Journal of Social History

Drinot, Paulo

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac041pmid: N/A

In this article, I draw on two sets of sources to explore how Peruvian doctors tried to make sense of what had driven a man to engage in necrophilia in late 1942. On the one hand, I examine the case history and other related documentation that I located in Lima’s psychiatric hospital. On the other, I study a detailed article written on the case by Dr Lucio D. Castro and published in 1943. Together, these sources provide rich evidence on how Peruvian doctors addressed what they framed as an abnormality of the sexual instinct and, in turn, as a mental disorder. But the case also provides a fascinating vista on a major taboo—sex with the dead—and more generally on the history of “perversion” and therefore on the history of sexuality in Peru. I pay particular attention to how doctors mobilized an eclectic “theoretical artillery” of biomedical knowledge in trying to explain the man’s psychopathology. I argue that through their “unruly appropriation” of sexological knowledge, doctors like Castro sought to make meaningful contributions to a global sexual science while proposing means to channel sexuality away from deviant forms in a manner consonant with broader projects of sexual regulation that Peru and other countries promoted at the time.

Wylegała, Anna

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac051pmid: N/A

This article is a micro-historical study of the collectivization of agriculture carried out by the communist authorities in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. Using the example of the village of Gierczyce in the Kielce region (Central Poland), it shows under what conditions collectivization, resisted in most of the Polish countryside, was able to succeed, and it traces the long-term effects of this process on Gierczyce’s social structure and social relations. It also analyzes this rural community’s contemporary memory of the emergence and functioning of the production cooperative. Thus, it critically engages with, and questions, the “resistance paradigm” dominant in studies of collectivization. Enriched with a broader regional and national comparative context, the article is based on the analysis of archival material from central and regional archives, personal documents, and extensive field research.

Newman, Rachel Grace

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac056pmid: N/A

This article considers the ways that middle-class and elite citizens in post-revolutionary Mexico pursued access to exclusive favors from the state in the 1920s and 1930s and emphasizes the overlooked role of merit as political logic in this era. Examining political discourse within clientelist exchanges through the close reading of petitions, I explore ideas about class and nation as articulated by young strivers and their families who sought scholarships for foreign study. The article argues that working within clientelism, upwardly mobile Mexicans strategically wielded merit to preserve and legitimate their status amid social tectonic shifts. Petitioners’ ideas of merit encompassed individual loyalty and patriotism, unique talents, and inherited status. I identify heritable and disciplinary merit as distinct yet compatible understandings of worthiness used by privileged citizens. These citizens claimed that exceptional Mexicans trained abroad would make an outsized contribution to the national well-being and thus deserved special rewards, an argument which anticipated rationales that the Mexican state would later embrace for its modernization policy. After 1940, the state expanded international scholarship programs and invoked the same terms that citizens had used in the early post-revolutionary period to justify socially regressive benefits providing foreign education for the already fortunate.

Ivanova, Anna

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac060pmid: N/A

In the Soviet Union during the 1970s, many service workers, such as salespeople, hairdressers, and car mechanics who worked in the state-owned retail sector, rose to prominent financial positions. They achieved this mobility because they had access to coveted goods and services that were in short supply. Soviet citizens’ disposable incomes were growing, producing a desire to consume in a more sophisticated way. However, shortages of the planned economy meant that people often could not satisfy their growing demands for consumption. Service providers illegally sold goods and services on the side for higher prices and became wealthy by collecting a huge portion of the money that the populace could not spend in the state retail system. The Soviet state was reluctant to prosecute these dealers because it needed their services to provide for consumers and to avoid pursuing large-scale economic reform. However, the enrichment of service workers caused resentment among the broader population. The newly rich, as opposed to members of an older Soviet upper class including party and state officials and the cultural and academic elite, flaunted their wealth and created a new mass culture of luxurious lifestyle. They not only became role models for some Soviet youth, but also created a sense among many Soviet citizens that socialism was in crisis. The prominent status of this new elite and its conspicuous consumption contradicted traditional socialist values of modesty, collectivism, and the priority of spiritual over material concerns.

