Living above the shop: home, business, and family in the English "Industrial Revolution"

This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the "household family" into the nineteenth century (rather than its more modern, "nuclear" variant) and the existence of keenly felt gradations of status within households making it likely that the constitution of "the family" differed according to one's place in the domestic hierarchy.

The talk of the town: kit manufacturers negotiate the building industry, 1905-1929

Urban historical scholars have neglected smaller urban centers, including their residential environments and the forces that shaped them. For a time, one of these forces was the mail-order kit home. Kit manufacturers sold houses to families throughout the United States and Canada but enjoyed their greatest success in small towns where detached single-family homes were the norm. They worked to insert themselves into local building industries: They challenged lumber dealers and ignored architects but strove to mollify the contractors on whom they and their customers depended. They attracted considerable attention and met with initial success: Emerging rapidly after 1905, they had hit their stride by 1914 and enjoyed a heyday in the 1920s. They were stricken by, and failed to recover from, the Depression in large part because lumber dealers had learned how to compete with them.

[The importance of Jewish nursing in World War I as shown by the example of the Jewish nurses' home in Stuttgart]

The history of Jewish nursing in World War I has so far not been central to medical history research. Rosa Bendit's war diary is still the only source available on the voluntary service Jewish nurses provided during World War I. Their number was small compared to that of nurses in general. Jewish nursing in Germany has hardly been researched. Jewish nurses, like their Christian colleagues, took on wartime nursing tasks voluntarily. This paper will focus on the experiences of the nurses who were sent to various locations in East and West by the Stuttgart Jewish Nurses' Home. Based on quotations from the war diary their position within the medical service will be described, compared and analyzed. The paper draws attention to special characteristics in the comparison ofJewish and Christian nurses and explores issues such as religious observance, religious discrimination, patriotism and differences in the evaluation of the nurses' work. A brief outline of the history of the Stuttgart Jewish Nurses' Home illustrates their working conditions. The Jewish nurses applied themselves with as much effort and devotion as their Christian counterparts. Although there were only few of them, the Jewish nurses managed to establish a recognized position for themselves within the medical service. The history of Jewish nursing in Stuttgart ended in 1941 when the Jewish Nurses' Home was dissolved by the Nazis and four nurses were murdered in concentration camps.

Back to the garden: communes, the environment, and antiurban pastoralism at the end of the sixties

This essay examines the complicated relationship among hippie communes, the environmental movement, and New Left and Black Power militants in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those relationships lie the roots of the divide that separated environmental issues on one hand and urban issues on the other during the 1970s and beyond. This essay examines how the fight between militants and back-to-the-land communards and environmentalists, between what we might call urban progressives and antiurban progressives, was staged as a fight between those who cared about the issues of the city and those who turned their backs on them. In this way, this essay locates the city more centrally in politics of the era.

Tales of deviance and control: on space, rules, and law in squatter settlements

In Latin American cities, around a third of the urban population lives in tenure situations that can be designated as informal, yet variation in the ways and extent to which these arrangements do not comply with law is extensive. Furthermore, informal dwellers often employ a variety of strategies to legitimize and ultimately legalize their tenure, implying a dynamic rather than a static relationship between illegality and legality. Conceiving of land tenure in dichotomous terms, as simply being either legal or illegal, therefore, fails to reflect this diversity, nor does it capture the evolving nature of the relationship between informal settlements and the state system. Drawing from the development of squatter settlements in Buenos Aires, this article proposes an alternative perspective and shows how settlements alternate strategies of noncompliance with adaptation to the state legal system to gradually increase their legality.

The shantytowns of Central Park West: fin de siècle squatting in American cities

This article argues that the scope and importance of squatting has been greatly understated in discussions of nineteenth-century urban development. Period newspapers reported often on the struggle of cities and titleholders across North America to evict squatters, indicating that squatters were a common and persistent component of the city landscape. Evidence also suggests that many, if not most, squatters believed that they would eventually win clear title to their homes.

