bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
L'Évolution des structures de l'enseignement universitaire spécialisé de santé publique au Québec: 1899–1970
Authors: Desrosiers Georges , Gaumer Benoit , Keel Othmar
Published: December 2016

L'enseignement universitaire spécialisé de santé publique (distinct de l'enseignement de santé publique donné dans les formations générales de base aux médecins et infirmières) a commencé au Québec en 1899. Les auteurs étudient les structures d'organisation qui lui ont servi de cadre jusqu'en 1970, date qui a 6té le point de départ de changements radicaux dans ces structures, puisqu'on a aboli l'école spécialisée de santé publique et qu'on a intégré son enseignement dans les facultés de médecine et de sciences infirmières. Les auteurs commencent par présenter l'hypothèse qu'ils ont formulée pour comprendre la naissance de cet enseignement et les transformations intervenues durant la période. Ils avancent l'idée que les institutions de formation dans le domaine de l'enseignement spécialisé de santé publique sont liées beaucoup plus directement aux pratiques effectives de santé publique du moment, vaccination, éducation sanitaire, et à l'utilité que la société leur reconnaît qu'à une dynamique interne du système d'enseignement universitaire médical. Elles sont donc dépendantes dans leurs transformations historiques surtout de déterminants externes dont il faut cerner et mesurer les effets. Dans un deuxième temps, les auteurs présentent une typologie des organismes qui ont eu la responsabilité de cet enseignement ainsi que des programmes offerts et des catégories de professionnels qui ont été formés. Dans un troisième temps, I ils étudient les différentes étapes des transformations intervenues et en analysent les facteurs déterminants à partir de l'hypothèse formulée au départ.
The Paterson Lecture, 1989 — Les Hopitaux de Paris aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles
Authors: Biraben Jean-Noël
Published: December 2016

Cet article s’intéresse à la naissance des hôpitaux de Paris aux XVIIème et XVIIIème siècles. L'institution de l'hôpital, inconnue pendant l'Antiquité, était essentiellement le produit de la charité chrétienne. Bien que les premiers hôpitaux de Paris remontent au début du Moyen Age, le XVIIème siècle fut particulièrement riche, non seulement en ce qui concerne la création de nouveaux hôpitaux, mais également pour la reconstruction d’hôpitaux plus anciens. Fruits d’actes de charité, ces hôpitaux ne se réclamaient pas de la médecine officielle. Les hôpitaux servirent le double rôle d'institution donneur de soins et de lutte contre la pauvreté et la clochardisation. En1657, la mendicité fut interdite. Les mendiants furent internés dans le système hospitalier général pour des raisons l'hygiène et par soucis philanthropiques. Dans la première moitié du siècle, les administrateurs cherchaient à mettre de l'ordre dans le système en séparant les différentes catégories de personnes internées. Cette tâche devait être complétée par des médecins et des administrateurs dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIème siècle en utilisant les catégories de la médecine clinique.
Guest Editorial—How Can University Presses Publish Canadian Medical History?
Authors: Spaulding William B
Published: December 2016

In the course of writing an essay reviewing three books on Canadian medical history for this journal (see CBMH, 6 [1989]: 179–83), I noticed something odd. In each book the authors described historical aspects of their own medical school. Each alma mater endorsed its home town book. And each of the three alma maters had a university press. Yet none of the books had been published by its home press. Here is a striking illustration of the current weakness of university presses and one reason why few worthwhile books on Canadian medical history are published. How can the situation be changed to allow at least some university presses to fulfill an obligation to publish scholarly work—even of novice writers—without having to make a profit on each book? How can writers of Canadian medical history be helped to get their works into print? For in this early stage of scholarship in our embryonic subject, authors—and Canadian medical history itself—need all the help imaginable to enrich and publicize the field. After proposing that more books need to be produced, I shall suggest ways writers could be encouraged to get them published and to have the final product improved.
Medical and Related Museums, Historic Sites, and Exhibits in Ontario: An Annotated Guide and Review
Authors: Connor J.T.H , Connor Jennifer J
Published: December 2016

The artifacts of medicine and other health-care practices offer an important source material for historians. Scholarly study of medical technology, such as surgical instruments, can often augment our knowledge of health-care practices in ways that are not possible with traditional textual sources; such study can also contribute to our understanding of larger issues in the history of technology in general. To undertake scholarly analyses requires collections of artifacts representing as wide a cross-section of health-care practices as possible. Fortunately, through the foresight of some historical institutions around the world collections are available for study. Similarly, owing to the energies of connoisseurs, who collect medical artifacts for their aesthetic or antique value, many private collections have also developed. As well, defining artifacts broadly to include physical structures or historical sites expands the range of material available for analysis.
Cameron's Search for a Cure
Authors: Griffin J.D.M
Published: December 2016

