Future Interior of the Past: An Air Terminal Comes of Age at Detroit-Willow Run

Making, Shaping, and Resisting Nations in the Twentieth Century: Women in Australia, Occupied Japan, and Postwar United States and Canada Jean Quataert and Leigh Ann Wheeler This issue features a remarkable trio of paired articles. All investigate the ways that women have made, shaped, and resisted the nations within which they reside, but each pair also opens a separate conversation of its own. The first two articles consider the political rights of white Australian, and the survival strategies of disfranchised aboriginal, women. The second duo examines the role of gender in U.S. occupation strategies. The third considers how maternalism expanded and delimited women’s political power in postwar United States and Canada. We are excited to present you with this distinctive publication in which thematically and geographically focused conversations play out within the context of the broader theme of women and nationhood. As usual, we conclude with a number of review essays that bring recently published books into productive and dynamic conversation. We open with Clare Wright’s fascinating reinterpretation of one nation’s founding, “‘A Splendid Object Lesson’: A Transnational Perspective on the Birth of the Australian Nation.” Historians have attributed the rise of an independent and democratic Australian state to its men’s military accomplishments during World War I, especially the legendary heroism exhibited at Gallipoli. Wright, however, shows that the fledgling nation earned global respect as early as 1902 for providing white women political rights equal to white men. Wright thus challenges “the centrality of militarism in historical and popular accounts of nationhood,” moving gender equality to the heart of Australia’s founding story by demonstrating how reformers and leaders of western democracies—most notably in the United States and the United Kingdom—looked to Australia as a model of democratic governance and gender equality. Wright acknowledges that white women’s political empowerment in Australia accompanied the disfranchisement of aborigines in what proved for white women “a timely alignment between the ideals of international feminism and the historical coincidence of federalism.” This fascinating story, then, counters “the androcentric underpinnings of Gallipoli’s enduring ‘birth of a nation’ mystique.” That mystique effectively drowned out collective memories about the nation’s founding achievements in legal equality. Indeed, Wright shows clearly that long before the First World War offered men opportunities to show off their military might, white Australians reveled in their global status as pioneers in the quest for more egalitarian political processes. [End Page 7] If Wright recounts the history of Australian nation-building from elite white women’s perspective, Kathryn Hunter aims to rewrite Australian history from the vantage point of indigenous women near the bottom. In “Aboriginal Women in Australia’s Travelling Shows, 1930s–1950s: Shadows and Suggestions,” Hunter explores the murky and poorly documented world of women who performed in “sideshows,” “tent shows,” and other ephemeral entertainment venues. The performances staged multiracial groups, including many aboriginal women who were presented as “Polynesian” or “South Seas” women—primitive but glamorously exotic Pacific Islanders rather than local, colonized aborigines. Hunter demonstrates that the nomadic lifestyle required of these performers placed them beyond the bounds of respectability drawn by white Australians who “celebrated settlement as the core of modern nation-building.” But aboriginal women who performed in travelling shows were, according to Hunter, actually pursuing a modern lifestyle in one of the few independent occupations open to them. Indeed, as the modern Australian state increasingly invaded the lives of indigenous peoples—by confiscating their wages and their children, for example—travelling performers escaped much of the state surveillance that kept others dependent and impoverished. Thus Hunter argues that indigenous performers were not simply objects of a modernity imposed on them by the Australian state; they were, rather, agents who participated in “making themselves modern” by claiming independence from that very state. The next two articles examine the central role of gender in nation-building—or, to be more precise, nation rebuilding—and they add foreign policy to the mix in their explorations of women in U.S.-occupied Japan. Meghan Warner Mettler’s piece, “Modern Butterfly: American Perceptions of Japanese Women and their Role in International Relations, 1945–1960,” uses American newspaper articles, novels, and movies...

Developments in macro-econometrics have been evolving since the aftermath of the Second World War.[...]

