Everyday Americans Research Articles

Closing AmericaaS Enormous Fiscal Gap: Who Will Pay?

The US government has spent decades taxing current generations while also writing them huge IOUs for future benefits. This paper models the effect on everyday Americans of closing the true $210 trillion fiscal gap with an immediate and permanent 57 percent increase in all federal taxes or with a delayed increase of 69 percent. We examine the impact either method of smoothly closing the fiscal gap would have on five stylized households in three different cohorts. Raising the federal tax rate on all households, at all age and resource levels, increases each family's lifetime tax rate and decreases lifetime spending. The results show that delaying the tax increase lowers the burden on those now alive, particularly the elderly. Meanwhile, the burden on those left to pick up the tab grows larger with each passing year of congressional and presidential inaction.

Making and Unmaking Citizens: Law and the Shaping of Civic Capacity

American democracy is more fragile today than in recent memory. As evidence of stubborn imbalances in political influence grow, so too does public skepticism concerning the relative benefits of our democratic institutions. Scholars have taken note, and two dominant camps have emerged to offer proposals for restoring democratic accountability and responsiveness. The first, like the public, identifies the flood of money into electoral politics as the primary source of our troubles, whereas the second points to political parties as the root of the crisis. More recently, however, a nascent third approach has emerged. Looking beyond the usual suspects—money in politics or the state of our political parties—its focus is on legal reforms that would permit everyday Americans to exercise political power through organizations capable of providing a counterweight to the political influence of wealth. This Article seeks to further develop the efforts of this third approach. It argues that a more nuanced understanding of the recursive relationship between governance and civil society—one that appreciates the ways that public policy, as instantiated in legislation, inevitably influences the trajectory of civil society— permits us to envision a broader conception of law’s role in democratic reform. This broader conception is particularly critical given that several traditional routes have been effectively foreclosed by the Supreme Court. Toward that end, this Article identifies opportunities for law and politics—nudged perhaps by good governance philanthropists and technological advances—to make considerable strides toward rebuilding a participatory civil society capable of demanding the recognition of elected officials.

Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America by Jamie L. Pietruska

Reviewed by: Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America by Jamie L. Pietruska Joy Rohde (bio) Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America. By Jamie L. Pietruska. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Hardcover $45. Looking Forward is a creative, original, and deeply-researched monograph. It offers a lively and compelling account of the ways that technical experts, government officials, and everyday Americans wrestled with the uncertainties associated with modern capitalist society between the 1860s and the 1920s. Historians have argued that the turn of the twentieth century was a period marked by the search for order. But Pietruska complicates that narrative. Government experts sought technoscientific knowledge that could [End Page 922] produce order. But they were hampered on two fronts. Commercial forecasters and skeptical publics challenged their claims to authority. And their own predictions fell far short of their expectations. Rather than being fulfilled, by 1920 the pursuit of certainty morphed into an uncomfortable acceptance of uncertainty as a fact of the modern condition. Instead of grasping for certainty, producers and users of foreknowledge embraced the provisional, yet scientific, status of expertise about the future. Pietruska makes her case by following expert, policy, and public debates in four well-chosen areas—crop estimates, weather forecasting, economic prediction, and fortune-telling. She traces the efforts of U.S. Department of Agriculture officials who sought to produce accurate estimates of cotton yield rooted in observational evidence and sound statistics. Despite fielding a network of trained crop surveyors, government estimators failed to produce accurate estimates. In some cases, they performed worse than commercial forecasters, amplifying the erratic nature of the trans-Atlantic cotton markets that they had hoped to tame. Not surprisingly, Americans were skeptical of government experts' claims that they could reliably predict the future. Yet, they were also adamant that such expertise be shared with them. This was especially the case when it came to the weather. Even as they derided the contents of the daily "Synopsis and Probabilities"—short-term weather forecasts thought to be particularly useful for agriculture—farmers in remote regions demanded timely access to them. They also sought long-range weather forecasts, which Weather Bureau officials initially insisted could not be produced to reasonable standards of scientific validity. But by 1906, they gave in to public demands and persistent private meteorological research. Here, Pietruska argues, government officials replaced their desire for scientific certainty with an acceptance that foreknowledge could be scientific, yet still uncertain. Despite—or perhaps because of—its failure to produce certainty, prediction gained the patina of science. Pietruska traces legal debates over fortune-telling to demonstrate Americans' embrace of the culture and science of prediction. Tracking court cases and newspaper accounts, she shows that fortune-tellers successfully claimed the mantle of science to protect themselves against criminal and civil charges. If palmistry and character reading were scientific, then their practitioners were not violating laws proscribing people from pretending to tell the future. Looking Forward is thoughtfully embedded in a variety of literatures, including the history of science and technology, the history of capitalism, and policy history. Pietruska places technoscientific experts and government elites alongside farmers and palm-readers to great effect. Her account demonstrates that non-experts—and especially rural Americans—were at the center of the era's new culture of scientific prediction. They challenged meteorologists, economists, statisticians, and other technical experts to [End Page 923] revise their own perceptions of scientific certainty. But the book's lessons are not limited to historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking Forward also shows that narratives that root the origins of expertise about the future in the Cold War are flawed. While pervasive anxieties about nuclear destruction and the growth of computation nurtured new forms of expertise after World War II, Americans generations before them cultivated a science and culture of prediction that has shaped modern life. Joy Rohde Joy Rohde is associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Michigan and the author of Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013). Her current book project examines the history of algorithmic and big data...

