American Social Historians Research Articles

My Sixty Years as an Amerikanist

My Sixty Years as an Amerikanist Heinz Ickstadt (bio) My life as an Amerikanist began in 1958 with a seminar on Herman Melville that brought my rather vague academic interests—I was then in my fourth semester—into sharper focus. My major had been German literature. But Melville made me switch (or, rather, “convert,” the experience was that intense) to the study of American literature. Melville’s novels, especially Moby-Dick, seemed new and exciting, so different from everything I had read so far as a beginning student that I didn’t have to think twice. Besides, there were other reasons: Germanistik was a huge field. I remember an advanced seminar on Goethe’s Faust with 200 participants. In contrast, my Melville seminar was small; we were about ten. The Germanistik professors were all German and inaccessible, many of them tainted by their ideological affiliation with the Nazi past. My Amerikanistik professor (John McCormick) was American, strict, even authoritarian (he had been commander of an American destroyer during the war), but willing to interact with his students on the basis of personal respect—if perhaps not of intellectual equality—as long as he recognized their serious commitment to the subject he taught. His seminar, for me, was a lesson in democratic behavior, a self-strengthening experience of intellectual exchange, perhaps even a glimpse of a utopian republic of letters. It was so different from what I had experienced previously in other contexts of German academia in the 1950s (at the Universities of Mainz and Freiburg) that, for me, there was no alternative but to continue my studies as an intellectually reborn Amerikanist in Berlin. Of course, Amerikanistik was then still part of the English Department, like almost everywhere else in Germany and Europe. A few years [End Page 335] later, the section of American literature was integrated into the newly founded Institute of American Studies based on the concept of area studies. Ernst Fraenkel, who had to flee Berlin for the United States in 1938, brought the field back to Berlin around 1960, at the height of another “Berlin crisis” that culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall. Several disciplines were brought under one roof, loosely connected by “America” as their shared object of research. Yet they were by no means interacting in the formation of a coherent discipline (“American studies”). On the contrary, the borders between disciplines were sacrosanct. When I joined the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien (DGfA) in 1968 (fifteen years after its foundation in 1953), the majority of its membership was formed by literary scholars—although there were also some historians and fewer political scientists who felt rather uncomfortable in such a predominantly philological environment.1 The rebellion that started at the Erlangen conference was directed against the hierarchical structure of the association but did not (yet) aim at a redefinition of Amerikastudien as something more than American literature.2 That came a few years later, first as a protest against close reading and the purist restrictions of the New Criticism, then by discussing the canonical texts of American literature within larger social and historical contexts or placing them within the theoretical frames provided by Frankfurt school Marxism, social history, anthropology, poststructuralism, semiotics, or psychoanalysis. (In this, the German academic rebels—largely untenured assistant professors and PhD students—more or less followed the example of their American peers.) Of course, by then, the established canon had itself come under fire, together with the academic establishment that defended it. The canon was eventually enlarged to include texts of minority groups that formerly had been excluded from it. But I also remember an early student strike at my American Studies Institute (by then, renamed the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies) for putting Dreiser’s Sister Carrie on the reading list, before the idea of a canon itself was shelved altogether. I myself, although an ardent reader of literature (I had written my dissertation on the poetry of Hart Crane), had become member of a research team that studied German working-class culture in Chicago from 1860 to World War I, funded by the German Research Foundation and mentored by the American social historian Herbert...

Breastfeeding and Health Professionals in Britain, New Zealand and the United States, 1900–1970

Modern medical opinion is almost universally in favour of breastfeeding as the best food for newborn infants. Yet this was not always the case. American social historian Rima Apple has argued convincingly that medical attitudes in the United States undermined breastfeeding in the first half of the twentieth-century. She explains how the concept of “scientific motherhood”, successfully promoted by the medical profession during the first half of the twentieth century, “fostered the acceptance of, when not the wholesale commitment to, bottle feeding under physician-supervision”. In her recent book on breastfeeding in the United States, Jacqueline Wolf argues that while many doctors in the United States supported breastfeeding, they inadvertently undermined it by advocating routine feeding and by providing a viable alternative through milk formulas. Considering the experience of breastfeeding in two further environments, Britain and New Zealand, contributes to the discussion of the role of health professionals in promoting breastfeeding. Doctors in Britain and New Zealand did not promote the move from breast to bottle, as Apple found in America. Nor did they appear to undermine breastfeeding by their advocacy of routine feeding. The decline in breastfeeding occurred later than in America. It coincided with the new fashion for “demand feeding”, and with a new movement to medicalize breastfeeding itself. A study of breastfeeding in different countries and over time indicates that the attitudes and advice of health professionals were significant factors in the success or otherwise of breastfeeding.