More than 5 million pairs of falsies, also known as bust pads, were sold in the United States in 1946, exceeding prior sales records. In the postwar United States, falsies were an increasingly popular way of shaping the body into a fashionable curvaceous silhouette and utilized the latest in wartime synthetic material developments. Falsies were an important part of trans and queer life. However, these wearers and makers have been largely omitted from histories of fashion, foundationwear and material culture. This article traces the trans feminine history of falsies and other padded foundationwear in the postwar United States. The author analyses a range of archival materials largely sourced from the Digital Transgender Archive including publications and print ephemera from the 1950s–70s to show how trans feminine, queer and gender-nonconforming people innovated falsie design through DIY practices. While the majority of individuals in the postwar United States were unable to access trans healthcare and anti-trans legislation continued to publicly police bodies, trans feminine networks circulated information on how to purchase, wear and make padded foundations. These collective efforts empowered wearers and built community in a variety of ways.

Physical Education, Exercise, Fitness and Sports: Early PM&R Leaders Build a Strong Foundation

The article explores the role of cultural diplomacy in Weimar Germany and France's competing efforts to win the sympathies and support of the United States after the First World War. In the post-war United States, both France and Germany used cultural initiatives to pursue their opposing visions of the new international order: France to maintain and extend wartime cultural alliances beyond the armistice and implement the provisions of the peace treaty; Germany to overturn these very alliances and build a desirable transatlantic ‘friendship’ in line with its efforts to revise the Versailles Treaty. By focusing on the Franco–German rivalry for US affinities, the article calls attention to the transatlantic dynamics of interwar cultural diplomacy. It shows that the emergence of German cultural diplomacy was strongly shaped by French competition for the affections of politically isolationist Americans and that, in general, the rapid expansion of cultural diplomacy in interwar Europe arose from mutual feelings of crisis, starkly competing ambitions as well as the rapid circulation of ideas and practices.

In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. This story portrays the postwar racial break as a transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist modernity in which racial violence works normatively by policing representations of difference. Following the institutionalization of literature as a privileged domain for Americans to get to know difference—to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to race—the text focuses on literary studies as a cultural technology for transmitting liberal racial orders. It examines official antiracism in the United States and finds that these were key to ratifying the country’s global ascendancy. It shows how racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism made racism appear to be disappearing, even as they incorporated the assumptions of global capitalism into accepted notions of racial equality. Yet this book also recovers an anticapitalist“race radical” tradition that provides a materialist opposition to official antiracisms in the postwar United States—a literature that sounds out the violence of liberal racial orders, relinks racial inequality to material conditions, and compels desire for something better than U.S. multiculturalism.

The British Journal of SociologyVolume 61, Issue 2 p. 390-391 The Americanization Of Social Science: Intellectuals And Public Responsibility In The Post-War United States – By D.P. Haney Frank Furedi, Frank Furedi The University of Kent, CanterburySearch for more papers by this author Frank Furedi, Frank Furedi The University of Kent, CanterburySearch for more papers by this author First published: 02 June 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01318_6.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume61, Issue2June 2010Pages 390-391 RelatedInformation

Hereford: Prigionieri italiani non cooperatori in Texas

At the height of the Cold War, films and books that focused on anticommunist themes used depictions of communism as a way to promote a certain understanding of the roles of men and women in the post-war United States. The end of World War Two caused a reconfiguration of American society, providing a context in which cultural productions, such as these anticommunist Cold War narratives, could provide competing interpretations for what this transformation of society meant for men and women's roles in the United States. These films and books collectively construct an ideology that idolized the family as the most important unit of American life. At the same time, they condemned men who focused on work life instead of the family, in particular expressing the view that modern society turns men in conformists and effeminizes them. In the case of women, these narratives praised strong women who were wives, but stigmatized unmarried women who showed independence. This response to the changes in post-war America was one of a range of responses, but an important one. By exploring the relationship between anticommunism and a critique of gender, we better understand the nature of the Cold War, and how it was focused not only on political battles but also cultural ones concerning gender roles.

