SPECIAL SECTION: ARGUING WITH DIGITAL HISTORIES

Arguing with Digital History: Patterns of Historical Interpretation

Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen

Pages 1005–1022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab015

Digital history has only rarely created interpretative or argumentative scholarship that contributes back to disciplinary understandings of the past. The reasons for this are varied: digital historians have often preferred to create scholarship for public audiences, or they have pursued forms of scholarship which do not lend themselves to explicit interpretation. But we contend that digital historians have not had sufficient models of patterns of historical argumentation compatible with digital historical research. In this introduction, we read the articles by Rachel Midura and Leonardo Barleta that appear in this special section, and a series of other articles, in order to show the patterns of historical argumentation that digital historians can pursue. A companion website features versions of the articles by Midura and Barleta, as well as eight additional previously published articles, annotated by their authors to highlight how they developed their historical arguments so they can serve as models for argumentative digital history.

Itinerating Europe: Early Modern Spatial Networks in Printed Itineraries, 1545–1700

Rachel Midura

Pages 1023–1063, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab011

Before the advent of formal cartography, with its emphasis on observation and accuracy and its reliance on global standards, the itinerary was the height of geographic knowledge. These lists of cities and their relative distances, represented by many national "miles" or the location of postal waystations, opened European travel to a broad readership. This article traces the repetition and modification of route headings across a newly comprehensive bibliography of eighty-five itinerary books printed from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. The application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) models the organizing logic of the itinerary genre and hierarchization of regions, cities, and routes. Digital methods prove to be key for moving between scales of consideration, from following the fate of one city, to many linked cities, to entire regions or the network as a whole. While the pilgrimage path of St. James and transalpine commercial routes were widely republished, dynamic networks based on the dates of first and last publication indicate the influence of new postal hubs, sea travel, and borders on early modern conceptions of a connected Europe. Instead of a sharp break brought by the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), the 1620s saw the extension and diversification of routes, while the 1680s marked their curtailment. State-patronized cartography reshaped the genre, as authors and publishers increasingly incorporated maps into itinerary book production.

Spatial Genealogies: Mobility, Settlement, and Empire-Building in the Brazilian Backlands, 1650–1800

Leonardo Barleta

Pages 1064–1090, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab006

This study examines the territorial expansion of Portuguese colonization in South America by analyzing the spatial practices of Luso-Brazilian families in the captaincy of São Paulo, Brazil during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the 1690s, successive discoveries of mineral wealth lured thousands of colonists to scattered settlements in the interior of the continent, challenging the long-established maritime orientation of the Portuguese empire. Given obstacles posed by distance and lack of infrastructure as well as the near absence of formal institutions, this study asks how the Portuguese extended the occupation into the backlands and what mechanisms enabled the integration of these new pockets of settlement into the rest of the empire. It combines different computational methods, such as text mining, data modeling and analysis, and digital mapping to examine a large corpus of genealogical writings about prominent families of colonial São Paulo, reconstituting patterns of geographic mobility of more than 3,000 individuals. These patterns indicate that mobility was shaped by family ties, which allowed colonists to marshal resources, share geographic knowledge, and forge alliances for travel and exploration. Because kinship was an enduring form of social relationship, it provided lasting linkages that connected distant settlements to the consolidated areas of occupation and gave a sense of spatial cohesion that sustained the empire inland.

ARTICLES

"A Very Bad Presidente in the House": Workhouse Masters, Care, and Discipline in the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse

Susannah Ottaway

Pages 1091–1119, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa016

Although they linger in historical memory as "Pauper Bastilles," in the long eighteenth century, English workhouses functioned in many ways as institutions of care, as well as places of discipline. This article uses an unusual set of source materials—including a Master's Query Book—to examine the nature of workhouse discipline in the Leeds township workhouse in the mid-eighteenth century. A close analysis of this remarkable source allows us a clear view of both the structures of authority and the agency of poor inmates in this institution. Poor Law officials monitored material conditions in the workhouse—the provision of food, clothing, and medical care—with great attentiveness, ensuring inmates were kept in good health, while leaving records that reveal intensive surveillance of the material objects inside the house. The workhouse committee also, however, kept an eagle eye on the workhouse master, allowing inmates a direct line of complaint. Workhouse inmates responded to these conditions by vigorously resisting rules that restricted their freedom of movement inside and outside the institution. Masters in such institutions were intermediaries between parish governors and the poor, rather than "technicians of discipline." At the same time, workhouse records show that children were far more vulnerable, subjected to discipline at the discretion of master and mistress; we must disaggregate their experiences from the general population of inmates. These findings conform well to a widening strand in the historiography that reveals Old Poor Law workhouses as complex, hybrid institutions.