The Landscapes of Early Automobile Registration and Licensing Laws: Creating New Jersey’s Department of Motor Vehicles, 1903 to 1957

The offices and facilities of New Jersey’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) are mundane boxes of concrete, glass, linoleum, and fluorescent lights, and yet they have a backstory to tell about the slow incorporation of the automobile into everyday American life at the turn of the twentieth century. Urban historians and geographers have attended to the development of everything from asphalt to stop signs, gas stations to automobile dealerships, motels to restaurants, bypass roads to the federal highway system, but not the government offices and facilities developed to service automobile regulation. The goal of this article is to detail the creation and evolution of DMV offices and facilities in the state of New Jersey, between 1903 and 1957: why they took the form they did and how they changed over time. These landscapes, perceived today as utterly ordinary and banal, are the tangible, physical expression of how people in the early 1900s struggled to live safely and fairly with the automobile.

Improving Generic Drug Approval at the FDA

Generic drugs are the store-brand cereal of the drug world. While they lack the vibrant colors of and exciting commercials behind name brands, generics are still effective. Most importantly, for some people, they make the difference between accessing essential treatment and going without. Getting generics to market as quickly as possible means fewer people will cut pills in half or skip doses to save money, which also saves billions of dollars across the U.S. health system. Because a new generic does not offer lifesaving changes for people with rare or complicated diseases, generics lack the “cultural capture of rhetoric about saving lives by getting new drugs to patients more quickly.” But generics are the drugs that many of us take every day. Generic drugs’ ease of entry into the market impacts whether everyday Americans can afford health insurance and access healthcare. Better recognition of these benefits combined with insurer buy-in to the Food and Drug Administration’s (“FDA”) generic approval program has the potential to improve health while reducing systemic costs. This Note proposes three changes to the current approval process for generic drugs at FDA. First, the FDA should conduct a regular study to identify drugs that feature the biggest negative medication adherence impact.3 Second, the FDA should allow insurers to sponsor generic approval for those drugs. Third, the FDA should be required to engage healthcare stakeholders beyond generic drug makers and manufacturers when it negotiates generic drug approval funding with industry.

Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business by Susan Spellman

Reviewed by: Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business by Susan Spellman Jonathan Rees (bio) Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business. By Susan Spellman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 226. Hardcover $82. Cornering the Market is about "corner" grocery stores, the small independent markets that began in the late-nineteenth-century United States and grew through the first few decades of the twentieth. It is also about the reasons why larger chain stores managed to surpass and largely strangle those smaller stores during the 1910s, 1920s, and especially the Depression decade of the 1930s. It is a very useful addition to the numerous books covering the grocery industry, especially since it starts far earlier than recent works on the same industry by other scholars. Spellman's thesis is that the structure and activities of independent grocery store owners exemplify the process of industrialization just as much as the large manufacturers that followed them. Even though steelmaking and automobile manufacturing have sucked up much of the historical attention, she argues that the modernization efforts and coordination activities of these much smaller businessmen are as much a part of the story of American industrialization as anything that Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller accomplished. Indeed, because food was much more important to the daily lives of everyday Americans than steel or oil were during this period, the history of grocery stores can tell us more about their experiences than those of larger companies can. As this description should suggest, this book is primarily a work of business history. However, technology of all kinds played an important part in facilitating the increased efficiency and growth of independent grocers. Spellman points to technologies (in the broad sense of that word) like specialty display cases, new ledgers, and even telephones as important tools for independent grocers in their quest for growth and modernization. Background technological changes such as improvements in transportation and electricity play a part in her story as well. The same is true for technological changes in the production of the food products that grocers sold. The development of Fleischmann's Yeast, for example, aided independent grocers in their quest for efficiency, because dealing with branded products helped them systematize the acquisition of inventory. [End Page 972] The best chapter in the book is the one which covers another one of these technological innovations in much greater detail. Cash registers, argues Spellman, were an essential element of grocery modernization because they greatly increased how well proprietors understood the daily operation of their businesses. The information registers provided increased efficiency and deskilled clerks and encouraged a business culture that rewarded innovation. In the course of describing these effects, Spellman links the features on the models that National Cash Register manufactured to the needs of independent grocers, since that company solicited them directly for feedback. Grocers wanted clocks on registers, for example, so that they would know when the most sales occurred and could have the necessary amount of labor in their stores at that time to meet demand. The book closes with the effect of the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 on the growth of chain stores, which she argues promoted a culture of efficiency that did not match this industry's original ethos. It then jumps to the impact of Walmart on today's grocery industry, suggesting that these giant stores are really local grocers that have market power not so much due to price fixing, but because of technological advantages, such as a ruthless and shrewd employment of information technology. The greatest contribution this book makes involves the details of the grocery business between the 1870s and 1890s, which never would have survived if it weren't for the many technologies that Spellman mentions. While this book would probably be of primary interest to business historians, its broad scope and the careful research that Spellman has conducted on the relationship between technology and the growth of independent groceries make it a worthwhile acquisition for historians of technology who have any interest in how food was either manufactured or distributed. Jonathan Rees Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University...

Writing Blue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happened by William Least Heat-Moon

Reviewed by: Writing Blue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happened by William Least Heat-Moon Nels H. Granholm William Least Heat-Moon, Writing Blue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happened. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014. 184 pp. $24.95. William Least Heat-Moon's new book Writing Blue Highways is not a sappy, "poor me," or "woe is me" rendition of how exceedingly difficult and painful it is to write and publish a book. It's the story of how a man born in 1939 with BA, MA, and PhD degrees in English from the University of Missouri and a distinguished American writer went about writing and publishing a book on one of the greatest adventures of his life, a three-month, 13,000 mile, thirty-eight state journey deep into the interior of America to profile the lives of everyday Americans and how he went about writing and publishing his ode to these bedrock people—his "thirty-seven great characters." Heat-Moon's focus is how best to preserve the stories and integrities of the "thirty-seven characters," not about how he had to prevail after umpteen revisions and disappointments following numerous rejections. As in all great writing, the original Blue Highways was not about the writer but about something far greater and more important than the writer—the pulse and integrity of the people of America. In a sense, Writing Blue Highways is also an examination of how best to tell the story of writing the book focused not so much on oneself, but on the process and on the desire to preserve the integrity of the original work. Heat-Moon's intense determination, even after nearly four years of rejections of his Blue Highways, makes his efforts remarkable. Over and over he tells us that true writers have little choice but to write no matter how many [End Page 114] rejections. His determination might even seem to be a bit excessive when, after a contract with royalty check had been awarded and the publisher was ready to proceed, a "little problem" arose. There was a slight hitch, one minor detail—there will be no pictures in the book! His manuscript has made it through the "transom," through the "slush pile," through the numerous reviews, final editing, and was in line for the presses. But pictures of the book's subjects, the main "characters," had to be deleted. Over the phone the editor explained, "the photographs are driving the price of the book too high. We're sorry to tell you this, but we're going to have to leave them out … there's no other choice." At that point Heat-Moon stated, "There is another choice … I'll withdraw the manuscript." The stunned editor replied, "You're making a big mistake … a big, serious mistake." And then the line went dead. After nearly four years of anguish, pain, suffering, disappointment, and hardship getting his book written, revised and revised, accepted, edited, and nearly published, Heat-Moon said "No!" He was unwilling to compromise on an element he deemed to be one of the critical components and visual bedrock foundations of this text—photographs of his "thirty-seven characters" whose stories are foundational in the telling of Blue Highways. Fortunately, the next morning the phone came alive. "You win," said the editor. It turns out that everybody, Heat-Moon and the reading public, won. Writers and publishers want their books to sell well. They are concerned about sales. "Does the book have legs?" The morning after Heat-Moon received an actual real copy of his book, the publisher called to tell him, "It looks like Blue Highways doesn't have legs … it's more like wheels." During 1982 and 1983 Blue Highways was on the New York Times' bestseller list for forty-two weeks. I first encountered Blue Highways during the 1980s while teaching at South Dakota State University. I had the privilege of teaching a marvelous course called "The Two Cultures: Bridging the Gap between the Humanities and the Sciences." Our purpose was to extend the themes of C. P. Snow and attempt to provide clear evidence that certain individuals, by virtue...