In a recent issue of the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Dr. Robert A. Cleghorn has described the background, the personality, and the treatment programs of the late Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. Dr. Cleghorn, a member of Cameron's senior staff, succeeded him in 1964 as head of the McGill Department of Psychiatry and chief of the Allan Memorial Institute (AMI). There is no need therefore to expand further on this subject except to mention briefly the four books published in 1987-88 which provide more details about some of the individual patients who were involved as well as additional anecdotal material about Cameron himself and a great deal of information about the role played by the U.S. and Canadian governments in supporting Cameron's research.
The Celebrated Abortion Trial of Dr. Emily Stowe, Toronto, 1879
Authors: Backhouse Constance B
Published: December 2016

Emily Howard Stowe is generally recognized as the first white Canadian woman to practise medicine in Canada. Less is known about her role as one of the first doctors to be tried for attempting to procure an abortion in nineteenth-century Canada. That she was the target of a well-publicized prosecution in Toronto in 1879 was no accident, however, for her stature as a feminist activist made her a focal point for unprecedented medical and legal scrutiny. This article explores the details of her role in both the initial coroner's inquest and subsequent trial, placing them in the context of prevailing feminist, social and professional ideologies.
Advice to Parents: The Blue Books, Helen MacMurchy, MD, and the Federal Department of Health, 1920–34
Authors: Dodd Dianne
Published: December 2016

This examination of the first set of all-Canadian, government-sponsored childcare advice literature, written by Helen MacMurchy as Chief of the Child Welfare Division of the newly formed federal Department of Health in the 1920s, investigates divisions within the public health movement. MacMurchy's conciliatory role in balancing the interests of organized women's groups who promoted improvements in maternal and infant health, and the diverse professional interests who considered infant and maternal health as one aspect of a larger public health program, are reflected in the advice. The resulting contradictions provide insight into the relationship between feminism and professionalism in the 1920s, and between public health and private medicine. This discussion also illustrates the influence of eugenics on public health, with its often contradictory expectations. Canadian mothers were asked to provide the ultimate in childcare to preserve both the physical and mental health of children, to guard their own precious health, and to continue to have large families—despite serious restrictions on accessibility of medical services.
Mahlon William Locke: “Toe-Twister”
Authors: Clow Barbara
Published: December 2016

Mahlon Locke was a Canadian physician who attracted international attention in the 1930s with an unusual therapy. Through a process of foot manipulation, popularly known as "toe-twisting," Locke seemed able to relieve many intractable cases of arthritis as well as a variety of related afflictions. Sufferers flocked to his clinic in Williamsburg, Ontario and, at the height of his fame, he was tending literally hundreds of people each day. Despite this spectacular public reaction, however, Locke is an obscure figure in Canadian history. People who lived through the Great Depression may remember the crowds lining the streets of Williamsburg or the media coverage of the clinic, but later generations are largely unacquainted with this unusual practitioner. One purpose of this paper, then, is simply to recapture and recount his story for the record.

At the same time, Locke represents more than just a curious episode in Canadian history; he inspired strong and divergent opinions and the study of these reactions can help us to understand the social and medical climate of this period. In this discussion, I have focused on the attitudes of Locke's orthodox medical colleagues with particular attention paid to the disparate reactions of physicians in Canada and the United States. Thus, the other aim of this paper is to suggest that, despite shared definitions of health and healing, Canadan and American doctors responded differently to Locke as a result of fundamental differences in the tradition and character of each medical community.
Patent Medicines in Imperial Gemany
Authors: Woycke James
Published: December 2016

Popular remedies have maintained a separate existence in modem medicine, accentuated by industrialism and commercialism which permitted the production and marketing of patent medicines on a vast scale. In Germany one thousand patent medicines were already available by 1871. Advertising was the cornerstone of this success, with products sold in various retail outlets and by mail order. Some offered a universal cure for all illnesses; others targeted specific illnesses, particularly sexual concerns. Although doctors in Germany recommended legalization of "quackery" in 1869, the explosion of patent medicines caused most doctors and pharmacists to seek greater legal control of sales and bans on advertising to protect the public. The federal structure of Germany and the difficulty of treating patent medicines separately from legitimate pharmaceutical products hampered their efforts. As well, popular support for patent medicines stayed high because of a lingering belief in humoral pathology, lower cost and accessibility of patent medicines, and the inability of professional medicine to cure many illnesses, including those causing most anxiety. The extension of health insurance in Germany gradually overcame these obstacles.
“Ignorant of Any Rational Method”: European Assessments of Indigenous Healing Practices in the North American Arctic
Authors: Vanast Walter J
Published: December 2016

