Early Twentieth-century America Research Articles

Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America

In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

Indian Problems, Indian Solutions: Incantations of Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia

Indigenista writings marked an important shift in discourse regarding the majority indigenous population in early twentieth-century Latin America. Indigenismo was an ideological current that developed throughout Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century that focused on the Indian population and questions of nation and of citizenship. In Bolivia, penned in the wake of the 1899 Civil War in which the Aymara indigenous group played a central role, indigenista authors such as Manuel Rigoberto Paredes and the members of the Aymara Academy responded to this Indian initiative participating in national politics. The indigenista authors crafted a legitimizing discourse for the rising Liberal Party, headquartered in La Paz, that came to power as a result of the 1899 Civil War. The Inca became the axis within a liberal indigenista discourse that strove to address questions of progress and race. However, in this context the lauded ‘Bolivian Inca’ had an important ancestor: the Aymara. This indigenista effort to connect the Aymara past to the Inca past within the national historical narrative represents an alternative liberal discourse on the ‘Indian problem.’ In the wake of the war, the promotion of a specific Indian past was not the sole domain of the indigenista authors. As indigenista intellectuals crafted a glorified Inca past for Bolivia, residents of Aymara communities began to appropriate and enact theatrical performances of the indigenistas’ idealized Inca past in town celebrations, as demonstrated by the case of Caracollo, Bolivia.

Taking technology to task: The skill content of technological change in early twentieth century United States

This paper uses new data on the task content of occupations to present a new picture of the labor market effects of technological change in pre-WWII United States. I show that, similar to the recent computerization episode, the electrification of the manufacturing sector led to a “hollowing out” of the skill distribution whereby workers in the middle of the distribution lost out to those at the extremes. OLS estimates show that electrification increased the demand for clerical, numerical, planning and people skills relative to manual skills while simultaneously reducing relative demand for the dexterity-intensive jobs which comprised the middle of the skill distribution. Thus, early twentieth century technological change was unskill-biased for blue collar tasks but skill-biased on aggregate. These results are in line with the downward trend in wage differentials within U.S. manufacturing up to 1950.

What Adolescents Ought to Know: Sexual Health Texts in Early Twentieth-Century America by Jennifer Burek Pierce (review)

What Adolescents Ought to Know: Sexual Health Texts in Early Twentieth-Century America by Jennifer Burek Pierce (review)

Marking Mormon Difference: How Western Perceptions of Islam Defined the “Mormon Menace”

Abstract: This article argues that inaccurate perceptions of Muslim and Mormon sexual and political deviance merged to help fuel a sustained anti-Mormon campaign in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. The inflammatory rhetoric of slavery and defilement that anti-Mormon writers deployed to equate the violation of the individual female body in plural marriage with the violation of the social body through Mormon treachery and authoritarianism relied largely on anti-Muslim caricatures for both its venom and its meaning. Only when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embraced a model of the church that fit within the framework of American denominationalism did the Mormon menace begin to recede and anti-Muslim vitriol begin to fade from anti-Mormon discourse. This article further contends that the political compromise that allowed Mormonism to survive—indeed, to flourish within the United States—helped demonstrate the boundaries of religious and political freedom not just for Mormons but for all Americans. In this context, the evolution of polemic literature served to mark significant cultural change.

READING THE TICKER TAPE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN MARKET

This article analyses popular accounts of financial innovations such as the stock ticker in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Recent social studies of finance (e.g. Preda 2009) have drawn attention to the socio-technical performative agency of such new modes of disseminating economic knowledge that do not merely provide a more accurate representation of ‘the market’ as a coherent entity but in fact help create it. However, where Preda focuses more on the modes of rational calculability and the mechanisation of trust that were encouraged by the numerical abstractions of the ticker tape and subsequent charts of the fledgling technical analysts, this article discovers a residual attraction to rhetorical forms that humanized the impersonality of the financial markets, but which, in so doing, were more in tune with occult than modern understandings of finance.

