Cultural cold wars and UNESCO in the twentieth century

One might hope that philosophy could reconcile us to our social world and each other. To entertain this as plausible is to think there is some perspective one could reach via philosophical enquiry that shows our life and society to be as they are for good reason, allows us to see it all as in some sense rational. Hegel is no doubt the great exponent of this ideal, his system promising to trace history's patterns and conceptual development, while he is so optimistic as to believe that, at its end, we would achieve the perspective whereby every agent's own actions and situation can be made intelligible to themselves and others. This was meant to be true for us the readers, so we would be able to see for ourselves how what we do makes sense, given our circumstances, and is plausibly tending towards a good end. 1 Of course, the problem is that there may not be such a perspective. Perhaps to see the world aright is to recognize it as a jumbled mess, with no progressive tendency towards greater coherence, and no satisfaction to be had in achieving superior insight. Perhaps there is no good end we are collaboratively working towards, no possible reconciliation with each other; maybe we are perpetually on the brink of descending once more into a Hobbesian nightmare. Hegel hoped to reassure us that the existence of that clarificatory perspective is guaranteed; as free agents, once we achieve self-awareness we necessarily mutually recognize one another as engaged in a fundamentally cooperative project tending towards justified ends. 2 But, alas, not all of us have been convinced, and a kind of existential anomie can befall a thoughtful person who surveys our present socio-cultural situation. 3 What if there really just is no excuse for how things are, and no good reason for me to carry on?

‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

JOHN B. MARINO, The Grail Legend in Modern Literature. Arthurian Studies LIX. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Pp. vi, 175. ISBN: 1-84384-022-7. $70. John B. Marino's volume on the grail legend in modern literature is longer on ambition than on delivery. Aiming to trace emergent forms of grail scholarship into the literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marino displays broad knowledge of the relevant textual histories, but fails to treat enough literature to keep the reader of modern literature interested. The treatment of modern literature is delayed by a fourteen-page introduction on Arthurian film, which, while interesting and well done, holds little indication of what lies ahead. Then the first of four chapters deals exclusively with source texts. While the chapter is brief and displays impressive fluency with these texts, it is left to the reader to make the links between this chapter and those that follow. The second chapter, on Christian versus pagan origin theories of the grail and their competing influences on modern literature also begins with a long cataloguing of source texts, here in the forms of medievalist literary theory. Roger Sherman Loomis, Jessie Weston, and James Frazer get honorable mentions, again demonstrating Marino's facility with criticism. The first major texts Marino covers are John Cowper Powys's Glastonbury Romance and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon and its prequels. These are key texts in what Marino envisions as a 'culture war' between Christian and pagan grail versions. Here, for the first time, appears a hint of denigration in Marino's writing about neo-paganism a la Bradley-a hint that grows stronger as the book proceeds. (In one footnote, Marino goes so far as to suggest that gendered approaches to the Grail legend are both consonant with Bradley's work and, simultaneously, worthy of ridicule [101].) Marino depicts Bradley as explicitly anti-Christian, a sense that might not be conveyed by her work. Later, when Marino concedes the point that Bradley is a Christian, he goes on to write that her Christian characters hold 'beliefs that are highly unorthodox by the standards of the Bible, Roman Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, to name a few forms of Christianity that profess a claim to absolute truth' (77). By the close of the chapter, Marino has ceased discussing the treatment of the grail in modern literature in favor of railing against 'relativism. …

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery


 
 
 Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebis

The essay aims to explore the potentialities of collective writing for the deconstruction of the authorship in a cultural and political sense. Some historical experiences of collective writing from the avant-gardes are in fact cited in Roland Barthes’essay which, in a dialogue with Michel Foucault, opened in 1968 the debate on “The Death of the Author”; and even if the two scholars came to divergent outcomes as to the diagnosis of the author’s health, both reflections were based on the assumption of the political implications inherent in the figure of the Author as it was built and mythologized by the bourgeois society. It will be seen how, from the end of the twentieth century, some collective writing experiences, in particular the Italian collectives Wu Ming and Scrittura Industriale Collettiva, have attempted to force and deconstruct the authorship by transforming collective writing into a tool of political and cultural struggle. However, the authorship remains unavoidable both for the aesthetic needs of literary criticism and for the commercial exploitation of the publishing market, which transforms this name into a brand to sell; the essay therefore intends to show that collective writing can not in itself be an antidote to the marketing of the author unless it is accompanied by paratextual strategies and extra-literary activities that are truly capable of deconstructing the mythology denounced by Barthes.