By focusing on a single therapy—surgical treatment of headache—this article defines the broad pattern of early white reactions to native healing in the North American Arctic. Many Europeans, particularly those with medical training, denied the value of indigenous surgery. Missionaries, to the contrary, recognized its success, and thought its suppression necessary: "cutting" reinforced native religious concepts by providing an exit for illness-causing spirits. When they could not deny the efficacy of traditional therapy, Europeans resorted to naturalistic explanations. In practice, they realized, there was little difference between indigenous arctic and European surface surgery: both produced bleeding and counterirritation. Native healers, it followed, were unwittingly applying contemporary European treatments; alternatively, they had learned effective procedures through contact with whites. Only very rarely did newcomers incorporate indigenous therapeutic concepts into their treatment of native patients. With few exceptions, Europeans failed to recognize inherent value in traditional northern healing.
The Nagler Case: A Revealing Moment in Red Cross History
Authors: Hutchinson John F
Published: December 2016

This paper uses a legal case as a window through which to observe the important changes in the relationship between the US government and the American Red Cross in the early years of this century. In 1917, the government brought suit under the Espionage Act against Louis Nagler, Assistant Secretary of State for the State of Wisconsin and a German-American follower of progressive Senator Robert La Follette. Nagler's "crime" was that he had been heard to criticize the management of the American Red Cross. Although the government ultimately dropped the case after World War I ended, Nagler's indictment and conviction are, it is argued, evidence of the heavy-handed tactics used to raise funds in the name of patriotism and charity, tactics that were sanctioned if not encouraged by the government. Such an event could have occurred only after the American Red Cross, a late developer in the international Red Cross movement, had been deliberately and explicitly subordinated to the will of the government and the military. This transformation, a conscious imitation of the position and role of the Japanese Red Cross Society, was both sought and directed by military surgeons in the Army Medical Department. Their role in nationalizing and militarizing the Red Cross was virtually ignored by Foster Rhea Dulles, whose The American Red Cross: A History (1950) has remained the standard work on the subject.
The Guru and the Godfather: Henry Sigerist, Hugh MacLean, and the Politics of Health Care Reform in 1940s Canada
Authors: Duffin Jacalyn
Published: December 2016

In September 1944, Henry E. Sigerist (1891-1957), historian of medicine from Johns Hopkins University, conducted a survey of health services in Saskatchewan for Premier T. C. Douglas and his newly elected CCF government. His brief report became the basis for legislation that enacted Canada's first free hospitalization plan. The recommendations seem to have been prompted by Dr. Hugh MacLean (1871-1958), a relatively unknown surgeon who practised in Saskatchewan for over 30 years. MacLean had observed how the economic Depression resulted in inadequate medical care and he became an ardent supporter of “socialized medicine.” Based on interviews with those who witnessed the events and on the personal papers of Sigerist and MacLean, this article explores the contributions of these two physicians to the Canadian health care system.
Les archives médicales de la quarantaine du ministère fédéral de l'agriculture aux Archives nationales du Canada, 1867–1918
Authors: Tétreault Martin
Published: December 2016

Avant la création du ministère fédéral de la santé au Canada en 1919, les questions reliées à la santé publique relevaient du Ministère de l'Agriculture. Pareille juridiction dévolue au Ministère de l’Agriculture étonne à première vue. Le législateur avait également octroyé à ce ministère la responsabilité des brevets d'invention, le droit d'auteur et les marques de commerce, le recensement et les statistiques, l'immigration et l'émigration, et enfin l'Hôpital de marine de Québec et la quarantaine.
Medical Bibliography, Publishing, and Libraries
Authors: Connor Jennifer J
Published: December 2016

The history of medical literature, publishing, and libraries has traditionally played a strong role in the history of medicine, especially in the twentieth century when numerous retrospective guides have supported its study. The most important of these guides, Leslie T. Morton's A Medical bibliography (Garrison and Morton): An Annotated Check List of Texts Illustrating the History of Medicine, has become a classic work used extensively by booksellers, collectors, and others interested in medical literature. Other guides generally supplement “Garrison-Morton” through their much narrower geographical or chronological focus: for example, Francisco Guerra's American Medical Bibliography 1639–1783; Robert Austin’s Early American Medical Imprints 1668–1820; and Francesco Cordasco's American Medical Imprints 1820-1910. Added to these are descriptive catalogues of important library collections such as the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (1880–1961), William Osler's Bibliotheca Osleriana: A Catalogue of Books Illustrating the History of Medicine and Science, and Bibliotheca Walleriana. As well, numerous studies of medical literature have appeared, perhaps the most notable being John L. Thornton's Medical Books, Libraries and Collectors. Both Thornton's book and the Gadson-Morton bibliography have recently been revised and republished in new editions. Another publication, Francesco Cordasco's Medical Publishing in 19th Century America, also merits attention as a recent contribution to the history of medical literature.
The French Navy and the Struggle for Revolutionary Authority: The Mutiny of the Brest Fleet in 1793
Authors: Cormack William S.
Published: December 2016

