Stephen Robertson
University of Sydney
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Law and History Review | 2006
Stephen Robertson
On February 15, 1886, in a New York City courtroom, Bridget Grady placed her mark on an affidavit charging Bernard Reilly with rape. The twenty-six-year-old servant told the magistrate that in July of the previous year, while her employer was in the country, Reilly had called on her at the east 38th Street home where she worked. he had been Bridgets “steady company” for about three years and had “several times told her that if he married at all, he would marry her.” During the visit he made what Bridget described as unexpected, unprecedented “advances” to her. When she resisted, Reilly seized her, and they fell to the floor. Bridget, being, as she put it, a “proper and virtuous woman,” became so frightened at Reillys conduct that she immediately lost consciousness. While Bridget was in that state, Reilly had sexual intercourse with her, as a result of which Bridget became pregnant. once she regained consciousness, Bridget “began to cry, and declared she would kill herself; he took her upon his lap and tried to pacify her, telling her at that time that if anything came of it he would marry her.” As a result of that promise, Bridget took no action against Reilly. Seven months later, however, still unmarried, and due to give birth to a child in two months, Bridget had come to the court to make a complaint.
Journal of the History of Sexuality | 2012
Stephen Robertson; Shane White; Stephen Garton; Graham White
“W h i t e o n l o o k e r s . . . m u s t b e made to remember that Harlem is not merely exotic, it is human,” W. e. B. Du Bois wrote in the National Association for Coloured People’s magazine the Crisis in 1927. “It is not a spectacle and an entertainment, it is life; it is not chiefly cabarets, it is chiefly home.” In admonishing whites, Du Bois was assuming that homes presented a picture of black Americans different from that of public performances and that the residents of Harlem, New York City’s foremost African American neighborhood, had adopted the bourgeois domestic ideals promoted by the black middle class as a means of advancing the race toward equality. On other occasions, however, he was less certain of the propriety and order of black home life. Du Bois shared with reformers of both races a concern that many residences in growing urban neighborhoods were so overcrowded that their occupants lacked privacy, causing them to be corrupted by lodgers or pushed out into commercialized public spaces where men and women freely mixed. Such anxieties were rarely supported by evidence of what actually happened in homes. Instead, reformers followed
Journal of Urban History | 2013
Stephen Robertson; Shane White; Stephen Garton
In the 1920s, as Harlem emerged as the largest black city in the world, a significant white presence remained in the neighborhood. Whites not only frequented nightlife, they owned and operated the vast majority of Harlem’s businesses, policed its streets, staffed its schools and hospital, drove its public transport and most of the vehicles traveling its streets, delivered goods, collected rent and insurance payments, and patronized sporting events. Scholars have made only brief mention of this presence and its impact on everyday life, portraying race relations as harmonious and inconsequential in a neighborhood represented as a segregated refuge from whites. Drawing on black newspapers and legal records, and using the Digital Harlem website to map and visualize that evidence of the white presence, reveals a very different picture, of interracial encounters that often led to conflict, and of Harlem as a place of contestation, negotiation, resistance, and accommodation.
Law and History Review | 2016
Stephen Robertson
As the fields of digital humanities and digital history have grown in scale and visibility since the 1990s, legal history has largely remained on the margins of those fields. The move to make material available online in the first decade of the web featured only a small number of legal history projects: Famous Trials; Anglo-American Legal Tradition; The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913 . Early efforts to construct hypertext narratives and scholarship also included some works of legal history: “Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century Courts,” in Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies; Who Killed William Robinson? and Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska . In the second decade of the web, the focus shifted from distributing material to exploring it using digital tools. The presence of digital history grew at the meetings of organizations of historians ranging from the American Historical Association to the Urban History Association, but not at the American Society for Legal History conferences, the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, or the British Legal History Conference. Only a few Anglo-American legal historians took up computational tools for sorting and visualizing sources such as data mining, text mining, and topic modeling; network analysis; and mapping. Paul Craven and Douglas Hays Master and Servant project text mined a comprehensive database of 2,000 statutes and 1,200,000 words to explore similarities and influence among statutes. Data Mining with Criminal Intent mined and visualized the words in trial records using structured data from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Locating Londons Past, a project that mapped resources relating to the early modern and eighteenth century city, and also made use of the Old Bailey records. Digital Harlem mapped crime in the context of everyday life in the 1920s. Only in the past few years has more digital legal history using computational tools begun to appear, and like many of the projects discussed in this special issue, most remain at a preliminary stage. This article seeks to bring into focus the constraints, possibilities, and choices that shape digital legal history, in order to create a context for the work in this special issue, and to promote discussion of what it means to do legal history in the digital age.
Journal of Social History | 2007
Stephen Robertson
prewar and wartime Japanese commentators and towards the shared intellectual and institutional territory of modernity. Nonetheless, his research also provides much grist for considering what was different about Japanese efforts to combat juvenile delinquency. One apparent difference—though perhaps Germany and Italy are similar to Japan in this regard—concerns the extraordinarily cooperative relationship between civil society and the state. Ambaras shows convincingly—depressingly so—how eagerly the institutions of civil society in Japan allied with the state to manage and surveil youth—and, when the political climate turned rightward, how readily they were mobilized towards decidedly illiberal (though modernist, not traditionalist) goals. In an effort to extract policy applications from this study, one might ask crudely: Was there some deficiency in Japan’s civil society that made it susceptible to such developments and, as a result, fueled the repressive, fascist policies of wartime Japan? And if so, what was that deficiency? It is not within the scope of Bad Youth to address such questions, but this important, trenchant book will serve as a valuable resource for those seeking to do so without reverting to notions of Japanese exceptionalism.
Allgemeine Homöopathische Zeitung | 2007
Stephen Robertson
In August 1931, less than two weeks before her sixteenth birthday, Elizabeth Tedesco, having decided that her family was being too strict with her, ran away from her Brooklyn home. Several days later, she saw a sign for the Strand Dance Roof, a taxi-dance hall, and, after dancing there all night, applied for a job as one of the hostesses. With a photograph paid for with money borrowed from the woman in whose
Archive | 2005
Stephen Robertson
Journal of the History of Sexuality | 2005
Stephen Robertson
Journal of Social History | 2002
Stephen Robertson
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences | 2001
Stephen Robertson