Enrolment at the French Navy’s School of Advanced Studies in Paris from 1896 to 1899

IN MARCH 1875, A CHICAGO TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT reported that a miners’ strike in Brazil, Indiana, continued with conditions worsening and the “breach between labor and capital widen[ing].” The year-long labor dispute found the striking miners “dogged and sullen” and was taking a dreadful toll on the men and their families. Many of the town's merchants initially supported the strike, but they increasingly feared violence would ensue as the striking miners became more vigilant and defiant. One merchant stated that he had witnessed other strikes, but none of them had “men so determined not to yield,” and he believed it would be necessary to bring in the military to prevent an outbreak of violence. The Tribune correspondent predicted that a “revolution in labor” was imminent because the desperate mine operators were willing to hire Black workers to take the place of the striking miners. The mine operators were “confident that, if negro labor [was] adopted unanimously, it [would] completely and effectively crush strikes, which [had] become so frequent and arrogant of late as to make any dependence on white labor impracticable.” African American workers, according to the correspondent, were more dependable than white laborers, and they would not become “turbulent at trifles, and for many other reasons that are apparent.” As a result, some midwestern mine operators had already arranged to fill their mines with Black workers, and “others will follow suit.”1The newspaper correspondent's prediction about a “revolution in labor” was accurate—during the height of labor unrest in the late 1870s, Northern industrialists sought measures to undercut the burgeoning labor movement by importing African American workers from the South into their predominantly European American worksites. Industrialists were encouraged by two overarching factors: first, Black workers from the South traditionally earned lower wages than their Northern counterparts and would therefore cost less; and more importantly, due to racist exclusionary measures, as well as the relatively small African American population in the North, semi-skilled and skilled worksites were dominated by European American workers. Industrialists correctly assumed that the racism of their workers would cause an exceedingly vitriolic reaction to the idea of Black workers replacing them. In addition to the typical labor conflict issues, racialized violence would invariably ensue. Industrialists then found justification to utilize draconian measures on the strikers—enforced by local militia or police—to ensure that the replacement workers would be allowed to work in relative safety, and to ensure that industrialists continued to make profits.2This racial dynamic became increasingly prevalent throughout the Midwest as rapid industrialization and massive population growth created whole new categories of workers. European American workers braced themselves for the possibility of a chaotic economic transformation by frantically jockeying for occupational viability within the racial hierarchy. In the environment of an increasingly racialized labor movement, Black and other non-white workers, with few exceptions, were forced to the bottom of the economic ladder.Among midwestern states, Illinois was particularly distinct due, in part, to the massive growth of Chicago as a central industrial hub for the region. In comparison to adjacent midwestern states, Illinois was also unique because of its relatively small African American population. By 1890, the African American population in Illinois was only 57,028 (1.5 percent of the state population); in 1900, 85,078 (1.8 percent of the state population). The dearth of a substantial Black population, coupled with a significant rise in anti-Black sentiment throughout the state, helped to create the perception that African American workers were unable to perform technologically advanced labor. Thus, Black Illinoisans of the late nineteenth century were often forced out or excluded from more desirable occupations and, subsequently, forced to the periphery of the labor movement.This article explores the labor activism of Black Illinoisans during the tumultuous late nineteenth century in the context of this relatively new phenomenon—that is, the racialization of labor. Of course, historians generally acknowledge this period as the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States. Yet for African Americans, the period also signified a time in which their racial “character” was under severe scrutiny—not only in labor, but also in virtually every aspect of Black American life. Notions of white racial superiority invariably circumscribed Black people as inferior outsiders—undeserving of a place within mainstream American life. Thus, to most European Americans, it made perfect sense within the twisted logical framework of white supremacy to categorize labor based upon race.In the context of heightened anti-Black sentiment, Black Illinoisans were faced with a difficult decision: should they remain with the larger labor movement that increasingly viewed them as “inferior” workers? While the European American working class famously fought for labor issues such as unionization, safer working conditions, and the eight-hour workday, Black Illinoisans during the nineteenth century also supported these issues. Yet Black workers were forced into a hybrid labor activism—an activism where they fought for their rights not only as workers but also as workers who were gradually excluded from higher-skilled occupations based upon their race. In addition to the racialized occupational environment, Black workers were also forced into a battle for their civil rights during the late nineteenth century as they fought against the inimical rise in white supremacy throughout the United States.The concept of racializing labor was not entirely novel to Northern industries. As historian Jacqueline Jones explained, white Northerners had always expressed their apprehension over emancipating Black people from slavery in moralistic terms. As early as the eighteenth century, they claimed that free Black laborers had shown a lack of restraint in public—displaying “racial” behavior that European American city dwellers found galling. Various groups of African American workers came under attack by the early nineteenth century for advertising for services in a supposedly unseemly fashion. For European American workers, their goal was to maintain their advantageous position in the workplace, and any other socio-political aspect in which there was the perception of losing