Volume 32 (Fall 1998) Issue 1
Article Abstracts

Abstract: Timothy Kelly and Joseph Kelly "Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Gender Roles, and the Decline of Devotional Catholicism"

Pittsburgh Catholics participated in a devotion to the religious icon Our Lady of Perpetual Help (a painting of Madonna and child) beginning in the late nineteenth century. Participation, high during the 1930s and 1940s, began a rapid decline in the 1950s. This article argues that the decline reflected a changed religious sensibility, a shift in ideology. The devotion inculcated Catholics, especially females, with the belief that women should seek to navigate the temporal world through Mary (and that the best requests to Mary were for help to accept the world passively). Their rejection of this ritual derived in some measure from the rejection of the belief that power derives from passivity. That rejection likely resulted when women saw an achievable alternative to the discourse that the devotion fostered, and that alternate path (also evidenced in women's reproduction and family behaviors) derived from women's increasing work outside of the home. That these changes came prior to the Second Vatican Council and the 1960s women's movement suggests both that the transformation in religious sensibility derived from other sources and that the 1950s saw dramatic cultural and social change. Alternative explanations for the rejection of devotional behavior depend too strongly upon developments that occurred after Catholics had begun to abandon the devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and therefore cannot adequately interpret the decline.

Abstract: Joseph Spillane, "The Making of an Underground Market: Drug Selling in Chicago, 1900-1940"

Historians understand marketplaces to be the kinds of "space" which illuminate social and economic relationships. The same appears to be true for illicit drug marketplaces, which have been highly visible centers of exchange in twentieth century United States cities. This article examines the evolution of drug distribution in Chicago between 1890 and 1940. By the first decade of the twentieth century, concerns over the popular use of opiates and cocaine led a coalition of Progressive reformers to curtail the legal supply of "dangerous" drugs. As the legal supply shrank, public pressure and law enforcement drove the drug marketplace into Chicago's well-known vice districts. Here, a collection of independent entrepreneurs created underground drug distribution networks serving customers from throughout the city. With the closing of Chicago's "Levee" district, and the end of sanctioned vice, the drug trade moved into the Black Belt neighborhoods of the South Side. The concentration of drug selling in the Black Belt was not inevitable, but had much to do with choices made by law enforcement and city government that implicitly endorsed a containment policy for drug marketplaces.

Abstract: Clifton Crais, "Of Men, Magic, and the Law: Popular Justice and the Political Imagination in South Africa"

The article examines the rise of the anti-stock theft Makbulu Span movement in rural South Africa during the 1950s. Focussing on the political imagination of the men who took the law into their own hands, the article argues that the movement involved much more than the resolution of disputes and struggles over control of property. Initial attempts to control stock theft became larger struggles against the implementation of apartheid and, ultimately, over the nature of rural civil society. Ideas concerning evil and witchcraft, authority and legitimacy, ethnicity and nation, and the moralorder of masculinity, critically shaped the movement's formation and its persecution of suspected thieves and political collaborators. The article points to the complex intersection of violence, masculinity, and subaltern visions of the nation.

Abstract: M. Langley Biegert, "Legacy of Resistance: Uncovering the History of Collective Action by Black Agricultural Workers in Central East Arkansas from the 1960s to the 1930s"

During Reconstruction a violent incident occurred between white residents and black agricultural workers who were trying to unionize in central east Arkansas. In 1891 and 1919 similar incidents occurred in the same area. This paper examines the history of collective action efforts by black agricultural workers in central east Arkansas to show that there was a pattern of resistance attempted by black workers in this region between the 1860s and the 1930s, culminating in the founding of the Southem Tenant Farmers' Union. The study attempts to show how knowledge about these efforts was suppressed by local white residents who controlled the official record and was preserved primarily through the oral history of the local black community. By uncovering the lost history of this community, scholars can gain a fuller understanding of patterns of resistance to racism and economic oppression by rural African American residents&emdash;a pattern, which may have existed in other communities throughout the South.

