ARTICLES

Plague Hospitals, Poverty and the Provision of Medical Care in France, c.1450–c.1650

Neil Murphy

Pages 825–853

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab066

This article examines the expansion of plague hospitals in early modern France. It shows that the development of these institutions was an urban initiative and that there was only limited involvement from the crown before the mid-seventeenth century. While there is a typically highly negative view of French plague hospitals, with these institutions being seen as death traps where the infected were simply sent to die, they played a vital role in providing the poor with access to specialist care. Plague hospitals were staffed by physicians, surgeons, nurses, and apothecaries, who provided a range of important medical treatments to the infected. Municipal governments developed these specialist hospitals for the plague sick—and only the plague sick—and sought to provide them with the type of environment early modern medical experts believed to be the most conducive for healing. The article situates the development of these hospitals within the wider context of health care provision in early modern France. Overall, it shows that the development of plague hospitals was a key manifestation of the drive toward providing professional medical care to the poor.

Modern Magic, the Illusion of Transformation, and How It Was Done

Peter Lamont

Pages 854–874

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shw126

In 1584, Reginald Scot claimed that jugglers who performed magic tricks were mistaken for witches. The claim was repeated and later became the basis of the Victorian idea of "modern magic." According to stage conjurors and writers on magic, "modern magic" was magic that was (now) understood to be an illusion. The claim continued to be repeated by amateur historians of magic, who reinforced this idea of "modern magic" by citing cases of early modern jugglers who were persecuted as witches. In recent years, "modern magic," as a distinctly modern form of magic that was understood to be an illusion, has become part of modern cultural history.

The view that magic tricks were mistaken for witchcraft, however, is not to be found in the historiography of the early modern period. Indeed, it is a myth. When one examines how magic tricks and witchcraft were compared, one sees that there was a clear distinction made between the two. Nevertheless, despite the lack of evidence, the myth continued to survive. It was used to justify the exposure of secrets, enhanced Victorian conjurors’ respectability, and it fitted neatly within the modern narrative of rational progress. It persisted due to the uncritical reading of sources by some historians, whose examples of persecution were the result of misinterpretation. Thus, "modern magic," as a form of magic that was understood to be an illusion, was not a particularly modern phenomenon. Indeed, despite some changes in how magic was experienced, early modern views of magic were remarkably similar to modern ones.

Lost Things and the Making of Material Cultures in Eighteenth-Century London

Kate Smith

Pages 875–898

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab061

This article focuses on everyday occurrences of loss and losing in urban spaces to examine the role that absence played in shaping material cultures in the past. It returns to a site that has remained central to material histories, eighteenth-century London, and shows how possessions regularly went missing due to theft and forgetfulness. Examining daily newspapers, alongside court cases, diary entries, and handbills, demonstrates how experiences of loss prompted urban denizens to devise systems of reclamation. "Lost" notices placed in London’s new daily newspapers became crucial to ensuring the return of lost possessions. While these systems were largely managed by thief-takers such as Jonathan Wild in the early decades of the eighteenth century, after Wild’s death in 1725, it fell to Londoners themselves to remember the salient features of their possessions and write the notices. These writings and the material practices that underpinned them shaped how people understood the material world around them and how they operated in urban spaces. As such, the article demonstrates the significance of absence in shaping urban material cultures.

Defining the Family of Washington: Meaning, Blood, and Power in the New American Nation

Cassandra Good

Pages 899–924

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab067

This article examines the many meanings of family that George Washington deployed throughout his life, with particular attention to his claim to having "no family." Drawing on kinship theory, historiography, and Washington’s writings, it situates his varied understandings of family in the context of Anglo-American notions of inheritance law, lineage, and blood. Washington’s and his fellow Americans’ definitions of family were also intimately tied to the political ideals of a new republic hoping to sever family from government power. Careful analysis of the family as an ever-changing and situational process in Washington’s life provides a model for an alternative way of approaching family history.