The term “culture war” has become a generic expression for secular–Catholic conflicts across nineteenth‐century Europe. Yet, if measured by acts of violence, anticlericalism peaked in the years between 1927 and 1939, when thousands of Catholic priests and believers were imprisoned or executed and hundreds of churches razed in Mexico, Spain, and Russia. This article argues that not only in these three countries, but indeed across Europe a culture war raged in the interwar period. It takes, as a case study, the interaction of communist and Catholic actors located in the Vatican, the Soviet Union, and Germany in the period between the beginning of the Pontificate of Pius XI in 1922 and Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany in 1933. As revealed in Vatican and Comintern correspondence, Papal officials and communist leaders each sought to mobilise the German populace to achieve their own diplomatic ends. German Catholics and communists gladly responded to the call to arms that sounded from Rome and Moscow in 1930, but they did so also to further their own domestic goals. The case study shows how national contexts inflected the transnational dynamics of radical anti‐Catholicism in interwar Europe. In the end, agitation against “godlessness” did not lead to the return of a “Christian State” desired by many conservative Christians. Instead, the culture war further destabilised the republic and added a religious dimension to a landscape well suited to National Socialist efforts to reach a Christian population otherwise mistrustful of its völkisch and anticlerical elements.

Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination

American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. By Gary Gerstle. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. 444 pages. $29.95 (cloth). In the late 1980s, a period marked by culture wars and historiographical upheavals, Americanists in a variety of disciplines began calling urgently for what Thomas Bender called "a new synthesis" of American history. 1 The explosion of scholarship on communities defined by—and divided by—race, ethnicity, gender, class, and ideology had resulted in a greatly expanded awareness of particular experiences in a diverse nation, but it left many scholars with the uneasy sense that something was missing—some overarching way of talking about the American past. The reading public bypassed shelves of books written by academic specialists in favor of popular—frequently military and political—histories and History Channel-style public programming, leading some to conclude that the kind of projects undertaken by academics had rendered them irrelevant in the public sphere. 2 In spite of the mountains of journal articles, biographies, and monographs devoted to recovering and repositioning the lives, beliefs, and endeavors of men and women on the margins, undergraduates continued to identify the same traditional American heroes (mostly white and male) as the most important shapers of the nation's life. 3 Indeed, at all levels of education, battle lines were drawn over the appropriate content of American history. [End Page 317] In the following decade, a spate of works took up the challenge of constructing narratives that would address the felt need for synthesis and simultaneously incorporate the insights of this rich body of work. Ronald Takaki invited readers to peer into a "Different Mirror," and Priscilla Wald probed "cultural anxiety and narrative form" as critical aspects of the process by which Americans constituted themselves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. David Roediger, George Lipsitz, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and others placed race at the center of their work as constitutive of American democracy and culture. 4 These broad efforts have neither obviated nor displaced particularistic studies, but they have provided valuable frameworks within which such studies can be contextualized. Gary Gerstle's American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century offers another way of thinking about the relationship between "wholes and parts" by examining nationalist discourse in the century just concluded. It also sheds light on the reasons for the historiographical shift. Influenced by the work of scholars noted above plus Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Gerstle examines two streams of thought that "animated the nation's communal imagination" (5)—civic nationalism and racial nationalism. The civic nationalist stream, he argues, flows from founding ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence that affirm equality, fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and confidence in the people to govern themselves democratically. Racial nationalism, he insists, flows from an equally venerable tradition of thought embedded in the Constitution and the 1790 immigration law. This ideal imagines the American nation in racial and ethnic terms "as a people held together by common blood and skin color and by an inherited fitness for self-government" (4). Gerstle shows how both nationalist conceptions shaped the thinking of twentieth-century leaders from Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton and consequently how both found expression in public policy and social reform movements. The result is a deeply textured and insightful reading of a complicated era in U.S. history. One of the many virtues of this study is Gerstle's refusal to caricature either nationalist strain. The racial nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt, for example, bears little resemblance to the rabid white supremacist vision of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. TR believed racial hybridity—the mixing of diverse racial stocks—invigorated the United States, but his vision did not include all racial stocks. Indeed, he willfully [End Page 318] diminished the role played by the black Ninth and Tenth Cavalries and Twenty-fourth Infantry in the battles for Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill in the 1898 war with Spain when...