The Rural Woman Enters the Frame: A Visual History of Gender, Nation, and the Goodbye Mate in the Postcolonial Río de la Plata

Rebekah E Pite

Pages 1120–1159, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa021

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the image of a rural woman handing a gaucho on horseback a drink before he trotted away began to circulate with increasing frequency in the Río de la Plata region. The drink the woman passed the man was the local infusion yerba mate, and, in earlier illustrations, it had been served by another man. This gendered shift occurred alongside a dramatic expansion of common peoples' access to images via photographs and postcards. Tracing the social and visual history of the goodbye mate ritual from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth reveals the quotidian manner in which locals in this region constructed, consumed, and circulated overlapping visions of their nations. As the gaucho become a popular and contested national symbol in Argentina and Uruguay alike, the rural woman (then referred to as la china, but now largely unnamed) became a local one whose faithfulness to the gaucho and, by extension, the nation, was coveted by men across the sociopolitical divide. This article is, on the one hand, a microhistory of the goodbye mate ritual and, on the other, an argument about how centering visual sources and marginal figures, like the china, allows us to better understand the historical and hierarchical construction of national identities and icons.

The Indian Doctress in the Nineteenth-Century United States: Race, Medicine, and Labor

Angela Pulley Hudson

Pages 1160–1187, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa022

This article addresses the robust market in "Indian medicine" that flourished in the nineteenth century—partly due to the influence of urbanization, industrialization, and new technologies of print—and the specific roles that Indian doctresses played in that phenomenon. Indian doctresses in the United States operated at the intersection of cultural values and beliefs regarding womanhood, medicine, and American Indians. Not all of these women were of Native ancestry, but they all mobilized widespread ideas about Native peoples while seeking entrepreneurial success as healers. Using print culture, the author analyzes strategies employed by women who worked as Indian doctresses and patterns of reactions to their efforts. By combining profiles of women who worked as Indian doctresses with popular but not always positive representations of the type, the article offers a kind of composite biography of an occupation. Women from a wide variety of backgrounds fused caregiving skills with popular assumptions—particularly those involving "indigenous anti-modernity"—to make a living. In this way, Indian doctresses also became useful symbolic figures upon whom changing conceptions of race, gender, and class could be projected and debated. The author thus aims to shed new light not only on histories of American medicine but also on the labors of American women and the business of Indian representation during the nineteenth century.

Louise Spieker Rankin's Global Souths: An American Cookbook for India and Culinary Imperialism

Tanfer Emin Tunc

Pages 1188–1212, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa024

In 1933, Louise Spieker Rankin published the first edition of An American Cookbook for India, a recipe and household manual for American women who, like herself, found themselves living as expatriates in India with little or no prior knowledge of domestic life in subcontinental Asia. While Rankin's cookbook builds upon the preexisting body of Anglo-Indian colonial cookbooks produced by the women of the British Raj, what renders the second edition of An American Cookbook for India (published in 1944) worthy of examination is how it connects one global south—Rankin's homeland of the American South—to another, South Asia. In Rankin's network of global souths, the troubling legacy of American slavery and domestic servitude by people of color are superimposed onto India through an extension of U.S. imperialism—in this case, through a complicated form of culinary imperialism in which male Indian cooks continue the work of the "mammies" of the "Old South" by replicating nostalgic southern recipes and perpetuating white supremacy. As I contend, a significant part of this gendered, racist, imperialist project is also the elision, or at best selective representation, of two wars—the American Civil War and World War II—which are eclipsed by the mythmaking that accompanies An American Cookbook for India.