Looking through a Different Lens: Microhistory and the Workhouse Experience in Late Nineteenth-Century London

Peter Jones

Pages 925–947

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab078

This article uses a microhistorical approach to investigate the "workhouse experience" of a single pauper in late nineteenth-century London. Its subject is Frank Burge, a remarkably prolific (though by no means unique) correspondent who wrote several lengthy letters of complaint from the Poplar workhouse to the Local Government Board (the central poor law authority) between 1884 and 1885. It places these letters, and the official responses they stimulated, alongside other public and official documents and uses a blended methodological approach to uncover a rich narrative of hardship, struggle, and personal agency. In doing so, it argues that, in contrast to more orthodox histories of welfare, it is only through this kind of painstaking and sensitive historical reconstruction that we truly can understand the nature, and the legacy, of poverty and the "workhouse experience" on the nineteenth-century poor.

"What Does that Flag Mean to Them?" Rural Relief, Children's Suffering, and American Philanthropy in Cuba

Daniel A Rodríguez

Pages 948–972

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac017

This article explores the transnational politics of hunger, philanthropy, and rural reconstruction during the U.S. occupation of Cuba (1899–1902). In the wake of Cuba’s final War of Independence (1895–1898), tens of thousands of reconcentrados—rural civilians forcibly removed from their lands by Spanish forces during the war—continued to face starvation, disease, and homelessness in the island’s western towns and cities. The Cuban Industrial Relief Fund, a U.S.-based philanthropy, hoped to return the reconcentrados to their now-overgrown lands and help them rebuild their homes and farms. The organization connected rural Cubans and ordinary Americans through the complex bonds of transnational philanthropy just as Americans were working out the meanings of American power and responsibility in the new post-1898 world. Early during the U.S. occupation of Cuba, debates over rural reconstruction and relief became a central locus for Americans to articulate the meanings of U.S. power in Cuba. These meanings, however, were refracted through American understandings of childhood, race, and poverty, as paternalist understandings of poverty as cultural failure and colonial depictions of Latin Americans as childlike and untrustworthy shaped debates over the future of rural Cuba. Based on newly available organizational records as well as Cuban and U.S. archival and popular press sources, this article argues that while the goals of the CIRF were to return the Cuban peasantry to a state of self-sufficient independence, entrenched racialized U.S. perceptions of the Cuban poor as lazy, irresponsible, and essentially dependent doomed the prospects of any large-scale industrial relief for Cuban reconcentrados.

Rebellion at the Fringe: Conspiracy, Surveillance, and State-Making in 1920s Mexico

Ulices Piña

Pages 973–1000

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab054

In 1925, rumors of an alleged international conspiracy to overthrow the state circulated in central-western Mexico. The reports prompted the country’s newly created Departamento Confidencial (Confidential Department) to begin surveilling former rebels and zealous Catholics in the region, as well as political exiles in the American Southwest. This article explores how the intelligence services helped consolidate institutional power after the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). The investigations uncovered well-organized propaganda campaigns that centered on generating support, organization, and information. These networks originated abroad and circulated in the small hamlets, towns, and metropolitan centers of the region. The widespread rumors reflected what ordinary people thought was credible and socially conceivable, while also nourishing the belief among locals that a rebellion would breakout against the state. Ultimately, this type of surveillance transformed how the central state interacted with, and came to produce knowledge of, its citizenry.

White Ethnicity in the Urban Crisis: Newark's Italian Americans

Nancy C Carnevale

Pages 1001–1030

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab075

Scholars have largely understood the urban crisis, including racial violence, as a matter of Black versus white, with white ethnics in possession of a largely inconsequential ethnicity. An examination of two community leaders from Newark’s North Ward reveals competing Italian American perceptions of the urban crisis. Anthony Imperiale, the race-baiting demagogue and politician, has been portrayed by the media and by scholars as the lone voice of the North Ward. Stephen Adubato argued that urban white working-class ethnics like Italian American Newarkers were reacting to economic hardship at a time when they believed the government was advantaging African Americans. Rather than foster a white identity and anti-black sentiment, Adubato aimed to promote stronger Italian American ethnicity as a basis for making claims on resources. A consideration of the two men, using newspaper accounts and archival sources, illustrates that Newark’s Italian Americans as a distinct ethnic group had diverse if at times overlapping interpretations of their experience of the urban crisis rooted in identification by race on the one hand and ethnicity on the other. The attitudes toward and relations with African Americans represented by both men were grounded in real and imagined socioeconomic, political, and cultural realms within the specific racial context of the era and the challenges of the urban crisis which extended to the Italian American community.