Leiboff, Marett

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac052pmid: N/A

Law is everywhere and all around us. Yet while law is overwhelmingly visible in all forms of media it is simultaneously, by virtue of the opacity of its discourses and doctrines, its principles and practices, also troublingly invisible. For those of us not inured in law, the process that moves us towards law’s invisibility is a source of immense frustration—for lawyers, it is grist to the mill. It is precisely this antonymic tension that inhabits Julie Stone Peters’ newest work, Law as Performance. It is deeply concerned with the causes, effects and consequences of this duality—law’s visibility and invisibility—using performance concepts to retrace thinking about law. Her book offers both a history and jurisprudential—or legal philosophical—rethinking of the opacity of lawyers’ law, drawing on her field of performance studies to return law to a world of visibility. She takes us through a series of stories about law as performance and in performance, taking us through stagings of law both as spectacle and contest, to audiences who observed these public displays of law, and performance’s fundamental role in the shaping and forming of law and lawyers and the courts. She brings to the fore the distorting effects that performance has on law through overacting and histrionic lawyers, and the distortion of justice and law that occur when spectators and audiences, in the form of judge and jury, and the populace at large, are swept along by rhetoric, foot stamping lying lawyers. And vice versa, where lawyers and their displays are central to obtaining justice. Through six chapters, an introduction and epilogue, Peters takes us through a broad sweep of nearly 2000 years of history. Her Introduction takes us to Tothill Fields and a thwarted trial by battle in 1571, as exemplar of what is to come: the battle never happens, the Queen (the unnamed Elizabeth) appears to interfere in the case, and the massive audience who comes to watch a spectacle is left disappointed. The actors who come to perform attempt to displace the authority of the court, which in any case, is no court at all because the case had already been decided the day before. Her account then moves to a series of case studies that take us through ancient Greece and Rome, through medieval and early modern Europe—the Italian city-states, France, the Netherlands, and then England, where she ends her account in 1678. In Chapter One, she brings us to the place of theatre and theatrocracy in ancient Athens, through trial as theatre. Working with Plato and Aristotle’s philosophical engagement with theatre, Peters argues against the theatrical in law, before moving into an interrogation of the advocacy through the figure of actor and rhetorician in Ancient Rome in Chapter Two. Here she works with Cicero and Quintilian’s prescriptions for effective advocacy, important in their own right and as markers for what is to come in early modern Europe and the eventual deployment of their practices and techniques in the training of lawyers at the Inns of Court in London (Chapter Six). In Chapters Three and Four, Peters takes us to the liveliness and social world of medieval theatre and law in a highly public series of displays of law, from the stocks, to new research about the public and highly visible courtrooms of medieval Europe. In these, as well as Chapter Five (“Performing Law in the Age of Theatre (c. 1500-1650)”) she focuses on law and courtrooms in Europe, with some occasional references to theatre and law in England, which she returns to in Chapter