Avenging ‘Bridget’: Irish domestic servants and middle-class America in the short stories of Maeve Brennan

This article will examine the representation of Irish women servants in Maeve Brennan's short stories, first published in The New Yorker in the 1950s, and collected in The Rose Garden (2001). The Irish ‘Bridget’, the most publicly visible, if troubling, image of Irish womanhood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, has received much-needed attention from historians and social scientists in the last decade, and is a central figure in discussions of Irish women and diasporic identity in the American context. Drawing on this body of work, and focusing in detail on key stories from the collection, including ‘The Bride’, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, ‘The Anachronism’, ‘The Divine Fireplace’, and ‘The Servants’ Dance', I argue that Brennan's reimagining of the Irish Bridget can be approached as a form of feminist revisionism, as Brennan's stories enter into a charged dialogue with the history of imagining the Irish woman servant as an undesirable but necessary presence in middle-class American domestic culture. Brennan's self-reflexive reworking of this paradigm is informed by her work as a satirist for The New Yorker, and proves an effective means of writing back to this problematic history, as she takes up recognisable tropes and motifs from earlier representations of Bridget in popular and literary culture, and alters them in knowing and subversive ways.

Compulsory Conrad: Fanny Butcher and the Gender of Literary Criticism

This essay explores Conrad's transnational reception by early twentieth-century female American literary critics through the lens of Fanny Butcher (1888–1987), a nationally renowned literary critic and editor of the Chicago Tribune. It argues that Butcher's early writings on Conrad, from approximately 1914 to the late 1920s, offer valuable insights into Conrad's status as a cultural icon in the United States whose appeal and value was broadly understood to resonate according to lines of gender. They indicate that a woman writing about Conrad at that time necessarily had to negotiate not just his writings, but an author already claimed by vocal male critics: a “compulsory Conrad” who must be embraced by all those who wished to be heard. Butcher's passionate devotion to Conrad, it is argued, should be understood as both an act of free self-expression and a kind of calculated performance that entailed self-censorship even while validating Butcher's authority to speak on matters of literary taste and culture. By framing her own appreciation for Conrad through a discourse that emphasized his elite appeal to a masculine sensibility, Butcher established her position as a female peer in a network of male literary critics. As such, her writing shows how the name “Conrad” operated as a marker of institutionalized power and cultural capital in early twentieth-century America.

Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States by Amy L. Blair (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States by Amy L. Blair Martin Green Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States. By Amy L. Blair. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 250 pp. $28.95. Although not focused on periodical studies, per se, Amy L. Blair's Reading Up has its jumping off point in the periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and provides a valuable insight on the cultural stakes involved in the burgeoning field of mass magazines. "Reading up" is Blair's phrase to describe reading as a process of social mobility. Reading the "best books" becomes a means of acquiring social capital, like wearing the right dress or hat or owning the best automobile or furniture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many self-appointed cultural mediators capitalized on the status anxieties of an aspiring, mostly female, audience, eager to acquire the accouterments of middle-class life and to engage with the artifacts of high culture. Blair's study focuses on the writings of Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846-1916), whose column of advice for aspiring readers ran for a decade in that bastion of upward mobility, the Ladies Home Journal, under the editorship of Edward Bok. This is an aspect of Bok's Journal that has not received much attention. Mabie was the fourth proprietor of the Journal's book chat column, including Bok himself and Robert Bridges (moonlighting from Scribner's under the pen name "Droch"), but it was Mabie who had the longest tenure, turning out an even hundred columns from 1902-1912 and orienting the column toward purveying reading advice. As Blair outlines, Mabie's advice to readers of LHJ took many forms, recommending books under various rubrics: "Books for Young People," "Books of the Season," "Courses for Private Reading," "Living Novelists Best Worth Reading," and "Are Best Sellers Worth Reading?" are among the column titles. Mabie also responded to readers' inquiries (or, Blair speculates, framed questions he imagined readers of LHJ might have had). His tastes ran toward the conservative and genteel and romantic, as one might imagine, but he was also somewhat eclectic in scope and liberal in allowing readers to follow their own inclinations on what to read. His goal, Blair maintains, was to encourage his readers, who were already reading "recreationally," to refine their tastes and "read up." In this regard, he did not reject realism, but his engagement with the style associated with the revolt against gentility and [End Page 89] critical of middle-class standards involved reinterpretation (to put it kindly) or misreading (whether strategic or unconscious) of the work of writers such as James, Howells, and Wharton. After her initial chapters outlining Mabie's approach, Blair spends the bulk of the study examining how Mabie reads Howells, James, and Wharton and how these writers implicitly responded to his point of view and he to theirs. All three were cultural brands, in Blair's phrase, and had to be reckoned with, although Mabie was not always in sympathy with their work. Mabie recommended The House of Mirth seven times over the course of his columns (for context, Vanity Fair with sixteen mentions is the leading title in Mabie's canon), but his recommendation of Wharton was, in Blair's view, somewhat backhanded, defining Wharton as someone one should read for her craftsmanship if not for her critique of high society, which he deflects and softens somewhat. Wharton gave as good as she got and implicitly critiqued Mabie's program of cultivating readers in an essay in the North American Review in 1903 that attacked "dutiful" and "mechanical" readers. (Mabie, in turn, implicitly responded in a 1905 column that advocated structured reading programs.) Likewise, although Mabie was highly critical of The Rise of Silas Lapham when it was first published, he mentioned the book more than any other novel other than Vanity Fair, and he turned Howells "into a line item on a checklist of cultural acquisition" (98). Mabie preferred the early James to the more psychological intricacies of the late phase of the...