The Lion and the Newt: A British View of American Conservatives' Fear of Social History

Viewed from Lancaster, England the sustained virulence and intolerance of the American Right's attack on social history is difficult to comprehend, both in its scale and its nature. It is not that British social historians are unfamiliar with the prejudices and paranoias of right-wing governments we have, after all, had one of our own since 1979, and Major differs from Thatcher in style and selfS presentation rather than in substance. But during all this time no attack on this potentially subversive discipline has come near to the intensity of the American campaign, although, as we shall see, this is not to suggest that social history in Britain has gone unchallenged as regards its and core methodologies, or that it has had an easy ride. The contrast in experiences may be instructive in various ways, and I propose to discuss the fortunes of social history under the Conservative Party in Britain over the last fifteen years before enquiring into the possible reasons for the differences in the attitudes, policies and profiles of the Right in the two countries. This in turn may make contribution, however indirect, to the construction of survival strategies by American social historians in these difficult times. The Thatcher regime was no more hostile to social history than to the social sciences generally, and although damage was done, it was not the result of directly-targeted campaign. One of the first priorities of the 1979 government was to cut the funding of the national research councils, and the Social Science Research Council was so seriously affected that it had to reduce the number of postgraduate training awards by 25 percent in the first year. Within this framework Economic and Social History, under which motley label most social history research and teaching was then assumed to be done, was under particular pressure, but only because it was seen as traditional scholarly subject which was at risk in the heightened search for relevance to business and policy which was now in vogue.l But social history survived as recipient of research grants, despite perceptions in high places that there was (infamously) no such thing as society, only individuals and their families (a remark attributed to Margaret Thatcher), and that reading history at university was a luxury (a pearl of wisdom from the same chemistry graduate). The concept of social science was officially abolished, but the research council, re-named in newspeak the Economic and Social Research Council, survived and continued to fund projects in social history. Senior social historians felt, however, that the dice were loaded against the discipline and that it had to struggle to be heard; thus Eric Evans in 1987, when the (then) University Grants Commission was persuaded to institute an enquiry into the current state of economic and social history:

Street, Block, and Neighborhood: Residency Patterns, Community Networks, and the 1895 Argentine Manuscript Census

Latin American social historians often decry the lack of statistical material available in the region. In some countries national censuses were not taken in the nineteenth century, and municipal information for the period is hard to locate. The lack of data makes it difficult to investigate such questions as family size, mortality, employment, and residency among those groups which were least likely to provide written records of their lives. As a result, many studies are limited by the availability of data. Recently, however, Latin American social historians have begun to propose additional questions, plumbing the potential of those sources which are available.

IMMIGRATION AND THE MORAL CRITICISM OF AMERICAN HISTORY: THE VISION OF OSCAR HANDLIN

Oscar Handlin, the leading American social historian in the early Cold War era, envisioned immigration as the key to America's national and world historical destiny.1 For Handlin, the history of American immigration was the source of universal insights about the possibilities for co-existence under the conditions of freedom that could illuminate a pathway in a problematic modern world. America as the quintessential immigrant nation was the quintessential modern nation, and as such its national destiny had much to say about human destiny.

Mass Media Coverage of Conflict and Civil Disorder: Pseudo-events as Agents for Change

This critique of the relationship between media and social change reviews both the nature of the pseudo event as originally analyzed by American social historian Daniel Boorstin, and the relatively few systematic studies and essays on how news about such events may have affected social behavior, political power and history. Minority movements involving confrontation with police seeking to preserve established order are examined in the context of news communication, social and political causes and in some cases violence. This analysis casts considerable scepticism on the short-range impact of pseudo events, but offers a longer historical look at citizen participation in democracies, problems of substituting symbols for complex issues, and the clash of minorities and disorder with the resistance of the established majority. This article assembles both sporadic essays and commentaries along with more systematic studies, many of which were contemporary observations at the time when the events occurred. The in...

