After the economy stabilized following World War I, the U.S. experienced a record level of residential construction. When considering housing in this period, scholars have usually focused on the sheer number of units built and perhaps on the fact that the rate of construction turned down several years before the whole economy soured. Relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which U.S. building patterns differed in the 1920s from earlier periods and what these changes can tell us about broader social trends. This article examines residential building in this period in more detail, by looking at the city of Chicago, and suggests that new patterns of housing construction may have been linked to changes in the economy as a whole.

Plaintiff Michael Marx, a Veterans Administration pensioner, complained on 8 December 1944 that he rented a room from defendant Mary Frances for $3.25 per week, not knowing that the World War II Office of Price Administration (OPA) had set a maximum rent of $3.00 per week on that apartment (Marx v. Frances). Marx alleged a total overpayment of $4.50 and further complained of Frances's verbal abuse and threats to evict him if he pursued this action. As a result, he claimed return of the overcharge, treble damages on the overcharge ($13.50), $5.00 for failure to provide normal services, $100 in attorney's fees, $500 for current and future doctor bills, and $5,000 for the ruining of his health.

People in the Icelandic Sagas, and with them the narratives themselves, are impelled by powerful human passions: love, hate, pride, envy, fidelity. This is easy to see and easy to explain. In stories that are intended to captivate their audience, it is vital to spellbind listeners of both sexes and all ages with the excitement of eternal existential problems.

Yet there are other features in the sagas that modern cultural analysis has considered less dependent on the requirements of the literary genre and thus more revealing expressions of the Scandinavian mentality. These include the legalism that pervades the sagas (see, e.g., Gurevich 1985; Hastrup 1985; Byock 1988). One is struck by the extent to which people think and argue in legal terms. This applies to men in conflict, to men demonstrating their power and influence.

There is no Doubt that Sweden, at least from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, belonged to the European countries where legal control of extramarital sex was most extensive. First of all, there was a difference between Protestant and Catholic countries, not in principle but in emphasis and form. The Spanish Inquisition was, for instance, mainly interested in whether people thought that a certain behavior was a sin or not. Religious confessions proved that the sinner realized that he had done something wrong, and he could therefore be treated with a certain mildness afterwards (Benassar et al. 1979; Henningsen et al. 1986). Protestantism, at least in Sweden, tended to be more interested in people's actual behavior, usually leaving the internal spiritual life of the sinner aside. This dichotomy between thought and behavior was of course not total in practice, but it tells us something important about the difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards religious control. Religious homogeneity also explains some of the success of Swedish orthodox Protestantism in creating a system of tight control. There was no escape for dissenters except emigration, since the creed was protected by the civil state.