Early Twentieth-century America Research Articles

Magic, Monsters, and Movies: America’s Midnight Ghost Shows

This essay examines midnight ghost shows (alternately known as “spook shows,” or “spookers”) and seeks to reinsert them into theatre history and to posit them as a cultural barometer of the time in which they were popular. Ghost shows were magic shows presented on the stages of America’s movie theatres throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A ghost show was usually part of a double-bill with a film, and each built to a special blackout sequence that would close the show. The earliest ghost shows used illusions borrowed from séances, such as table tipping and the production of apparitions, while later ones featured characters from popular horror films and bloody stage illusions such as decapitations and immolations. These productions represent how some enterprising magicians were able to create a trans-medial synergy between their staged magic shows and the emerging motion-picture industry, allowing them to not only survive, but to thrive in the changing entertainment milieu of early twentieth-century America. Ghost shows also stand as early examples of movie events that prefigured the phenomenon of midnight showings associated with cult films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show .

Little Lord Fauntleroy and the Evolution of American Boyhood

This paper evaluates late nineteenth and early twentieth-century definitions of idealized childhood through an analysis of the rapid rise and fall of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy . The 1886 novel of a British-born and American-bred author, Little Lord Fauntleroy tells the story of an American-raised child whose British grandfather suddenly calls him to England to become an earl. Fauntleroy’s initial popularity, the paper argues, can be credited to his embodiment of concepts of innocent childhood found in lingering constructions of the Romantic child still flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic. The essay explores how in the early twentieth-century United States, such ideals came to be considered threats to nationalism because they smacked of an allegedly degenerate effeminacy caused by over-civilization. Though the infamously frilly Fauntleroy suit is actually only briefly described in the novel, it was widely marketed to early readers, and this paper contends that it became a straw man read in contrast to teleological conceptions of U.S. identity which venerated constructions of rugged, rebellious male adolescence as evidence of America’s rightful place at the pinnacle of social evolution. The paper concludes that the drama of Little Lord Fauntleroy ’s reception history suggests that the enormous cultural capital of the figure of the child stems from the way in which the transience and dependency of childhood exposes it to continual social repurposing under the cover of outwardly timeless essentialism.

‘And We Got Here First’: Albert Johnson, National Origins and Self-Interest in the Immigration Debate of the 1920s

Congressman Albert Johnson was co-sponsor of the 1924 Immigration Act — the so-called National Origins Act. Partly as a result of this, he has been considered one of the arch-advocates of a more restrictive immigration policy in early twentieth-century America. Closer examination proves his stance to be more reasoned than his reputation would suggest. Such scrutiny shows him to be no less committed to restriction and reveals some unpleasant political and racial views and language. But detailed reading also shows that his arguments, political techniques and rhetoric seem somewhat closer to their mainstream modern equivalents than has frequently been acknowledged. What emerges from inspection of Johnson’s stance is that he is dealing with a far less united and unified lobby in favour of immigration control and a far more effective opposition to such measures throughout the 1920s. As in so many other crucial political debates, self-interest emerges as the key consideration, and not only from Johnson’s perspective.

"One Important Witness": Remembering Lydia Brown in Thomas Dixon's <i>The Clansman</i>

It may seem surprising to begin an essay on Thomas Dixon's 1905 bestseller The Clansman with epigraphs by three female African American authors, contemporaneous with his novel: Anna Julia Cooper, Mrs. N. F. Mosseli, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Surely, many current scholars read plot of The Clansman as simple and racist4 so much so that activist work and political writings of African American women should have no context within Dixon's self-proclaimed accounts of historical enactment of Reconstruction and of the true story of 'Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy/5 Seemingly inspired by racial paranoia that tormented early twentiethcentury America, text prides itself upon narratives of miscegenation and lynching that inspire textual climax: alleged rape of Marion Lenoir by former slave, Gus, and attempted rape of Elsie Stoneman by mulatto activist, Silas Lynch. The story finds its redemption when these miscegenous attempts are thwarted by Ku Klux Klan. As a consequence, story ends with triumphant lynching of Gus and ultimately preservation of southern womanhood. Nonetheless, I begin with these epigraphs because Dixon, as he preserve[s] in this romance both letter and spirit of this remarkable period, seems to engage textually with each.6 Dixon's version of chaos of blind passion that followed Lincoln's assassination is mobilized