Who Stayed in School? Social Structure and Academic Achievement in the Determination of Enrollment Patterns, Providence, Rhode Island, 1880-1925

Class, race and ethnicity, gender, urban or rural life, religion-these aspects of social structure have been crucial to the work of American social historians. Much of that work explores the relationships between them and patterns of family life, residence, political involvement, schooling, social mobility, crime, and leisure. Clearly, however, there are also differences among individuals-in characteristics of intellect, personality, and values, for example-that are unrelated to position in the social structure and that also influence behavior. Since one cannot usually identify and generalize about the role of such personal chracteristics in the past with much confidence, social history focuses overwhelmingly on the positions of individuals in the social structure. Nevertheless, how much free play the personal qualities had and to what extent they were constrained by social structure are questions that can be asked about many aspects of social life. Here the concern is with schooling. And in connection with schooling the questions have been raised regularly, in one form or another, for at least a century and a half. They represent one way of asking how democratic American education has been. In recent work on the history of education, the effort to understand schools in terms of their relationship to the social structure has been especially strong in the work of historians loosely grouped together as revisionists. A range of perspectives exists within that loose grouping; the most influential and intellectually challenging historical work has been that of Michael B. Katz. The revisionism that characterizes those perspectives insists that an earlier view of educational institutions as evolving toward egalitarian and socially benevolent arrangements must be discarded as myth. Instead, American education is, and was, universal, tax-supported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and class-biased, in Katz's pithy summary of 1971. In order to explain how this situation came into being, most revisionists' work

Ideology and American Educational History

The ideological atmosphere has been highly charged recently in the study of American educational history. Hot debates center on the altruistic or self-serving motives of public school reformers, the liberating or oppressive effects of schools, and the relationship of educational history to present policy. Historians of American education are often most readily identified by ideological labels like “radical” or “Whig”. Thus it seems incongruous to me that members of this subfield have paid so little systematic attention to the ideology of the people we write about, and in particular, to the ideology of school reformers. This inattention to the concept of ideology and to the substance of particular ideologies is true of American social historians in general, with some important exceptions. Most often, one encounters the term in a casual reference, where the writer has apparently taken for granted the meaning of the term and the constituency of the ideology mentioned. Nancy Cott refers variously to “early nineteenth-century ideology”, to “ideology in reawakened Protestantism,” and to “nineteenth-century sexual ideology.” Linda Kerber refers to “republican ideology” without defining either term, and Stephen Thernstrom refers not only to the “ideology of mobility” on which he focused, but to a “total reigning ideology,” of which it was a part.

The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Aries

Few works have exerted a greater influence upon British and American social historians than Philippe Aries's L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime. Sensitive and encompassing,2 of undisputed importance,3 erudite, imaginative, and inventive, this book has, in Lawrence Stone's words, had a dazzling success and has been for more than a decade primum mobile of the study of family history.4 Known mainly in its English translation, Centuries of Childhood, which appeared within two years of the French original, Aries's work has even received the enthusiastic attention of a feminist and the qualified praise of a leading historical demographer.5 While Aries himself has moved on to explore the themes of contraception and attitudes to death, Centuries of Childhood continues to appear at the head of undergraduate reading-lists, seemingly assured of a commanding place in the historiography of the family.

Books and Bookmen

THAT British historians will have to be careful and have a care is indicated by the following judgment pronounced by the youngest member of the literary staff of the imposing “New York Herald Tribune.” The subject of review was “A Short History of the British Working Classes,” by a British authority, Mr. G. D. H. Cole, and the reviewer's comment on the book is as follows: “… a serviceable book; perhaps we may say indispensable, until such time as an American social historian addresses himself to the fascinating, though arduous, task of working over the immense mass of material now available for the purpose of furnishing the American student with an authoritative summary of an enthralling subject.” Well, we have learned lately that the definitive work on the Great War is now being projected by an associate professor of a university in the American backwoods, so we are preparing to pull up our socks.