Six, where she entertains with a re-reading of existing histories of legal training in the Inns of Court in London, focusing now on the role of performance in that training. Justice can’t be done to the depth and breadth of Peters’ arguments and ideas in a brief review. Historically exciting, the textures and complexities of her book are grounded in the valorisation of Plato’s polemics against theatrocracy, or the judgment of the masses that distorts law, morphing into an examination of power of the courts and of law, through to the place of the body, rhetoric and optics as a perverse mechanics of persuasion that distorts law and the requirements of democracy. Through stories contained in her chapters, we are brought into the contradictions and absurdities of law bound up in its black letter on the one hand and its denial, on the other, of the role of the body of lawyers in advocacy and representation, of the power and pitch of rhetoric. What is clearly apparent, however, is a particular trope that suffuses the book, and one which speaks to theatres and courtrooms that are popularly imagined—that courtrooms are like theatres, and that advocates perform in those courtrooms as if they were in theatres, that is, that it is game, illusion and a perversion of reality. Built into her position is a claim that it is law depends on performance to constitute its own logics and practices, that law needs performance to justify law, as a direct inheritance in the long trajectory she narrates. But though her history ends with the early years of Charles II’s monarchy, her trajectory reaches into now, to bring performance back into law. Eighteenth and Nineteenth century legal concepts, that we still live with today, turned their face against law performed, despite the popular image of law as a place of theatre and performance. Her own jurisprudential argument runs close to a radical critical jurisprudential position of the U.S. critical legal studies movement of the 1960s and 1970s (the crits), which sought to demystify law, and to draw its failing to account, not least through its adoption of techniques and norms that obfuscated and shaped normative forms of existence, harming vulnerable groups and individuals through abstract reasoning, cloaking hidden political and social agendas and producing profound injustices, based solely on argument in law and the assumptions of the courts, or judges. Reading law through performance as history radically exposes the limits of law. For lawyer’s law begins and ends, largely, in the superior courts, where judgment, holding reasoning and the formation of new norms, is the only thing that matters. Yet, as the crits urged—along with their jurisprudential grandparents, the American legal realists—law is given shape and form right at the outset, in trials held in courtrooms, before a judge alone. What happens there shapes lawyer’s law, but what happens in trials is the stuff of the popular imagination, of law visible and on display. And this is where Peters’ position requires a mapping that might be obvious to a U.S. audience, but less so to those of us from outside the U.S., where law is barely visible and courtrooms aren’t usually televised. Jurors are never interviewed and the intermediary of heritage media operates as eyes and ears. Peters is concerned about the theatrocracy of the masses, but it is perhaps outside the court now where the court of public opinion operates. As the US Supreme Court has shown in its most extraordinary decisions in 2022, there is, it seems, nothing outside law at all. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Haroon, Sana