Business Leadership in the Movement to Regulate Industrial Air Pollution in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America

Abstract This article concerns an important but currently still poorly understood aspect of the history of environmental reform: the leadership role played by reform minded businessmen in movements to regulate industrial air pollution in American cities between 1860 and 1920. For the most part, the task of writing the history of air pollution regulation in this period has fallen to historians who been predisposed to play up the leadership of public health and women reformers, while playing down the role of business reformers and casting anti-regulation businessmen and their organizations as the villains against which the public health and women reformers struggled. This article will use an examination of movements to regulate industrial smoke and the stenches of the meatpacking industry in Chicago, New York City, St. Louis, and several other cities to tell a different, much more complex story, one that recognizes the business community’s conflicted role in these movements. It will show that, while it is true that business interests actively opposed regulation, often bringing it to a standstill, they also played crucially important, positive leadership roles in movements whose success often hinged on the ability of environmental reformers to forge broad coalitions. It argues that only by investigating the ambiguities of business’s complex role, including its leadership role, will historians be able to explain the political strategies that led to progress in these early movements to regulate industrial air pollution.

Immigration, crime, and incarceration in early twentieth-century America

The major government commissions on immigration and crime in the early twentieth century relied on evidence that suffered from aggregation bias and the absence of accurate population data, which led them to present partial and sometimes misleading views of the immigrant-native criminality comparison. With improved data and methods, we find that in 1904, prison commitment rates for more serious crimes were quite similar by nativity for all ages except ages 18 and 19, for which the commitment rate for immigrants was higher than for the native-born. By 1930, immigrants were less likely than natives to be committed to prisons at all ages 20 and older, but this advantage disappears when one looks at commitments for violent offenses. The time series pattern reflects a growing gap between natives and immigrants at older ages, one that was driven by sharp increases in the commitment rates of the native-born, while commitment rates for the foreign-born were remarkably stable.

A HISTORICAL ATLAS OF OBJECTIVITY

The mythical scientist in early twentieth-century America cut a lone figure, “impersonal as the chill northeast wind” and “oblivious of everything save his experiment.” He toiled through the night in his laboratory, “a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-temperature bath with its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs,” as if working in the lab were a prayer that promised illumination—“alone, absorbed, [and] contemptuous of academic success and of popular classes,” he knew all about material forces, but he was blind to the vital force that created all others. Accustomed to the “beautiful dullness of long labors,” he remained “illimitably ignorant” of literature, art, and music. He believed that unerring techniques in experimentation, impartial observations, and exquisitely minute calculations would bring progress—a steady march toward the truth. He chose the highest calling in the world because he was “intensely religious—so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.” He was “so devoted to Pure Science . . . that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong. Having built a shrine for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere human beings.” This autocratic figure, brilliantly insane and tyrannically honest, embodied the cult of science and objectivity.

Lynching and spectacle: witnessing racial violence in America, 1890-1940

Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and antilynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.

"I Try to Live Somewhat in Keeping with my Reputation as a Wealthy Woman": A'Lelia Walker and the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company

This article examines the marketing strategies of A'Lelia Walker, daughter and coworker of Madam C. J. Walker who manufactured beauty and hair products and built up the extremely successful Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in the early decades of the twentieth century. Whereas the mother was and still is widely admired as a hardworking "race woman," her daughter is frequently dismissed as a spoiled and frivolous heiress whose conspicuous consumption ultimately undermined the Walker brand. By placing A'Lelia's work for the company within the context of recent scholarship on black labor and consumption, this article suggests that we understand A'Lelia's consumer strategies as a savvy response to the new demands of mass marketing. Furthermore, an analysis of the changing and gendered ideas of consumption in early-twentieth century America reveals that A'Lelia's lifestyle challenged both black and white elites' gendered expectations of respectable consumption and helped to reshape the politics of black women's labor.