ground within the racial hierarchy. Thus, European American workers developed new forms of self-definition that would establish a sharper distinction between “white” and “Black” labor.3One of the earliest and staunchest proponents for disrupting the burgeoning labor movement through racialization was co-owner of the Chicago, Wilmington, and Vermillion Coal Company (CW&V) Alanson Sweet. He quickly developed a reputation for slashing wages and firing workers when he forced workers at the Michigan Central Railroad Company to take a pay cut during a dispute in 1862. Workers that protested were fired and replaced with African American workers from the South.4 Sweet believed that the reaction of his predominantly white workforce would be intensified with the importation of an all-Black strikebreaking unit that would likely lead to violence. When violence inevitably ensued, Sweet and his co-owners were then able to utilize state-sponsored protection to ensure the protection of both his imported workers and his property.5As a co-owner of the CW&V in Braidwood, Illinois, during an economic depression, once again, Sweet reduced workers’ wages. Predictably, the unionized miners refused any pay cuts and went on strike. After some convincing, the CW&V co-owners acquiesced to Sweet's ideas on importing African American men to disrupt the conflict. “With the mines filled with colored men,” he assured his fellow owners and stockholders, “it is believed that the Company will not be burdened with the expense of another strike for many years.”6 The CW&V co-owners may have been willing to agree to Sweet's concept due to their past failures. In an 1874 labor dispute with their workers, both recently arriving European immigrants and white workers were recruited as strikebreakers. Instead of being a disruptive force, the replacement miners met with the striking Braidwood miners, became informed of the ongoing labor dispute, and were subsequently convinced to leave. Significantly, the workers left relatively peaceably within days of their arrival.7The nation was in the throes of a massive railroad strike starting in July 1877. Wage cuts, and generally poor conditions and treatment touched off a nationwide strike that shut down most of the nation's railroads. The Chicago Times observed that the arrival of African American workers, combined with the news of the national railroad strike created an “anxious mood” among the Braidwood miners, and “it would take but very little to cause an outbreak in this place.” When the African American workers arrived in Braidwood, there were no friendly meetings. Instead, the striking Braidwood miners gave them an ultimatum: leave town “peaceably or forcibly.” Fearing trouble, some of the miners left town.8 However, when Sweet and the CW&V ownership alerted Illinois governor Shelby Cullom of the intimidation tactics, the state militia was brought in to restore the Black miners to their jobs. The next day, 1,250 Illinois state militia were called into Braidwood to quell the conflict, and if the strikers resisted, “the troops [would] make short work of them.” The CW&V owners understood that an escalation in violence could possibly lead to such measures—and these measures would ensure that the African American workers would be protected and allowed to work in the mines.9Convinced that order could be maintained, and the African American miners would be allowed to remain in the mine shafts, the state militia left Braidwood several weeks later. Although relative peace did prevail after the departure of the state militia, the strike continued another four months. The Braidwood strike of 1877 was the longest strike in United States’ history (to that date) and took an enormous toll on the lives of the strikers and their families. With winter approaching in November 1877, the weary miners finally gave in and ended the strike. The owner's desire to destroy the miners’ union was successful, and the company refused to hire the union leaders as well. Feeling victimized by the CW&V owners, many miners complained bitterly about working alongside the African American strikebreakers who they believed had done “all they possibly could to assist capital to crush labor.”10 For the CW&V owners, the reaction of the Braidwood miners to the importation of African Americans into the mines was the crucial element in their victory. If white and immigrant miners did not react violently, the owners would not have brought in the state militia to see that their mines and their replacement workers were protected.Race relations remained strained in the Braidwood mines during the immediate years after the strike. Nevertheless, African American miners remained in Braidwood and continued to work in the mines. At least half of the seven hundred miners in Braidwood were African American; by 1880, there were 703 Black men and their families living in the surrounding area (compared to 242 in 1870). Institutions such as the Colored Odd Fellows lodge and the First Baptist Church were established in 1878 to support the town's African American community. Reverend T. C. Fleming, who was one of the strikebreakers during the 1877 strike, was the pastor of the church.11 Despite establishing themselves as viable workers in the mines, and decent citizens in Braidwood, the small African American population continued to experience difficulties in town and the workplace.While the African American miners at Braidwood established a reputation for being viable workers and willing union men, their white counterparts insisted on following national racist trends in the workplace. Moses Gordon, an African American miner among those imported from Virginia, observed: “[African Americans] could no more get work here until the year 1877 than they could fly. . . . [I]t was the miners themselves who would come out on strike before they would allow the negro to earn his daily bread.” White workers increasingly drew the color line in the workplace and the major labor unions in the late nineteenth century. Significantly, Gordon also noted that CW&V owners fired African American workers that joined unions. Thus, the racialization of labor worked as a two-pronged attack against Black workers during the industrial era: As discriminatory policies against non-white citizens in the United States became the norm, and therefore accepted by the dominant racial group, employers increasingly utilized African Americans as strikebreakers in order to disrupt unionization. African American workers were either shunned from major labor unions by white union members who refused to allow them to join, or, as in the case in Braidwood, African American workers were threatened with termination. On