Early 20th Century America Research Articles

The Cornbelt's Last Open Pollinated Corn: Agricultural extension and the origins of the hybrid corn seed industry.

The 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.

Nursing and eugenics in the early 20th century United States

BackgroundResearch has documented how ideas about race, class, ethnicity, ableism, and structural hierarchies determine health outcomes and disparities today. The historical role of nursing practice and education needs further exploration. PurposeThis study aims to better understand how some nurses thought about and interacted with eugenics in the early 20th century. MethodsHistorical analysis of primary and secondary sources. DiscussionIn the early 20th century, reformers of the day, including some nurses, demonstrated much ambiguity of thinking as they pushed for eugenic improvement of the “human race” while also enhancing environmental changes, such as good nutrition and clean, safe housing. ConclusionNursing’s past relationship with eugenics sheds light on the history and construction of the system leading to health disparities among marginalized groups. Nurses must acknowledge the historical roots and context of their education and practice as we engage in critical conversations about social inequities.

Human Capital, Female Employment, and Electricity: Evidence from the Early 20th-Century United States

Abstract This paper revisits the link between electrification and the rise in female labour force participation (LFP), and presents theoretical and empirical evidence showing that electrification triggered a rise in female LFP by increasing market opportunities for skilled women. I formalize my theory in an overlapping generations model and find that my mechanism explains one quarter of the rise in female LFP during the rollout of electricity in the U.S. (1880–1940), and matches the slow decline in female home production hours during this period. I then present micro-evidence supporting my theory using newly digitized data on the early electrification of the U.S.

Egypt and Egyptology in the pan-African discourse of Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey

Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey argued for the Africanity of ancient Nile Valley cultures, in direct opposition to some academics. In early 20th-century United States, incorrect narratives alleged that Africa had no history. The Garveys, and other Black intellectuals, looked to the Nile Valley to show the absurdity of that claim. The pan-Africanism of Garveyism instilled pride in African descended communities and united them against colonial structures. Pan-Africanism factored strongly in President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s conception of the modern nation-state of Egypt. Egyptian scholars from a variety of fields, including Nile Valley studies, continue to understand ancient Egypt as part of a network of African cultures.
 Keywords: Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus Garvey, Gamal Abdel Nasser, pan-Africanism, Egyptology, Egypt

Separate Spheres and Separate Roles: Christian Beliefs, Medical Ideology, and Women’s Sport and Physical Activity in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century United States

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.

The US farm credit system and agricultural development: Evidence from an early expansion, 1920–1940

AbstractI 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.

Oil media: Changing portraits of petroleum in visual culture between theUS, Kuwait, and Switzerland

This article examines three cases of mid-20th-century oil media—oil-related imagery, iconographies, and media—in visual culture: a series of popular science books entitled The Story of Oil published in the US, an oil-themed set of Kuwaiti postage stamps (1959), and an art exhibition in Zurich (1956) titled Welt des Erdöls: Junge Maler sehen eine Industrie (World of Petroleum: Young Artists See an Industry). While depicting crude oil in its natural habitat was a common photographic theme in the early 20th-century United States, the material discussed shows that, by the mid-20th century, crude oil no longer had the same visual presence. The iconography of oil in the three case studies came to rely increasingly on images of oil infrastructure and on context-specific depictions of living within petro-modernity or petro-culture, meaning lifestyles fueled by cheap fossil energy. However, it is not just the changes in visual representations of petroleum that matter; any debate about the visibility and invisibility of petroleum has to take into account the very media through which petroleum has become visually communicated—that is, the precise forms of oil's mediatization. The aesthetic negotiation of petroleum through media-based visual representations has been crucial for the dematerialization of fossil matter in its conversion to fossil energy, as well as the decoupling of sites of extraction from sites of production and consumption in the public imagination. As petro-culture has morphed into national or even global culture (rather than representing just one possible energy source among many), oil media has paved the way for our intimate relationship with fossil energy-dependent lifestyles, which is one of the biggest drivers of climate change.

C-3s and Model Ts: The Machines behind Two Lovely Farewells.

B. F. Skinner's 1976 editorial "Farewell my LOVELY," eulogizing the passing of the cumulative record as a primary form of data analysis, borrowed its title from a 1936 E. B. White essay of the same name. In it, White, a well-known 20th century essayist and children's book author, eulogized the Model T Ford. This article considers the parallels between the machine behind the cumulative record-the cumulative recorder-and White's Model T. The cumulative recorder considered for comparison is the Ralph Gerbrands Company Model C-3, widely considered by scientists of the time to be the best of the cumulative recorders that proliferated between the 1950s and the 1990s. On a much more modest scale, the C-3 became as popular, visible, distinct, and important in research laboratories devoted, but not limited, to the experimental analysis of behavior as was the Model T on the roads of early 20th century America. Not only were there parallels in manufacture and marketing, but, more importantly, in reliability, durability and ease of function of these two machines that changed the respective practices and culture of behavioral psychology and the world.