Deborah Cohen theorizes and documents Mexican workers in the United States in the mid-twentieth century as complex transnational and gendered agents acted upon by two governments but also acting on their own behalf for various reasons. Her analysis offers the most complicated view yet of these workers in the World War II and Korean War eras, part of a growing movement to capture these men’s stories, which are increasingly becoming unavailable.Cohen positions her narrative between those black-and-white analyses of the bracero program as either exploitation or opportunity; her account is rather one containing nuanced voices. The book focuses on the multiple stakeholders, expectations, and rationalized agendas of nations, interest groups, and individuals involved with the program. She builds national, transnational, and supranational themes as they intersect with individual workers, their families, and their communities. Located within these multiple discourses is the Mexican worker, neither a victim nor a martyr but a historical agent perhaps hoping to gain wealth, occasionally a war hero, or a transnational spouse and father taking a chance on working in the United States.The book is structured around three unofficial phases of the bracero program: 1942–1947, 1948–1951, and 1951–1964 and its legacy. Cohen’s analysis of the diplomatic rhetoric and agendas of the two nations is superb, highlighting the irony of the Mexican government touting the modernizing effects the program would have on the country through workers returning from the United States with new technological skills, competencies that they were often denied as growers favored braceros serving as hand workers. Instead, the little technological access and modernization received by Mexico came from the individual consumption and products braceros brought back from the United States. The Mexican government’s goal of elevating the country through exposure to returning mexicanos, while perhaps more symbolic and discursive than anything, did not preclude braceros from being agents of change for their home families and communities, as Cohen aptly demonstrates in her interviews with many returning workers. She also documents the costs of the program to transnational bracero families, particularly to women and children left in Mexico, not just the benefits of returned income and goods.The US government and agribusiness sectors had their own goals and narratives. Cohen excels at explaining the rhetoric by which US farmers positioned themselves as Jeffersonian models of self-sufficiency, which masked the massive governmental aid they received, of which braceros were a part. Growers also presented themselves as beleaguered businessmen, national heroes during two wars who desperately needed help. Yet, in reality, by 1940, 50 percent of the nation’s food was grown on less than 10 percent of its farms; one-third of farmworkers labored on less than 3 percent of the farms. The mythic image of the yeoman farmer as a small businessman trying to scrape by was just that, mythic, and it shaped the trajectory of the bracero program and the treatment of the men coming from Mexico.Cohen also details how the individual worker fared within both these larger themes of modernization in Mexico and salvation in the United States. As other scholars have, Cohen describes the hurdles and processes for selection into the program from the Mexican side, but she highlights better than any previous researcher the role the United States played in manipulating workers in Mexico through selective opening of the border or the use of Operation Wetback. Again, the strength of Cohen’s work lies in those sections that describe the need for applying workers to appear to be Indian and in need of modernization in order to be selected, or that chronicle the attempts by the US government and social service agencies to control men and their bodies. Both sides attempted to circumscribe bracero agency as individuals in favor of a broader national agenda.The book concludes with critical analysis of contemporary guest-worker issues such as the H-2A provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act or missing bracero pensions from over a half-century ago. Cohen effectively predates and predicts the contemporary immigration and guest-worker debate due to her profound understanding of these historical policies and discourses. These “ambassadors in overalls” (p. 251) were suspect in the eyes of their countrymen for leaving and in the eyes of US residents for coming. This distrust prevented workers on either side of the border from finding common cause with braceros, a lesson that still resonates in the present as competing interests once again politicize, imagine, and rhetoricize another transnational labor agreement.

At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In Braceros , historian Deborah Cohen asks why these temporary migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen reveals the fashioning of a U.S.-Mexican transnational world, a world created through the interactions, negotiations, and struggles of the program's principal protagonists including Mexican and U.S. state actors, labor activists, growers, and bracero migrants. Cohen argues that braceros became racialized foreigners, Mexican citizens, workers, and transnational subjects as they moved between U.S. and Mexican national spaces. Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and documentary evidence, Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies. |At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In Braceros , historian Deborah Cohen asks why these migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.

Monetary base growth, deposit growth and inflation in the postwar United States

To Protect and Serve

Review: <i>Neoclásicos: Edgar Negret y Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar entre París, Nueva York y Bogotá, 1944–1964</i>, by Ana M. Franco

<i>Stephen Schryer</i> Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction<i>Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction</i>. Stephen Schryer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 278.