In September 1793, the French Atlantic fleet mutinied in Quiberon Bay and the sailors demanded to return to Brest in defiance of government orders and their admiral’s authority. Beyond interpretations which emphasize a counter-revolutionary conspiracy or the collapse of discipline, the Quiberon mutiny illustrates a fundamental characteristic of the political situation throughout France. The inherent ambiguity of popular sovereignty created confusion and conflict over the location of legitimate revolutionary authority: was national authority to be identified with executive power and its agents, or was the Will of the Sovereign People to be expressed in the decisions of local administrations or even the direct democracy of sailors? Jeanbon Saint-André and the Committee of Public Safety were justified in linking naval disorder to Brest’s participation in the “Federalist Revolt” against the Convention in the spring and summer of 1793. Yet just as the Revolt is no longer interpreted as a direct reflection of the parliamentary conflict, neither should the navy be seen as divided clearly between partisans of the Montagnards and the “Girondins.” In Brest, as elsewhere, moderate republicans rebelled against revolutionary extremism and justified their resistance as more legitimate than the rule of the purged Convention. The fleet was also torn between political moderates and radical revolutionaries, but the more fundamental cause of the mutiny concerned division over the location of national authority. When the Nation’s Will ceased to be equated with the authority of agents of executive power, the commanding officers, mutiny became unavoidable. The mutiny of the Brest fleet was thus a microcosm of the larger political struggle in 1793 over whether the government of the state should be acknowledged as the only legitimate expression of popular sovereignty.
Aux sources de l’écologie politique: Le personnalisme “gascon” de Bernard Charbonneau et Jacques Ellul
Authors: Roy Christian
Published: December 2016

French personalism is a political philosophy generally associated with the review “Esprit” founded by Emmanuel Mounier in 1932, although another branch is also known, that of the review “L’Ordre Nouveau” (1933-1938). This article identifies a third version, fostered in Southwestern France by Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul in the local groups of the two Paris-based reviews. Working within the framework of the “Amis d’Esprit,” they broke away from it after having failed to turn it into a non-conformist revolutionary movement, closer in many ways to “L’Ordre Nouveau.” Yet this Gascon group differed from both “O.N.” and “Esprit” by being based on a radical critique of technology and industrial society grounded in “feeling for Nature as a revolutionary force,” to quote the title of a 1937 manifesto by Charbonneau, one of many texts where with Ellul he formulated — probably for the first time — a new revolutionary political orientation beyond Right and Left, the outlines of what would decades later come to be known as political ecology. If what Ellul was to develop after the war in his critique of technique was already to be found there, he never hesitated to point to Charbonneau as its true — if unknown — originator, a role this article confirms for him in the history of ideas. It also offers glimpses of the life of the personalist movement outside Paris and of its contacts with Georges Bataille and his circle. It disputes Zeev Sternhell’s thesis linking “1930s non-conformism” (Loubet del Bayle) to Fascism, by showing how the Gascon personalists, by having thoroughly worked out and rigorously applied the original revolutionary implications, were able to foresee the collectivist drift of the more reformist “Esprit” during and after the war, and to warn consistently of all such totalitarian tendencies in mass society.
Perceptions and Realities of the Urban Margin: The Rag Pickers of Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Ratcliffe Barrie M.
Published: December 2016

The urban margin, be it economic or social, spatial or cultural, is difficult for the historian to study because of conceptual and methodological problems, because of the lacunar nature of surviving sources and because much of what we now know about those who were deemed marginal comes to us from the biased discourse of contemporary elites. The purpose of this article is, first, to demonstrate that, despite these manifold difficulties, the margin can be studied and, second, to argue that scholars have been wrong to accord only little attention to the margin which may be crucial for an understanding of urban processes and city life. The medium chosen to make this case are the rag pickers of the Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century. Two kinds of source are interrogated. The one is the pictorial and literary representations of chiffonniers in contemporary elite witness. These are deciphered to show that they reveal less about rag pickers than generally assumed since they are more anthropocentric reflections of bourgeois identities and phantasms than mirrors of the realities of rag picking. The second is serial data on pauperism, crime, public health, violent deaths, and other archival sources, which are used to determine numbers practising the trade, its structure and place in the urban economy, as well as to provide a better understanding of the culture and community of chiffonniers. Three conclusions arc drawn: elite discourse served ends other than representing reality; rag picking, like other trades in the informal sector, was an integral part of the urban economy; chiffonniers, despite low returns in the trade, were able to establish enduring ties of culture and community.
La structure de l’emploi féminin dans une ville en voie d’industrialisation: Tourcoing au XIXe siècle
Authors: Craig Béatrice
Published: December 2016

Little work has been done on the impact of industrialisation on the economic role of women in nineteenth century France and Belgium. The existing literature suggests that it declined as a result of an improvement in the standard of living (Tilly and Scott; Alter), of the disappearance of traditional female jobs (Gullickson), or as a consequence of the introduction of protective legislation at the end of the century (Accampo). In all cases, women who worked did so because the economic well being of their family required their income or their labour. Middle class women are even more neglected; the general assumption is that those women hardly even had an economic role.