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac036pmid: N/A

This book explores the teachings and activities of the Mujaddidi Sufi Fazl Ahmad and his spiritual and familial descendants to construct a cultural landscape stretching from Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan in late precolonial India to Bukhara and Khoqand under imperial Russia. Mujaddidis took their identity from their training in the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624). Ziad argues that Mujaddidi sainthood constituted a “hidden caliphate” in the form of a Persianate sacro-cultural sphere; this study of Fazl Ahmad’s lineage maps out a domain of exchange and circulation of Mujaddidi “scholarly, sacred, and diplomatic goods and services.” Chapter 3 and the associated Appendix B track the reproduction of two manuals in print and manuscript form (thirteen of one and nine of the other) presenting a model for understanding the transmission of spiritual knowledge and the extension of the Mujaddidi Sufi order. These manuals served as a Mujaddidi curriculum and, repackaged with texts produced by other lineages, constitute a continuous Mujaddidi tradition from Sindh to Khoqand. Ziad tells us that these texts were demanded by disciples who carried them back to remote villages to serve as teaching aids. Commissions reveal a literate reading class, rulers, and courtiers among the audience for these texts. Ziad’s presentation of this material is highly instructive in proposing a model for understanding the regional dispersal of a spiritual tradition and undergirds his treatment of the Mujaddidi Sufi order as a unified tradition by providing evidence of Mujaddidi teachers providing spiritual services demanded by their students and other social elites. In chapters 4–9, Ziad examines the lives and careers of Fazl Ahmad and some members of his family and lineage “beyond the Oxus and the Indus.” Chapters 4 and 5 present Fazl Ahmad’s teaching and activities in Peshawar, a node of activity in which Fazl Ahmad’s personnel managed caravan trade routes, correspondence and land grants from the 1760s until his death in 1816, and in Bukhara where he established a second khanqah. Ziad makes good use of twentieth century Urdu language hagiographies and waqf documentation located in the Uzbekistan national archives to situate Fazl Ahmad. Chapter 7 examines Fazl Ahmad’s adaptation to a non-sedentary environment through his deputization of the illiterate Faqir Sahib who was already a spiritual leader in his own right, and the latter’s base of operations in Zakori and in the Powindah tribal caravans from 1801–1857 where he provided spiritual protection that facilitated trade. Chapter 8 presents Fazl Ahmad’s son and nephew as “diplomat saints” in Khoqand where they offered spiritual guidance to the Khan and served as his ambassadors to the Russian imperial court from 1827 to 1864. Chapter 9 presents the Akhund of Swat in the territories lying between Peshawar and Kabul and his connections to Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly and the court of Dost Muhammad Khan, a landscape, personalities and events that already have a place in histories of 19th century north Indian Muslim organization and Anglo-Afghan frontier building. Ziad adds to what we know about the Akhund to tell us that he was initiated into Mujaddidi practice by Fazl Ahmad and that one of Fazl Ahmad’s sons and his descendants attached themselves to the Akhund’s base in Swat around 1849. Chapter 6 offers greater perspective on the differences between Fazl Ahmad and Sayyid Ahmad and his anti-Sikh mujahidin. Ziad tells us that together the saints described in these chapters constituted part of a greater Mujaddidi “sacro-cultural sphere,” and Faqir Ahmad and the Akhund of Swat also each oversaw a “hidden caliphate” of their own. A significant impact of Mujaddidi participation in the region is presented in Chapter 5 in which Ziad presents Fazl Ahmad’s writings and his relationship with the ruler Amir Hyder of Bukhara after 1800 that fashioned a model of sacred kingship. This distinctly Mujaddidi political outlook proposed a role for the Mujaddidi Sufi as arch mediator, between God and the king and between the sovereign and his subjects, and can be distinguished from models of millennial sovereignty that emerged in Iran and the Mughal empire in the 16th century. Chapter 8 extends Ziad’s examination of the political participation of Mujaddidis in the story of Fazl Ahmad’s son’s and nephew’s service at the court of the Khan of Khoqand. This book knits together the political landscape spreading westward from Sirhind in north India in which active Mujaddidi networks and Mujaddidi spiritualism and deputization produced spiritual identities, interconnections and rivalries without observing frontiers or boundaries created by the Anglo-Russian rivalry. While he could offer more critical reflection on the ways in which hagiographies and polemical tracts are produced precisely in order to establish religious legitimacy, Ziad makes good use of these sources to put together the story of Fazl Ahmad’s lineage. Evidence of waves of Mujaddidi transmission in the region preceding Fazl Ahmad’s arrival, multiple instances of competition and conflicts between Mujaddidis, and the fact that Mujaddidi saints were usually initiated into multiple Sufi and spiritual orders also emerges from these sources. It is not clear, and perhaps not even Ziad’s intent to argue, that Mujaddidi thought produced an overarching framework of organization, coherence and cohesion among these Sufis. Mujaddidi sainthood emerges in The Hidden Caliphate as a spiritual and personal practice and a prized credential transmitted and received by disparate spiritual leaders across the region stretching from Dera Ismail Khan and Peshawar to Bukhara and Khoqand from 1760 through the end of the nineteenth century. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Shanahan, Brendan A

