Journal of Social History

Guidi, Andreas

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaf046pmid: N/A

This special issue investigates the nexus between empires and youth by addressing different forms of socialization, possibilities of life and career prospects, and representations of belonging. Long considered by historiography to be a prerogative of nationalism and nation-states, recent studies have begun to argue that new images and modes of mobilization centered on youth were propelled by imperialism, colonialism, and their politics of difference. The articles in this issue build on this trend by offering insights into Eurasian empires (the Ottoman, Romanov, and Habsburg states), the French colonial empire, and Fascist Italy. The objects they analyze range from premilitary training for teenagers to colonialist student associations and magazines for emigrants’ children. Together, they argue for a more connected history that brings together the study of empires as large and diverse political systems, the lived experiences and life trajectories of youth, and the media depictions shaping belonging, loyalty, and activism. Empires are particularly fitting to study how ideas and practices travel, interact, and change, often adapting preexisting models to local or regional specificities, while youth help us discuss how the political and socioeconomic transformation of modern empires shaped the lives and ideas of their populations. In discussing these circulations, the special issue shows how empires aimed to appropriate the potential of youth mobilization and functioned as a reference for initiatives and ideas elaborated by the youth themselves. In all cases, however, this mutual attraction also revealed the structural limits hampering empire-wide activities, such as gender, social and ethno-confessional distinctions, difficulties linked to channeling a highly volatile life stage into long-term projects, and the cleavage between public and intimate experiences.

Dubois, Antonin; Legrandjacques, Sara

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaf040pmid: N/A

This article analyses the existence of an imperial youth in late-nineteenth-century France through the study of an association created for and by French young men in 1897, the Ligue coloniale de la jeunesse. Thanks to a thorough examination of a booklet edited by the Ligue comprising the names and information of 288 members, combined with other archival sources, it aims at writing a social history of the French imperial youth. In order to retrace the mindset and socialization of this youth, the article first scrutinizes the place of the Ligue in the colonial associative landscape and its recruitment, underlining the various profiles of its members. Second, it analyses the activities offered by the Ligue, divided into three main categories following its motto: propaganda, education, assistance. Lastly, it confronts the Ligue’s aim to shape colonial careers with the colonial prospects formulated by its members and their completion. In doing so, this article highlights the importance of the colonial world in the projections of French young men regarding their place in society, their training, and their professional future. More generally, it contributes to a better understanding of what youth meant during a time of thriving imperialism.

Guidi, Andreas

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shae082pmid: N/A

In the early-twentieth century, state institutions and voluntary associations in the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov empires envisioned a “new generation” of imperial subjects to reinvigorate patriotism serving as the bond between state and society. Anxieties linked to military inadequacy vis-à-vis other empires combined with the fear of social unrest and moral disorder, which drew increased attention on the discipline of youth. In those three Eurasian empires, forms of premilitary training involving children and teenagers (mostly aged six to nineteen) emerged from private initiatives and were quickly coopted by imperial authorities. The article discusses institutions like Türk Gücü in the Ottoman Empire, the Poteshnye Roty in the Russian Empire, and the Reichsbund der Jugendwehren und Knabenhorte in the Habsburg monarchy. Although their visibility in illustrated magazines and other media grew rapidly in the early 1910s, those projects mirrored the empires’ difficulties in implementing activities throughout vast territories. Premilitary training caused frictions between ministries and raised new issues of belonging and loyalty in those multiethnic societies. Eventually, the envisioned militarized imperial youth did not prove particularly effective in the framework of the First World War. However, those initiatives reveal a crisis in politics of difference as they reinforced activism in the name of empire albeit mostly limited to the empire’s respective “dominant” group: Sunni Turks, Catholic Germans, and Orthodox Russians. In so doing, premilitary training tested forms of mass mobilizations and remained a reference with which post-imperial societies in the republics of Turkey and Austria as well as the Soviet Union had to reckon.

Tossounian, Cecilia

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaf024pmid: N/A

In the 1930s, Italian children residing abroad had access to a fascist magazine specifically tailored for them, Il Tamburino. Its existence demonstrates that the regime considered these children to be potentially significant actors, and particularly so when it came to the expansion of Fascism beyond the Italian peninsula. Despite the growing interest in the history of fascist imperialism, the ways in which children experienced and connected with the fascist regime from abroad remain an overlooked topic. Through the study of hundreds of children’s letters published by Il Tamburino, this article investigates the relationship between the imperial fascist discourses that positioned Italian children abroad as a central element in the regime’s expansionist ambitions and the responses of children to this campaign. The analysis of children’s correspondence reveals, first, that the manifestations of adherence to the regime were presented mainly through young writers’ displays of physical and emotional control. Second, that the experiences of children at school and summer camps, as well as their interactions with food, uniforms, and toys, contributed to the formation of a sense of fascist Italianness from below anchored in intimate, vernacular, and material elements. Third, the exchange among readers and editors fostered a sense of transnational community by facilitating the identification of shared experiences and emotions across diverse geographical locations. The children often depicted the magazine as a paternal figure caring for an extended family scattered across the world. Fourth, that this supposedly homogeneous and harmonious transnational community contained, however, disparities and tensions among its members that were the result of fascism’s internal dynamics.During the 1930s, Italian children residing abroad had access to a fascist magazine specifically tailored for them, Il Tamburino. Within its pages, children could have found fictional narratives portraying courageous boys assisting Italian military personnel in overcoming adversaries in colonial settings or depicting Italian pilots traversing the Atlantic Ocean in their sturdy aircraft. They could also read accounts written by other young expatriates who had traveled to Italy to attend summer camps organized by the regime. Engaged readers even had the opportunity to become magazine correspondents. Those entrusted with this task were responsible for providing updates on their respective educational institutions and fellow students. In urban Italian communities worldwide, including those in cities as different as Buenos Aires, Cairo, and London, the magazine disseminated information about Fascist Italy and extended invitations to its readership to contribute to Italy’s imperial project.