This article attempts to broaden our understanding of the process through a case study of a nineteenth century northern French textile city, Tourcoing. In Tourcoing, the economic role of women of all classes declined rapidly in the earliest phase of industrialisation, but remained stable afterwards. There were also little differences between the participation rates of working and middle class women, and self employed women seem to have remained unaffected by the contemporary transformations of the economy.
Educating Child Labourers in France: The Parliamentary Debates of 1840
Authors: Koepke Robert L.
Published: December 2016

This article examines the motives of the French élite in supporting or opposing schooling for the masses. It analyzes the parliamentary debates of the first French child labour law of 1840, because that law made education compulsory for child labourers.

The basic thesis is that there was no single reason for supporting compulsory education. Nor was it the result of a coalition of groups with differing motives. Rather, the legislators acted on a combination, or confusion, of motives. They argued that compulsory education was particularly necessary for young workers because their education was lagging behind others and because it would “moralize” them; moralization would not only make them better workers, but it would also help them to alleviate their misery and make them better citizens. Thus they would have better lives and contribute to society in general as well as to industrial prosperity. There is no evidence to support the theory of social control. Although one could argue that such control was an underlying motive, it is just as easy to argue that the representatives sincerely sought to help young workers. Those who voted against compulsory education did so not because they were afraid of too much education, but simply because they saw no need for it.

The legislators clearly recognized the need to actively promote intellectual as well as industrial development. Thus they consciously fostered the socio-economic development of France.

This article also draws general conclusions about the problem of determining motive. It argues that while historians tend to search for a single, rational motive, including hidden ones such as class interests, individuals typically have difficulty in discerning and distinguishing motives even within themselves. As in this case, self-serving and altruistic intentions can be jumbled together under broad expressions such as moralization.
Symbol of Paradox: The Casablanca Conference, 1943
Authors: Farrell Brian P.
Published: December 2016

The Casablanca Conference of January 1943 is usually treated as a pivotal point in both Allied war policy and grand stategy but for different reasons. The declaration of the policy of unconditional surrender marked a decisive shift in war policy, but the military decisions were an inconclusive compromise. This reinterpretation suggests that this distinction is artificial. The questions of what was decided at Casablanca and the impact of these decisions are approached primarily from the perspective of the efforts of British and U.S. military staffs to reshape grand strategy. These main points are made: both sides brought a clear broad vision of an overall grand strategic offensive to the table but failed to entrench either concept as definitive Allied policy; in the process, several paradoxes regarding Allied policy for the perceptions of the central direction of the war were clearly exposed and the future direction of that policy was laid down in broad outline. Churchill and Roosevelt on the one hand and their military staffs on the other held different views of the scope and time frame of agreed offensive plans. These were the most expansive Allied plans shaped mainly by British proposals, but the U.S. staff served clear notice of its intention to absorb and then go beyond the British offensive concept as soon as possible. The declaration of the policy of unconditional surrender exposed an irreconcilable clash between British war policy and grand stategy shaped by their own contradictory assumptions; this left the initiative in linking the two areas in U.S. hands. Finally, the effectiveness of British staff organization and military diplomacy taught the U.S. staffs a lesson soon put to good use in reorienting Allied grand strategy. With due attention to prevailing interpretations, this study concludes that the Casablanca conference must now be seen as a decisive stage in the emergence of an Allied grand strategy which blended British and U.S. offensive concepts, while exposing the contradiction between British war policy and grand strategy.
Les Journées Populaires et la Violence collective dans le Vaucluse Rural Après Thermidor
Authors: Wilson Warren
Published: December 2016