Abstract: Linda Reeder, "Women in the Classroom: Mass Migration, Literacy and the Nationalization of Sicilian Women at the Turn of the Century"

This article argues that, by encouraging rural Sicilian women to enroll in school, mass male migration repositioned these women within the nation-state. Between 1880 and 1930, most Sicilians emigrated hoping to improve their family's economic and social position at home. While migrant men struggled to earn the cash needed to buy houses and land, the material trappings of success, their wives who remained behind sought to acquire the cultural attributes identified with membership in the local gentry. In Sicily, literacy was one of the distinguishing features of the local elite. Male emigration motivated adult women to enroll in night classes and to keep their children in school. The consequences of literacy went beyond the family's social status in the village. Education redefined the relationship between rural women and the state. Classroom texts, popular literature and advertisements illustrate the ways migration contributed to the spread of new ideas about female civic identity and began to integrate rural women into a national consumer culture. By fostering female literacy, mass male migration contributed to the nationalization of rural Sicilian women at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Daniel H. Kaiser, "The Poor and Disabled in Early Eighteenth Century Russian Towns"

This paper assesses the frequency and character of urban poverty in Petrine Russia on the basis of twelve population inventories carried out in ten central Russian cities between 1710 and 1720. Although there is substantial variation among censuses, the sources isolate as poor or tax-exempt about 10 percent of Russian city populations. Legislation from the era indicates that the Russian government attempted to depress the levels of poverty, perhaps explaining the relatively low percentage of the poor recorded in the town censuses. The disabled do not occupy a prominent place among the poor; for the most part, they resided in regular, tax-paying households. But both age and sex were highly associated with poverty. The mean age of poor heads-of-households was about 50, and the aged predominated in urban poorhouses. Women appeared among the poor in numbers significantly greater than their percentage of the population; widows comprised an especially sizable proportion of all poor householders. Orphans are less visible in these sources, although some households clearly sheltered orphans, ostensibly as an act of charity, but perhaps also as a source of labor and income.

Peter Shapely, "Charity, Status and Leadership: Charitable Image and the Manchester Man"

This article considers the relationship between voluntary charity, status and social leadership. The limitations of the historiography have been suggested by Alan Kidd (Social History, 1996). Most studies have focused on either the role of the individual, the "agent," and his/her motives, or the functional role of charities, the "object," as a vehicle for employers to exert direct and indirect influence over the poor and working classes. This article will offer an alternative approach by considering the role of agent and object. It will use Bourdieu's notions of "field," "capital" and ''symbolic power" to provide a basic conceptual framework. It will focus on a group of 100 charity leaders in Victorian Manchester. The article will examine how this group was able to enter the charity field with significant cultural capital, such as wealth, education and social standing, and transform their economic and social positions into a form of symbolic capital, a legitimate form of social domination and leadership in the urban environment. However, it will also suggest that the value of charity as a means of underpinning social leadership was determined by sections of the community, which in effect restricted its importance to the mid-to late-Victorian period.

Thomas S. Wermuth, "New York Farmers and the Market Revolution: Economic Behavior in the Mid-Hudson Valley, 1780-1830"

The essay examines how the "market revolution" impacted ordinary farm families in the agriculturally rich Hudson River Valley. Like their New England counterparts, larger farmers responded to the new opportunities by increasing agricultural production and becoming "commercial farmers." Most smaller producers did not, however, although the "market revolution" did impact their lives. These families diversified their production, turning to various forms of rural manufacturing in order to maintain their standard of living. This production brought even these small households closer to the market than they had been in the eighteenth century as they now responded to new demands and opportunities that had not existed earlier.

However, unlike their New England neighbors, who increasingly became wage-laborers in capitalist "outwork" networks, valley farm families remained relatively independent of this form of productive relations, at least through the 1830s. Many families continued to structure their production around the home, maintaining control over what was produced and the methods employed. Furthermore, a vibrant local trading system, centered around household production and barter with neighbors and storekeepers, continued to exist along with the more commercially-driven New York City trade.

Frederick Marquardt, "Review Essay: 'Schaffe, Schaffe, Hausle Baue': Hans Medick, The Swabians, and Modernity"

Hans Medick's book is an experimental "micro-history" of proto-industrial weaver-farmers in the "raw alps" of Wurttemberg. In an imaginative analysis of exceptional breadth and depth, Medick unearths a particular economic strategy of grinding hard work and pragmatic adaptability, a local economy that in some ways conformed&emdash;and in some ways did not&emdash;to the model of proto-industrialization that Medick helped formulate in the 1970's, a "culture of appearance" in clothing that underwent change within a stable hierarchy, and a religious culture of Lutheran pietism that sanctified the particular local ethos of persistent toil and meager accumulation. The study strikingly validates Medick's methodology. It offers insights and raises questions about the model of proto-industrialization. It also raises the question of whether Medick's book tends toward the kind of romanticism against which scholars like Kocka and Wehler have warned.