the other hand, white workers—embracing the full social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century—and thus, completely accepting their collective place at the top of the racial hierarchy in American society—readily rejected African American workers from the most desirable occupations. As white workers wielded more bargaining power in the last decade of the nineteenth century, they insisted on the racialization of both the workplace and their labor unions. Gordon remarked on how this racist process in Braidwood would affect the working class: “Every nationality on the face of the globe can come here and go to work wherever there is work to be had, except for the colored man, and in nine cases out of ten the miners are to blame for it. A house divided against itself cannot stand. If the laboring class fights capital for their rights, they have enough to do without fighting against six millions [sic] of people that have got to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.”12Strikebreaking served as an occupational and economic weapon against the racialization of labor for men like Moses Gordon. As labor historian Eric Arnesen explained, strikebreaking was a viable form of working-class activism for African Americans as they sought to strengthen their economic position during the labor upheaval of post-Reconstruction America. The most important coal mining towns in Illinois followed the practice of racial exclusion. Strikebreaking not only allowed African American workers to gain entry into desirable industrial positions, but it also represented chances for low paid Southern African Americans to earn higher wages. Their decisions to become strikebreakers were often informed choices, rationalized by a complex and changing worldview that balanced their experiences as industrial workers, farmers, and African Americans. Indeed, these Black men were neither willing tools nor ignorant serfs—rather, they were poor and ambitious men who were often recruited by coal company agents, sometimes under false pretenses. During the nineteenth century, African Americans were never the only workers used as strikebreakers in Illinois or any other Northern state. Moreover, they were never the most used strikebreakers during the height of labor turbulence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, African Americans were usually the most visible strikebreakers because of American racism, and therefore, they were almost always the easiest targets for white working-class rage during the tumultuous labor disputes of this era.13As the Chicago Tribune correspondent predicted, other industrialists throughout the region adopted racialization as a weapon to squelch unionization among the working class. For example, in 1880, approximately one hundred African Americans were hired to replace striking coal miners in Rapids City, near Rock Island, Illinois. Tragedy struck immediately—one of the African American strikebreakers was shot and killed by a striking miner. That same year in Springfield, Illinois, mine owners resisted demands made by union officials and proceeded to import African American miners from Richmond, Virginia. The predominantly European American workforce was ordered to remove their tools from the mines and evacuate company houses. If any violence ensued, the mine operators, their property, and the African American workers, were all protected by local police officials. These drastic actions led to the demise of the union.14 In the summer of 1886, a strike for higher wages occurred in Vermillion County at Grape Creek. In this case, there was a small African American presence in the mines—yet they refused to strike with their European American coworkers. The African American miners belonged to the biracial Knights of Labor (KOL) union and refused to participate because it was “a white man's fight.” The Grape Creek operators brought in African American men from Tennessee and Kentucky under police protection. The conflict dragged out and defeated the strikers, as the mine operators brought in five to fifteen new African American workers each day.15 This pattern of racialization continued throughout Illinois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to data compiled by economic historian Warren Whatley, Illinois industrialists utilized Black strikebreakers more than any state during this period. However, while Black strikebreaking increased substantially during this period—especially in high-profile conflicts—they remained a relatively small percentage of the nation's strikebreaking force.16While Northern industrialists continued to recruit Black workers from the South during the late nineteenth century, they virtually ignored Northern Black workers. This omission was particularly glaring in Illinois and other midwestern states due to the dearth of African Americans living in the region. Approximately 90 percent of the African American population remained in the South, and it was simply easier to find and recruit Black labor in the South. Another more compelling reason had to do with the collective attitudes of African Americans living in the North. While Southern Black workers were cajoled relatively easily due to precarious economic condition or general lack of knowledge of a particular labor conflict in the North, Northern African Americans simply had more exposure to Northern labor strife. Although the Black population of Illinois was quite small, they gained a reputation as ferocious labor agitators during the late nineteenth century. Like their European American working-class counterparts, they also battled for workers’ rights. To be sure, African American workers in Illinois were occasionally used as strikebreakers during the late nineteenth century—there would be a collective shift in their attitude toward the labor movement by the turn of the twentieth century as white working-class racism became more pronounced. Yet prior to the full implementation of white supremacist ideas about allegedly inferior and superior workers based upon race, Black Illinoisans were not only a part of the labor movement, in some cases they were at the vanguard of the movement.During the summer of 1877, while the Braidwood mine operators were importing African American workers into their labor fracas, more than 150 Black longshoremen from Illinois disputed recent wage cuts against the Mississippi Valley Transportation Company (MVTC). Like their Braidwood counterparts, they too were inspired by the “Great Railroad Strike” and organized their own all-Black union. In solidarity with the national movement, the workers arranged a general strike against all Illinois, employers due to the recent wage When the owners were