Todd L. Savitt, Race and Medicine in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America

Todd L. Savitt, <i>Race and Medicine in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America</i>

The Politics of Uncertainty: Lobbyists and Propaganda in Early Twentieth-Century America

The Politics of Uncertainty: Lobbyists and Propaganda in Early Twentieth-Century America

The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940 (review)

Reviewed by: The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940 Andrew Sargent Carter, Julian B. 2007. The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940. Durham: Duke University Press. $79.95 hc. $22.95 sc. ix + 219 pp. Early in his book The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940, Julian B.Carter poses the kind of methodologically self-conscious question that has appeared in nearly every work of "whiteness studies" in recent years: "Why do we need another representation of whiteness in conversation with itself?" (44). Carter's question echoes the anguished soul-searching that whiteness studies scholars have engaged in ever since the field's 1990s heyday, in which the valid critical project of "making whiteness visible" is nonetheless seen to risk reinforcing the white privilege that the field seeks to challenge. If The Heart of Whiteness does not completely avoid such methodological tripwires-more on these in a moment-it is certainly not held back by them. On the contrary, this complex, richly textured book reaffirms the ongoing value of carefully researched, theoretically informed historical scholarship on American whiteness. In particular, it offers a powerful example of the productive new directions taken by scholars participating in what might be called the sexual turn in whiteness studies, or, perhaps more accurately, the racial turn in queer theory. As a queer theorist and historian of sexuality, Carter makes use of queer theory's challenge to heteronormativity in order to "elucidate normative meanings of whiteness" (158). In the process, he makes a significant contribution to the intertwined history of race and sexuality in America. Carter's central aim in The Heart of Whiteness is to chart the emergence of the concept of "normality" in the early twentieth-century United States. For Carter, discourses of the "normal" in this period were in fact covert means of enshrining whiteness and heterosexuality as twin cornerstones of what it meant to be a socially acceptable American. Carter shows that while upper-crust Anglo-Americans in the Gilded Age used relatively explicit racial language to trumpet what they saw as the superiority of white civilization, the normality discourse that emerged in the ensuing decades became increasingly "race-evasive" (154); that is, it tended to express white superiority in the race-neutral terms of monogamous, heterosexual marriage in a way [End Page 152] that made such lifestyles seem universal to all. This evasiveness enabled whites to think of themselves as inclusive, egalitarian, and loving, while avoiding accountability for the very real forms of exclusion and inequality that normality discourse fostered. Carter anchors his argument in often brilliant analyses of three sets of print materials that gained wide circulation between 1880 and 1940: medical literature on nervousness, marital advice manuals, and sex education guides for schoolchildren. In his first chapter, Carter argues that discussions of neurasthenia in the Gilded Age tended to construct "whiteness as weakness" (72) in a way that paradoxically reinforced belief in white superiority. While the recurrence of "nervousness" among elite Anglo-Americans suggested their inability to cope with the demands of a rapidly modernizing society, doctors who diagnosed this condition also tended to characterize nervousness as a sign of heightened sensitivity absent from less "civilized" populations. Carter next examines popular marital advice manuals that sought to address the so-called "marriage crisis" of the early twentieth century. Noting that life in the machine age was hampering sexual intimacy between men and women and driving up the divorce rate, the manuals preached the value of a self-disciplined adherence to monogamous sexual fulfillment that could enable white civilization to perpetuate itself. While the literature prescribed mutual pleasure between husband and wife (symbolized by the simultaneous orgasm) as the key to this enterprise, Carter shows that even this seemingly progressive vision masked lingering power hierarchies between men and women, and between whites and other racial groups. In his final chapter, Carter reads sex education literature in much the same way, arguing that training in "the birds and the bees" served as a way not just to teach schoolchildren about sex but to indoctrinate them in the "normal" virtues of monogamous heterosexuality that educators saw...

