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ABSTRACTS
| Lara Putnam, " Atlantic Lives: Microhistory on a Transnational Stage"
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This article looks at existing and potential connections between two disparate subfields of historical inquiry: microhistory and Atlantic history. New research in the latter has utilized microlevel sources (those that allow the researcher to track an individual life) to challenge long-accepted generalizations about which kinds of people did what where in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic. But, the author suggests, such research raises specific methodological challenges and epistemological caveats. The risk is that we may borrow some of the more attractive elements of microhistory—in particular, the chance to tell extraordinary stories about ordinary lives—without addressing the elements of research design that give rigor and weight to the most persuasive microhistorical studies. Can microhistorical evidence from the Atlantic world serve as a basis for explanatory as well as descriptive claims? The article explores this question by discussing the author's own attempts to use microhistorical inquiry to answer macrolevel questions about the origins and breadth of anti-imperialism in the interwar British Caribbean.
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| Gary Cross, "Crowds and Leisure: Thinking Comparatively Across the Twentieth Century"
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Comparative studies of the uses and changes of free time have been relatively rare in social history, especially in the 20th century. By reflecting on some of the ideas and findings generated by a new study that John Walton and Gary Cross conducted concerning the changes in the meanings and behaviors of playful crowds in the U.S. and Britain across the 20th century at Coney Island, Black-pool, Disneyland, and the Beamish Museum, this paper raises some of the possibilities and difficulties of doing a comparative social history of 20th century pleasure crowds. National and other differences will be considered in explaining why the Blackpool resort area survived much social change in the 20th century and Coney Island did not, as well as how Disneyland and the heritage site of Beamish reflected differing adaptations to middle class crowd and aesthetic sensibilities.
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| Wendy Webster, "Transnational Journeys and Domestic Histories"
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This essay considers the potential of histories of transnational movements of people, and the erosion of boundaries between British domestic and imperial history, to expand and revise the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British domestic life and work. Literatures on migration demonstrate how far the history of home involves transnational themes, including the recruitment of migrants and refugees who crossed national borders to do domestic work—in Britain and empire—and their development of what has been called the 'transnational family'. Domestic life, including motherhood, cannot be fully understood outside the history of the control and orchestration of national borders: which people were allowed inside for settlement, which people were refused entry, which people were positively encouraged to enter. The essay considers refugee movements as part of transnational movements—a neglected area in historical work, including work on Britain—developing a case study that compares the recruitment of people from displaced persons camps to the Australian and British labour markets in the late 1940s, situating both recruitment schemes in the context of post-war British migration to Australia.
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| Carl H. Nightingale, "The International Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century American Urban Segregation". . . |
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