Frost, Ginger S

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaf095pmid: N/A

Studies of mixed-race couples have largely centered on higher courts, yet most marital disputes involving poor couples went to the magistrates’ courts or petty sessions. This article uses a database of 107 cases (fifty-two separations for persistent cruelty and fifty-five cases of assault summonses between couples) to assess the role of gender, class, and race in working-class marriages. The study reveals a curious pattern. For the most part, gender (mixed with class) remained the most important factor in the adjudication of domestic violence cases. Husbands had legal and economic advantages that privileged reconciliation over separations; magistrates knew wives could not survive on the small sums most men could afford. However, newspaper coverage showed strong racial biases, especially after the race riots of 1919. Stories implied that people of color were “savages” or that the cultural differences between husbands and wives were too great to overcome. The one place the law and newspapers worked together was when violence interacted with vice crimes, especially with stereotypes such as Chinese opium sellers or men of African descent involved in sex work. When the law and newspapers worked together, their prejudices could influence the husbands’ treatment. Ironically, this emphasis had the effect of normalizing domestic violence.

Curless, Gareth

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaf083pmid: N/A

This article examines conflicts over the meaning and organization of work on the waterfront of Georgetown, Guyana. In the Anglophone Caribbean, “free” wage labor was a key component of the post-emancipation civilizing mission. Afro-Caribbean peoples, however, had their own ideas about the place of wage labor in their individual and collective lives. For many freed peoples and their descendants, wage labor was often one “livelihood strategy” among many, and it did not always take priority over other individual needs, or familial and communal concerns. This article investigates how these different understandings of wage labor shaped the multifaceted worlds of Georgetown’s Afro-Guianese waterfront workers. The first part examines the social relations and hierarchies that mediated the organization of work on the waterfront, influenced waterfront workers’ attitude toward wage labor and its relationship to other aspects of their lives, and facilitated episodes of industrial protest, including strikes when Afro-Guianese and Indo-Guianese workers co-operated in defiance of British Guiana’s racialized political economy. The second part focuses more narrowly on the workplace and the colonial authorities’ ongoing search for answers to the labor question. The article contends that decasualization—which complemented the wider post-1945 development and welfare agenda—represented a new iteration of the post-emancipation project to organize Afro-Guianese peoples’ lives around wage labor. Against the backdrop of rising anti-colonial sentiment and the subsequent split within the nationalist movement, the article demonstrates that although the colonial authorities had some success in creating a cohort of regular waterfront workers, decasualization was no panacea for the labor question.

De Graaf, Jan

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaf039pmid: N/A

This article seeks to shed fresh light on the “golden age of social mobility,” which lasted roughly from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s, in postwar Eastern and Western Europe. While much mythologized as a lost era of steadily increasing life chances and equality of opportunity in present-day Europe, historical research into social mobility in the postwar decades has only gotten off the ground in recent years. This article aims to formulate some general hypotheses for this budding research field by taking a pan-European approach, integrating the histories of social mobility in the communist East and the capitalist West. It focuses on three central dimensions of the golden age of social mobility. First, it analyzes how the golden age affected class relations, observing middle-class resilience and peasant advancement at the expense of the working class. Second, it explores how postwar educational expansion mostly benefited the same groups, while undercutting traditional working-class forms of training. Third, it questions the links between social mobility and postwar political stability, pointing to the dislocating effects that the golden age had even on some of its main beneficiaries. In doing so, the article challenges conventional wisdom on the consequences of the “drying up” of social mobility in Europe from the 1970s onwards.

Phelps, Wesley G

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaf017pmid: N/A

In 1975, students at Texas A&M University created the campus’s first gay and lesbian student organization, Gay Student Services (GSS). When university administrators refused to recognize the group the following year, the student members filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the university had violated their First Amendment rights protecting speech, expression, and association. Nearly a decade later, the students won, and a federal appellate court ordered Texas A&M officials to recognize GSS. The students’ legal strategy differed remarkably from the one employed by the mainstream gay and lesbian rights movement of the era, which relied on a constitutional right to privacy to advance queer equality. In this article, I uncover a largely forgotten and discarded strategy in the national movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) equality. I argue that using the tools of social history to study the Texas A&M students’ legal struggle against the university reveals the ways that constitutional arguments about free speech, expression, and association had more liberating potential than arguments about sexual privacy. Although free speech, expression, and association eventually took a back seat to arguments about privacy in the larger movement, the First Amendment may yet hold a key to preserving the rights of queer people today.

Cobo, Natalie

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaf014pmid: N/A

Stearns, Peter N

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaf013pmid: N/A