Changing the World, One Website at a Time

Mark Rank on a project to help everyday Americans see their risk of poverty.

Testimony Before the Committee on the Budget of the United States Senate, Hearing on 'Moving Toward a Stronger Economy with a Regulatory Budget'

Chairman Enzi, Ranking Member Sanders, and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me here today to share with you my concerns about regulatory budgeting and to explain why I think this strategy could hurt everyday Americans while producing no benefit to the overall economy. As a former official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), I’m very proud of the professionalism and resourcefulness of America’s regulatory agencies. And, as a law professor, I know that our regulatory system can be much improved. But rather than focusing on artificially imposed caps, I think we would do better by instead providing executive agencies with the tools and resources they need to write the smartest, most effective rules possible. Agency resources should, of course, enable policy makers to identify deficient rules already on the books and to fix or remove them. (And, in fact, periodic retrospective review, is already required of most agencies.) But a regulatory budget — whose fixation is quantity, not quality — will not lead to smarter regulations, a stronger economy, or a healthier and more secure citizenry. It will stand against those those things, making the concept, however well-intended, ultimately counter-productive.

Soldiers Fighting Alone: The Wars of the Market-Security State

Abstract: The rise of Anglo-American market-security in past few decades has created contradictions in how Britain and United States conceive and conduct their armed conflicts abroad. For those who bear brunt of fighting, killing and dying, accentuated political distance between frontline and civilian world produces a particular kind of alienation. Creative measures are needed to help those who must navigate transition between and mall. ********** There is a problem with how United States and its allies exercise power, a problem rooted in forces deeper than imperfections of any one president or government. This problem was pithily summarized by a widely circulated photograph of a written statement a whiteboard in a forward operating base in Iraq: is not War. The Marines are War. America is Mall. (1) As it happens, this statement in some ways is an inadequate summary of ripples in Iraq generated. ultimately stretched beyond frontline and affected home society deeply, from war's contribution to debt-deficit crisis that has swept Euro-Atlantic world to unexpectedly large number of maimed and wounded personnel, extent of whose care our societies are unprepared. But statement does summarize how a dysfunctional set of social relations shapes way state exerts force in world and begets a confusion about what it means to be at war. To borrow a phrase Leon Trotsky, albeit used in a different context, war, no peace. The rise of Anglo-American market-security in past few decades has created particular problems in how countries both conceive and conduct their armed conflicts abroad. Due to confluent forces and choices, countries like Britain and United States wage (and augment state power to do so) by invoking moral language of great national wars, while in other ways resisting status of being at as a political condition, that is, not declaring war, not making material demands of directly, and going to great lengths to insulate their populations from conflict. For nation as a whole, this contradictory condition helps bring about a situation in which state applies military power continuously in name of an existential struggle, but trying to do so on cheap while encouraging the people to look as passive consumers--or to look away. For those who bear brunt of fighting, killing and dying, accentuated political distance between frontline and civilian world produces a particular kind of alienation. This distance does not warrant nostalgia for twentieth-century's total that mobilized an engaged, nationalist, and even conscripted population. But it does warrant concern for the consequences of lessened levels of mobilisation for quality of democratic citizenship. (2) suggests greater attention is needed to bridge gap, and greater support is needed for creative measures to help those who must navigate transition between and mall. More ambitiously, it means greater demands should be made of whose behalf such wars are fought, and in return, a more robust civil society is needed to exert greater civilian supervision of government. War Time and Peace Time In her ground-breaking study of conceptions of war and peace time, Mary Dudziak observes as Global War Terror dragged on, it left society in a strange state of limbo. It is not a time without war, but instead a time in which does not bother everyday Americans. (3) In her account, root problem is how collective memory of twentieth century creates an outmoded way of thinking, where suspend vital political questions--of state power, its limits, and authority--because they wrongly await end of to get back to a post-war normality. …

