History books of potential interest to genealogists

Three books that looked promising to me, out of the huddled masses reviewed in The American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 2012): 533, 543, 525

An Illinois woman's struggle in the 1860s and later to give allegedly insane people the right to a jury trial before being immured in an asylum:
Linda V. Carlisle, Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

How non-snooty restaurants rose along with the middle class:
Andrew P. Haley, Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

A family story about crossing racial boundaries in St. Louis and New Orleans (although without as much historical context as one reviewer wanted):
Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family's History of Race in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011).


Harold Henderson, “History books of potential interest to genealogists” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post.]

Bookends Friday: Insanity and genealogy

Anyone who's crazy enough to get into indexing and abstracting records of 19th-century insanity commitments should spend an evening or two with a little book from Indiana: From Under the Cloud at Seven Steeples, 1878-1885: The Peculiarly Saddened Life of Anna Agnew at the Indiana Hospital for the Insane (Zionsville: Guild Press/Emmis Publishing, LP, 2002), by Lucy Jane King, M.D. Anna Agnew, evidently a sufferer from what we would now call bipolar disorder, spent seven years on the inside, and lived to get well and tell about it -- but she never got her seven years, or her family, back. King quotes extensively from Agnew's own book and explains the situations. (Her attempts to bring the mental-health story down to the present are less successful, in my opinion. Oliver Sacks has another perspective in a recent New York Review of Books ($).)

It's a unique and essential view of a group that had a rough time in that century. The huge asylum buildings that survive look like grim antiquated warehouses to us now, but warehousing was not what the medical people of the 1800s had in mind. They built asylums on the theory that people became insane because the world was too fast-moving and confusing for them; hence the attempt to create an atmosphere of serene regularity and beauty for the inmates. Of course, not everyone who worked there understood or appreciated that philosophy.

Methodology Monday with Nancy (Donnally) Bane

On her web site, Sharon DeBartolo Carmack posts some past articles, including an interesting and easy-to-follow account of her research into a mentally ill woman in the 1880 census: "Mania -- and Nancy Bane: Identifying the Family of Nancy (Donnally) Bane, Inmate at the Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum and the Athens Insane Asylum," The American Genealogist 79 (Jan.-April 2004):121-34.

There's no particularly intricate logic or much indirect evidence here, just persistent and knowledgeable digging, and careful elimination of near-matches. It's a good research model and a good read (be prepared to learn a few unpalatable things about late-19th-century "treatments" for mental illness), and a reminder that TAG, one of the top-notch magazines in the field, is open to more than just articles about the English origins of New England colonists!