Inocencia: Shining Path and the Recruitment of Minors, Ayacucho in the 1980s

Charles F Walker

Pages 1031–1053

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab052

This article uses a unique source to examine the role of young people in the Peruvian Maoist group the Shining Path. The Archivo Regional de Ayacucho contains the records of trials from 1980 to 1985 against minors accused of belonging to and supporting the Shining Path. About one-third of the detainees were women, and the majority were children of Indigenous migrants to the city of Ayacucho. These trials provide a ground-level view of how the guerrillas recruited and employed them, how these young people attacked “enemies of the people,” ransacked stores, set off dynamite, and dodged the police. They help explain why these young men and women joined a violent movement that was being met with similar brutality. The trials also illustrate how the police, the military, and the courts reacted to this guerrilla movement. The analysis of the trials contributes to debates about young people and insurgency, providing insights into the motivations for militancy and changing subjectivities. They also provide snapshots of Ayacucho in the early years of the struggle: the attacks that first bewildered and then petrified; the initial naivete about the Shining Path; and the panic of families when their children were detained as well as the families’ desperate efforts to defend them. The final section of the article tracks the fate of some of those detained. These trials tell the harrowing story of youth and the internal armed conflict in Peru in the 1980s.

"Just Enough Mystery": Multivocal Afterlives of a Tokugawa Refugee in Japan and the United States, 1868–2018

Anne Giblin Gedacht

Pages 1054–1077

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab065

This article examines the life and afterlives of Okei, a political refugee from the Japanese Boshin Civil War (1868–69), who became the first Japanese woman interred in North American soil. Looking at a shared space of commemoration, in this case a grave site in California, this paper tracks how Okei’s memorialization on both sides of the Pacific constructed specific communal identities over a hundred and fifty years. Okei’s legacy has been consciously constructed by different actors to at once prove the resiliency of the Japanese spirit, provide an origin story for Japanese America, glorify Japanese expansionism, promote U.S.–Japanese friendship, establish regional prestige, and embody internationalism. Despite these multivocal trans-Pacific interpretations, all renderings of Okei’s story share one key similarity: the manipulation of history to empty Okei’s life of its divisive political context. A history replaced by multiple myths, the Okei narrative came to express contrasting yet parallel identities grounded in that lonely hill in California.

REVIEWS

The Sámi Peoples of the North. A Social and Cultural History. By Neil Kent

Otso Kortekangas

Pages 1078–1079

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz093

Neil Kent’s overview of Sámi history, The Sámi Peoples of the North. A Social and Cultural History, is a rare example of transnational history in a research field dominated by methodological nationalism. The indigenous Sámi people lives across a northern homeland called Sápmi, spanning from Norway in the West, over the northern expanses of Sweden and Finland to northwestern Russia in the East. A vast majority of the scholarly literature on the Sámi, however, treats the history of this population within the boundaries of just one of the four countries. Kent’s book is impressive in its inclusion of themes from all around Sápmi, and of sources from many different language areas.

The range of the book is comprehensive. Beginning with Sámi prehistory and linguistic research on the origins of the different Nordic populations, the book covers the history of the Sámi from earliest contact with other populations, through the mission period and the governmental policies of twentieth-century Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia/the USSR, up until the current era. It is a narrative of colonialism, forceful conversion, and oppression, but also of cooperation, resistance, and Sámi activism. The comprehensive character of the book makes it suitable not only for scholars and interested readers, but also for curricular use. I myself have used the book as core literature for a course on Sámi history that I have taught since 2015. There are few, if any, other volumes that cover the history of the Sámi in as chronologically and geographically comprehensive a manner as Kent’s book does. The book also succeeds in conveying the diversity of Sámi cultures: when talking about the Sámi, we are, in fact, talking about a number of separate yet related cultural and linguistic groups that fall under the umbrella term Sámi.

Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil War. By Eliza Richards

Kristen Treen

Pages 1080–1082

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz091

The past two decades have witnessed a transformation in the academy’s approach to American Civil War poetry. It has long been acknowledged that the Civil War did much to democratize poetic practice: alongside its unprecedented carnage, a collective sense of the war’s historic moment prompted individuals from all walks of life to add their voices to a growing poetic discussion about the conflict’s meaning. As their voices circulated within systems of print media expanded and fortified by wartime reportage, soldiers and civilians, black citizens and white, enslaved and free people all found that the war provided new platforms for debate, generating new manifestations of collectivity and nationhood in the process.

While scholars writing in the latter half of the last century generally saw fit to pick and choose their representative war poets with literary “merit” in mind, it is only recently that new generations of literary historians have begun to engage with the full extent of Civil War versifying. Their important work has revealed the diverse and complex cultural discourse that resides in what had been dismissed, for too long, as “popular” verse blighted by the “scourge” of sentimentalism, or the predictable jingles of the war’s amateur poets. Alice Fahs, Faith Barrett, Michael C. Cohen, and Elizabeth Lorang and R.J. Weir, among others, have unearthed neglected material and drawn our attention to the social lives of ballads, elegies, and marching songs, not to mention the communities they imagined in the midst of war’s destruction. In doing so, these works have expanded the literary horizons of Civil War and Reconstruction-era scholarship.

Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South. By Brandi Clay Brimmer

Melissa Milewski

Pages 1083–1084

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab041

Brandi Clay Brimmer’s Claiming Union Widowhood is a compelling and deeply researched exploration of how African American widows of Union soldiers negotiated claims for U.S. government pensions from the end of the Civil War through the beginning of the 20th century. While she centers the experiences of the black women who made these claims, the book also explores the role of white and black claims agents who helped women make their claims and the government agents assessing the claims. Brimmer argues that the pension system became a battleground between these parties, as differing definitions of marriage, respectability and women’s work became crucial to the outcome of black widows’ pension claims. As they judged claims, federal agents sought to impose their own ideas of what constituted a marriage and how Union widows should comport themselves. At the same time, black widows making claims asserted their own virtue and citizenship rights even as their marriage and living arrangements did not always conform to Victorian ideals. When black widows succeeded in gaining pensions, then, it had political and economic implications, including, Brimmer writes, “[carrying] a measure of respectability, legal personhood, and a modest addition to their income for the life of the claim” (70). The book’s focus on claims-making and the politics of respectability in the lives of largely working-class women who had lost a spouse adds another important layer to her investigation.

Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement. By Cathleen D. Cahill

Laura E Free

Pages 1085–1087

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab034

In Recasting the Vote Cathleen Cahill traces the lives and activism of six women of color who fought for voting rights and racial equality in the early 20th century. Not merely a series of biographical sketches, the book is a comprehensive overhaul of woman suffrage history centering the stories of Indigenous, Hispanic, Black, and Chinese activists. Activists of color, and their ideas about equality and democracy, Cahill demonstrates, were always at the center of the fight for women’s enfranchisement, even as they battled both a movement and a nation that did not fully recognize their right to participate in either.

The first part of the book introduces how each of the six women became politicized fighting for causes that mattered to their communities. Nina Otero-Warren, member of a politically prominent Hispanic family, began her activist work by advocating for the rights of native Spanish language speakers as New Mexico became a state. Black poet and writer Carrie Williams Clifford came to suffrage through the National Association of Colored Women. Lawyer Marie Bottineau Baldwin (Ojibwe/Chippewa), musician and writer Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Dakota), also known as Zitkála-Šá, and speaker and author Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Wisconsin Oneida) all began their activism by fighting federal policy that held Indigenous Americans as wards of the state, denying them basic civil rights unless assimilated. Mabel Lee, possibly the first Chinese immigrant woman to earn a PhD in the United States, tied advocacy of suffrage to immigration policy, as federal law prohibited all Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens. Regardless of how they came to suffrage, all of the activists Cahill discusses viewed women’s ballots as essential tools in their campaigns for equality, citizenship, and autonomy.