"Justice Is Something That Is Unheard of for the Average Negro": Racial Disparities in New Orleans Criminal Justice, 1920–1945

Jeffrey S Adler

Pages 1213–1231, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa013

Historians of race relations and criminal justice have emphasized the ways in which the rule of law emerged as a mechanism of racial control in the early twentieth-century South, gradually supplanting rough justice. This essay examines the protracted, uneven pace of this transformation and the development of Jim Crow criminal justice in New Orleans. An analysis of the adjudication of homicide cases in New Orleans between 1920 and 1945 reveals that the majority of black-on-white homicides did not result in convictions, and only a small minority of African Americans suspected—or even convicted—of interracial murder went to the gallows. But racial disparities in convictions and executions widened dramatically during the interwar era. Thus, this essay analyzes the social, cultural, and legal shifts that expanded race-based differentials in criminal justice. It also argues that, ironically, Jim Crow prescriptions intensified white fears of African American crime and helped to generate the anxieties that legal measures were imposed to address, increasing racial disparities and making racial biases in criminal justice self-perpetuating.

REVIEWS

A Diné History of Navajoland. By Klara Kelley and Harris Francis

Neil Dodge

Pages 1232–1233, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa033

A Diné History of Navajoland is part of a long chain of scholarly interest on Diné. Scholars Klara Kelley and Harris Francis provide a deeper, more community-focused view of Diné and their struggles to remain tied to their homeland than is present in much of the literature. As such, this book is intended for Diné, young and old. In eleven well-written but not well-connected chapters, Kelley and Francis center the Diné view: "We don't own the land; the land owns us."

The introduction lays out the symbiotic relationship of both oral history and indigenous sovereignty in holding a nation together. Kelley and Francis come out swinging in chapter one by challenging the established narrative that Diné were late arrivals to the Southwest. For instance, they argue that people and cultures change through time rather than remain static. The languages and material culture of Diné studied by archeologists may not be the same as Diné of the distant past. With a combination of archeological uncertainty and Diné oral traditions, Kelley and Francis set up a convincing framework for subsequent chapters. In chapters two and three, the authors utilize oral traditions, ceremonial knowledge, and Diné verbal maps to make a convincing case for the long residence of the people in the Southwest. Most effective is the explanation about place names and their significance in past generations of Diné finding their way through these ancient markers. Chapter four requires a careful read as Kelley and Francis lay out the close ties between ancestral Pueblos and Diné. The case they make is for ethnogenesis through ceremonial cycles and the inclusion of distinct peoples (104). Chapter five covers a wide stretch of time from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century and serves as a connector from the ancient past to history recorded in documents from the Spanish, Mexican, and later U.S. governments.

Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean. By Laurent Dubois and Richard Lee Turits

Anasa Hicks

Pages 1234–1235, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa034

Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean envisions the history of the Caribbean from the ground up. The struggle between the plantation and the counter-plantation animates Laurent Dubois' and Richard Lee Turits' lively narrative of the region, from pre-Columbian encounter to the twentieth century. Historians and anthropologists have long asserted that the Caribbean is where the plantation system, defined by ruthless land exploitation and the use of enslaved people as the dominant labor force, found its fullest and most lucrative expression. Dubois and Turits interrogate the advent and consequences of the plantation and what they call the counter-plantation: the alternative relationships to land that people across the Caribbean imagined and executed both during and after slavery.

It might seem obvious that the question of land and what to do with it has been central to Caribbean history, but the assertion yields refreshing perspectives and a useful methodological intervention. One singular story of the Caribbean is difficult to tell: Should one focus on the Spanish, French, English, or Dutch Caribbean? How much to talk about the indigenous populations of the islands? Are we interested in islands that became independent in the nineteenth century, or the islands that remain tied to metropoles even today? But by focusing on land and land rights, Freedom Roots tells a straightforward and easy-to-follow history of the Caribbean that doesn't sacrifice theoretical sophistication.

Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay. By William Garrett Acree, Jr

Matthew B Karush

Pages 1236–1238, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa031

At the end of the nineteenth century, among the most popular entertainments in the cities and towns of the Río de la Plata region of South America were "creole dramas" that narrated the exploits of courageous gaucho heroes forced into lives of violent criminality by an oppressive state. In his engaging analysis of this genre, its origins and its impact, William Acree has decisively expanded our understanding of a key moment in the cultural history of Argentina and Uruguay.

Acree is hardly the first scholar to examine the popular culture that emerged around the figure of the gaucho. Adolfo Prieto's pioneering 1988 study of the chapbook literature of late-nineteenth-century Argentina established the cultural and political significance of what he called criollista discourse. Acree accepts the broad outlines of Prieto's analysis: by celebrating rural, anti-modern heroes at a moment of rapid modernization, gaucho stories provided recent migrants to the cities with a comforting nostalgia, gave immigrants the means to assimilate into their new nation, and enabled elites to craft a self-serving cultural nationalism. However, by moving the focus from literature to theatre and by adopting a transnational frame, Acree has generated a series of powerful insights and pushed the study of criollismo in productive, new directions.

Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City. By John Henderson

Marina Inì

Pages 1239–1240, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab007

Plague outbreaks have often produced substantial documentation leaving the historian with the dilemma of which method to use to approach the sources. John Henderson's Florence Under Siege, which analyses the plague outbreak in Florence between 1630 and 1631, magistrally uses both the qualitative and quantitative approach in providing an interdisciplinary and comprehensive account of the outbreak. Indeed, the sources left by the Florentine Government are especially well suited for both purposes. On the one hand, John Henderson employs part of the sources to reconstruct the demographic impact of the plague, focusing above all on mortality in the urban context. On the other, more descriptive sources such as correspondence, reports and the accounts written by contemporaries are used to reconstruct how the city reacted to plague in its quotidian life.

Part I of the book focuses on the measures undertaken by the Health Office and their impact on the city, while Part II analyses different themes associated with the everyday life of the city during the plague: religion, life inside isolation hospitals, and the experience of those left in the city. A useful preliminary chapter summarises the historiography of plague and plague studies, situating the book among the latest approaches and publications on the subject. Chapter 2 reconstructs how plague approached Florence and the first measures undertaken to keep the plague at bay. Here, Henderson revises the method and the set of sources used in calculating plague mortality in order to present a more precise set of data. The following chapters, Chapters 3 and 4, analyse the role played by the environment in contemporaries' ideas of plague and contagion focusing on the measures undertaken to control and cure the disease. In particular, Chapter 3 focuses on the well-known association between disease and the poor. The author offers a refreshing reading of attitudes towards the poorest member of society: the poor were indeed faulted in bringing the disease to the city, but the great effort made by charitable institutions in poor relief activities reveals a more ambivalent position. In Chapter 5, Henderson engages fruitfully with the urban space of the city by focusing on the parish of S. Lorenzo to measure the impact of plague and quarantine. By once again using the sources in a quantitative and qualitative way, the author reconstructs the urban context of the parish, underlining the role in the pattern of diffusion of the disease of both the density of the built environment and of the socio-economic structure.

Caribbean New Orleans. Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society. By Cécile Vidal

Pierre Force

Pages 1241–1242, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz122

This book offers a social history of New Orleans, from the foundation of the city by the French in 1718 to the Spanish takeover in 1763. It is a very large, very detailed study, based on a colossal amount of archival work. No other book on the early history of New Orleans approaches the level of depth found in this one. The question of race is at the center of the author's attention, as the single most important organizing principle for social formation. The book puts forward two broad, interrelated claims, supported by a vast amount of archival evidence: 1) the social history of New Orleans should be understood as belonging to Caribbean history rather than continental history; 2) New Orleans became a "slave society" (as opposed to a "society with slaves") much earlier than is usually understood: in many ways, it was conceived and designed to imitate slave societies that had already emerged in other parts of the French and English Caribbean. The fact that New Orleans was founded later than the other cities to which it can be reasonably compared (Kingston, Charleston, Saint-Pierre, Cap-Français…) makes it an interesting case study as a place where a social model that had emerged elsewhere was applied deliberately and consistently. The claim that New Orleans history belongs in Caribbean history is meant to counter a distinction often found in the historiography between two models of race and slavery: a continental one, understood to be rigid, and a Caribbean one, presumed to be more fluid, among other things because a class of free blacks stood between whites and enslaved people. Ultimately, the author argues, in spite of local variations, there was a great deal of continuity in the organization of slave societies across the Americas.