of the strike, they hired strikebreakers. The next the striking longshoremen on the and their and that they leave the When they refused to the longshoremen them by a of in their The longshoremen then after the to ensure that none of the strikebreakers would only a few but it created quite a throughout The observed that the longshoremen may well have been within their rights to strike for higher but they no to prevent from working who willing . . . to work for the The noted that by the strikebreakers off the the Black longshoremen were a for which they be a significant in how the African American workers were in When African American workers for their rights, they were often as or workers. In Black labor activism was often viewed as chaotic and While strikebreaking was generally in white working-class when Black workers fought to their economic the they should be a that [would] last them for all time to the Braidwood which and supported striking miners during their African American workers were viewed with throughout and as workers throughout Illinois sought the same measures in unionization as other workers prior to the full of racialization in labor. As early as 1877, the Knights of Labor (KOL) established as many as seven in Illinois that African American men and into their For many Black workers, the was more than a labor the of leaders and as a than any other union in their the were able to the for African American After the national railroad strike in 1877, labor leaders recruited Black workers to the to racist to workers. goal of the labor leaders was also to the of Black workers during an 1878 African Americans the supported the and the city and with the white Chicago continued to into one of the nation's industrial the of the city was for African Americans. The battle for skilled labor in a environment, was often a losing for African American for from the South. African American men often to racist racist white and workers with the of racist to Black men out of viable As a result, Black workers in Chicago were left with occupational and often found themselves to with national of the racialization of labor was in Chicago by the last of the nineteenth century. By 1890, African Americans were as the to be laborers, workers, or to the During that decade they represented only percent of the population percent of all in the occupational for Black of or no higher than railroad or were also tools for the of such as or who were who or the of and dwellers more and the to their To ideas of racial and economic the their to an One noted that African American men of slavery . . . and became a of to the of the African American men, as a Chicago were the they are by and to were not always to ideas of racial if it in wages. A could a sense of and the of the of the South, which could lead to a was a relatively novel idea in the nineteenth Yet any that these men would allow these to into their in labor issues of the would be an Black in were the of hybrid labor activism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black over pay In 1875, they out of throughout the during and in some of At the out because their new to He informed the all-Black that they would be to at the an before their and they would no be allowed to left over by practice that allowed workers to their out in during the and workers of all and were toward labor unionization in the Yet European American workers to follow nationwide discriminatory in labor unions by Black workers from union Black often with their own of labor activism that all-Black unions or biracial unions. For example, after the of the five Black from the in Chicago, were to their of the that were to citizens of every and and were informed that it was against the to of their in the The the men a in the where the and their while on The by the left for another where they were and served without in Chicago were to find a labor union that would their in fighting for their labor and civil rights. The them with the of unionization that they In 1886, created the Colored local and more than four hundred Black and during a The Chicago Times the the Knights had on the Black the union the colored and gave the with This represented the entry of African Americans into organized labor in Chicago and was followed within two years by a Black the which organized after from the of the Black in Chicago little time in their reputation as labor In two hundred African American joined nine hundred white in of the of and in wages. The biracial an of substantial for The owners to a through the workers by importing African American replacement workers to replace the white The between the workers was and the Black were enough to the strikebreakers to A year during another Black labor conditions, and they also the to become more about their rights and the labor was not one African American predicted, by would for their working-class men and in Illinois for more biracial union during the late nineteenth century. an African American of the that more Black workers to the union to themselves as a within the labor than a within the the for laboring men and was an of wages. have been

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Capitalism, Protectionism, and Beer Wars in Rock Island, 1880–1900

Revolutionary Violence and the Rise of the Art Novel

Reviewed by: Empire and Imperial Ambition: Liberty, Englishness and Anti-Imperialism in Late-Victorian Britain by Mira Matikkala A. Martin Wainwright (bio) Empire and Imperial Ambition: Liberty, Englishness and Anti-Imperialism in Late-Victorian Britain, by Mira Matikkala ; pp. viii + 288. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011, £59.50, $100.00. For nearly a generation, historians have backed up Linda Colley’s central assertion in her seminal article, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument” (Journal of British Studies 31.4 [1992]), that wars and imperialism played a crucial role in uniting the regional identities of the British Isles in contrast to the Other that British soldiers and merchants encountered abroad. Mira Matikkala complicates this narrative of the construction of British identity by focusing on opposition to imperialism during its height in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to Colley, she argues that late nineteenth-century England had two identities, one imperial and the other constitutional. Matikkala builds on Miles Taylor’s “Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century” (The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 19.1 [1991]), which argues that late nineteenth-century British radical opinion was concerned with the detrimental effects that British imperialism—and the