How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900-1940. By Thomas C. Hubka

Anna Vemer Andrzejewski

Pages 1088–1090

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab035

On its face, Thomas C. Hubka’s latest book purports to be about architecture; the latest in the University of Minnesota Press’s Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture series, Hubka’s book indeed narrates the story of the modernization of working-class houses. That it aims to tell a national story distinguishes it from many previous books on vernacular architecture of this period, which tend to be local or regional histories. Yet like the best studies of vernacular architecture in the U.S. over the last fifty years, Hubka’s book is as much a social history as an architectural one. The author enlists evidence from buildings to explain how the working class became modern in the four decades leading up to World War II.

Hubka focuses on houses that constitute what he calls the “middle majority”—the 60% of houses that fall between the wealthiest 20% and the poorest 20% (xix). This would seemingly give Hubka a huge evidence base, but not an unproblematic one. The absence of national housing data makes it impossible to draw firm boundaries around what actually comprises this “middle majority.” Further, large swaths of working-class housing have fallen victim to demolition as part of postwar urban renewal or more recent gentrification, making an accurate assessment of the most common house types hard to discern. Acknowledging these (and other) challenges, Hubka is still able to draw important conclusions from his research on standing “middle majority” houses in more than twenty metropolitan areas over the past few decades. The result utterly upends the way we think about American housing.

Earthquake Children: Building Resilience from the Ruins of Tokyo. By Janet Borland

Alice Y Tseng

Pages 1091–1093

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab036

Without first-hand experience, the improbable feeling of solid earth trembling like Jell-o is difficult to conceive through other people’s words and pictures. The combined terror of the conflagrations, aftershocks, total pandemonium, and extreme privation that ensue is also beyond simple imagination. Because of—and despite—this challenge, numerous scholars of Japan have taken on the great earthquake of 1923, known as the Great Kantō Earthquake, to shed light on the magnitude of destruction and trauma that upended the major metropolis Tokyo and neighboring Yokohama. Janet Borland finds a new entry point into the extensive body of scholarship that has accumulated around the subject; she seeks to understand the catastrophe by focusing on children as the subjects who experienced the disaster and as the objects of disaster relief.

Like previous studies of highly destructive modern-period earthquakes of Japan by Gregory Clancey, Gennifer Weisenfeld, J. Charles Schencking, and Gregory Smits, Borland structures her book around the immediate events surrounding the Great Kantō Earthquake and the subsequent years of recovery and reconstruction. She works off of the major arguments established by the earlier publications—such as seeing the earthquake as the catalyst for large-scale social, cultural, urban, and technological change, and emphasizing the discourses about nationhood and citizenship that arose as coping reactions to the unanticipated natural disaster. She relies on contemporaneous media coverage (newspapers and journals) as well as personal essays, drawings, and memoirs published shortly after 1923 to retrieve the raw, seemingly unfiltered reactions and reflections of the time. She turns to government and expert reports to present the authorities'responses.

After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia's New York. By Elisabeth Israels Perry

Robyn Muncy

Pages 1094–1096

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab040

After the Vote represents a worthy capstone to Elisabeth Perry’s rich career in U.S. women’s history. Published only a few months after Perry’s death, the book capitalizes on her many years of careful thinking about both feminist biography and U.S. women’s politics in the twentieth century. In particular, the book analyzes the meaning of the vote for women in New York City between the 1910s and the emergence of a mass women’s movement in the 1960s. It was inspired by and builds directly on a biography of Belle Moskowitz, advisor to New York’s progressive governor Alfred E. Smith, which Perry published in 1987 and which exposed the skeleton of a women’s network active in New York politics in the 1910s and 1920s.