Speaking with the Dead in Early America. By Erik R. Seeman

Emily Suzanne Clark

Pages 1243–1245, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa026

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America historian Erik R. Seeman offers a compelling story of religious life with, of, and for the dead. What began as a quest to tell the prehistory of séance Spiritualism prompted the realization that communication with the dead was very much alive in Atlantic World Protestantism, especially the northern colonies of British North America. When so many primary sources centered on the importance of sustaining relationships with the dead, it became clear to Seeman that he was doing more than contextualizing the origin of American Spiritualism. Instead his research revealed the vast network of practices and ideas that Spiritualism grew among; in short, it's much bigger than Spiritualism.

From gravestone epitaphs to Gothic fiction to mourning jewelry and more, Seeman's book emphasizes the importance of maintaining connection with the dead for American Protestants. Protestants might seem an odd choice at first for some readers, but Seeman efficiently and elegantly unpacks "Protestantism as a religion in which the dead are important figures" (8). To help make this case for the significance of Protestant engagement with the dead, Seeman utilizes Robert Orsi's emphasis on "presence" in the study of Catholicism. Presence argues that religious people understand themselves as part of a rich religious community that includes unseen actors, invisible forces, and extra-human beings. While much of the historiography on Protestantism understands it to be a religion of absence, Seeman centers these attempts to converse with the dead and reveals the deeper complexity of lived Protestantism. Seeman is not alone in using presence to explore Protestantism; Brett Grainger's recent book on nature, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2019), also employed Orsi's idea. This is a smart, historical move that helps us better understand the religious lives of American Protestants and it is good to see historians of Protestantism take it more seriously. Catholics are not the only American Christians who see the world as a network of human and suprahuman spiritual entities, and this focus on Protestant interactions with the dead proves that.

"The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret": George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon. By Mary V. Thompson

Michael Dickinson

Pages 1246–1247, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz124

In The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret, Mary V. Thompson challenges the reader to see George Washington and the world of Mount Vernon through the eyes of the captives who made his wealth possible. The author uses Washington's correspondence, ledgers, and visitor descriptions along with the material culture of the site to tell the complex story of Washington and his enslaved workforce. Through this analysis, Thompson argues that "The story of Mount Vernon cannot, therefore, be told properly without also telling the story of the many people who worked on this site" (10). Consequently, the text investigates a well-known figure, a captive community, and the built environment of Mt. Vernon upon which slavery reigned.

Thompson's interest in Washington's enslaved population was inspired by her own work and experiences as a research historian at Mount Vernon. Confronted with inquiries about the war-hero's assumed benevolence as a slaveholder—many of them riddled with problematic phrasing—and long challenged by visitors thirsty for ways to qualify his slaveholding past, the author decided to take this aspect of Washington's life head-on. But Thompson makes clear that her goal is not merely to examine this troubling element of Washington's life. Instead Thompson sees within Washington the unreconciled legacy of American slavery. In Washington, therefore, one is forced to envision both a talented leader and a national contradiction which continues to haunt the American consciousness. Since her work has been vital to recent efforts at Mt. Vernon to discuss slavery more openly with visitors, she is ideally suited to this larger task of historical reconciliation at the heart of the project.

A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation. By Beth Barton Schweiger

Christopher Hanlon

Pages 1248–1250, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa017

In A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation, Beth Barton Schweiger documents the experience of two antebellum families living in the Blue Ridge Mountains, focusing particularly on journals left by four daughters who describe their various interactions with print: the textbooks that taught them to read and to write as well as the songbooks, stories, novels, periodicals, tracts, and other printed materials that entered their lives and shaped their patterns of thought and expression. Amanda and Betsy Cooley, who lived on Coal Creek in Carroll County, Virginia, and Jennie and Ann Speers, who lived at Providence in Yadkin County, North Carolina, provide Schweiger with "a preliminary bibliography" (x) from which she spirals outward to ruminate over larger swaths of antebellum southerners and their dealings with print. Either through their own reading or in conversation or in song with others who read, antebellum southern rurals were influenced profoundly by a proliferating print culture in which texts circulated in myriad, often unauthorized, ways.

Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. By Andrew Israel Ross

Jeffrey Merrick

Pages 1251–1253, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa019

Early modern clergy and jurists instructed French subjects to channel their desires and control their bodies for the purpose of procreation within marriage and stigmatized other sorts of sexual activity, including prostitution and sodomy. Local officials and royal officers never enforced these prescriptions as consistently and rigorously as sermons and statutes suggest. By the eighteenth century the recently organized police of the capital generally allowed Parisians to do as they pleased in private places unless neighbors complained about scandalous misconduct. At the same time they arrested thousands of women for selling sex to men and men for seeking sex with men in public spaces. From the Regency onward they discussed solicitation in secular, not religious, language and attempted to manage, not erase, such problems through surveillance and detention. Some offenders of both sexes ended up in the provinces or the colonies, but few sodomites (or pederasts, after midcentury) ended up in the Place de Grève. As these retrospective observations suggest, some of the patterns and issues that Andrew Ross addresses in his insightful and instructive book are rooted in the preceding century: appropriation of the urban landscape by women and men in search of profit or pleasure, cultivation of less visible and troublesome types of sexual commerce and networks throughout the city, tensions and changes in administrative operations intended to limit illicit sexuality without extinguishing or publicizing it.

Mettray: A History of France's Most Venerated Carceral Institution. By Stephen A. Toth

Julia M Gossard

Pages 1254–1255, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa027

Mettray is a familiar name to those acquainted with Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Foucault places the "birth" of the modern carceral system at the opening of Mettray in 1840. Despite the juvenile detention center's important place in the history of incarceration, Stephen Toth's Mettray: A History of France's Most Venerated Carceral Institution is the first work to extensively study the prison. But, Toth's Mettray is far from just an institutional history. Instead, Toth provides an analysis of both the incarcerators and the imprisoned, shedding light on the understudied policies and practices inside this famous facility.

As Toth states in his conclusion, a key goal of his book is to "confer agency on Mettray's young colons" in order to provide "a counterweight to Foucault who was never particularly interested in how historical actors impede and complicate presumptions of institutional power" (195). Through extensive archival research, Toth supplies the people, the events, and individual perspectives that Foucault's studies lack. Mettray provides unique insight into the experiences, lives, and decisions of juvenile delinquents over the course of the nineteenth century. Divided into six thematic and chronological chapters, Toth explores the types of labor convicts performed, the changing and varied understandings of masculinity that existed within the institution, and the nineteenth-century's attention to rehabilitation, especially of youths and adolescents.

Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860-1968. By Eloise Moss

Mark Roodhouse

Pages 1256–1258, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa018

Between 1861 and 1968, English criminal law defined burglary as the act of breaking into, or out of, someone's home between 9 pm and 6 am to commit a felony or with the intention of doing so. "Cracking a crib" in criminal argot was one of three "breaking" offenses: the other two being sacrilege and housebreaking. There was also a related category of offenses akin to burglary such as being found by night armed or in possession of housebreaking implements. English law retained these distinctions, restated in 1916, until 1968 when burglary expanded to include sacrilege and housebreaking. Of the three types of breaking, housebreaking was by far the most common as it embraced breaking into any building, day or night. The number of statutory housebreaking offenses was so large that police distinguished between housebreaking as burglary's daytime corollary, and a catch-all category of shopbreaking that encompassed breaking into all non-residential properties aside from churches. Unsurprisingly, housebreaking and shopbreaking were the London detective's chief concerns throughout the period.