Human Milk as Technology and Technologies of Human Milk: Medical Imaginings in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Human Milk as Technology and Technologies of Human Milk: Medical Imaginings in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Business Leadership in the Movement to Regulate Industrial Air Pollution in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America

Business Leadership in the Movement to Regulate Industrial Air Pollution in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America

Writing the lost generation: expatriate autobiography and American modernism

Members of the Lost American writers and artists who lived in Paris during the 1920s, continue to occupy an important place in our literary history. Rebelling against increased commercialism and the ebb of cosmopolitan society in early twentieth-century America, they rejected the culture of what Ernest Hemingway called a place of 'broad lawns and narrow minds.'Much of what we know about these iconic literary figures comes from their own published letters and essays, revealing how adroitly they developed their own reputations by controlling the reception of their work. Surprisingly the literary world has paid less attention to their autobiographies.In Writing the Lost Generation, Craig Monk unlocks a series of neglected texts while reinvigorating our reading of more familiar ones. Well-known autobiographies by Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein are joined here by works from a variety of lesser-known - but still important - expatriate American writers, including Sylvia Beach, Alfred Kreymborg, Samuel Putnam, and Harold Stearns. By bringing together the self-reflective works of the Lost Generation and probing the ways the writers portrayed themselves, Monk provides an exciting and comprehensive overview of modernist expatriates from the United States.

Projecting an Aria, Singing the Cinema: In search of a shared vocabulary for opera and film studies

In 2007 I found myself facing 'the future of sound studies' in the middle of an ice storm at the University of Iowa. A colleague and I had organised an interdisciplinary conference titled 'Studies in Sound: Listening in the Age of Visual Culture' that, at some level at least, demonstrated the ways in which we had stopped 'listening' to one another. While we praised the diverse collection of scholars that populated each panel, the one paper that worked the hardest to integrate multiple approaches was also met with the most suspicion. On that frosty February day, a musicologist delivered an analysis of the opera Carmen that imported ideas from feminist film theory.1 'But', the audience was quick to point out, 'Carmen isn't a film!'. The group was far more interested in the ontological status of the video clip that the presenter used as illustration than in the music and voices she asked it to reveal. It seemed the 'age of visual culture' had snuck in the back door after all. Frozen with their disciplinary tools, those in attendance were unable to conceive of a serious connection between opera and cinema that allowed for a modification of the procedures of one field to suit a text from another. Yet before I dismiss these reactions completely, I should note that in trying to establish the significance of this video clip the listeners were performing a rather important task. Carmen has, of course, been filmed numerous times and for many different reasons; whether it is preserved for historical documentation, cinematic adaptation, or performance analysis, the 'meaning' of the opera and the status of the film on which it has been recorded has been changed. This short conference presentation thus encapsulates a much larger problem that lingers in the exchange between opera and film studies: when we talk about opera and cinema, should we broaden our theories to embrace both media or narrow our techniques to focus on the intricacies of each individual text? Whether we approach the interaction for the purpose of textual analysis or make a stab at theoretical expansion, the conflict over Carmen makes it clear that we must account for the particular historical conditions that make both ideas and media possible if we are to establish an effective dialogue for studies in sound.Historically, musicologists (who tend to produce much of the work included under the aegis of 'opera studies') and film scholars speak very different dialects. Perhaps the response of those at the Carmen panel (most of whom were film professors and graduate students) can be explained as a reflex to protect against a perceived pillaging of cinematic discourse by the uninitiated. While the last decade has witnessed an encouraging rise in scholarship that explores the relationship between 'film' and 'opera', lying dormant in much of this discourse are assumptions about what these words really mean. This lack of specificity ultimately fails to account for the special status of opera onscreen during particular periods and within individual national cinemas or film genres. For example, one need only note that contemporary connotations of the term 'opera' are strikingly different from those that circulated in early twentieth-century America, when arrangements and translations of operatic arias were familiar to people from a variety of social classes. Moreover, an opera was not necessarily considered an autonomous entity, but was instead drastically altered to suit the location of performance. 2 Thus the particularities of these operatic exhibitions, like those of early film screenings, often shifted the source of meaning from the composer's hand to the local experience.3 When we try to explain the 'nature' of a medium like opera or cinema, whose significance drastically alters as it interacts with changing technological and social conditions, we do a disservice to theoretical approaches designed to make sense of a unique experience.A consideration of the distinctness of its sound transmission, however, often fails to make its way into discussions of opera on film. …