After the Vote puts meat on the bones of that skeleton and walks it through several decades of New York City politics. In doing so, the book reveals a rickety but passable bridge between the suffrage generation and the second wave of feminism. In that way, After the Vote enhances the argument made by such scholars as Dorothy Sue Cobble, Kate Weigand, and Landon Storrs that feminism did not sink into irrelevancy between the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and the women’s movement of the 1960s but was embedded in organizations and institutions not explicitly feminist. Perry’s subjects pursued their efforts for women’s advancement in political parties, local government service, and broad-gauged reform organizations like the League of Women Voters or the YWCA. Focusing especially on women elected or appointed to government offices in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s, Perry construes the mayoralty of Fiorello La Guardia as a hinge between the women’s movements of the 1910s and the 1960s. Extending from 1934 to 1945, La Guardia’s term as mayor both culminated progressive women’s post-suffrage political work and nurtured a new generation of female political activists.

Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate. By Yoni Furas

Elizabeth Brownson

Pages 1097–1099

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab045

Educating Palestine by Yoni Furas is an important study that analyzes multiple aspects of the Palestinian and Zionist education systems and the teaching of history during the British Mandate (1920-48). The book reveals that historiography and the teaching of history were transformed by the Palestinian and Zionist nationalist movements, each of which was carefully tracking the Other’s education system. Furas also builds on scholarship that demonstrates the shortcomings of Britain’s provision of education to Palestinians and its vague education policy, both of which dismally failed compared to the Zionist system. Based on a diverse array of sources and enlivened with descriptions of teachers’ lives and excerpts from students’ writings, the monograph fills a major gap in scholarship on the Mandate period and provides a new perspective on the conflict.

Furas examines fascinating, little-used sources, such as history textbooks, newspapers, Haganah intelligence files, colonial education files, school journals, and interviews. One of the book’s greatest strengths is its use of these sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, the three official languages of the Mandate. Chapter 2, for instance, draws on educators’ memoirs, newspapers, and education department files, among other sources, to trace how educational segregation became ingrained during the Mandate. The chapter’s conclusions, however, are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence presented. Furas characterizes educational segregation partly as a collective failure of Jews and Palestinians, and he also places responsibility on “government reluctance” to create mixed schools (45). Previously, however, Furas attributes the education department’s botched attempt to establish a joint agricultural school to the Zionists’ boycott of the venture (42).

China's Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism. By Rana Mitter

Kelly A Hammond

Pages 1100–1102

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab047

Rana Mitter is a well-known academic and public intellectual. His most recent book explores the legacies and historical memories of World War II on the development of Chinese nationalism in the postwar period vis-à-vis China’s changing geopolitical position in Asia and the world over the past forty years. In short, the book examines how “China’s attitude towards collective memory of its wartime participation changed significantly,” since the rise of Deng Xiaoping and how these changes have had “profound consequences on…domestic and international politics” (3).

For readers who are familiar with European historiography of the war, it might be shocking that Mitter is really the first to tackle the ways that war memories are deployed by both the state and citizens in modern day China. But, for several reasons, such as the Cold War tensions between Mao’s China and Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist government-in-exile in Taiwan, wartime memories were stifled or told through a Marxist lens that privileged the Chinese Revolution. (Similarly, historians of Russia are beginning to deal with the memory of World War II—an edited volume called The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia comes out this year with Routledge).

The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties. By Eric Zolov

Fernando Herrera Calderón

Pages 1103–1105

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab063

Eric Zolov has solidly established himself as one of the chief historians of the Latin American sixties. His first book, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (1999) was the first significant English-language scholarly work about the counterculture movement in Mexico and Zolov’s first major foray into the burgeoning debates and discussions regarding the “global sixties'' taking shape in academic circles. In The Last Good Neighbor, Zolov once again summons Mexicanists and scholars, as well as students of the “global sixties,'' to rethink Mexico’s place within the rest of the world. Zolov puts forward a persuasive and revisionist history by analyzing how Mexico became instrumental in the fashioning of the international dynamics of the global sixties. By deviating from a reductionist interpretation that Mexico was merely an arbitrator between the United States and Cuba, he also seeks to reveal the complexity of U.S.-Mexico relations. For too long, he suggests, Mexico has been perceived as only a regional model for developing nations, something the United States helped to boost in order to discourage Latin American’s most vulnerable members of society from falling under the spell of revolutionary Marxism and taking up arms rather than counting on the electoral process to create effective radical change. Instead, Zolov explores Mexico’s transition from a regional political actor into a puissant champion of the Third World. By elevating Mexico’s prominence in the area of “global sixties” studies, Zolov petitions for Mexico’s much-deserved recognition within the “collective cartographic project that is already well underway” and the changing trends and broader scholarly over an era of political and cultural effervescence (20).