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac038pmid: N/A

In co-authoring Immigration: An American History, two of the nation’s leading experts on the subject—Carl Bon Tempo and Hasia Diner—have taken on possibly their greatest challenge yet: surveying four centuries of U.S. immigration history in a captivating yet concise narrative that engages general interest, student, and academic readers alike. Their adroit organization of the book, incorporation of classic and recent works of scholarship covering a wide array of subfields and subjects, and crisp narration of major immigration policy developments alongside concrete demonstrations of representative migrant experiences combine to produce an excellent and original work of synthesis. At a succinct 364 pages of main text, the book proceeds briskly. After a short introduction, the authors divide their work into thirteen chapters, each about twenty-five pages in length. While the chapters largely cover distinct historical eras and advance in chronological order, lengthier time periods—especially those which witnessed high rates of immigration—often receive two chapters split along thematic lines. Though the book prudently eschews broad theorizations in favor of a narrative synthesis, the authors do offer three big-picture conclusions in their epilogue: that “Immigrants came … in search of a better life,” that “the state … shaped immigration,” and that “Immigrants are like us” (italics in original; 362, 363). The paired chapters stand out among the book’s many strengths as especially efficacious. They afford the authors enough space to dive into social, cultural, and economic histories of immigrants in one chapter while describing contemporaneous immigration politics and policy developments in the other. This organization, in turn, allows the authors to lean into their respective areas of expertise and past publications (such as Diner’s socioeconomic and cultural explorations of Jewish, Irish, and/or women’s immigration history and Bon Tempo’s work on the development of post-World War II U.S. refugee law) while interweaving older and newer examples of immigration scholarship (on subjects ranging from the evolution of the federal immigration apparatus to various immigrant rights movements). While this structure does produce occasional complications (with content about the Dillingham Commission split among back-to-back chapters, for instance), its benefits far outweigh these slight costs. The stand-alone chapters are likewise well utilized, providing sufficient content while avoiding over-repetition. Beyond these wise organizational decisions, the authors also effectively marshal and communicate their evidence. Immigration: An American History regularly, and adeptly, employs representative quotations by immigrants and their detractors to illuminate real-time aspirations for, concerns about, and/or encounters of migration from colonial times to the present. Similarly, Bon Tempo and Diner helpfully deploy illustrative examples drawn from the individual stories of famous and ordinary immigrants alike (from John Nordstrom, the founder of the eponymous department store, to factory workers, refugees, and would-be immigrants denied entry into the country) to concretely demonstrate the phenomena they describe. While the accounts of immigrants hailing from the major sending countries of each respective era are well-represented in these demonstrations, the authors commendably go beyond their better-known stories to give voice to migrants from countries like the Philippines, Ethiopia, and nations from across the Americas (including Canada, the Caribbean, and Brazil) often breezed past in works of synthesis. Bon Tempo and Diner can pack so much into their text because they are clear about its aims. They underscore that their book centers on immigrant experiences and encounters “at the point of arrival and earliest settlement, focusing most intently on the comings, and sometimes goings, of various newcomers and the economic forces, political structures, and familial and personal imperatives that attracted them.” Conversely, the authors emphasize that their book does not deeply engage the “complex, multigenerational undertaking” of “ethnicity,” a subject which “Other works have addressed…in great detail” (10). One such work they are undoubtedly alluding to is Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (HarperCollins) by Roger Daniels. Bon Tempo and Diner repeatedly draw from and cite Daniels’s classic immigration history survey, first published in 1990. But the former choose not to divide their synthesis into chapter-length discussions and comparisons of various immigrant communities’ intergenerational integration and ethno-religiosity à la Daniels (subjects which garnered greater interest among immigration historians when the latter wrote his book). In this manner, Bon Tempo and Diner’s new work builds on, strongly complements, but fundamentally differs from Daniels’s formative text. Scattered among Immigration: An American History’s many successes are rare stumbles. Most are either trivial errors (i.e., Georgia was named for George II in the early 1730 s not his better-remembered grandson George III [25]) or inconsistencies in terminology (e.g. mid-nineteenth-century migrants from Québec are given the modern name “Québécois” [70] but then their early twentieth-century successors receive the more historical designation “French Canadians” [164]). There is also a minor structural imbalance in the book’s use of endnotes on a chapter-by-chapter basis. As is common to textbooks and surveys, early on the endnotes are kept to a minimum with “Further Reading” sections provided at the end of each chapter helping to clarify key secondary sources employed. By contrast, the endnotes grow much more extensive later in the book, approaching the conventions of a historical monograph (while also retaining the “Further Reading” guides). The effect of this unevenness is minimal, but it may represent a small stumbling block for readers hoping to learn more about topics that cut across early and later chapters. Overall, however, Immigration: An American History strikes a strong balance for a historical synthesis. While each chapter could easily be read alone as an excerpt, the book can—and should—be assigned in its entirety on a weekly basis for many undergraduate U.S. immigration history courses. It also serves equally well as a narrative for general readers and as a reference for scholars preparing a lecture or beginning a new subject of research. Bon Tempo and Diner have thus produced an excellent, original synthesis that will be widely used for decades to come. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Goodman, Adam