Reading Up: Middle Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth Century United States by Amy L. Blair (review)

Reading Up: Middle Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth Century United States by Amy L. Blair (review)

Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy over "Whiteness." (review)

Reviewed by: A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy over "Whiteness." Michael A. Olivas A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy over "Whiteness." By Patrick D. Lukens. (Tucson: University of Arizona University Press, 2012. Pp. 250. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780816529025, $50.00 cloth.) This carefully argued book considers a subject that is at the intersection of early twentieth-century United States immigration policy, racial politics, and particularly the racial ascription of being Mexican-origin. In A Quiet Victory for Latin Rights, Patrick D. Lukens details an obscure case of naturalization, In the Matter of Timoteo Andrade. In his first hearing, in 1935, the family gave evidence and testimony asserting that Andrade was "50-75 percent Indian blood." The judge denied his petition. Later, the family argued that his Indian blood was only "two percent." With that argument, he was granted citizenship. Other authors have touched on this interesting case in books and journal articles. Additionally, a number of historians, including Mario T. García, Mae Ngai, Ignacio García, Steven H. Wilson, Clare Sheridan, Neil Foley, and Thomas Guglielmo, have written about the politics of whiteness with regard to Mexican Americans, especially in Texas, without reference to this case. In another stream of Chicano historiography, other scholars, particularly anthropologist Martha Menchaca in Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (2002) and also Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants: A Texas History (2011), have zeroed in on the machinery of the United States immigration regime and its racist roots. Legal scholars Ian Haney López, Laura Gómez, and Guadalupe Luna have added substantially to this literature as well. Although the listing of these works suggests major attention to the case and its larger geopolitical context, Andrade is still quite obscure and Lukens's book constitutes the first full-length treatment of this case and its fascinating backstory. As with many unpublished cases (e.g., Bastrop v. Delgado, etc.), it is hard to find [End Page 326] and read, which likely accounts for its relative obscurity. In addition, as Lukens reveals, there was disagreement within the FDR Administration over almost all aspects of the case, and officials pushed to keep it from being published in the Federal Reporter "to avoid making the decision too conspicuous" (128). The rest of his book lays out in some detail the conflicting politics of the various departments in the FDR Administration. Particularly interesting is its exploration of the 1930 and 1940 U.S. Census designations. Michael A. Olivas University of Houston Law Center Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association

Does the structure of banking markets affect economic growth? Evidence from U.S. state banking markets

This paper examines the impacts of banking market structure and regulation on economic growth using new data on banking market concentration and manufacturing industry-level growth rates for U.S. states during 1899–1929—a period when the manufacturing sector was expanding rapidly and restrictive branching laws segmented the U.S. banking system geographically. Unlike studies of developing and developed countries today, we find that banking market concentration generally had a positive impact on manufacturing sector growth in the early twentieth century United States, with a somewhat stronger impact on industries with smaller establishments, lower rates of incorporation, and less reliance on bond markets (and, hence, relatively more reliance on banks). Because regulations affecting bank entry varied considerably across states and the industrial organization of the U.S. banking system differs markedly from those of other countries, we consider the impact of other aspects of banking market structure and policy on growth. Even after controlling for differences in the prevalence of branch banking, deposit insurance, and other aspects of policy and market structure, we find that market concentration boosted industrial growth.