The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007 by Sally Bachner, Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010) by Aimee Pozorski

<i>The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007</i> by Sally Bachner, <i>Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010)</i> by Aimee Pozorski

Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism: The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines

From the first years of the American occupation of the Philippines, the American colonial elite ran their households with the help of Chinese servants. The preference of government officials, including Governor William Howard Taft himself, for Chinese domestic labor was in flagrant disregard for the policy of Chinese exclusion as well as the principle of “benevolent assimilation,” according to which the Americans claimed to be “uplifting” the Filipino people by providing them with the opportunity to experience the dignity of labor. In opting for Chinese rather than Filipino domestic labor, elite Americans were replicating the traditions of the “Old World” colonizers, particularly the British in Asia.

Gospel according to the Klan: the KKK's appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930

To many Americans, modern marches by the Ku Klux Klan may seem like a throwback to the past or posturing by bigoted hatemongers. To Kelly Baker, they are a reminder of how deeply the Klan is rooted in American mainstream Protestant culture. Most studies of the KKK dismiss it as an organization of racists attempting to intimidate minorities and argue that the Klan used religion only as a rhetorical device. Baker contends instead that the KKK based its justifications for hatred on a particular brand of Protestantism that resonated with mainstream Americans, one that employed burning crosses and robes to explicitly exclude Jews and Catholics. To show how the Klan used religion to further its agenda of hate while appealing to everyday Americans, Kelly Baker takes readers back to its second incarnation in the 1920s. During that decade, the revived Klan hired a public relations firm that suggested it could reach a wider audience by presenting itself as a fraternal Protestant organization that championed white supremacy as opposed to marauders of the night. That campaign was so successful that the Klan established chapters in all forty-eight states. Baker has scoured official newspapers and magazines issued by the Klan during that era to reveal the inner workings of the order and show how its leadership manipulated religion, nationalism, gender, and race. Through these publications we see a Klan trying to adapt its hate-based positions with the changing times in order to expand its base by reaching beyond a narrowly defined white male Protestant America. This engrossing expos looks closely at the Klan's definition of Protestantism, its belief in a strong relationship between church and state, its notions of masculinity and femininity, and its views on Jews and African Americans. The book also examines in detail the Klan's infamous 1924 anti-Catholic riot at Notre Dame University and draws alarming parallels between the Klan's message of the 1920s and current posturing by some Tea Party members and their sympathizers. Analyzing the complex religious arguments the Klan crafted to gain acceptability and credibility among angry Americans, Baker reveals that the Klan was more successful at crafting this message than has been credited by historians. To tell American history from this startling perspective demonstrates that some citizens still participate in intolerant behavior to protect a fabled white Protestant nation.

The Tea Party Movement, Framing, and the US Media

In February 2009, the Tea Party Movement (TPM) burst onto the political scene in the USA. Emerging out of popular unrest over the economic downturn of 2008 and the perceived radical agenda of President Barack Obama, the Tea Party quickly captured the imagination of disenchanted conservatives. Media coverage of the movement was abundant, with a frame contest between the TPM and its political opponents swiftly surfacing. Media frames bracketed discussions over the authenticity of the Tea Party, the composition of its members, the movement's message, and whether the TPM was poised for a long-term impact. This study systematically analyzes the predominant media frames that materialized in 882 news packets from nine major print and television news sources between 19 February 2009 and 30 November 2010 in order to better understand the role the US media played in defining the Tea Party, and to determine whether Tea Party perceptions of its media coverage were accurate. Four sets of diametric frames appeared in the media—the Everyday American vs. Non-Mainstream, Grassroots vs. Establishment-Affiliated, Fiscal-Federal Frustrations vs. Amalgam of Grievances, and Election Impact vs. Flash in the Pan. Overall, the TPM succeeded in mobilizing symbolic media representations to advance their goals, achieving politically propitious coverage. US media depicted the TPM with supportive frames more than twice as often as the deprecatory characterizations the activists opposed. This study investigates how the media used these frames and discusses implications of Tea Party coverage as it relates to journalistic norms, social activism, and overarching framing processes.