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac040pmid: N/A

Henry Weiss was born in Constantinople in 1866. He spoke German at home and learned French, Spanish, Italian, and English, along with some Syrian, Hebrew, and Portuguese. In 1890, at age twenty-four, Weiss left the Middle East and immigrated to the United States, arriving in San Francisco. He soon made his way to New York City, where he and his wife started a family. Weiss became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1896. Seven years later, his language skills helped him land a job as an interpreter with the Immigration Bureau. Just over a decade after immigrating, Weiss had become part of the burgeoning federal bureaucracy tasked with regulating migration. He excelled in his work and in 1914 the Commissioner of Immigration made him the United States’ first chief deportation officer. Weiss spent the rest of his life coordinating the nation’s newly centralized removal system and overseeing transcontinental trains full of immigrants bound for deportation from Ellis Island or Angel Island. Dominico di Stefano was one of the people Weiss transported across the country. Born in 1890 in a wheat and sheep-producing region of central Italy hard-hit by changes in the global economy, di Stefano first migrated to the United States in 1907. He settled near the Bronx and found odd jobs to make ends meet. Returning home in June 1912, he married and had a daughter before leaving and crossing the Atlantic again the following spring. Di Stefano worked construction on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border until a physical altercation with an immigrant inspector at a rail yard in Sumas, Washington, led to his arrest. At first, he gave an alias and insisted that he had nothing to do with the incident (later admitting to having been present though not directly involved). In July 1914, a U.S. District Court judge sentenced him to six months of hard labor in county jail for assaulting an officer. Weiss conducted di Stefano’s deportation hearing in Italian and ordered his removal for “entry without inspection” and on the grounds that he was “likely to become a public charge.” Di Stefano spent a total of seven-and-a-half months incarcerated before authorities forced him onto a train headed to New York and, finally, a ship to Naples. Weiss and di Stefano’s stories are but two of many Ethan Blue tells in his thoroughly researched book about the deportation trains and the growth of the United States’ immigration enforcement infrastructure during the first decades of the twentieth century. Blue centers the histories of the authorities in charge and the immigrants aboard, offering a social history of both the deportation state and the people it targeted. He argues that trains functioned as mobile prisons, poorhouses, hospitals, and asylums. Periodically drawing from Theodore Irwin’s 1935 novel Strange Passage, Blue conveys a sense of what the journey might have been like for deportees. Rather than unfolding as a linear narrative, the book follows a composite trip of the Deportation Special. Each chapter is named after a stop along the eastbound and westbound routes—Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, El Paso, etc.—and recounts the tales of immigrants facing removal who boarded the train in that particular place. Blue dedicates much of the book to reconstructing migrants’ paths to the United States and their lives before their apprehension. He adopts an “entangled microhistories” (307n57) approach, grounded in the belief that ordinary people’s “‘small’ stories offer expansive vistas and deep insight into the structures of the past” (19). Blue’s mining of the immigration records from the National Archives allows him to recreate compelling individual accounts that, when taken together, illustrate the diverse array of people who found themselves in U.S. officials’ crosshairs: Punjabi Sikh laborers, French sex workers, Korean students, Irish political radicals, entire Mexican families, and immigrants from around the world whom authorities deemed mad, cognitively different, sexually immoral, or likely to become public charges. More than simply documenting migrants’ trials and tribulations, Blue highlights the increasingly constricted lines around U.S. citizenship in the 1910s. He describes immigration control as “a second-order process of settler colonialism, regulating who might be permitted as a settler and eventually, perhaps, a full citizen, and restricting or expelling the rest” (12). The Deportation Express makes a meaningful contribution as the first book to examine the mechanics of expulsion during “the age of rail-based removal” from 1914 to 1945. Yet Blue’s case studies focus on the first five or six years of this period, and it’s unclear how representative they are of the broader era. While he emphasizes the importance of specificity in regard to place and scale, his non-linear narrative risks obscuring how the deportation regime changed over time. Interspersing migrants’ stories from the 1910s with snippets of Irwin’s novel, set in the early 1930s, flattens out the significant differences in immigration law and in the enforcement apparatus between World War I and the Great Depression—from the implementation of the national origins quota system under the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the creation of the Border Patrol that same year, to the criminalization of unauthorized entry in 1929 and the crackdown on immigrants during the global economic crisis. Some quantitative perspective is instructive here. Between the first and second decades of the age of rail-based removal, the average number of annual post-entry formal deportations rose nearly 500 percent (increasing from 2,797 for fiscal years 1914 to 1923, to 13,707 for 1924 to 1933). At the same time, the average number of transcontinental expulsion trains crisscrossing the country tripled (increasing from five or six in 1914 and 1915, to eighteen or nineteen in each year from 1930 to 1932). Although Blue acknowledges that the deportation state “started small and was built piece by piece” (23), he left me wondering what its dramatic expansion meant for both immigration officials and immigrants. How important the trains were to realizing nativists’ fantasies also remains unclear. Authorities apprehended most people near where they had entered the United States, so only a small portion—likely five-to-ten percent, based on the scant sources available—of the million-plus deportations from 1914 to 1945 would have involved the transcontinental railroad. These numbers matter. So does the specific historical context in which expulsions occur. But as Blue shows, we can’t boil down the Deportation Special’s significance to how many people it carried. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Smith, Kylie M