A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War. By Samuel Fury Childs Daly

Meredith Terretta

Pages 1106–1108

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab030

As I read this book on the Biafran War and its aftermath, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted rights and mobility everywhere to varying degree, ushering in a state of prolonged uncertainty across the world. This present-day backdrop made it easier to imagine the cumulative and increasingly grave effects of the changes to daily life that war ushered in to 1970s Nigeria following the Republic of Biafra’s brief existence. Daly’s central argument is that “It is impossible to understand Nigeria’s long experience of crime without the context of the Nigerian Civil War—specifically, the survival tactics that Biafrans and Nigerians developed to cope with wartime dangers and postwar hardships” (13). Criminality is not inherent to Nigeria as popular and scholarly portrayals too often suggest. Rather, it is contingent, arising from the war and its aftermath.

Using evidence gathered from incomplete court records, memoirs and supplemented with some thirty oral interviews (2, 23-6), Daly has reconstructed a social history of Biafrans and Nigerians who lived in and with Biafra in wartime. He shows how after the war, state and non-state actors on both sides of secession navigated the three Rs—reconciliation, reconstruction, and rehabilitation—in ways profoundly shaped by what they had survived. Absent from this account are the exogenous factors that, while distracting us from local realities and historical contingencies, attract internationalists, political scientists and developmentalists to Biafra’s brief history—namely international humanitarianism, state-building, diplomacy, and oil. Instead, Daly centers the historical context of Biafra itself.

Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia. By Rachel Applebaum

Benjamin Tromly

Pages 1109–1110

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz081

At first glance, the notion that “friendship” existed between the peoples of the Soviet Union and those of its satellite states in Eastern Europe seems unlikely. Against the backdrop of the fragility of the Soviet bloc and the military interventions needed to keep it together—not to mention the collapse of the socialist camp in 1989—the cultivation of friendship through official discourse and mass friendship organizations would appear to have been empty talk. Not so, Rachel Applebaum argues in this richly researched and well-written study of the official friendship policies and programs meant to tie Czechoslovakia to the USSR. The “friendship project,” as well as the ideological construct of socialist internationalism that undergirded it, failed to cement Soviet power in Czechoslovakia, as the Prague Spring demonstrated. Yet it “succeeded in creating a cohesive socialist world in the realm of everyday life” (14).

The book pursues this argument through analysis of a varied series of episodes in Soviet-Czechoslovak relations from 1945 to 1968. The first chapter examines film as an arena for transnational influences before and after the 1948 coup, first as a vehicle for nationalist Czechs and Slovaks to question Soviet power and then as a Stalinist tool for the imposition of Soviet culture. The book then turns to Czechoslovak youth sent to study in the USSR, arguing that the experience provided them with a schooling in Stalinism. The book’s next section outlines the deepening of transnational ties and “citizen diplomacy” during the Khrushchev Thaw. The work ends with an examination of the paradoxical durability of official friendship programs during the Prague Spring and after its military suppression: Czechoslovak dissenters took up the trope of internationalism to oppose Soviet invasion, Soviet tourists found themselves as cogs in Soviet occupation policies, and the two regimes reinstated the internationalist status quo ante to prop up “normalization” in Czechoslovakia.

The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War. By Michael S. Sherry

Stuart Schrader

Pages 1111–1113

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab025

To live in the United States is to live in an intensely punitive society. This country has incarcerated millions over the past several decades. Historians have turned their attention to this growing phenomenon in recent years. As a topic that crosses subfields, scholarship on “the carceral state” has rapidly become one of the burgeoning areas of U.S. history. Although nearly all who study the rise of the carceral state would agree that the cultural dimensions of this shift matter, until now, nobody has written a single study tabulating and analyzing them. For that reason, The Punitive Turn in American Life is an important complement to existing scholarship, filling in what has often been a palpable absence. Its fundamental premise is crucial: the militaristic U.S. posture toward the rest of the world helps explain the carceral state.