Weight and economic development: current net nutrition in the late 19th- and early 20th-century United States

ABSTRACT When traditional measures for material and economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, height and the body mass index (BMI) are now widely accepted measures that represent cumulative and current net nutrition in development studies. However, as the ratio of weight to height, BMI does not fully isolate the effects of current net nutrition. After controlling for height as a measure for current net nutrition, this study uses the weight of a sample of international men in US prisons. Throughout the late 19th- and early-20th centuries, individuals with darker complexions had greater weights than individuals with fairer complexions. Mexican and Asian populations in the US had lower weights and reached shorter statures. Black and white weights stagnated throughout the late 19th- and early-20th centuries. Agricultural workers’ had greater weights than workers in other occupations.

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

The early 20th century United States provides an opportunity to determine whether imposing capital requirements on commercial banks promotes banking stability in the long run. The structure of the national banking system facilitates inference using a regression discontinuity design. The discontinuity arose because federal law raised capital requirements on banks operating in towns whose populations exceeded certain thresholds. These thresholds enable me to estimate the impact of capital requirements on the choices and outcomes of similar banks operating in similar towns under different regulatory regimes. I find that banks subject to higher capital requirements did hold more capital, but also increased their lending proportionately, so that their leverage and risk of failure remained roughly unchanged. Ultimately, capital requirements did not result in lower suspension rates or enhance financial stability.

Assimilation and ethnic marriage squeeze in early 20th century America: A gender perspective.

BACKGROUNDDuring the 19th and early 20th centuries, large waves of international immigrants, often heterogeneous in terms of age and sex structure, arrived in the United States. Within a relatively short time, many of these immigrants were assimilated. While prior studies have identified an impact of the marriage squeeze on intermarriage, the role of gender is less known.METHODSWe use data from the 1930 census to examine the role played by variation in the sex ratios of the six largest immigrant groups at the beginning of the 20th century on marital outcomes by sex.RESULTSOur analyses show that the probability of marrying outside one’s ethnic group in this period is strongly tied to local ethnic sex ratios. Marital outcomes are affected for both sexes, but sex ratios are found to be more influential on males marrying out of their ethnic group. While a surplus of one’s own sex increases the probability of exogamy for males, it is likely to increase the probability of being single for females.CONTRIBUTIONOur findings highlight the importance of ethnic sex ratios in local marriage markets at a critical juncture of American immigration and its consequences. We focus on an understudied aspect of this process: gender differences in the association between sex ratios and marital assimilation. We show that marital decisions differed by sex and that the high levels of intermarriage in this period are more likely to be explained by unbalanced sex ratios for males than for females.

When Coercive Economies Fail: The Political Economy of the Us South after the Boll Weevil

How do coercive societies respond to negative economic shocks? We explore this question in the early 20th-Century United States South. Since before the nation's founding, cotton cultivation formed the politics and institutions in the South, including the development of slavery, the lack of democratic institutions, and intergroup relations between whites and blacks. We leverage the natural experiment generated by the boll weevil infestation from 1892-1922, which disrupted cotton production in the region. Panel difference-in-differences results provide evidence that Southern society became less violent and repressive in response to this shock with fewer lynchings and less Confederate monument construction. Cross-sectional results leveraging spatial variation in the infestation and historical cotton specialization show that affected counties had less KKK activity, higher non-white voter registration, and were less likely to experience contentious politics in the form of protests during the 1960s. To assess mechanisms, we show that the reductions in coercion were responses to African American out-migration. Even in a context of antidemocratic institutions, ordinary people can retain political power through the ability to ``vote with their feet.'' Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Oil discoveries and education provision in the Postbellum South

This paper studies the effect of oil wealth on the provision of education in the early 20th century United States. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields, I find that oil wealth increased local revenue and education spending. However, population increased, and as consequence, schooling quality did not improve across the board. Nominal teacher wages increased, and oil-rich counties were more likely to participate in the Rosenwald school building program for blacks. However, neither student-teacher ratios nor school attendance rates improved in the wake of oil discoveries.

Landscape of Evils in Upton Sinclair’s <i>The Jungle</i>

In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair delineates the social evils in the early 20th-century America from such aspects as the evils of reification, banality and unscrupulous personality. He discloses the phenomena of reification appearing under the systematic force by highlighting the reification of political-commercial relation, capitalist-worker relation and interpersonal relation, denouncing the social trample on laborers’ basic human rights and dignity from the perspectives of political corruption, politician-businessman collusion and capital monopolization. Moreover, he explores the anti-civilization, anti-socialness and anti-ethics of banality of evils through the revelation of evil-doings of scabs, manual laborers and real estate brokers. Finally, the unscrupulous personality finding expression in jealousy, avarice and lust brings to light the pleasure-seeking evil psyche harmful to social interaction.

Henry Ware Cattell and Walt Whitman's Brain.