Housing supply and residential segregation in Ireland

The article examines the role of housing supply in ethnic diversity and the residential segregation of Asian, African and eastern European immigrants from Irish nationals in Ireland. Housing supply is defined as the proportions of new housing, private rental accommodation and social housing among all housing units in an electoral district. Multivariate regressions reveal that, among all three housing supply variables, the proportion of private rentals had the largest effect on ethnic diversity and immigrant— Irish segregation. Areas with higher proportions of private rental units were more ethnically diverse, had greater presences of Africans, Asians and eastern Europeans (as opposed to high concentrations of Irish nationals) and exhibited greater integration between each of the three immigrant groups and Irish nationals. The article concludes with a discussion of immigrant assimilation and questions whether the patterns of residential integration observed would further facilitate other forms of social inclusion for immigrants in Irish society.

Rebuilding the park: the impact of Hurricane Katrina on a black middle-class neighborhood

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina unveiled the legacy of racial and class stratification in New Orleans, Louisiana. Much of the Katrina-related research has focused primarily on how poor Black neighborhoods were disproportionately affected by the disaster. While this body of research makes valid claims, there has been very little research that examines how Black middle-class residents in New Orleans were impacted by Hurricane Katrina. This study examines how residents in Pontchartrain Park, a Black middle-class neighborhood, are responding to the disaster. The author uses in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, and archival data to examine the barriers that residents are facing in the recovery process. She argues that the experiences of the Black middle class also have implications for the connectedness of race and class. The challenges discussed within the article are linked to a history of racial stratification.

Modernizing the Estonian farmhouse, redefining the family, 1880s-1930s

In the nineteenth century, the transition from a Baltic-German-controlled manor-and-serf economy to individually owned farmsteads transformed all aspects of life including the spatial organization and form of farmhouses in the western provinces of Tsarist Russia. Agricultural experts and social reformers discussed how to update the traditional threshing-room dwelling house (rehielamu) into a healthy dwelling for successful farmers and, after the Estonian War of Independence, for new settlers. Using material culture such as contemporary plans, I show that changing household relationships, in addition to economic and technological factors, helped to transform the ancient rehielamu into a modern dwelling.

Enabling Housing Cooperatives: policy lessons from Sweden, India and the United States

Housing cooperatives became active in urban areas in Sweden, India and the United States during the interwar period. Yet, after the second world war, while housing cooperatives grew phenomenally nationwide in Sweden and India, they did not do so in the United States. This article makes a comparative institutional analysis of the evolution of housing cooperatives in these three countries. The analysis reveals that housing cooperatives' relationship with the state and the consequent support structures explain the divergent evolution. Although the relationships between cooperatives and the state evolved over time, they can be characterized as embedded autonomy, overembeddedness and disembeddedness in Sweden, India and the United States respectively. Whereas the consequent support structures for housing cooperatives became well developed in Sweden and India, such structures have been weak in the United States. The article highlights the need for embedded autonomy and the need for supportive structures to enable the growth of housing cooperatives.

[Antoine Brulon, a wealthy privileged apothecary in Paris in the seventeenth century, and Anne de Furnes, his wife. Their illustrious tenant in the Place du Palais Royal - Molière]

In the seventeenth century, Antoine Brulon, originally from the Auvergne, had a particularly prosperous career. He acquired a privilege as apothecary and was syndic for the Society of royal and princely apothecaries. He spent his whole life in the Rue Saint-Honoré where he practised pharmacy in his status of privileged apothecary. In 1651 he bought a house close to the Quinze-Vingts hospital, and the following year he married Anne de Furnes, the daughter of a lawyer. In 1658 he bought three old houses on the Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, soon selling two of them to Louis-Henry Daquin, doctor in ordinary to the king. They both built new houses. Daquin let two apartments in succession to Molière between the years 1661 and 1665. In January 1666, Molière became the tenant of the house built by Antoine Brulon and owned by his widow, Anne de Furnes. This building was occupied successively by three royal apothecaries who rented the shop and its outbuildings: Philbert Boudin, apothecary in ordinary to the Queen, Jean Morel, apothecary to the King's camp and armies, and finally Pierre Frapin, apothecary to the Grande Ecurie, and supplier of medicine to Molière, as we have previously shown. The two latter apothecaries thus lived in turn in the same building as Molière between January 1666 and July 1672. Antoine Brulon died 5th March 1665. The inventory of his goods indicates not only the rich décor of his apartment, but also a sum of 75,780 livres in cash, representing 96% of his total fortune. This was remarkable wealth for a Paris apothecary of the time.