This article examines rural violence in one department of southern France, the Vaucluse, in the period after Thermidor. After a brief summary of the early years of the Revolution in the former papal enclave, two journées that occurred within a week of each other in the large village of Rochegude are discussed in some detail. One was characterized by the spontaneous actions of a large crowd while the other was the work of a small group of hard-core counter-revolutionary brigands. Several cases of anti-Jacobin violence are then discussed to show that popular riots became murderous only in specific circumstances, while premeditated assassination was the work of the small organized gangs. These riots seem to be an original feature of the Thermidorian period in the Vaucluse and other regions of Lower Provence, whereas the organized bands were prominent all across the Midi. This active involvement at the village level ensured that the reaction in the Vaucluse would be extremely difficult to suppress. However, the spontaneous and local anti-Jacobin violence was never transformed into an organized revolt as was the case in western France. The pretender’s agents did not succeed in effectively harnessing the popular protest to the royalist cause. Individual revolutionaries in the Vaucluse were greatly endangered by this reaction, but the Republic was not.
“Pursued by a Bear”: British Estimates of Soviet Military Strength and Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1922-1939
Authors: Neilson Keith
Published: December 2016

Prior to 1914, imperial Russia was one of the great powers of Europe. After 1917, the armed might of Soviet Russia was an uncertain quantity. This had serious repercussions for Britain in the inter-war period. If the Soviet Union were a negligible military quantity, then Britain would have to pay greater attention to the balance of power on the continent, since France alone could not check the might of a rearmed Germany. If the Soviet Union were strong, fears for the continent might be eased, but Britain would have to continue to consider such pre-1914 concerns as the defence both of India and the rest of Britain’s Asian empire against the Soviet Union. In both cases, an accurate estimation of Soviet military strength was crucial to the formation of British policy.

The period from 1922 to 1939 divides into two periods. From 1922 to about 1934, the Soviet Union avoided European politics, but posed a threat to Britain’s imperial holdings. Fortunately for Britain, during this period Soviet military power was slight, although it is likely that British military authorities exaggerated it in the scramble to obtain funding. In the period from 1934 to 1939, the Soviet Union was a major player in European politics. From 1934 to about 1937, the British viewed the Soviet Union as a military power, leading some to think that an Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance was the way to deter Germany’s expansion. However, the purges in the Red Army in 1937 made the British feel that Soviet military strength had declined, making the appeasement of Germany the best course of action. Only in mid-May 1939 did the British begin to have confidence in Soviet military strength again. The Anglo-Soviet negotiations of 1939 did not fail because the British had no confidence in Soviet military strength; rather, they failed for political reasons.
From Rites to Rebellion: Islamic Conversion, Urbanization, and Ethnic Identities At The Cape of Good Hope, 1797 to 1904
Authors: Shell Robert C.-H.
Published: December 2016

This essay deals with religious conversion and ethnic identities in nineteenth-century South Africa. It takes issue with Robin Horton’s theory of monolatric conversion, that is, that conversion to a monotheistic religion is a process of modernization and rationality. The author argues that the underlying reasons for conversion require a different axis of explanation since the phenomenon was not primarily intellectual and, moreover, changed in type. In the slavery period (1652-1838), the reasons for conversion were complex: Islamic conversion was partly based on exclusion from Protestant Christianity, but was also entwined in the wine economy of the Western Cape. Slave owners believed male Muslim slaves made the best overseers and wagon drivers since they did not drink. In the first urbanization movement in South Africa (1838-42), emancipated slaves from all cultures turned to Islam. In these two periods most converts were male; in the following period, commentators agreed that many more women (including some European women) turned to Islam. In this latter period (1843-55), syncretism, mysticism and magic became important elements in the spread of Islam. The Khalifa ceremony, especially, caused profound alarm in Cape Town and resulted in a police enquiry in 1855. With the assistance of the British Crown and the Sublime Port, a Muslim missionary was persuaded to go to South Africa, resulting in a period of orthodoxy and a slowing down of conversion. He wrote religious manuals in the language of congregations — Afrikaans. An authentic universalism and cradle-to-grave sacraments resulted in a secure religio-ethnic identity for tens of thousands of people by the late nineteenth century. This culminated in a macabre graveyard “rebellion.” Religious conversion had important social and ethnic components which — in nineteenth-century South Africa, at least — outweighed any cognitive religious responses.
“A Completely Immoral and Cowardly Attitude”: The British Foreign Office, American Neutrality and the Hoare-Laval Plan
Authors: Roi Michael L.
Published: December 2016

The Abyssinian imbroglio of 1935-1936 precipitated a major crisis for British foreign and defence policy-makers. Prior to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, Italy was not counted amongst Britain's enemies. By October 1935 and especially after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October, this situation had changed dramatically and Italian enmity now had to be considered in strategic calculations. As relations between Britain and Italy deteriorated as a result of Mussolini's expansionist aims in East Africa, the British government, and more specifically, the foreign office began to reassess Britain's strategic position.