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac044pmid: N/A

In many ways, “Asylum Ways of Seeing” by Heather Murray, is an extended riff on the term “asylum”—what it meant for psychiatry and for patients, and how this meaning changed over time. To explore this change in meaning, Murray employs a “history of emotions” framework and takes an overtly cultural and intellectual history approach to center the experiences of patients themselves. In this way, she argues not only that we need to try and understand the history of psychiatric institutions from the point of view of the people who were in them, but that there is a relationship between the way psychiatric patients made sense of their experience, and changes in institutional policy. This is an ambitious approach and requires Murray to draw on a broad array of archival and historiographical sources. This creates a tension for the book, because it is a difficult enterprise, and reveals some of the ethical and logistical issues in any attempt to take a “history from below” approach to psychiatry. How do we get at the patient experience, given the nature of archives and laws that (rightly) protect patient privacy? And how do we make sense of those records even if we do have access to them, given they are always so heavily mediated by the clinical encounter? To try and get around this problem, Murray draws largely on patient letters contained in state archives or in personal collections, and on the extensive body of work in the domain of patient narrative. While much can be gleaned from these sources, there is an important limitation born of the fact that the people with the resources to write and publish such a memoir are almost entirely white, and usually middle or upper class. This tends to skew the whole book towards that type of patient experience, and this causes a ripple effect throughout the book that Murray herself is aware of—the idealized perception of the asylum experience. The chapters in the book tease out this central theme of the asylum as a place of care or control through the idea of the automaton. Murray explores to what extent commitment to a psychiatric institution created the patient as a passive, resigned zombie, and how broader policy and cultural attitudes shaped this resignation as a necessary aspect of therapeutic care: a respite from the stress of modern society. But as Murray tracks changes in asylum practices and broader cultural shifts, she also tracks the ways that the image of the automaton became a problem for psychiatric practice. Each chapter moves the reader forward chronologically through the 20th century from the interwar years onwards, demonstrating the way that the idea of the “asylum” gave way to the concept and practice of the “hospital” as public expectations, political ideology and policy, and psychiatric practice converged. In chapter one, Murray explores the concept of resignation as patients write about their time in institutions as a thing to be endured while they waited to get well, or to be released. This sense of hopelessness was, she argues, tempered by the collective recognition that “time away” was what was needed to restore equanimity. Chapter two explores the role that psychiatric practice at the time had in the creation of this “happy drone”: the belief that a relief from distressing symptoms was in itself a cure. This belief made drastic technologies like psychosurgery (lobotomy) possible and acceptable, even if for most families and psychiatrist it was “a last resort” as Jack Pressman has called it. In chapter three, Murray argues that patients were not entirely passive in this “endurance” but found ways to make community and a sense of belonging within institutional spaces. Here, Murray examines the rise of occupational therapy and psychopharmacology as transformative of institutional spaces. As post WWII concerns with authoritarianism and fascism filtered through social psychiatry into individual practice, Cold War culture stressed the importance of the productive and assertive American individual, reflected in new approaches to treatment and care. But there are also inequities here. For Black patients especially, occupational therapy was never intended for them in the same ways, and in Southern spaces it took the form of backbreaking farm and domestic labor. Murray mentions these only in passing, however, and this is a noticeable gap in the book overall. The exposés, documentaries, films, and narratives that emerged in the post-war period about bad conditions and overcrowding in institutions paid short shrift to the forms of abuse and neglect that Black patients were subject to, and this is reflected in Murray’s own analysis at times. Even when she draws on the work of Martin Summers there is still a tendency to read the white patient’s experience as the normal one. Yet behind those stories lie horrors only recently coming to light, as in the recent work of Mab Segrest. The last two chapters and the epilogue trace the emergence of patients’ rights and anti-psychiatry, both of which drew on precedents set by the Black Civil Rights movements. Patients’ rights court cases, new science, and the imperative for psychiatry to be taken seriously as a medical specialty all combined to create a new cultural and policy approach to mental illness. The idea that people could and should be treated in the community, the neoliberal approach to medical funding, and the horrors of the asylum all combined to reject the idea that institutionalization of the mentally ill was the answer. Murray concludes with a reflection on the process and consequences of deinstitutionalization, and suggests that the original, albeit idealized, idea about the curative and therapeutic benefit of the asylum had some merit. This may be true, but what Murray’s book also demonstrates is that the costs of those institutions on the millions of individuals who suffered, lived, and died in them was, and should remain, too high to bear. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]