The 1919 Peace Settlement: A Subaltern View

As every schoolboy knows, or used to know before the rise of multiculturalism, in the early twentieth century and North America dominated the world. A recent president of the American Historical Association reports that, with postcolonial studies firmly anchored in the curriculum, our students now learn that Europe that funny little peninsula jutting off the edge of Asia is not the center of history.1 So much for history wie es eigentlich gewesen. No one thought that way ninety years ago. Europe, the United States, and other Western offshoots encompassed 33.9 percent of world population and produced 67.7 percent of world GNP at the time. Taking account of the productivity of the fifty million Europeans who had emigrated abroad and revolutionized agriculture and trade in such places as Latin America's Southern Cone, North Africa, and Asian city-states, people of European stock generated three-quarters of world income. The United States and Britain alone came close to producing half of global manufactured goods.2 One analyst estimates that between 1400 and 1900 the four principal West European civilizations contributed roughly 80 percent of humankind's achievements in the realms of science and technology, art and music, and literature and culture.3 The European civil war of 1914-1918 thus constituted a tragedy of immense proportions. The statesmen who, in the midst of unprecedented economic travail and an influenza pandemic, struggled to craft the Versailles treaty in 1919 had their hands full. They had to reconstruct Europe, contain Germany, clean up the detritus left by three collapsed empires, and found the League of Nations.4 Could they, and should they, also have made time to address the stirrings of anti-colonial nationalism in Egypt, India, China, and Korea, the subject of Professor Erez Manela's much-praised book? If one reads history within its unfolding context rather than backward from the present, the notion seems less than reasonable.

British Encounters with American Art

The Ashcan School paintings discussed in Douglas Tallack’s Urban Visual Culture course at the University of Nottingham were, for me, the hook. I was enthralled by the way that my growing knowledge of the history of chaotic, cosmopolitan, early-twentieth-century New York opened up the complex legibility of these works. Coming to American studies after having previously read English and philosophy, I was surprised to be spending my time looking at art. However, while researching my thesis (“On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism”), as a Terra summer residency fellow, and in my postdoctoral career, I have sought to catch up on both art history practice and the history of American art. I now teach in the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham, where I offer courses entitled The Emergence of Mass Culture and American Realisms. My journey, from novice to teacher—or novice teacher—in less than a decade represents a fairly intense encounter with American art. But it also suggests a trajectory, from initial fascination to a more informed engagement, relevant to encounters of other kinds. At Nottingham, visual art forms one element of our interdisciplinary Thought and Culture survey and is also taught in specialist options, such as those named above and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s course African American Visual Culture. Both approaches are used at other U.K. American studies undergraduate programs: at the University of Leicester, painting and photography are discussed in courses exploring the City and the West; at King’s College London, Shamoon Zamir leads secondand final-year options titled Visual Culture: An Introduction and Photography USA; and at the University of Winchester, Carol Smith asks the students who take her Picturing a Nation course to reflect on the discourse surrounding recent exhibitions of American art in Europe. At these and other programs, American art is explored in an interdisciplinary American studies framework, with all the attendant benefits and dangers. American art also appears in U.K. university curricula within art history programs. Typically offered as options for secondand final-year students who have already taken the introduction to Western art, these courses tend to be specific in period or thematic focus. While the emphasis is often post-1945, as in the New York School course at the University of Leeds, Michael Hatt examines an earlier moment in Modern American Art, 1900–1930 at the University of Warwick, and Andrew Hemingway teaches Inventing the Americans: Issues in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture at University College London. While sharing the common difficulty of teaching the subject at some distance from its objects and archives, art history and American studies programs in Britain provide distinct disciplinary frames for American art. In the opening sessions of my Realisms module, I have to combine discussion of Thomas Eakins’s career with a crash course in how to read a painting, but when we come to social realism I can rely on existing knowledge of the Depression and the New Deal. Teaching students with strong foundations in methodology and with the background provided by the course The Traditions and Institutions of Western Art, Michael Hatt includes novels and cultural histories on his reading lists to provide context of earlytwentieth-century America. Both situations demand that teachers think closely about what American art requires. As yet, U.K. academics have not concluded that encounters with American art need to be framed by an American art survey. A trawl through teaching syllabuses reveals no evidence of such a course being taught. Anecdotally, at least, this approach appears to work. Students find ways of discussing the images they are shown in class, and in the courses I teach and moderate, I have read outstanding essays on racial stereotypes in early-twentieth-century advertising imagery, Edward Hopper’s sense of space and place, and historical references

Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (review)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY COMPOSERS Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices. By Michael Broyles and Denise Von Glahn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. [xvi, 392 p. ISBN-13: 9780253348944. $34.95.] Illustrations, music examples, works list, biographical references, index. In the early part of the twentieth century, Russian-born Leo Ornstein burst onto the American musical scene. He played piano recitals to standing-room only audiences across the country, was discussed in newspaper and magazine articles, parodied in cartoons, and had his portrait painted by Leon Kroll and William Zorach among others. For a time, Ornstein was the poster child for the cause of musical modernism. His name once was mentioned beside Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky as a harbinger of modernism in America; however, shortly after World War I he disappeared from the public eye and was almost entirely forgotten by music historians. In the early 1970s Ornstein's family contacted historian Vivian Perlis, with the hope that she could help bring the composer out of obscurity. Perlis brought Ornstein's manuscripts and related material to the Yale University Music Library, where she was able to preserve and promote his music. One of the fruits of her labors was an article published in this journal (The Futurist Music of Leo Notes 31, no. 4 [ June 1975]: 735-50), which helped to acquaint the late twentieth century to Ornstein's music. Despite Perlis's work, Ornstein unfortunately still resides on the periphery of American music. For this reason, the authors of Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices seek to reestablish Ornstein's place in early twentieth-century America and the development of musical modernism. In addition to presenting the most comprehensive history of Ornstein's music and life to date, they attempt to answer two questions about Ornstein's life: what led to his slip into obscurity and what influenced his brief stint with musical modernism? In the preface the authors tell us that this text will be more than just a biography of Ornstein and an attempt to answer these pressing issues about his life. The authors indicate that they want to tell about the role of music in early twentieth-century America. To this end, the book covers the gamut of events, from Russian pogroms that led to mass migrations of Jews to the United States, to the beginnings of a modern art movement in the United States; from anti-Semitism in the early 1920s to the stock market crash of 1929 and the rise of the Red Scare. In the broad path of this historical sweep we encounter a cast of prominent characters who had some type of relationship to Ornstein, albeit sometimes tangential, such as Frank Damrosch, Henry Ford, Georgia O'Keefe, Deems Taylor, Henry Cowell, Sergei Rachmaninoff, John Coltrane, Dan Rudhyar, and George Antheil. Besides discussing important figures and events of the early twentieth century, the authors also discuss some of the important technologies sweeping the musical world such as player pianos, recording technology, and radio broadcasting. The first two chapters of this text serve to give the reader the most comprehensive understanding of Ornstein's musical beginnings. In the first chapter the authors give details of Ornstein's earliest days in a fairly novel way; they turn to the autobiography of Jacob Titiev, Ornstein's uncle, to furnish otherwise incomplete details about the Ornstein family's life in Russia and their immigration to the United States. In the second chapter the authors attempt to pinpoint the impetus behind Ornstein's futurist works. In addition to examining the first references in contemporary media to Ornstein's new style, they also probe his compositions to look for the transitional period to determine from where and whence his inspiration came. The authors' sticking point in the argument is whether Ornstein was influenced by modern music that he heard while on a European tour in 1913 or whether his modernist style emerged from his own imagination without any contemporary influences. …

Photographs of Japanese Picture Brides: Visualizing Immigrants and Practicing Immigration Policy in Early Twentieth Century America

Photographs of Japanese Picture Brides: Visualizing Immigrants and Practicing Immigration Policy in Early Twentieth Century America