As a corollary to this reassessment, the British embarked on an examination of the effects of American policy on Britain's global strategy, particularly on the difficult issue of European peace and security. The attitude and actions of the government in Washington profoundly influenced the course of British foreign policy during the Abyssinian crisis. Concerns about American behaviour went beyond the issue of whether or not the United States would support a League of Nations’ oil sanction against Italy. Following the introduction of neutrality legislation in 1935, serious doubts began to take hold within the foreign office that the economic resources of the United States might not be available to Britain in the event of a future conflagration, as they had been during the Great War. By autumn 1935, when Anglo-Italian relations had reached the nadir of the inter-war period, this consideration became increasingly important. The uncertainty of American financial and material support induced the British to find a diplomatic solution to end the Abyssinian crisis, which played a significant role in the events that led to the Hoare-Laval agreement in December 1935.
Patrician Partisans: New York in the House of Representatives, 1789-1803
Authors: Harp Gillis J.
Published: December 2016

American historians continue to differ about whether the politics of the founding era were fundamentally elitist or democratic in character. While both state-focused and national studies have appeared over the years, few analyses have attempted to delineate how state politicians became integrated into the new national government. This article addresses this lacuna in the literature through a systematic examination of the New York delegation to the first six congresses. A prosopography of the delegation reveals that representatives from both Republican and Federalist state parties came from decidedly elite backgrounds, though (contrary to the stereotype), Republicans often had wealthier, more privileged roots than did their opponents. Moreover, quantitative analysis of the delegations’ voting record also offers a fresh perspective on the emergence of national parties in the early republic. In spite of their shared social status and regional loyalties, their voting behaviour in congress was highly partisan almost from the beginning. In short, this two pronged study of New York congressmen should discourage one from drawing too neat a connection between social location and political act. Second, this analysis (if corroborated by similar studies of other state delegations) should encourage scholars to identify the beginnings of the First Party System early in the first few congresses.
Femmes en trop, femmes sur le carreau: Reading et le Berkshire au milieu du XIXe siècle
Authors: Daigle Jean-Guy
Published: December 2016

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the phenomenon of “surplus women” has to be studied in the dual context of the sex imbalance in the whole population and the underemployment of women on the labour market. This article shows how the structural changes in a regional economy and the common precepts in the patriarchal ideology contributed to make more fragile and precarious the condition of young women in the rural south of England. It is based on qualitative sources (literary and parliamentary) and quantitative data (registry general and published census). The case in point is the corn-producing county of Berkshire and its industrial centre, Reading. Around 1840­1850, new capitalist farming processes led to male emigration and quasi-eradication of female labour in the countryside: unable to marry there, many girls went to the county town and were hired there as domestic servants. From the 1860s, railway building and a big biscuit factory made Reading into an industrial centre, without relying upon available female labour, however. When the sex imbalance became less acute in the 1870s, most women had no other work experience than domestic service as a preparation for marriage, and a whole generation of aging surplus women was still a reminder of Reading’s former reputation as a maiden town. On the whole then, the middle decades of the past century stand out as a particularly crucial period in the history of the sexual division of labour, a most visible phenomenon in the context of a regional economy dominated by structural change in its agricultural activities. Here it was reinforced by structure and ideology combined.
Religious Communism? Nicolai Berdyaev’s Contribution to Esprit’s Interpretation of Communism
Authors: Baird Catherine
Published: December 2016

The origins of the French personalist movement (1930-39) have been traced to French neo-criticism and Thomism, and German existentialism. The contribution of Russian religious-populist philosophy to personalism has not yet been studied, despite the participation of several Russian émigrés in the movement. Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), a leading proponent of the Russian tradition, brought his version of Russian “personalism” to Europe upon his exile from the new Soviet Russia. In France his works were seized as a manifesto by the French personalist movements L’Ordre Nouveau and Esprit. This essay will examine the confluence between Nikolai Berdyaev’s theories about communism and the public position espoused by Esprit from 1932-39. By exploring the personal connection between Berdyaev and the editor of Esprit, Emmanuel Mounier (1905-50), and their interchange of ideas, it will attempt to establish the case of influence. In describing the origins of Esprit’s stance on communism, it finds support for the assertion that French personalism did, indeed, offer a “third way” distinct from the ideologies of Marxism or fascism, and a revolutionary plan opposed to either communist or capitalist economic theory. The influence of Russian ideas on French personalism offers a new dimension to the history of ideas.
Gas and Water Feminism: Maud Adeline Brereton and Edwardian Domestic Technology
Authors: Clendinning Anne
Published: December 2016

In 1911, a group of British gas managers made advertising history by establishing a collective organization dedicated to the promotion of a single industry. The British Commercial Gas Association directed its campaigns at various consumer groups, including builders, architects, and tenants. To present the "woman’s point of view" to their female customers, the B.C.G.A. executive hired Mrs. Maud Adeline Cloudesley Brereton as editor-in-chief of its monthly publicity magazines. A former teacher turned domestic science specialist, Brereton decided to work for the private sector, the gas industry, because it offered a practical solution to housing problems. In this respect, Brereton combined business with social reform.

