Revisiting the link between electrification and fertility: Evidence from the early 20th-century United States

Notes on the Contributors Introduction B.Sewell & S.Lucas PART I: AMERICA POWER AND THE WORLD Reflex Actions: Colonialism, Corruption and the Politics of Technocracy in the Early 20th Century United States P.Kramer Ambassador W. Averell Harriman and the Shift in U.S. Policy toward Moscow after Roosevelt's Death F.Costigliola The Kennan Diaries D.Milne Ideology, Race, and Nonalignment in U.S. Cold War Foreign Relations: Or, How the Cold War Racialized Neutralism without Neutralizing Race J.Parker America's Great Game: The CIA and the Middle East, 1947-67 H.Wilford The Perfect and Sustainable Road to Economic Development?: The Eisenhower Administration and Latin America B.Sewell The Defeat of Ernest Lefever's Nomination: Keeping Human Rights on the United States Foreign Policy Agenda S.Snyder PART II: CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES: POWER AND INTERVENTION Areas of Concern: Area Studies and the New American Studies J.C. Rowe Libertas or Fri? On US Liberty, Decline, Freedom and Pluralism D.Ryan The United States and the United Nations: Hegemony, Unilateralism and the Limits of Internationalism A.Johnstone The US War in Iraq: Confronting the Vietnam Analogy A.Priest Domesticating Katrina: Eliding the International Coordinates of a 'Natural' Disaster A.Hartnell From Ends to Means: American Foreign Policy and Women's Rights H.Laville Conclusion S.Lucas Index

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, women were limited in their ability to participate in sport and physical activity. The prevalent thinking of the time assigned (white, middle/upper class) women separate roles. Based on Christian religious beliefs rooted in Victorian era ideology, women were expected to maintain a level of domesticity and morality in order to remain feminine. Similarly, medical professionals often construed women as weak and frail, due to the energy demand of the reproductive system. These two ideologies together limited women’s participation in both physical education and competitive athletics. Focusing primarily on the role of women’s colleges, it is argued that these limitations have had long term effects on the development of women’s sport, from intercollegiate competitions to the Olympic games.

Accurate vital statistics are required to understand the evolution of racial disparities in infant health and the causes of rapid secular decline in infant mortality during the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, infant mortality rates prior to 1950 suffer from an upward bias stemming from a severe underregistration of births. At one extreme, African-American births in Southern states went unregistered at the rate of 15 to 25 percent. In this paper, we construct improved estimates of births and infant mortality in the United States for the 1915-1940 period using recently released complete count decennial census microdata combined with the counts of infant deaths from published sources. We check the veracity of our estimates with a major birth registration study completed in conjunction with the 1940 Decennial Census, and that the largest adjustments occur in states with less complete birth registration systems. An additional advantage of our census-based estimation method is the extension back of the birth and infant mortality series for years prior to published estimates of registered births, enabling previously impossible comparisons and estimations. Finally, we show that underregistration can bias effect estimates even in a panel setting with specifications that include location fixed effects and place-specific linear time trends.

Benjamin Kahan’s 2013 book on celibacy and modernism investigates celibacy in early 20th century United States as a prominently urban issue, questioning and to some degree discarding the commonplace of a sexually saturated modernism. This article aims at broadening up the scope of this analysis by investigating celibacy and sexuality in Sherwood Anderson’s short stories, mostly set in small provincial towns. The main contention of the article is that in Anderson’s stories male celibacy questions the social and symbolic order sanctioned by the typical nuclear family of rural and peripheral towns of the United States. More specifically, the stories discussed here and collected in The Triumph of the Egg overthrow the traditional attribution of sexual roles within the nuclear family, thus subverting the usual representations of both masculinity and fatherhood.

Arrowsmith has a claim to be the greatest ever novel about medical research. Writing at the very beginning of a revolution in medicine that would yield a generation of powerful...

Did Capital Requirements Promote Bank Stability: Lessons from the National Banking Era

We use the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 to study the effect of bankers on corporate boards in facilitating access to external finance. In the early twentieth century, securities underwriters commonly held directorships with American corporations; this was especially true for railroads, which were the largest enterprises of the era. Section 10 of the Clayton Act prohibited investment bankers from serving on the boards of railroads for which they underwrote securities. Following the implementation of Section 10 in 1921, we find that railroads that had maintained strong affiliations with their underwriters saw declines in their valuations, investment rates and leverage ratios, and increases in their costs of external funds. We perform falsification tests using data for industrial corporations, which were not subject to the prohibitions of Section 10, and find no differential effect of relationships with underwriters on these firms following 1921. Our results are consistent with the predictions of a simple model of underwriters on corporate boards acting as delegated monitors. Our findings also highlight the potential risks of unintended consequences from financial regulations.