Health care reform and American politics: what everyone needs to know

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in March 2010 is a landmark in U.S. social legislation. The new law extends health insurance to nearly all Americans, fulfilling a century-long quest and bringing the United States to parity with other industrial nations. Affordable Care aims to control rapidly rising health care costs and promises to make the United States more equal, reversing four decades of rising disparities between the very rich and everyone else. Millions of people of modest means will gain new benefits and protections from insurance company abuses - and the tab will be paid by privileged corporations and the very rich. How did such a bold reform effort pass in a polity wracked by partisan divisions and intense lobbying by special interests? What does Affordable Care mean - and what comes next? In Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol--two of the nation's leading experts on politics and health care policy--provide a concise and accessible overview. They explain the political battles of 2009 and 2010, highlighting White House strategies, the deals Democrats cut with interest groups, and the impact of agitation by Tea Partiers and progressives. Jacobs and Skocpol spell out what the new law can do for everyday Americans, what it will cost, and who will pay. Above all, they explain what comes next, as critical yet often behind-the-scenes battles rage over implementing reform nationally and in the fifty states. Affordable Care might end up being weakened. But, like Social Security and Medicare, it could also gain strength and popularity as the majority of Americans learn what it can do for them.

New Directions in Information History

AbstractRecent decades have seen an upsurge in scholarly activity in the history of information science. It has emerged as a field of study distinct from library history and from the history of computing. This panel explores the relevance of other historical approaches and the potential for information history to reach other audiences. Haigh sets the context for the session with a look at the evolution of information history and an examination of the challenges and rewards of reframing work in the area to address different questions. Bowker pushes back the scope of information history beyond its conventional focus on the events of the past century or so, and explores the social and organizational dimensions of this work. His central thesis is that information seeking has most often been a collaborative activity occurring in specific social and cultural settings. Downey examines past, present, and future connections between the history of communication and the history of information, in terms of both research literature and classroom practices. Finally, Aspray concludes the presentations with a look at the use of history in the study of information‐seeking behavior and of information in everyday life. Presentations will be kept short to leave plenty of time for interaction between the panelists and with other attendees. (Chair) Robert Williams, University of South Carolina Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, “Challenges and Opportunities in Information History” Greg Downey, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Information history meets communication history.” Geoffrey Bowker, Santa Clara University, “‘Did that really happen?’ The search for the useful fact from the Enlightenment to the present” William Aspray, University of Texas, Austin, “The Use of History in Studying Information‐Seeking Behavior in Everyday American Life “

The Wild West Turns East: Audience, Ritual, and Regeneration in Buffalo Bill's Boxer Uprising

In the summer of 1900, the Western world turned its attention to Peking (Beijing), China, where the expatriate community found itself trapped in the Foreign Legations, under siege from soldiers of the anti-western Boxer movement. In an effort to rescue the Legations, the United States, European nations, and Japan formed an international relief force that marched to Peking, routed the Boxers, and lifted the siege. Mere months later, William Cody assembled a reenactment of this military engagement that served as the spectacular grand finale for the 1901 edition of the Wild West. Along with describing this rare portrayal of the Far East in the Wild West, this article possesses two additional objectives. First, it seeks to understand the reenactment by situating it among several interrelated contexts: the closing of the frontier, the encroachment of modernity on everyday American life, and the intensifying imperial ambitions of the United States. Second, the article shifts away from the performance itself so as to explore the peculiarly raucous behavior of audiences. Employing the theories of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, the article suggests that Americans may have used the performance as a rite-of-passage ritual, aiding their transition from the rugged past to the modern industrial present.