Maud Adeline Brereton anticipated that gas technology, in the form of cookers, water boilers, and gas fires, had the potential to raise housing and nutrition standards for all classes. Within the context of public debates over racial deterioration and eugenics, Brereton promoted ameliorative technology to improve the health of the population. Moreover, she maintained that technology made possible a "domestic revolution," by significantly reducing the time and effort that women, as both servants and housewives, expended on housework. Time saved on housekeeping might be directed to more profitable and gratifying pursuits, including paid employment or voluntary service, extending women’s influence beyond the private sphere.

Given her preoccupation with public health and domestic architecture, Brereton continued the work of an earlier generation of Victorian feminist designers. As an Edwardian, she was not alone in this crusade, and interwar women’s groups renewed calls for affordable labour-saving domestic technology. However, Brereton stands out among her contemporaries because she chose to work, not through political organizations, but in the corporate sector in an age when few women held positions of influence in the predominantly male business world.
Salaires, niveaux de vie et travail féminin, dans l’arrondissement de Lille au XIXe siècle
Authors: Craig Béatrice
Published: December 2016

In the textile region of Lille, women, especially married women, seem to have withdrawn from the paid labour force in the second half of the nineteenth century: They were less and less likely to report an occupation to the census takers. What caused this apparent withdrawal? Not an increase in male wages, which would have allowed their husbands or fathers to support their families: male’s real wages seem to have stagnated during most of the period. Not a shift in attitudes towards women’s wage work: Employers and workers alike seem to have been very complacent about the issue. There were no demands for family wages, no emerging male breadwinner ideology in this region. Part of the answer lay in the diminishing supply of work that could be done at home, and that mothers of young children would have preferred. Ironically, those women’s inability to work in factories may have led to female wages raising faster than men’s - and to the progression of female real income. This in turn allowed women who could still work, at home or in factories, to work less, or less frequently: they were then considered casual workers, and their labour went unreported in the censuses.
Foreign Bodies: Travel, Empire and the Early Royal Society of London. Part 1. Englishmen on Tour
Authors: Illiffe Robert
Published: December 2016

The first part of this paper examines the experience of English travellers abroad. That many members of the Royal Society had made such trips is of great significance, although this fact has received surprisingly little attention in the historical literature on the Royal Society. The travellers tended to be young men who had just finished a university degree, although even younger individuals such as Robert Boyle were usually accompanied by their tutors. The journals and letters of a number of individuals from this period, points to the significance of learning in the context of the broader social accomplishments which made up the well-rounded gentleman or nobleman. Through their interactions with their hosts, a recognition of different cultural values served as a basis for the self-fashioning of a large number of English natural philosophers. In the second part of the paper, the often ambivalent attitude of the Fellows of the Royal Society to foreigners, relates this to the formation of a stable experimentalist “party line” in the 1660s. Prejudice formed the basis of a dynamic process of “productive exclusion” in which many practices which had once been part of a more pluralist outlook were deemed to be unacceptable. I conclude by looking at how this was also an issue of power, since the Society’s credibility was connected with the fact that it was composed of eminent men and was situated at the centre of an increasingly powerful protestant state.
Veterans Associations and Political Radicalism in West Germany, 1951-54: A Case Study of the Traditionsgemeinschaft Großdeutschland
Authors: Searle Alaric
Published: December 2016

Research on veterans' associations in the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1950s has so far concentrated on the activities of groups lobbying for improved welfare provision and the efforts to establish a unified soldiers' organization. The latter project led to the founding of the Verband deutscher Soldaten (VdS) in September 1951. As fears of a possible repeat of the Weimar experience with organized veterans were at their height in 1951, research dealing with political radicalism has focussed on events leading to the establishment of the VdS, but has not extended beyond it, either in terms of other associations or the period in which they were active. This paper takes one tradition association as a case study, that of the Traditionsgemeinschaft Grossdeutschland, to examine how far prominent tradition associations became involved in radical politics and what attitude they developed towards the new democratic system and the politically charged question of West German rearmament. Despite a number of early indicators that suggested an anti-democratic, anti-state attitude might take root within the ranks of Grossdeutschland veterans, the history of the association in the period 1951-54 shows that there was in actual fact a surprising rejection of National Socialist and radical, nationalist values. In addition to the varied and complex effects of the lost war and Allied occupation, one of the reasons for the overestimation of the radical potential of not only this group of veterans, but also those in other tradition associations, was the erroneous assumption that the views of leading generals represented those of the rank-and-file.