Reality Bites

In October 1958, Elvis was drafted and sent to West Germany, serving at the very frontline of the Cold War—a highly successful propaganda coup to win European “hearts and minds” in the cultural struggle between the two superpowers. How did Elvis manage to morph from America’s “inner enemy” into one of its key Cold War figureheads in only a few years? How did stardom and popular music transform the cultural conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union? What can Elvis’s story tell us about American soft power in the twentieth century more generally? Building on recent historiographical trends, this chapter uses Elvis’s story to investigate the role of popular music and consumerism in the Cold War. It reveals that, even though the US had initially sought to fight the cultural conflict primarily on the grounds of “high culture” and technology, Presley’s success unexpectedly gave America what would become one of its most potent cultural weapons—the public image of a nation freely endorsing consumer choice, innovation, and freedom of expression. It also argues that Elvis’s own adaptability and aloofness was key to his lasting success as a propaganda tool, allowing him to be easily transfigured into all sorts of things for various sorts of people. As America’s public image changed in the 1960s and 1970s, however, so did the image of its Cold War superhero.

This themed issue of The Journal of Architecture focuses on what appears to be a major blind-spot of current architectural historiography of the post-war period: the transfer of architecture and pl...

Why do so many conservative politicians flock to the campuses of Liberty University, Wheaton College, and Bob Jones University? In Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America’s culture wars. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, and a proper American, all within the bounds of biblical revelation. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools have thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty. If we hope to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to understand this influential network of dissenting institutions. Plus, only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America’s continuing culture wars. After all, our culture wars aren’t between one group of educated people and another group that has not been educated. Rather, the fight is usually fiercest between two groups that have been educated in very different ways.