Reading up: middle-class readers and the culture of success in the early twentieth-century United States

Acknowledgments Introduction: Cultivating Taste in a Mass-Market World 1 Mr. Mabie Tells What to Read 2 The Compromise of Silas Lapham 3 James for the General Reader 4 Misreading The House of Mirth 5 The Comforts of Romanticism Epilogue: Reading Up into the Twenty-first Century Appendix A: The Mabie Canon Appendix B: Novels Descriptive of American Life (November 1908) Notes Bibliography Index

Darger's Resources by Michael Moon (review)

Reviewed by: Darger's Resources by Michael Moon Daniel Shank Cruz Michael Moon . Darger's Resources. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 151p. Michael Moon's book about pop culture influences on the work of Henry Darger (1892-1973), a janitor by day and prolific writer and visual artist by night, is an important addition to the rapidly growing field of Darger Studies. It offers a retort to the standard view of Darger (as gleaned from his work) as a pedophile and possible psychopath, which in Moon's telling is most often epitomized by John M. MacGregor's Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal (2002). Instead, Darger's Resources argues that Darger's work is preoccupied with the violent aspects of American society that were also the subject matter of numerous pop culture genres throughout his creative lifetime, including religious pamphlets, comic strips, comic books, and pulp fiction. According to Moon, "if Darger and his desires seem bizarre to many people, that may be not so much because the desires are in themselves especially weird but because Darger (inadvertently or not) left an extraordinarily elaborate and extensive record of his intimate desires and fantasies" (86). Unlike much previous scholarship, Darger's Resources contextualizes Darger's work within the pop culture of his time instead of simply focusing on the work itself. More broadly, the book contends that "outsider artists" such as Darger do not work in an intellectual vacuum despite their lack of formal training, and it also implicitly places Darger's work within a queer matrix. Moon's arguments are convincing, and the book is thus a valuable one, though not without its flaws. The first chapter of Darger's Resources examines the obsession with young religious martyrs in Darger's work and shows that this fixation was shared throughout the Catholic milieu of which Darger was a part during the first half of the twentieth century. Moon discusses the many devotional books and mass-produced portraits of saints in Darger's personal library to assert that the (at times gruesome) violence toward children in his writing and painting is motivated by a fascination with martyrdom, not simply violence. Darger's work is therefore a part of the long tradition of religious art and literature rather than the self-made pornography of a lunatic. Similarly, chapter three investigates early twentieth century America's fascination with orphans, which manifested itself in a number of comic strips. As an orphan himself, Darger collected these comic strips in scrapbooks and often pasted them into his paintings or traced their figures directly onto his landscapes. Moon writes convincingly that the extreme focus on children in Darger's work is an expression of both the desire for children to be safe and the knowledge that, as in Darger's own experiences, children are often exploited rather than protected. [End Page 239] Chapter four examines two related genres which Darger read often, pulp fiction magazines and comic books. These publications help illuminate Darger's work because they also openly acknowledge the violence suffered by marginalized groups instead of attempting to ignore it for propriety's sake. The chapter focuses on the sadomasochistic elements of Darger's work, again showing that they are not unique, but were present in mass-market publications such as Weird Tales and Wonder Woman. Portrayals of Darger as sick because of these elements are therefore unfair. The major weakness of Darger's Resources is chapter two, which treats the similarities between Darger's writing and Branwell Brontë's juvenilia. While Moon successfully shows that the two bodies of work share a fascination with military battles which serves as a form of mourning for early childhood traumas in the writers' lives, he presents no evidence that Darger ever encountered work by Branwell or his sisters (in part because Branwell's work did not come into print until after Darger's death). The chapter works well as an exercise in comparative literature, and will be of interest to Brontë scholars, but it does not fit with the book's overall goal of examining Darger's "resources" to show how his work was influenced by them. Moon also compares Darger to another author...