Michael S. Sherry retired from Northwestern University in 2020, where he taught for 44 years. The winner of a Bancroft Prize and an openly gay historian, Sherry has made numerous important contributions to the study of U.S. history. He was a member of a cohort of scholars who opened up and diversified foreign-relations history, introducing new analytic tools. The Punitive Turn in American Life is a descendant of his landmark book on the political culture of war-making and national security from the 1930s to the 1990s, In the Shadow of War.

The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports. By Bruce Berglund (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 344 pp. $85.00)

John Wong

Pages 1114–1115

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab032

Historian and hockey fan Bruce Berglund has produced an astounding history of ice hockey. From its various origins of a stick-and-ball game played on ice to its modern form of professionalized, highly commercialized, and internationalized mass entertainment, The Fastest Game in the World is a most enjoyable journey through time and across space. Rather than “the whole of world hockey,” this book is about the “hockey world”—a “global network of people connected by the game—players, coaches, scouts, executives, journalists, fans” (11). In this sense, the book’s coverage is mostly focused on nations (exclusively in the northern hemisphere) that have comparatively lengthy histories of the game and the exchanges among them over time. For such an ambitious examination of international relationships, The Fastest Game in the World does not slight cultural, political, economic, and social environments. Berglund’s work is more than just a chronicle of the sport.

A strength of The Fastest Game in the World is its vast and varied primary and secondary sources. Berglund has the “man-advantage” of being fluent in Slavic languages which open up a world of archival sources little-examined by English-speaking authors on hockey. As hockey aficionados already know, a few former Soviet bloc countries besides Russia have had a prominent involvement in, and impact on, the hockey world. In-person interviews also help readers to peek inside this world. If nothing else, researchers and scholars of hockey will find Berglund’s sources most useful. Make no mistake, The Fastest Game in the World should be on the bookshelf of hockey researchers and fans alike. I do have some minor quibbles with the book though.

The People's Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America. By Lisa Z. Sigel

David K Johnson

Pages 1116–1117

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab033

With the rise of the Polaroid camera in the 1960s and internet sites such as YouPorn and OnlyFans more recently, amateur pornography has given the world of commercial pornography a run for its money. Lisa Sigel’s new book The People’s Porn persuasively argues that non-commercial erotica has a much longer history. She offers an historical overview of the world of homemade pornographic objects and images starting in the early 19th century and analyzes their complex relationship to the burgeoning world of American consumer culture.

“Instead of looking at what people bought from printers, we should turn away from commercial products and look at what people made—out of wood, metal, bone, and paper,” she argues (22). So she looks at 19th century scrimshaw with images of men and women copulating, Indian Head pennies altered to read “one cunt” instead of “one cent,” and carved wooden “man-in-a-barrel” phallic figurines. And given that the book is lavishly illustrated with over 90 images, the reader gets to look, too. Indeed, the volume sometimes looks and feels like an exhibition catalogue.

Histories of a Radical Book: E. P. Thompson and the Making of the English Working Class. Edited by Antoinette Burton and Stephanie Fortado

Rudi Batzell

Pages 1118–1120

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab046

This slim yet thought-provoking volume collects essays on the complex of resonances, silences, and inspirations arising from E. P. Thompson’s epic The Making of the English Working Class. Published in 1963, Thompson’s The Making was a towering historiographical landmark. The book, and more so its preface on class formation as a historical process fashioned by workers themselves, served as a touchstone for labor and social history in Britain, the United States, and beyond. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of The Making’s publication, this essay collection grew from a symposium in 2013 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A new preface for 2021 situates the volume in the aftermath of the #BlackLivesMatter uprisings of the past summer. The editors, Antoinette Burton and Stephanie Fortado, offer the hope that both “big books,” like Thompson’s Making, and small ones, like this set of reflections, might “still be capable of illuminating geographies of solidarity” (x). The breadth, variety, and quality of the eight essays is impressive.