Making an Urban Public: Popular Claims to the City in Mexico, 1879-1932. By Christina M. Jiménez

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

Pages 1259–1261, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz125

Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines. By Andrew J. Rotter

Daniel Immerwahr

Pages 1262–1264, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa010

Before William Howard Taft became the president of the United States or the chief justice of its Supreme Court, he was the governor of its largest colony, the Philippines. As the first U.S. civilian governor, Taft's thoughts were of great consequence. Would he support independence? Build roads? Make war in the provinces?

Taft had views on such matters, but it appears his mind was often elsewhere. He suffered from tropical sores and a rectal abscess, both aggravated by the rubbing of his heavy clothes in a hot and humid climate. Rubbing became an idée fixe for the future president. The local cloth, he complained, felt "like a coat of armor" and was unsuitable for white people (197). Instead, he ordered from Cincinnati drawers woven of Egyptian cotton, whose "soft finish," he hoped, would not abrade his long-suffering undercarriage (202).

Historians have chuckled at Taft's agonies, usually dismissing them as background. Yet for the whites who made their way to the Philippines and India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sensations were fully foregrounded. Colonizers wrote constantly about the scents, sights, sounds, tastes, and touches of Asia. Andrew Rotter's creative new book insists we take such sensations seriously. Empire was never just an abstract matter of economics and strategy, he argues. It was an intimate, embodied experience: the tantalizing glimpse of a half-clothed body or the exasperating chafing of a garment.

Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women's Rights After the First World War. By Mona Siegel

Megan Threlkeld

Pages 1265–1266, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa032

Peace on Our Terms is an ambitious effort to take a global snapshot of a watershed moment in world history: the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. This is hardly uncharted territory, but Siegel takes a novel approach. She wants to know what the conference looked like from the perspective of women's rights activists around the world, both those who were in Paris and those who were watching from afar. To that end, she has composed six chapters that proceed chronologically throughout that year, each of which centers on a particular woman or pair of women. Siegel's narrative travels from Paris to Egypt to Zurich to China to Washington, DC to Rome, with frequent returns to Paris. The main strengths of the book are Siegel's biographical portraits in each chapter and her innovation in putting all these stories side by side. Siegel has researched her subjects extensively, and that work shows in the rich detail she provides about these women's lives, their work, and their hopes for a better future.

Debating Women's Citizenship in India, 1930-1960. By Annie Devenish

Rosalind Parr

Pages 1267–1268, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa025

Predominantly, histories of Indian women's activism focus on the colonial context or, alternatively, consider the later decades of the twentieth century. Debating Women's Citizenship joins an emerging body of scholarship that shifts attention to the intervening decades, a period of flux during which India transitioned from colony to independent state. Foregrounding the interventions of women activists in defining and practising citizenship in modern India, this extensively researched book is a useful addition to this work. It demonstrates that the vibrancy associated with the late colonial women's movement did not, as is sometimes assumed, give way to years of post-colonial complacency. Rather, activist women continued to engage with the knotty political and socio-economic issues that determined women's roles and their status in society.

The relative importance of discourse and collective or individual agency in shaping women's lives is a central question in the historiography of gender in South Asia. In this book, Annie Devenish directs our attention to the ways a generation of women themselves shaped conceptions of gender by inscribing a specific set of meanings to postcolonial citizenship. The book is presented as a group biography, which enables the author to deploy the category of ‘woman' without oversimplifying. Devenish is alert to the intersecting categories of class and caste as well as to the range of women's perspectives that informed public debate. The production of gender discourse is thus revealed as a constant process of debate and renegotiation to which activist women made important contributions.

Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua. By Claudia Rueda

Carla Irina Villanueva

Pages 1269–1270, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa028

Students of Revolution is a history of student movements in Nicaragua during the Somoza era (1937-1979). Claudia Rueda takes a chronological approach, from the 1930s to the 1970s, to recount various phases of student activism in Nicaragua. In proposing a long time frame, Rueda pushes back on the "sixties" periodization to understand Nicaragua student protest. Her sources include newspapers, student records such as flyers and publications, United States and Nicaragua government documents, and interviews. Rueda studies a group of educational institutions, with primary attention to the National University in Leon. Rueda's main concern is discerning the changing factors that drove students to engage in political activism or mobilization, who they organized against, and what tactics they used in their fight. Rueda argues that "young people in the university, and in their society, relied on an understanding of student exceptionalism to both legitimize and protect their political activities" (8). As in other parts of Latin America, the National University's autonomy from the government of Nicaragua was a treasured characteristic, which did not necessarily protect students or the university from authoritarian violence. Rueda prioritizes the participation of women within the narrative, especially beginning in the late 1950s when the percentage of women students increased.