Pluralism, Place, and Gertrude Bonnin’s Counternativism from Utah to Washington, DC

Pluralism, Place, and Gertrude Bonnin’s Counternativism from Utah to Washington, DC Julianne Newmark (bio) In the first three decades of the twentieth century, racial nativism wielded considerable direct and indirect influence on policies that affected broader American attitudes concerning Native American people. In this three-decade period, many factors caused the kinds of national insecurity and instability that make a cultural climate ripe for upsurges in protectionist nativism. America experienced its greatest wave of immigration, the nation’s soldiers fought in a heretofore unimaginable global conflict, the African American northern migration began, and an economic collapse took hold. Yet xenophobic nativism, also called Anglo-Saxon nativism, is more than a mere protective or “ethnocentric habit of mind,” as John Higham points out. Within racial nativism, “race” becomes a vague glyph, employed in specific ascriptive fashion to groups of people who, for whichever of a variety of reasons, don’t seem to have the requisite “national character,” in Higham’s phrase, to be “American.”1 Functionaries of race-driven nativism that had particular impact on indigenous Americans were the Dawes Act, the Native American boarding school system, and the associated “outing” program. Between 1902 and 1938 Gertrude Bonnin (also known by her self-given name, Zitkala-Ša) came to understand that the employment of pluralist rhetoric could help her to textually and oratorically combat the zeal of race-based nativist nationalism and its narrow view of “national character.” Further, her pluralist counternativism, with its specifically Native senses of reciprocity and place centrism, propelled her efforts toward political empowerment and land rights for Native people across tribes. This thirty-six-year period includes Bonnin’s fifteen years in Utah and the final twenty-one years of her life in the Washington, DC, area. [End Page 318] Because of her dedication to land rights as a necessary component of Native futurity, we can see across this time period Bonnin’s evolving commitment to place (a concept that transcends territory and physicality) as the critical component of her activist work. Her unshakable commitment to place rights (which encompass personal, familial, and community traditions, histories, and futures) is the emblem, I argue, of her pluralist counternativism. Bonnin’s place centrism and its role as her tactic to invalidate the racial “logics” of nativism can be plotted from her Utah era political and activist apprenticeship to the fully developed pluralist counternativism of her Washington, DC, years. In this study I trace this evolution. By establishing a context for Bonnin within the volatile nativist climate of the Dawes era and by recognizing the palpable countercurrent of the antiassimilationist leftist intellectuals of the period, we can better appreciate the complexity and uniqueness of Bonnin’s political work. Bonnin insisted on the essential role that place must play (and has always played) for Native people as they strive for rights and acceptance in early twentieth-century America. This place centrism was Bonnin’s tactic for untangling the knotty problem of race-centric nativism that propelled the policies that excluded and defined “marginal” Americans of many kinds in the 1910s and 1920s. The watchwords “race,” “American,” “pluralism,” and “assimilationism” identify Bonnin’s concerns throughout her literary and political life. In a nativist America, particularly in the war years and the years immediately leading into and out of the war, Bonnin worked as an advocate for Native people and against Anglo-Saxon nativism. While the term “nativism” has been used in recent years to denote pro-Native (in fact, Native-initiated) traditionalist movements that vaunt Native nationalism, it was not this sense of the term that dominated American political discourse in Bonnin’s era. Of course, etymologically, the iterations of “nativism” share a concern with protection and nativity, but “nativism” as a minority challenge to majority hegemony was not the “nativism” of early twentieth-century European American political movements and cultural attitudes. The nativism that Bonnin challenged was the nativism described by such newspaper-article titles from the turn of the century as “Nativism Rampant” (in the Milwaukee Journal) and “The Nativists Are Restless” (from the New York Times). Bonnin foregrounded the value of land—of place—over that of race, rhetorically, in that discourses of place could provide her...