Reviewed by: Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City Mark Edward Lender Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. By Michael A. Lerner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 351 pp. $28.95). In this enjoyable and learned volume, Michael A. Lerner cites the temperance movement as one of the most influential reform efforts in American history, and National Prohibition, the crowning achievement of the movement, as perhaps the nation's single most dramatic attempt at moral, political, and social reformation. Lerner is right on both counts; his perspective, however, is that of case study, and he explores the struggle to dry up the country through the singular lens of New York City. The author concedes the early successes of the temperance crusade. Progressives and other reformers had identified alcohol problems as serious threats to public health and social order, and the beverage alcohol business, frequently corrupt, enjoyed little public esteem. By 1920, when the Volstead Act became the law of the land, most of the country already was dry at the state or local level; furthermore, early data suggested that Prohibition indeed had produced declines in drinking-related health and social problems. Reformers therefore were optimistic about the likelihood of drying out New York, in spite of the city's long-standing antipathy to the temperance crusade. But the New York experience, of course, was hardly the victory drys had anticipated. In fact, Prohibition ran into trouble on virtually every front. Reformers had hoped to bring New York's teeming immigrant population over to the temperance cause, but, to the increasing exasperation of drys, most new ethnic groups clung stubbornly to their wet cultural norms and resented reform initiatives. The closing of landmark city watering holes, with a corresponding loss of jobs and revenue, drew protests on cultural and economic grounds. In addition, it gradually became apparent that New York drinkers were not necessarily consuming less, but had simply shifted their drinking to new venues. Eventually, these included illegal but quite accessible speakeasies as well as elaborate nightspots. Owners of some of these establishments, including Texas Guinan and Helen Morgan, became major celebrities, and their flouting of the dry laws enraged reformers while reinforcing a growing public perception of the Volstead Act as unenforceable. Worse, it also became obvious that the federal Bureau of Prohibition lacked the resources necessary for an adequate enforcement effort, and that state and local officials were only reluctant allies. Indeed, enforcement agents frequently became enmeshed in corruption scandals, lured by pay-offs from bootleggers and illegal clubs, even as massive numbers of Volstead cases threatened to overwhelm the courts. Lerner traces these developments in considerable detail, all of it supporting his observation that, far from uniting New Yorkers in a common reform cause, the Eighteenth Amendment instead "had polarized New York between irreconcilable dry and wet camps, one bent on enforcing Prohibition at any cost and the other set on rebelling against it" (page 59). This "irreconcilable" divide reflected more than a fight over whether or not someone could buy a legal drink. Rather, Lerner sees the bitterness deriving from a clash of competing cultural visions—perhaps the first true "culture war" of the [End Page 811] twentieth century. He carefully depicts the wet-dry conflict in New York as representing a wider conflict between an older, more homogeneous America, and an emerging nation that increasingly emphasized personal liberty, co-existence between the country's constituent populations, and a tolerance of different cultural norms. By the 1920s, drys certainly understood that New York, composed of multiple ethnic groups and combining any number of social, political, and cultural outlooks, was one of the greatest imaginable threats to their reform agenda. Lerner makes this case clearly and forcefully, repeatedly citing examples of wet and dry voices talking past one another, but understanding the gulf between their positions only too well. Perhaps there was room for compromise, but no willingness. While Lerner is on firm interpretive ground, his account of Repeal is less satisfying. He accepts reports that the results were beneficent, but given their feelings toward Prohibition, New York officials and media hardly would have said otherwise. Lerner might have taken a closer look. Other scholars...

Dale Allen Gyure The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856–2006 Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2011, 294 pp., 81 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9781935195191 Thomas Muller and Romana Schneider Das Klassenzimmer vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis heute / The Classroom: From the Late 19th Century until the Present Day Tubingen, Germany: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 2011, 304 pp., 400 color and 400 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9783803033482 Jonathan Zimmerman Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory Icons of America series, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 233 pp., 13 b/w illus. $26 (cloth), ISBN 9780300123265 All of a sudden, architectural historians are thinking about schools. I hope this is evidence of a new trend to document educational landscapes, because for too long, far too long, places made for children to learn (and live and play) have received short shrift from our scholarly community. The encouraging evidence of interest includes a new history of children’s spaces in Denmark, several of open-air schools in Europe, and one study of British schools.1 In the United States, architectural historians have started to consider spaces for children, including in this journal.2 But the absence of book-length works on school design in the U.S. is puzzling, because schooling is the central experience of modern children and schools the central site where modern childhood is lived. For many reasons, the social construction of childhood changed in the nineteenth century, prompting parents to treasure children for their emotional contribution to family life and child savers to insist kids deserved to learn and play, rather than work. The transition was not easy or smooth, but as education came to be the job of every child, communities built public schools and hired architects to design many of them. Imagine the extent of this public works project, as important as any other in shaping a modern nation. Architects, some well known, others less so, designed buildings that, coupled with compulsory education, fulfilled the state’s interest in teaching children to read, write, and calculate. In the nineteenth century, this significant claim on the public purse demanded construction of hundreds of thousands of buildings in the U.S., from one-room schools in the country to grammar and high schools in cities and suburbs, and the manufacture of huge quantities of equipment, including desks. Immediately, these and other artifacts showed the cultural landscape of public education to be …