authoritarianism and militarism associated with it—were having on the constitutional structure of British government and domestic society. In doing so, however, Matikkala distinguishes between the anti-imperialist sentiments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The former, she argues, was culturally chauvinist in its assumption of the superiority of British culture and institutions: “the sole fact that anti-imperialists were against imperialism because it was ‘un-English’ implies a sense of cultural superiority.” The latter, on the other hand, emphasized the injustice of “the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised” (5). Since Matikkala’s emphasis is on the public debate over imperialism, she focuses on published sources, such as books, pamphlets, and articles from the period, rather than private correspondence. She divides her treatment of the subject into three parts. The first focuses on the economic debate, in which she identifies two major strains of thought opposing imperialism. One, beginning with Adam Smith and extending through Richard Cobden and John Bright, argued pragmatically that the costs of empire outweighed the benefits. The other, including William Digby and the Indian-born member of parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji, argued morally that Britain was draining the Empire, particularly India, of its resources. Ironically, therefore, although both arguments opposed empire they arrived at opposite conclusions regarding [End Page 503] its financial effects. The second part, focusing on the intellectual debate, distinguishes between old liberals, such as Herbert Spencer and John Morley, and new ones, such as William Clarke and John Atkinson Hobson. Both groups opposed international intervention, but the former did so in the context of supporting small government both at home and abroad. The latter, however, saw government intervention as necessary for providing justice at home. Some in this group were indistinguishable from socialists in their attitude toward empire. The final part explores the practical political aspects of anti-imperialism. Both pro- and anti-imperialists claimed to be the true English patriots, the former defending Britain’s interests abroad, and the latter its constitution at home. Matikkala highlights the limits of late nineteenth-century anti-imperialism, which often paradoxically supported emigration to the settler colonies but opposed the extension of empire in tropical Africa and Asia. Anti-imperialists regarded the dominions as pioneering extensions of British kinship networks which bore English characteristics of legal justice and liberal government. By contrast these same critics regarded the tropical Empire as largely militaristic imposition of authoritarian rule, a rule which threatened to subvert Britain’s liberal constitution much as Julius Caesar had used his conquests in Gaul to subvert the Roman Republic. Matikkala’s conclusion is rather short and leaves a significant question unanswered: were there really two types of English identity during this period or was the older constitutional one an English identity, and the newer imperial one a British identity? If the latter was the case, then Matikkala’s book does not challenge the Othering aspects of Colley’s thesis as much as may first appear. Moreover...

Reviewed by: Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries John Limon Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Laura Otis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. 297. $37.50. “Organic memory” is a tidy phrase for a messy confusion of what can be inherited and what can be remembered. Especially in the last third of the last century, according to Laura Otis’s [End Page 164] compendious study, scientists and litterateurs alike were preoccupied with bad analogies of genetic inheritance, cultural heritage, and memory. Lump them sufficiently, and peoples (defined by geography and /or culture and /or race and /or language) may be conceived as corporate people; just as human individuals are integrated by personal memories, nations may be united by racial ones. Not for nothing would the portentous muddles of organic memory seduce German polymaths. But wherever national identity was at issue in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, as for example in Spain after 1898, the organic memory idea was a temptation. Otis’s study is largely a history of that idea, born out of Lamarckian biology and Haeckel’s law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; refined at the border of experiment and prophecy by such thinkers as Ewald Hering and Théodule Ribot; adapted for fictional purposes by Emile Zola and ironized by Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy; translated into twentieth-century intellectual culture by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (I have named only a few of the major players in Organic Memory. Otis’s book is nothing if not populated.) The book crosses several frontiers (national, epochal, disciplinary) with nonchalant courage. And Otis’s scholarship excavates a deep source of material on questions of transcendent modern importance. What is the relationship of individuals and nations? Can memory be located in a place? Can spatialized memories find their way to the genetic blueprint of bodies? All literary criticism must now, by a universally observed rule, pass as metacriticism; my only basic reservation about Otis’s book is that on that level, I am not sure what she has shown. Otis opens Organic Memory quoting an incredulous challenge from a graduate student in neuroscience: “Why would anyone want to study the literature from past times?” (vii) Metacriticism, apparently, is the first order of business; the working hypotheses of Organic Memory are that we study literature because it foregrounds metaphors that inform all thinking, even scientific thinking, and that we study “literature from past times” because the past hardly ever does us the favor of dying. Of course, some ideas do fade away, scientific ones, preëminently—for example, organic memory. But they fade away only as science. Done in as science by their essential metaphoricity, they may linger elsewhere precisely by virtue of metaphoric power. The study of literature brings that hidden source of power to light, where it can do us less damage. At the beginning and end of her book, Otis is explicit about what damage organic memory has already done: Nazis and Serbs are much on her mind. The unexamined assumption (barely qualified on a couple of occasions) is that bad ideas have bad consequences. But implicit throughout the book is a lesson murkier than the one Otis herself infers from it. Part of the problem is that “organic memory” conflates, I think, two ideas: first that genetic inheritance should be conceived as a kind of memory; second, that actual memories are transmitted genetically. The former is probably more conducive to racist appropriation: racial similarity would seem, in its terms, to imply national identity. The latter, Lamarckian conception could be essentially inclusive, since hundreds of years of shared memories (as by Germans and Jews) would begin to produce genetic overlap. No wonder that two German Jews, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, are near the center of Otis’s story. And the presence of Freud (with Jung—but not as distinct from Jung as one had thought) at the culmination of the narrative makes it clear that exclusive conceptions of race did not have to be, by any logical entailment, essential to conceptions of organic memory. Racial memories might be shared...

