The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.     

1990年代《美国历史评论》的中国研究

作为美国社会中一个较大的学术群体,美国历史学家的中国研究对于我们了解美国知识分子的中国观具有很大的参照意义。最权威的美国史学刊物——《美国历史评论》——在20世纪90年代所发表的中国研究文章便从一个极为重要的角度展示了美国史学界的中国研究在最近十年的主要线索:中国的传统儒家思维方式左右着中国近现代的社会发展和对外交往。     

The Subtle Knife: Using Domestic Objects to Access the Middle Anglo-Saxon Worldview

The seventh to ninth centuries AD are understood as a period of changing worldviews with the introduction and embedding of Christianity across the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In contrast to the attention afforded to the ‘ritual’ or sacred transformations of this period, relatively little has been made of the changing archaeological record of ‘ordinary’ or secular spaces and material cultures in order to understand this historical change in worldview. The use and significance of the domestic Anglo-Saxon knife spans both settlement and cemetery contexts. It is argued that the study of knife use and deposition reveals beliefs and worldviews expressed in everyday activities as well as in those deposits that appear ‘special’.     

The Good Woman: the provenance and purpose of Montelupo oil jars

In memory of Ronald Coleman of Chapel Hill, Queensland, Australia (1938–2008)

SUMMARY: The Tuscan origin of the characteristic large oil jars found all over the world was confirmed by neutron activation analysis about 20 years ago, although some still call them Iberian storage jars. Our paper presents the unpublished analytical data and considers whose oil they contained. Italian records show that in the 18th century Montelupo despatched coppi (jars) down the River Arno to Lucca, where the best Italian olive oil was produced, and to Livorno (Leghorn), then the largest emporium in the Mediterranean for transit trade. In London, the jars became a familiar sight with different high and popular cultural meanings.