Democracy's Capital: Black Political Struggles in the Nation's Capital in the 1960s and 1970s. By Lauren Pearlman

Mary-Elizabeth Murphy

Pages 1271–1273, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa035

In Democracy's Capital: Black Politics Struggles in the Nation's Capital in the 1960s and 1970s, Lauren Pearlman analyzes how black leaders worked to enact their visions of racial justice in Washington, DC. The struggle for democracy in the nation's capital was always elusive because Congress, not its residents, formed the local government by the nineteenth century. And for black citizens, residency in DC held an added burden because white politicians routinely exploited the city's black population to score conservative political victories. In this new and timely political history, Pearlman documents how these local-national tensions played out in the nation's capital during the era of Civil Rights and Black Power. Drawing on oral histories, newspapers, organizational papers, and federal records, Perlman's book offers a welcome contribution to the historiography of Washington, DC and the history of public policy.

Pearlman traces the transition from "black protest" to "black power" at the local level during the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. By the mid 1960s, the black freedom struggle, both in Washington and across the country, was at a crossroads, as many activists were recognizing the limitations of an integrationist, civil rights approach and pressing for Black Power, marked by self-determination and more sweeping government programs and social services to address the structural impacts of racism. In Washington, DC, activists, especially black women at the grassroots level, were waging a War on Poverty through welfare rights activism and the housing movement. But DC's male leaders, including Marion Berry and Julius Hobson, contended that the restoration of local government was essential for activists to achieve any sort of racial progress in DC. President Johnson responded to this movement in 1967 by creating a beginning plan for Home Rule, which, in theory, would have given black Washingtonians more political power and a voice in local decision making. But Pearlman argues that in practice, federal officials and the city's white powerbrokers seized on Johnson's Home Rule plan to limit black self-determination in this majority black city. A powerful community of white powerbrokers, based in neighborhoods, businesses, politics, and the press, including Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, distrusted black politicians and activists and paternalistically used their clout to severely circumscribe the transformative possibilities of black political power in the nation's capital. With the appointment of commissioner-mayor Walter E. Washington in 1967 and the attendant majority-black city council, black activists in DC faced a wrenching choice: work within the narrow confines of this weak government, or continue to allow Congress to govern their city as a form of colonial rule. Activists selected the former, and spent the next decade putting pressure on the local government to enact their agenda of racial justice against powerful white forces.

Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory. By Long T. Bui

Heather Marie Stur

Pages 1274–1275, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa002

Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City. By A.K. Sandoval-Strausz

Lori A Flores

Pages 1276–1278, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa023

During the latter half of the twentieth century, American cities were thought to be in crisis. This decline, argues A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, was the real result of "population loss, economic decline, fiscal crisis, rising crime, and the racialization of all of the above" (8). As manufacturing and retailing left urban spaces, city governments raised taxes to maintain schools, sanitation, and safety services. Consequently, tens of millions of people fled to the suburbs.

Contrary to other scholars, Sandoval-Strausz does not believe the "creative class" (a mix of white-collar, intellectual, and artistic workers) was responsible for an urban renaissance. Rather, he argues that 25 million citizen and migrant Latinos played an "indispensable role" in reviving and transforming American cities by moving into them at a time of decline (11). Despite poverty, discrimination, and ever-changing immigration policies, Latinos reenergized urban communities with their capital and cultures. Moreover, their essential labor in sectors like construction, restaurants, and childcare greatly eased the lives of the creative class when they arrived to gentrify. Sandoval-Strausz performs two case studies of Chicago's South Lawndale community and Dallas's Oak Cliff neighborhood which represent "the nation's two main urban regions: the industrial North…and the Sunbelt" (11).