Social change and transformations in housing

This study aims to illustrate how residential morphology and home-use patterns reflect the transition from semi-nomadism to an urban lifestyle undergone by the Bedouin of the Negev (Israel). Thirty houses and 300 building plans were studied while planners, builders and residents were interviewed. Three types of buildings and home-use patterns were identified. Each type corresponds to a stage in the Bedouin adaptation to urban life in government resettlement towns. The state encourages resettlement by selling developed land at a low price and providing access to subsidies and mortgages, while refusing to develop property and not hesitating to demolish houses built on tribal sites. The houses built over the past 30 years are indicators of Bedouin lifestyle adaptation, as the Bedouin have been increasingly involved in their design. The empirical basis for this study is an analysis of the houses in Tel Sheva, the first of seven resettlement towns built for the Bedouin in the Negev. The houses considered were built between 1972 and 2002, with 1972 marking the beginning of the period in which the Build-your-own-home development scheme was applied to the Bedouin, a scheme in which plots of about 1,000m2 are allocated and owners are responsible for building on them.

New plans for housing in urban Kenya, 1939-63

Until about 1939, guided by a policy of trusteeship, the colonial government in Kenya limited the number of Africans in urban areas. As elsewhere in East and Central Africa, employers and municipalities were supposed to provide only 'bachelor' housing for unaccompanied African men. After 1939, encouraged by London, the Kenyan government began to promote a policy of development which implied urbanization. The permanent presence of Africans in towns was accepted, as was the growing responsibility of municipalities for the provision of housing for families as well as for bachelors. Municipalities began to plan for new types of housing, with more community facilities in new types of neighbourhood layouts. From the early 1940s, a wave of construction created many thousands of new dwellings in all major urban areas, but only a minority were designed for families. Many women and children were accommodated in 'bachelor' housing where they were compensated through rental subsidies. Although Kenya's housing initiatives in the late colonial period did not satisfy all of the rapidly growing urban needs, they were a substantial achievement.

Wooden objects from Ohalo II (23,000 cal BP), Jordan Valley, Israel

Eight wooden objects were found at Ohalo II, a submerged and well-preserved site in the Sea of Galilee, Israel. The fisher-hunter-gatherers' site has been radiometrically dated to 22,500-23,500 (cal BP) with 45 assays read by four laboratories. The wooden objects were found on brush-hut floors. They include a bark plank with polish and use signs, pencil-shaped specimens with longitudinal shavings, and other types that may have been decorative or symbolic. One incised wooden object is identical in size and incision pattern to a gazelle bone implement found in a grave, behind a human skull. The recovered wooden objects are not directly related to hunting, gathering, or fishing, and frustratingly, there are no remains of bows, arrows, spears, handles, or other such items. Nonetheless, the objects present a wide repertoire in terms of size, shape, and possible function. The new finds add to the growing body of evidence concerning the use of perishable materials during the Upper Paleolithic.

Disease and domesticity on display: the Montreal Tuberculosis Exhibition, 1908

This article explores ideas about tuberculosis in early 20th-century Montreal by looking at one particular event: The Montreal Tuberculosis Exhibition of 1908. An analysis of the layout and design of this exhibition reveals that objects were manipulated to convey specific messages. Domestic spaces were showcased as being particularly troublesome. The exhibition suggested that the home was a potentially dangerous agent of disease, thereby revealing a relationship between disease and everyday life.

Unraveling the mystery of why there was no childhood lead poisoning

Despite widespread use of leaded paints, classic life-threatening lead poisoning in small children began to be diagnosed as such only in the 1914-30 period. The diagnosis became suddenly more common in the 1950s and 1960s, but only in some areas of the United States. Experts focused on interior leaded paints as the source of the poison. Archival study of cases from Cincinnati and material from Denver, along with reevaluation of the medical literature, suggests that the problem should be reframed in terms of localized accident, not an epidemic. Very likely clinicians' reports accurately reflected social and material reality. Housing patterns hitherto not fully explored or understood explain why diagnoses were or were not reported. Moreover, evidence suggests the hypothesis that exterior (not interior) paint applied to middle-class houses (not mansions) may account for most cases not traced to repainted furniture and windowsills.