Science and technology in 20th century American life

The twentieth century witnessed the greatest changes in technology and science that humans have ever witnessed. These occurred rapidly and affected such a broad range of people. Scientists, inventors, and engineers built upon the great inventions of the 19th century to expand the reach of modern technology - for a citizen in 1900, communication, transportation, and agricultural was still primarily local activities; by 2000, an American citizen was part of an interconnected global community. These developments in science and technology were also important in the social and cultural changes of the period. The Great Depression, the World Wars and Cold War, the civil rights and women's rights movements - all were greatly impacted by the rapid scientific and technological advancements in the universities and industry. Science and Technology in Twentieth-Century American Life chronicles this relationship between science and technology and the revolutions in the lives of everyday Americans. The volume includes a discussion of: Transportation - the 20th century marked the transition from the railroad to the automobile and airplane, and the mass production of the automobile, and the building of roads and highways made it possible for Americans to travel the United States by car. ; Communication - radio and television brought news and entertainment into the home, while at the end of the century the World Wide Web linked people, news and entertainment by personal computer. Agriculture - The 20th century was an era of scientific farming. The techniques of animal and plant breeding combined with the science of genetics to produce high yielding varieties of crops and livestock to suit consumers. The book includes a timeline and a bibliography for those interested in pursuing further research, and over two dozen fascinating photos that illustrate the daily lives of Americans in the 19th Century.

"Questions of Seeing": Images and the Culture of Environmental Reform

"Questions of Seeing":Images and the Culture of Environmental Reform Thomas Robertson (bio) Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform. By Finis Dunaway. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 246 pages. $37.00 (cloth). American reformers have often used visual images to spotlight their causes, sometimes with tremendous effect. Think of Lewis Hine's images of children in textile mills and Jacob Riis's pictures of crowded tenement rooms during the Progressive Era, Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" during the Depression, and the images of African American schoolchildren facing water cannons and attack dogs in Birmingham during the civil rights movement. But perhaps no reformers have relied more on images, argues Finis Dunaway in Natural Visions, than environmental reformers of the twentieth century. This held true, he stresses, not just in the fledgling years of post–World War II environmentalism, when Ansel Adams's grand vistas of the U.S. West and NASA's Earth shots gained iconic status, but also during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, two pivotal earlier moments of environmental reform. Using both still and moving images to create a powerful new form of environmental storytelling, Dunaway contends in this carefully researched and elegantly written book, these reformers transformed key environmental issues into "questions of seeing" (xvii). In Natural Visions, Dunaway takes us on a cultural tour of many of the most politically powerful environmental images of the twentieth century, using a richly biographical approach to situate images within their full contexts. He focuses mostly on highbrow image makers and art meant to transform spiritually and politically, not the popular visual culture of everyday life; Natural Visions is a study of professional artists who care primarily about nature, not of Disney films and the millions of images of nature made by everyday Americans using inexpensive cameras. Dunaway's tour emphasizes figures familiar to anyone who has studied environmental politics—such as filmmaker Pare Lorentz, director of The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), and Sierra Club [End Page 239] executive director David Brower, the main force behind the slew of influential coffee-table books that the Sierra Club produced in the fifteen years before the first Earth Day in 1970—and lesser-studied figures, such as the early-twentieth-century photographer Herbert Gleason, whose work illustrated the twenty-volume 1906 edition of The Writings of Thoreau and became a key weapon in the landmark 1910s battle to prevent the damming of Yosemite National Park's Hetch Hetchy Valley, and Eliot Porter, a postwar pioneer of color photography and contributor to many Sierra Club projects. Dunaway ends by discussing photographers such as Charles Pratt, who, unlike Gleason and Porter, rejected the tradition of celebrating supposedly people-less wilderness landscapes in favor of illuminating human interrelations with nature in cities and rural landscapes. On his tour of environmental photographs and films, Dunaway is less interested in engaging recent theoretical and methodological debates in visual cultural studies than in showing how taking certain environmental photographs and films seriously as evidence can shift the historiography of twentieth-century environmental politics. Although he offers thought-provoking points about the camera as a "technology of memory" that appeared to capture reality and suspend change, allowing reformers to create "visual monuments to vanishing places," Dunaway devotes most of his energy to contextualizing environmental images culturally and politically (xviii). This is more a cultural history of environmental reform using unusual sources than a historical study of visual culture. That said, Dunaway is not naive methodologically. Indeed, using environmental images and textured biography, he deftly weaves together cultural and political history. On each stop of his tour, Dunaway introduces us to one or more key artists and the issues they engage, draws our attention to the cutting-edge aesthetic features of their images, and, unlike many guides, shows the impact of their work on American life at the time. Placing each image in its full environmental, intellectual, and political context, Dunaway's book is less a tour through a museum of two-dimensional images than a journey through a series of multilayered historical re-creations in which the images and their makers are actors in a much larger and more lively...