Nursing and eugenics in the early 20th century United States

When traditional measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, stature and the body mass index (BMI) are now widely-used measures that reflect economic conditions. However, little work exists for late 19th and early 20th century women’s BMIs in the US and how they varied over time. Women’s BMIs stagnated throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After controlling for characteristics, African-American women had higher BMIs than lighter complexioned mixed-race and white women. Women from the Southwest were taller and had lower BMIs than women born elsewhere within the US. Alternatively, women’s BMIs did not vary by socioeconomic status.

Este artigo desenvolve uma discussão marshalliana de firmas e mercados da Inglaterra do século XIX e dos EUA do início do século XX, com o objetivo de destacar a importância de arranjos institucionais e históricos da atividade empresarial para a coordenação de decisões no sistema econômico. Na análise dos casos históricos, mercados e firmas se estruturam de acordo com padrões históricos que representam soluções para o problema da coordenação, e os arranjos canalizadores e restritivos das ações são parte integrante desses mercados e firmas. Os desenhos institucionais assumem a forma de ambientes empresariais, ao invés de arranjos avulsos entre duas ou mais empresas, e as soluções se apresentam de maneira datada e localizada. Como resultado, a discussão promove o ambiente institucional à primeira importância na coordenação da atividade econômica.

The Emergence of the Deterministic Concept of Intelligence in Early 20th Century United States : On Individualization in Progressive Education

Oil discoveries and education provision in the Postbellum South

I explore the impact of the Production Credit Associations (PCAs), an arm of the early Farm Credit System, on agricultural yield and input use following the farm crisis of the 1920s. Like many low‐ and middle‐income countries today, farmers in the early 20th century United States found it difficult to access credit. The PCAs were established in 1933 and significantly increased the supply of short‐term credit available to farmers. Using distance from the serving PCA as a proxy for credit access, I find that counties within 30 km of a PCA had 7% to 14% higher crop revenue per acre and 9% higher corn yields than counties more than 60 km from a PCA. These areas also had a small but statistically significant increase in the use of tractors (1% to 2%). These results provide crucial evidence of the impact of government‐sponsored enterprises on the early US agricultural economy and its use as a cost‐effective tool to address market frictions.

Evolution of drought management policies and practices in the United States

Societal Impact StatementAgricultural extension is recognized as an important pathway for generating changes in individual farmers' practices and therefore broader patterns of production. In the United States, historical research has implicated extension work in transformations that privileged White farmers and wealthier operations over other producers and that fostered the industrialization and consolidation of farms. This article examines the work of one early 20th-century extension agent and the demonstrations he used to teach farmers how to choose and keep corn seeds and to identify the best performing corn varieties for a particular location. This history can inform contemporary efforts to develop more socially and ecologically aware approaches to agricultural research, extension, and production by emphasizing the need for measures of success that align with community-level objectives and for larger institutional structures that support and sustain such goals.SummaryThe article examines the histories of agricultural extension and crop development in the early 20th-century United States. It discusses the role of farm demonstrations, including the participation of farmer-breeders, in the development of spread of higher yielding corn varieties in the Midwestern states in the 1910s and 1920s. It highlights the emphasis placed on finding locally or regionally appropriate varieties in some early corn extension activities and dwells on the irony that these locally specific endeavors played a role in the development of universalized solutions.The article examines and contextualizes an unusual archival document as an entry point into these histories: The Cornbelt's Last Open Pollinated Corn, a two-volume work prepared by Martin Luther Mosher (1882–1982). Mosher was the first county agricultural extension agent in the state of Iowa and worked in extension until his retirement in 1950.The article makes three main observations: (1) The Cornbelt's Last Open Pollinated Corn is best read as an agricultural demonstration; (2) The Cornbelt's Last Open Pollinated Corn is Mosher's attempt to grapple with the material legacies of his extension work in relation to the different agricultural life he idealized; and (3) Mosher's work exemplifies the complex relationships and expectations seen among breeders, seed companies, extension agents, and farmers in the early 20th-century United States.The article concludes that Mosher's work with open-pollinated corn varieties offers insight into the importance of agricultural extension as a means of crop development and highlights the contingent nature of agricultural industrialization.