The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather

I This paper will trace the evolution of the attitudes expressed by the Scottish Clerks' Association (SCA) towards women in clerical work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For women trying to establish careers in office work it was necessary to be accepted as colleagues by men in organisations like the SCA. But, as Sylvia Walby noted, explanations of the increasing presence of women in clerical work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have emphasised the role of employers as the main actors in the feminisation of clerical work, while the resistance (or acceptance) by male clerks has been given less attention.' The evolution of the SCA's attitudes illustrates such resistance and then the growth of a kind of acceptance of women clerks in the early twentieth century; but this acceptance was within the context of male clerks' attempts to restructure their occupational group in order to preserve the better jobs for themselves. Clerical work as an occupation was ripe for restructuring due to the changes it was undergoing by the late nineteenth century. Earlier in that century, clerical work had been work mainly for men, in small offices, in close proximity to the owner of the firm. Men in clerical work would expect to support their families through that work, possibly to rise to become businessmen themselves, and to feel secure in their masculinity throughout their working lives. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the intimate, secure, small offices so often portrayed by Dickens were changing dramatically. Expanding enterprises in large-scale manufacturing, finance and transport required much larger offices and many more clerks than Dombey or Scrooge ever required. Even in small enterprises, increasing competitive pressures prompted greater attention to business decisions like costing and purchasing, and thus more thorough and careful record keeping and reporting were needed. In addition, a greater interest by the state in profitability and employment also created the need for increased record keeping and reporting. All of

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

The research purpose. The article under consideration is devoted to the problem of reconstructing the everyday life of Mariupol residents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author summarises certain results of its study and, on the basis of materials from reference books, periodicals, photographic documents, and sources of personal origin, identifies the most important components of urban everyday life, old and new cultural practices, and the time cycle of the city's life. The main research findings. The research reveals that the urban culture of Mariupol, like many commercial and industrial centres of southern Ukraine, especially since the late nineteenth century, has been developing in new realities. The specific combination of functions, including 'port city' and 'large industrial centre', in the economy of Mariupol, its involvement in foreign trade, and the active participation of foreign citizens (merchants and industrialists) in the economic and social life of the city, resulted in a rapid westernisation of urban everyday life, especially in the early twentieth century. Consequently, the gap between the culture of urban elites and ordinary residents gradually disappeared. It has been demonstrated that this phenomenon is most clearly evident in the emergence of infrastructure common to all categories of the population, as well as in the development of shared urban spaces for leisure activities, such as recreational areas, including city gardens and squares, as well as theatres and cinemas. The wider use of technical means had a significant impact on the city's entertainment culture and its mass appeal, particularly in the fields of communications, public transport, cinema and mass media. The early 20th century witnessed a significant telephonisation of the city, ranking it second only to the provincial city of Katerynoslav in terms of its telephone coverage. Concurrently, new routes, including automobile ones, were established to connect the city with its industrial suburbs and the port. Plans for the introduction of trams were also discussed in the city council. Cinemas, a popular form of leisure, emerged not only in the city centre but also in suburban working-class communities. Concurrently, the daily city newspaper, Mariupolskaya Zhizn, was established. The city witnessed the opening of two gymnasiums, a network of primary schools, libraries, and bookstores, contributing to the enhancement of residents' awareness regarding health, nutrition, clothing, and leisure. Conclusions. Despite the numerous changes that have occurred, it has been determined that the influence of the Greek community of immigrants from the Crimea has remained the most significant, despite its significant decline in proportion to other ethnic groups that constituted the city's population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is particularly evident in the preservation of names in the urban topography of the old part of the city, which is associated with the Crimean period of the Greek community's history, as well as in the preservation of certain production and festive practices and food traditions. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the preservation of names in the urban topography of the old part of the city, which are associated with the Crimean period of the Greek community's history. It is also evident in the preservation of certain production and festive practices and food traditions. Key words: Mariupol, everyday life, citizens, urbanisation, urban space, urban culture.

