the United States as it changed over twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. “Family law” refers to a particular branch of the law—mostly about marriage, divorce, child custody, family property, adoption, and some related matters. However, this chapter also briefly considers other parts of the law that touch on the family in an important way, such as inheritance or the intersection between criminal law and family affairs. The chapter then considers the changes to family law in this expanded sense. In part, the changes were continuations of trends that started in the nineteenth century; but in part they were completely new. Perhaps the single most important trend was the decline of the traditional family, the family as it was understood in the nineteenth century, the family of the Bible and conventional morality.

Socioeconomic Status and Structural Change

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-459
Author(s):  
Edwin R. Coover
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Social History ◽  
United States Public Health ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vital Statistics ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Community Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vertical Mobility

A prominent feature of much of the “new” social history of the past decade is the use of various representations to convey socioeconomic status. Most of these studies have been concerned with aspects of horizontal and vertical mobility, but they include urban and community studies and miscellaneous topics as well. Using scales developed by sociologists in the twentieth century that were initially created to judge a family’s suitability for adoption or to assist the United States Public Health Service in analyses of vital statistics raises interesting problems vis-à-vis current historical applications. One of these problems involves a familiarity with huge theoretical and empirical literature on status of the last half-century. Starting from Counts’ scale in 1925, a sociologist inventorying the literature in 1953 counted some 333 publications on the topic to that year.With these problems in mind, two objectives are proposed in this article. First, the use of socioeconomic status evaluations will be discussed from an historian’s perspective. This will be done under three general headings: context, ascription, and measurement. Second, having established the necessary critical background, the utility of using socioeconomic status evaluation to characterize and evaluate multidecade and aggregate developments in socioeconomic structures will be proposed.

Inside the Castle

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna L. Grossman ◽  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Family Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Gay Marriage ◽  
Sex Behavior ◽  
The Family ◽  
Modern Family

This book is a comprehensive social history of twentieth-century family law in the United States. The book shows how vast, oceanic changes in society have reshaped and reconstituted the American family. Women and children have gained rights and powers, and novel forms of family life have emerged. The family has more or less dissolved into a collection of independent individuals with their own wants, desires, and goals. Modern family law, as always, reflects the brute social and cultural facts of family life. The story of family law in the twentieth century is complex. This was the century that said goodbye to common-law marriage and breach-of-promise lawsuits. This was the century, too, of the sexual revolution and women's liberation, of gay rights and cohabitation. Marriage lost its powerful monopoly over legitimate sexual behavior. Couples who lived together without marriage now had certain rights. Gay marriage became legal in a handful of jurisdictions. By the end of the century, no state still prohibited same-sex behavior. Children in many states could legally have two mothers or two fathers. No-fault divorce became cheap and easy. And illegitimacy lost most of its social and legal stigma. These changes were not smooth or linear—all met with resistance and provoked a certain amount of backlash. Families took many forms, some of them new and different, and though buffeted by the winds of change, the family persisted as a central institution in society. This book tells the story of that institution, exploring the ways in which law tried to penetrate and control this most mysterious realm of personal life.

Human Evolution

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Wood
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Trace Fossils ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Molecular Evidence ◽  
Prehistoric Archaeology ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
The Family ◽  
And Behavior

The study of human evolution involves (1) understanding the evolutionary context and the circumstances surrounding the origin of the branch of the Tree of Life (technically referred to as a clade) whose only extant taxon is modern humans, (2) recognizing the extinct species that are more closely related to modern humans than to the closest living apes (i.e., chimpanzees and bonobos), (3) reconstructing the morphology and behavior of those species, (4) determining how they are related to each other and to modern humans, (5) investigating the factors and influences that shaped their evolution, and (6) reconstructing the origin(s) of modern human anatomy and behavior. The study of the fossil evidence for human evolution is traditionally referred to as hominid paleontology, which reflected the then-prevailing conventional wisdom that the differences between modern humans and the great apes were profound enough to merit being recognized at the level of the family, with modern humans in the family Hominidae, and the great apes in the family Pongidae. But the molecular evidence is consistent with a particularly close relationship between Homo sapiens (the formal Linnaean name for modern humans) and two of the great apes, chimpanzees and bonobos. In the light of this compelling evidence, many researchers use the tribe (the taxonomic category below the level of the family and above the level of the genus) Hominini to accommodate the species and genera more closely related to modern humans than to chimpanzees and bonobos. So, in the new terminology the study of the human fossil record should be referred to as hominin paleontology. The study of the artifacts (e.g., stone and bone tools, drawn and carved images, early structures, evidence of decoration, etc.) made in prehistoric times is called prehistoric archaeology. In the United States the combined study of hominin paleontology and prehistoric archaeology is called paleoanthropology, human prehistory, or just prehistory—this article focuses on hominin paleontology. The data available for reconstructing human evolutionary history are genetic (from molecules) and phenotypic (from true and trace fossils). Genetic data include information about modern-human genetic variation that allows researchers to reconstruct the relatively recent migration of modern humans, plus ancient DNA that so far has been recovered from modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the fossils from a site in Spain called the Sima de los Huesos. Phenotypic evidence, which is divided into macroscopic and microscopic, can be gathered from the surface of true fossils (i.e., bones and teeth) as well as from their internal structure. The latter can be accessed nondestructively by using imaging techniques or destructively by making sections of bones and teeth. The trace fossils that are most relevant for human evolution are footprints such as the c. 3.6-million-year-old hominin footprint trails from Laetoli in Tanzania.

scholarly journals E. P. THOMPSON IN AFRICAN HISTORY

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-1
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
African History ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Private Property Rights ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
The University

E. P. Thompson's influence on the writing of African history, especially in its Kenyan and South African concentrations, has long seemed so obvious that it has attracted little scholarly comment. In this JAH Forum we host four historians who have been associated with very different elements of this anglophone tradition of historical writing. Peter Delius challenges the widely held view that the Making of the English Working Class (1963) was key to the emergence of rural social history at the University of the Witwatersrand, and that he was a champion of Thompsonian methods and arguments; John Higginson draws on the intellectual debates of working class history in the United States to restate its ongoing significance for southern African history; Luise White returns to Whigs and Hunters (1975) to ask why it is that Africanists have not taken up the intriguing relationships between the hunting and preservation of wild animals and the evolution of private property rights in land; and Derek Peterson draws on Thompson's last book, Witness Against the Beast (1993), to draw attention to the ways in which historians have ignored the political theologies of African nonconformism. These articles were selected from a workshop hosted by the University of Michigan in November 2015, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which brought many of the assumptions and absences of African social history into productive focus; they map out a broad historiographical field and we anticipate that they will be followed by other works picking up on the problems and arguments of cultural and economic transformation that obsessed Thompson and many others.

Labor History and Public History: Introduction

2009 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Miller Klubock ◽  
Paulo Fontes
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Labor History ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor historians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the “Old Left,” made labor history public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party. Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the “New Left” and inspired by E.P. Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history “from the bottom up” beyond the confines of the academy, even as they shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political parties, to make the history of “ordinary people” and “everyday life” public history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while expanding the sphere of both “the public” and “labor” to include histories of women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.

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