Debating Music “Appreciation” outside the American Classroom, 1930–1950

Those teaching to American schoolchildren faced a fissure of sorts during the 1930s and 1940s. On one side of this divide stood Carl Seashore and the educators who embraced his philosophy. They promoted a sometimes arduous form of teaching and believed that the results of this tutelage could be quantitatively assessed. On the other side stood pedagogues influenced by the era's burgeoning learner-centered philosophy, educators who embraced the more individualized and friendly approach advocated by James Mursell and Mabelle Glenn. This well-known binary paradigm was born just as a impulse swept through America. The increasingly popular listening lessons billed as music became not just an aspect of in-school education for children but also a veritable music-appreciation industry targeting adults. It is my contention that the fissure in education, while certainly reflective of specific pedagogical trends and debates, also related to a more basic dialogue about what it meant to appreciate music. In this article, I will connect the Seashore-Mursell/Glenn binary to contemporaneous discourse about the meaning of extracurricular appreciation--discourse that occurred in many musical fields and also affected life across the Atlantic. More importantly, I will demonstrate that this discourse also played out within the pages of music-appreciation literature. This exploration will ultimately show that, while teachers were certainly grappling with new ideas about learner-centered education, this process was also influenced by and reflective of larger skirmishes about the nature of highbrow achievement that accompanied the fervor of the 1930s and 1940s. Debating Appreciation in Middlebrow America and American Schools Some comments about terminology must precede the analysis. While the phrase appreciation was prevalent in several contexts in early twentieth-century America, two uses predominated. On the one hand, schoolteachers often used this descriptor in reference to the era's increasingly popular lessons in listening. On the other hand, the term appreciation was also applied more generally to education offered to the adult layperson. While these two understandings are complex, the terrain of early twentieth-century appreciation is even thornier because there was a good deal of overlap between its curricular and extracurricular varieties. Many instructional books, for example, were written by renowned educators but were nevertheless aimed at both young students and adult laypeople. Nonetheless, terminology must be adopted to help readers make the distinction. I most often employ the phrase education to indicate school teaching (of appreciation, performance, or anything else). The term teachers will also be used in reference to official education within the school. The terms appreciation and education, meanwhile, will generally be used in discussions of the appreciation industry and its wares. Words such as educational and pedagogical will be utilized more generally. Discussion of the term is also needed. As others have chronicled the history of this term (1) and as its negative connotations burgeoned after the period discussed in this article, here I will unpack its meaning only briefly. The term became widely pejorative during the middle of the twentieth century through the writings of authors such as Russell Lynes and Dwight MacDonald. (2) MacDonald is especially important because he arguably brought criticism of the midcult and the middlebrow to new heights. Janice Radway has summarized MacDonald's critique of the Book-of-the-Month Club in a manner that astutely captures his overall perspective: [In 1960] MacDonald railed against the spreading 'tepid ooze of Midcult' and identified the Book-of-the-Month Club and its judges . …

BEAUTIFUL SOULS MIXED UP WITH HOOKED NOSES: ART, DEGENERATION, AND ANTI-SEMITISM INTHE MASTERANDTRILBY

The diagnosis made by Dr P. C. Remondino, M.D. was unambiguous. “Trilbyis a masterpiece when viewed in the light of a study in heredity,” he announced in the pages ofPractical Medicinein 1895. “Du Maurier has given us . . . the well digested results of a careful as well as discriminating study. . . . Neither Darwin, [nor] Galton, . . . could have given us a more comprehensive or more lucid study of the subject. Neither could Maudsley” (380–81). Despite the good doctor's critical insight,Trilby's deployment of degenerationist discourse has often gone unnoticed. On the rare occasions it has been touched upon, it has most often been subsumed under the banner offin-de-siècleanti-Semitism or connected to Du Maurier's anti-Aestheticism. Yet what this essay reveals is that art, degeneration, and anti-Semitism were, in fact, intimately connected in the late nineteenth century, and that this not only influenced literature, it also shaped its reception. This essay examinesTrilby(1894) in conjunction withThe Master(1894), a novel by the most important British Zionist of the late nineteenth century, Israel Zangwill. Since Zangwill's death in 1926, literary critics have paid him scant attention. His contributions to degenerationism have been wholly overlooked even though his notion of the “melting pot” was almost certainly the theory of ethnicity with the most traction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

“They Laid Planks ‘Crost the Coffins”: The African Origin of Grave Vaulting in the United States

Grave vaulting, a vernacular burial form common in nineteenth and early twentieth century America, consists of a simple primary grave shaft at the bottom of which is dug a smaller secondary shaft or niche within which the body or coffin is placed. Typically loose boards are then placed over the secondary shaft to offer protection from the soil coming into direct contact with the body or burial container. This tradition is documented through historical accounts and hundreds of excavated graves through a survey of 86 historic cemetery investigations. Although its cultural origins have been previously unknown, this study argues that the vaulted burial form in the United States is likely of African origin. An extensive ethnological survey of historical and modern cultures throughout the continent of Africa, from 1602 to the mid twentieth century, documents both the vaulted grave form and its variations. Correlating this African cultural practice to its use in the United States demonstrates a hitherto unrecognized creolization of Euroamerican mortuary tradition with African roots, and its corollary, the retention of an African mortuary tradition by those of African descent.

What adolescents ought to know: sexual health texts in early twentieth-century America

What adolescents ought to know: sexual health texts in early twentieth-century America