A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization and Graphic Visualization By André, Turmel Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2008 ISBN 9780521879774 (Hardback), 9780521705639 (Paperback) , 362 pp , £19.99 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, childhood came to be thought of as a science. Measurement, categorisation and statistical techniques offered hope that infant mortality could be reduced, child health improved, IQ assessed, a ‘normal’ pattern of child development established and appropriate measures taken for those children who in one respect or another fell outside the norm. These processes have already been quite widely studied and Turmel makes no claim to add to our stock of knowledge. His aim is more ambitious, it is to understand these developments sociologically. ‘A sociologist has to keep himself from doing history’, he reminds himself. Sociology does not have a particularly distinguished record with respect to childhood. Turmel notes perceptively that in the late nineteenth century there grew up a division of labour between psychology, which focused on children and sociology where the emphasis was on the family. Children were of interest to sociologists for the processes by which they were socialized into adulthood, in the child as becoming rather than as being. This gelled well with psychology’s insistence from the 1920s onwards that there were fixed developmental stages through, which all children progressed on the road to adulthood. Turmel acknowledges that the new sociology of childhood since the 1990s has changed that emphasis, but he thinks sociology’s reach with respect to childhood needs to be extended. He wants to integrate it with general sociology arguing that there cannot be any account of the social, which omits children. The way in which a sense of a normal childhood and of developmental stages became established was through the ‘social technologies’ of graphs, charts and tables. These, proliferating from the late nineteenth century, provided a visual inscription of normality and development, most famously not only in the weight-height-age charts but also in graphs of normal mental development. By this means, the ‘childhood collective’–‘parents, teachers, paediatricians, nurses and welfare activists, social workers’ came to have a common view of childhood. Turmel stresses that the acceptance of this common view was not uncontested, although most of his rather slender evidence on this topic comes from psychologists who rejected the dominance of developmental thinking rather than from parents or children. And indeed his overall argument depends on the triumph of developmental thinking through the ‘childhood collective’, an instance as he sees it of the type of rationalisation that Max Weber delineated. Childhood, thoroughly chaotic in structure at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, without a body of accepted fact or theory and facing the challenges of high infant mortality, morbidity and delinquency became stabilized through measurement, graphic visualisation and the triumph of developmental thinking, its epitome the work of Gesell and Piaget. The bite, for example, was taken out of delinquency by redefining it as ‘maladjustment’. Turmel is undoubtedly describing and analysing crucial developments in the history of childhood, as a body both of ideas and of practice. In the century, he covers from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, experts on childhood, primarily psychologists, gained a dominance in the field, which at some level impacted on the lives of nearly all parents and children. What Turmel never considers is whether there remained alternative views of childhood; for example, a romantic view of childhood as properly happy and protected, rather than as a series of obstacles to be surmounted if abnormality was to be avoided. His case would also be stronger if it was better-written. ‘I shall … focus on the consequences of the delimitation of criteria, standards, for this appears to be the core of the hybrid circulating in a given collective’ is a not atypical sentence. If historical sociology is going, as Turmel hopes, to have an influence across disciplines, it needs to be more accessible to readers.

