FRAGMENTS OF POSTWAR LOS ANGELES: THE BLACK DAHLIA IN FACT AND FICTION*

The gruesome murder of Elizabeth Short, a sex worker nicknamed the “Black Dahlia,” created a real-life film noir tale in postwar Los Angeles. In the unsuccessful search for her killer, the tabloid press and psychiatric “experts” indicted all forms of the open sexual expression brought on by the war as complicit. The problematic connection made at the time between the sexually dangerous woman and the corruptions of postwar Los Angeles has been reinforced in the numerous fictional retellings of the case written in the past fifteen years.     

HOW MUCH CHILD SUPPORT CAN ABSENT FATHERS PAY?

A variety of empirical studies show that custodial mothers and children are worse off after separation and divorce than absent fathers. Many of these mothers and children live in poverty and many more are above the poverty line but below median family income. Since 1974 the U.S. has had a federal-state program of Child Support Enforcement, but absent fathers still have a poor record of paying child support. To estimate how much money absent fathers could be expected to pay in child support, we used income data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Census Bureau data on the number of custodial mothers and children with living absent fathers, and two systems for determining how much money absent fathers should pay in child support. Using these sources, we estimate that absent fathers could pay $26.6 billion in child support–about 3.6 times as much as they actually paid in 1984. Most of this child support money would come from upper-income families. We conclude that absent fathers could substantially augment the financial security of custodial mothers and their children, and that the U.S. should therefore pursue a vigorous program of Child Support Enforcement.     

Archbishop Wulfstan’s criticism of King Edgar in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Archbishop Wulfstan of York’s interpolation in the DE version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 959 is out of character for both the churchman himself and for the pre-Conquest period as a whole, as it is the only text from early England critical of King Edgar. This article shows that Wulfstan’s complaints about Edgar, which focus on the king’s policies related to Scandinavians in England, are rooted in the monarch’s probable official employment of Scandinavians and in the law code IV Edgar. Ultimately, this article argues that Wulfstan’s criticisms of Edgar are best understood in relation to the archbishop’s notion that royal policy could have significant long-term negative consequences, especially if such policy contravened Wulfstan’s understanding of the will of God.     

The Gendering of the British Working Class

How have feminist historians transformed the account of class formation and consciousness articulated in Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class? Deborah Valenze’s The First Industrial Woman, Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches, Sonya Rose’s Limited Livelihoods, and Ellen Ross’s Love and Toil place the gendering of the British working class at the center of the process and explain the peculiar limitations of the working-class movement. The essay also places these books in the theoretical tradition of socialist feminism and considers them as responses to Joan Scott’s call for a poststructuralist approach to gender, class and power.     

The cultures of Native North American language documentation and revitalization

The reviewed books comprise an emerging ethnographic literature on endangered language documentation and revitalization in Native North America. Language loss and preservation are pressing concerns for tribal communities, galvanizing activists and researchers to develop classroom curricula and literacy traditions in hopes of producing new speakers. While the reviewed books show that this goal often goes unrealized, we nevertheless read them as grounds for optimism. Even if language revitalization rarely increases the everyday use of particular lexical and grammatical codes, it may succeed in accomplishing another important goal: facilitating indigenous communities’ efforts to create for themselves more meaningful contemporary cultures.