Henry Ware Cattell was a prominent pathologist and medical editor in late 19th and early 20th century America. Strangely, his name is unknown to most medical historians but is more widely known by aficionados of Walt Whitman's poetry. In 1892, Cattell was involved in an incident that abruptly changed his life and decreased his commitment to pathology as a career. Cattell had been serving as the pathologist/prosector for the American Anthropometric Society at the time the poet Walt Whitman died. Cattell, the pathologist for the University of Pennsylvania's Wistar Institute, performed Whitman's autopsy on March 27, 1892; Whitman's brain was removed and was to join those of other prominent American intellectuals who had donated their brains to the Society's "Brain Club," but something went horribly wrong (allegedly, an assistant had dropped the brain and destroyed it) and Cattell kept this a secret. Full of self-doubt, Cattell was anguished about his inadequacies as a pathologist and was extremely worried about how all of this would affect his career when discovered. While still continuing to practice hospital-based pathology, he began to transition into an author and editor. This essay will provide a detailed biographical sketch of Henry Ware Cattell, address his sibling rivalry with his more famous brother James McKeen Cattell, briefly discuss the fad of 19th century intellectuals embracing the pseudo-science of phrenology and their participation in anatomical "brain clubs," and, finally, address the mystery of what happened to Walt Whitman's brain. Clin. Anat. 31:988-996, 2018. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Black and white female body mass index values in the developing late 19th and 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.

“Boyish and Almost Gay”: Celibate Men and Fathers in Sherwood Anderson’s “The Triumph of the Egg”

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.

Mobility and the Modern Intellectual: Translated Images from Early 20th-Century Literary Works in Spanish by Carmen Lyra and Luisa Luisi

This essay juxtaposes original translations of contrasting images from the novel En una silla de ruedas [In a Wheelchair] by Costa Rican writer Carmen Lyra and Poemas de la inmovilidad [Poems of Immobility] by Uruguayan writer Luisa Luisi to reveal how representations of intellectuals who are paralyzed might complicate discourses of the artist, social hygiene, and eugenics in early 20th-century Spanish America. Lyra portrays her protagonist's paralysis as a tragedy, but his disability is also the source of social mobility that allows the novel to depict marginalized members of Costa Rican society. Luisi contests modernista aesthetics of perfect forms, countering with a multifaceted exploration of inner space enabled by physical stillness. Through their depictions of hospitals, asylums, and sanitariums, both writers bear witness to bodies the modernizing project would prefer to hide, and imagine alternative forms of progress.

The Land of the Free? Orthodox Reactions to Religious Freedom in 19th and Early 20th-Century America

The Land of the Free? Orthodox Reactions to Religious Freedom in 19th and Early 20th-Century America

Muslim Immigrants in the Early 20th Century America: Some Have Forsaken, While Others Preserved Their Identity

<p>This article explores the challenges that immigrant Muslims faced in pre-1965 America in their efforts to find acceptance within the American host society. To understand this phenomenon I have used the ethnographic methods of research and collecting data focusing on a Palestinian Muslim family (Abukhdeir) who came to America in 1910 and settled in Provo, Utah as Kader family and adopted Mormonism. As such, this article demonstrates that the identity crisis of early generation Muslim immigrants resulted in the following consequences: (1) Who assimilated to the prevailing American melting pot culture of mainstream society, including converting to American religions; (2) Who did not assimilate, rather escaped the pressure of assimilation by returning to their home countries and resettled there without coming back to live in America; and (3) Who both assimilated and preserved their Islamic identities, as they were the children of returnees, which coincided with the wake of multiculturalism in America in the late 1960s. These grown-up children of the returnees then shared the new process of assimilation into the multicultural America, replacing melting pot culture, and affiliated with the fastest growing Muslim communities.</p><p>Artikel ini membahas tantangan yang dihadapi imigran Muslim di Amerika pra-1965 untuk diterima oleh masyarakat Amerika. Untuk memahami fenomena ini, penelitian ini menggunakan metode etnografi dan mengumpulkan data yang berfokus pada keluarga Muslim Palestina, Abukhdeir, yang datang ke Amerika pada tahun 1910 dan menetap di Provo, Utah sebagai keluarga Kader lalu mengadopsi Mormonisme. Artikel ini menunjukkan bahwa krisis identitas imigran Muslim generasi awal menghasilkan konsekuensi berikut: (1) Berasimilasi dengan budaya Amerika, yang berlaku di masyarakat mayoritas, termasuk beralih ke agama-agama Amerika; (2) Tidak berasimilasi, keluar dari tekanan asimilasi dengan kembali ke negara asal mereka dan bermukim di sana tanpa harus tinggal di Amerika; dan (3) Berasimilasi dan mempertahankan identitas Islam, sebagai keturunan dari para imigran yang kembali, bersamaan dengan menguatnya multikulturalisme di Amerika pada akhir 1960an. Keturunan dari para imigran yang kembali ini kemudian membentuk proses asimilasi baru dalam budaya multikultural Amerika, menggantikan budaya peleburan “melting pot”, dan berafiliasi dengan komunitas Muslim yang berkembang dengan cepat.</p>