The representation of Igbo peoples as practitioners of twin abomination is very much part of a historical process in which missionary and colonial interest in twin killing as a sign of African atavism played a significant role. This article explores historical record for information about twin abomination and twin murder, taking into account paradoxical nature of twinship not only for Igbo-speakers but for missionaries who wished to convert Igbo and stamp out what they called the demon superstition. (Twinship, West Africa, colonialism, missionization, avoidance behaviors) It is one of many ironies of late-twentieth-century modernity that African woman celebrated in Houston, Texas, in 1998 for giving birth to first set of living octuplets should be an Igbo-speaker from southeastern Nigeria.(2) The Igbo have been represented as one of West African cases par excellence of a society that, in immediate precolonial period at least, not only abominated twins and other multiple births but actively attempted to eradicate them through twin murder. Twin murder, as it entered anthropological canon, was exposure or suffocation of multiple neonates, whose bodies were then disposed of in ojoo ofia (bad bush) outside Igbo towns. One reason Igbo case of twin abomination became so well known is that custom was much discussed and publicized during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Europeans who were considered knowledgeable about continent. Indeed, eradicating twin killing became one of great mission causes in southeastern Nigeria, inspiring work of almost every outside missionary, of every denomination, from late nineteenth century into 1930s, when practice seems to have been largely discontinued. Women missionaries were especially drawn to this work, and some, like famous Mary Slessor of Calabar, made entire careers out of their crusades to obliterate practices associated with abominated twin births. Just as multiple births (umu ejime) were considered by Igbo-speaking peoples an abomination (nso ani) against Ala/Ani, earth deity, and liable for severe sanctions on both parents (especially mothers) and children, twin killing was an abomination against Christian God in eyes of missions. The taking of what was perceived by missionaries to be innocent human life, tied as it clearly was to indigenous religious beliefs as well as to non-Western understandings of gender, elicited an intensely emotional response from European and African evangelists alike. The intensity of this response was not unlike contemporary debates about abortion and rhetorical battles raged along similar lines (e.g., Ginsberg 1990; Petchesky 1997). That is, value of twinship was only partially at issue; more important for debate over fate of twins was agreeing on boundaries of human existence, what criteria denoted humanity itself. Because of two opposing positions taken toward this philosophical, cosmological, and theological question, multiple births necessarily constituted a nexus for protracted struggle between missionaries and their would-be Igbo converts. This article explores how terms of this reformist struggle were defined and redefined in one southeastern Nigerian town, Onitsha, during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout this period, Onitsha indigenes insisted on understanding multiple births through lens of their own cosmology, and made that insistence material by practices that actively subverted mission interests, even while seeming to acquiesce to them. Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries (both African and European) for their own part vowed to fight the demon superstition not only through physical salvation of twin bodies but through spiritual salvation of twins, their parents, and other kin. It is important to recognize that master narrative of Igbo twin murder did not always fit exotic and sensationalist stories of unbridled twin murder and heroic twin salvation told by missionaries. …

Abstract*As much as recent scholarship, popular outlets, and even a documentary film have asserted that we find ourselves in another “Gilded Age” since the 1980s, such a conceit has its limits. Indeed, we should proceed with caution when it comes to embracing analogies that posit a “new” or “second” Gilded Age. We might instead profitably think about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as being a period of high capitalism and our current moment as reflecting a particular, if not peculiar, phase of capitalism. And, as much as our understanding of gender and sexuality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might actually be hindered by separating “Gilded Age” and “Progressive Era,” considering gendered dynamics of our current moment—a moment that has been termed late-stage capitalism—deepens our analysis of the low-wage economy. When it comes to sexuality, we should be careful in drawing parallels between the Gilded Age and the present given that contemporary understandings of sexuality began to coalesce during the late nineteenth century. Still, debates about sex and sexuality certainly shaped the Gilded Age and they continue to inform our current moment in dynamic and even unprecedented ways. We might not find ourselves in another Gilded Age, but we should arguably build upon current interest in histories of capitalism as a means think about the significance of progressive social movements within capitalist societies.

Since the early twentieth century, anthropologists have been including issues related to food into their scholarly scope (B. Malinowski, E. Evans-Pritchard, C. Lévi-Strauss, etc.). Food-culture studies (or culinary culture) examine the production, distribution, consumption, and ingredients of food products and analyse elements of culture related to food. One of the directions of food-culture studies is the gender approach, which considers subordination in female communities and ethno-social factors. The article’s aim is to study the attributes of the bol’shukha’s power (Rus. большуха) in Karelian peasant culture between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was part of everyday practices and played a symbolic role in the in-group stratification of the female community. The author studies attributes connected with the “culinary” topic, i. e. the stove, the dough bowl, and the samovar, referring to testimonies of contemporaries published in the press. She also uses archival documents, the materials of ethnographic expeditions, and linguistic data (dialectal speech and dictionaries). The Russian history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterised by the preservation of certain elements of the rural population’s traditional lifestyle while it was being modernised in the course of reforms. For the purposes of the article, the author adds the samovar to the traditional symbols of a housewife (the stove and the dough bowl) as it had become widespread by the late nineteenth century and was placed on the women’s side of the table in Karelian households. Having certain household objects demonstrated a woman’s status in the in-group hierarchy. The research focus chosen by the author is relevant for cultural anthropology and women’s studies, helping us form an idea of how women organised and realised hierarchy within their communities. The gender approach adds to our knowledge about the social practices and life experience of women’s communities and takes into account factors of ethnicity.