The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts

158 Michigan Historical Review Steven Watts. The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and theAmerican Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Pp. 614. BibHography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $30.00. There is no dearth of either informed historical scholarship or popular mythology concerning Henry Ford's Hfe and legacy. Ford's activities, opinions, and impact were so protean that contradictory data and contrasting interpretations abound. In Steven Watts, however, we have a scholar able to balance the contradictions and ambiguities and see past the ironies and idiosyncrasies. He provides us with a portrait that is contextuaHzed and chaUenging, yet subde and satisfying. Watts's interpretation will not persuade everyone, but it is convincing enough to make The People's Tycoon the most useful biography of Ford currendy ava?able. The oudines of Ford's Hfe and his influence inMichigan (and the nation as awhole) are too weU-known to need repeating here. Suffice it to say, aU the major elements of the story are here and neady introduced in chapter titles: farm boy, machinist, inventor, businessman, celebrity, entrepreneur, folk hero, reformer, poHtician, moraHst, father, bigot, antiquarian, and educator, among others. This biography goes far beyond the conventional emphasis on Ford and the automobile; Watts examines Ford's Hfe and influence along three thematic threads?Ford's capacity to maintain the loyalty of ordinary citizens despite his extraordinary and contradictory career and impact, Ford's role in the development of twentieth-century mass culture through his emphases on standardization and popular leisure, and Ford's influence as the major prophet of a new American culture of consumerism. These themes do not interrupt the essentiaUy chronological flow of the narrative, making The People's Tycoon an easy book to read. Creatively mining the material held in the Henry Ford's Benson Ford Research Center in Dearborn, Watts has made particularly effective use of the small-town newspapers and thousands of letters to Ford from ordinary citizens to evaluate Ford's popularity. Ford's anti-inteUectua?sm, anti-eUtism, and cultural conservatism, his emphasis on productive work and personal responsib?ity, and his deep respect for the American experience (despite the oft-misquoted statement about history) resonated with everyday Americans. According toWatts, these elements help explain why Ford remained immensely popular despite his very pubHc shortcomings. Ford's Book Reviews 159 contributions to standardization in industry are weU-known, but Watts draws attention to Ford's cultivation of shared leisure-time experiences and his celebrity status as exemplary features of modern mass culture. One quibble: Ford's voracious appetite for collecting historical materials was anything but "antiquarian." If any word can be used to describe it, this enthusiasm was utiHtarian, meant to inspire people, providing role models and educational experiences reinforcing Ford's values of innovation, productive work, and American uniqueness. Founded as an independent educational institution, Greenfield Village is best understood as his school text (not a recreated village) and the museum his Ubrary (not his attic). To the immense benefit of his subject, Watts is no reductionist. Ford's personal and social complexities emerge here due to the author's efforts as clearly as America emerged from the days of the horse and buggy due to Ford's efforts. WilHam S. Pretzer Central Michigan University David B. Wolcott. Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890-1940. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Pp. 264. BibUography. IUustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $44.95; CD, $9.95. There would seem to be very Httle to discover in the weU researched field of juven?e-justice history. However, David Wolcott has made a novel contribution by analyzing poHce behavior in three cities: Detroit prior to the creation of the juven?e court, Chicago foUowing its inception, and Los Angeles after 1920. Whenever possible, he uses arrest data to examine the shape of juven?e deHnquency. The result is a study that is attentive to gender and race, examines the impact of reform ideology on the court and on the poHce, and pays careful attention to the offenses that brought children into the precinct house. Wolcott makes a convincing argument for the centraHty of poHce discretion in the juven?e-justice process over...