Postwar America Research Articles

Reading oil (back) into media history: The case of postwar television

This article extends recent research about the material impact of energy-consuming media technologies by describing the role of oil and its derivatives in the production and consumption of television in the United States after the Second World War. It starts by exploring reasons why the material dimensions of oil have received limited scholarly attention in media history. Then it examines television by describing how the component parts of a TV receiver—the cathode ray tube, the chassis into which it was set, and the cabinet housing the chassis—incorporated elements made with oil. Finally, interpreting prior historiography through the lens of oil, it describes the role these different components played in conflicting discourses about the space of the home, especially the living room, in postwar America.

Subjectivity in flux: Contextualizing Don DeLillo’s White Noise

The idea of the subject as a construct, of various external influences, was not new to the cultural and literary circles in the 1980s when DeLillo published White Noise. In the second half of the twentieth century, post-structuralist and postmodern theories unsettled the established ideas of the humanist tradition like the concept of the subject. The idea that the subject is constituted by external factors posed a challenge to the modernist notion of the subject as authentic and independent consciousness. Influenced by post-structuralist and postmodern theories, novelists in post-war America, especially during and after the 1980s, portrayed their protagonists (the subjects) as textual constructs rather than authentic heroic figures we often find in modernists’ works of art. DeLillo engages with technological developments and sociocultural changes in post-war America and explores how such developments/changes influence an individual’s subjectivity. Critics have described Jack Gladney, the protagonist of White Noise, as a late-modernist displaced to negotiate the postmodern landscape. This study, which is purely of scholarly interest, attempts to show how Gladney vacillates between the notions of modernist authentic subject and the de-centred postmodern subject created textually. This article also attempts to explore how DeLillo’s fiction engages with the idea of the subject during the 1980s.

In This Issue

American history has witnessed many points of transition and transformation. Among the most remarkable moments of change in the nation's modern past is that time known as the Progressive Era: those years from the late nineteenth century until the 1910s when Americans faced their brawling, industrializing nation with a clutch of laws and reforms meant to safeguard children, workers, or women; when professionalization came to a host of occupations and group activities flourished; when women became increasingly present in the public sphere. And in this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly—with its emphasis on twentieth-century professional associations, child-centered advocacy, and labor rights—we see the saplings of the Progressive Era bearing fruit.Susan Rugh opens the issue with an analysis of three Utah men who tapped into the growing prosperity of postwar America by founding lodging chains. As she explains, the creation of these little empires was not simply a matter of building motels along the West's new highways, but rather a story of how the investment of capital and labor—especially family labor—combined with the development of business groups to lay the framework “for an extensive western hospitality network.” The organizations the Utah moteliers nurtured “were a crucial step in the metamorphosis of the lodging industry from small, family-owned motels to the later dominance of the nationwide motel chains like Holiday Inn.”Our second article steps back to the charged and difficult years of the Great Depression. In it, Linda Zabriskie examines the role of Senator Elbert Thomas on the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, which investigated the illegal use of spies, weapons, and more to discourage laborers from unionizing. Thomas's experiences years earlier, as a major in the Utah National Guard, prepared him for his role as the committee's co-chair, and his kindly, cerebral performance in the hearings elevated his national stature. In this year of 2022, when Americans from Amazon employees to Starbucks baristas have begun to unionize, the work of Thomas and the La Follette committee is entirely relevant.Next, Sarah Langsdon pieces together a history at once heartbreaking and hopeful, with her telling of how a murder case involving a young boy galvanized women's clubs in Ogden to fight for a better juvenile justice system. Difficult family dynamics underlay fourteen-year-old Ray Clough's murder of his father in 1920; those same dynamics meant the teen had no place to stay but the local jail, with adult criminals, while he awaited trial. Well-heeled women who had already taken on the role of “child savers” responded by advocating for Clough and crusading for the establishment of an appropriate juvenile detention center. The effort took decades but succeeded in the end.Like the women who advocated for Ray Clough, Claire Haines navigated a public world that was not entirely accepting of women. Like the men who established motel chains in the mountain West, Haines knew the importance of business clubs and associations. In 1923, Hannah Claire Haines became the first female certified public accountant in Utah. As David Hales and Alison McNeal relate, her path was one of professional success, marked by more than a little gender-based discrimination. Haines's career stretched from the 1910s to the 1970s, and despite her difficulties, she gathered a tidy personal fortune and dedicated it to furthering the cause of education—especially for women.Christine Cooper-Rompato closes this issue with her account of a woman who bridged the private and public worlds of the late nineteenth century with remarkable skill: Kate Barron Buck, musician, mother, fabric artist, and dentist, seemingly all at once.

Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman

Wild Intelligence: Poets' Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America by Mary Catherine Kinniburgh (review)

Wild Intelligence: Poets' Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America by Mary Catherine Kinniburgh (review)

Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons

Reviewed by: Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons Beth B. Cohen Victoria Aarons. Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory. Rutgers UP, 2019. vii + 241 pp. In her work on creativity and trauma, psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor Anna Ornstein grappled with the role of art and literature in preserving the memory of the Holocaust. How, she wondered, can artistic representations, especially by second-hand witnesses, authentically and responsibly interpret and transmit the Shoah to future generations? How can artistic representations by second-hand witnesses authentically and responsibly interpret and transmit the Shoah to future generations? Victoria Aarons addresses this question, and more, in Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory, in which she convincingly argues that graphic narratives are a compelling, even ideal genre for furthering Holocaust memory. Moreover, because of their unique structure, the author posits that these works can serve to combat "Holocaust fatigue" (6) in a world increasingly exposed to all "things Holocaust." The publication of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986, followed by Maus II in 1991, furthered the graphic novel genre in general and Holocaust graphic novels in particular. With Maus's widespread critical and popular acclaim, the genre has continued to evolve and take its rightful place as serious literature deserving scholarly attention. Indeed, Maus has spawned a large body of critical literary analysis. For this reason, Aarons begins her study in the post-Maus era. She recognizes Spiegelman's ground-breaking work, but it is not her focus. Rather, she throws a spotlight on what has happened since Maus; how other artists have interpreted and visualized their own relationship to the Holocaust. Choosing five graphic narratives that are a product of the twenty-first century, she analyzes how these books function as both personal and collective memorial pieces. [End Page 570] Aarons largely concentrates on works by individuals who have a familial connection to the events they write about, that is, individuals who are Holocaust survivors or children or grandchildren of survivors and identify as either the second or third generation. There are two exceptions; one is by Joe Kubert, whose Polish-Jewish parents immigrated to the US in 1926 but lost numerous family members during the war, and the other is a comic book created in the mid-1950s by EC Comics, one of the first US Holocaust-related comics drawn in the postwar era. Aarons proposes that, due to the complexity of the subject, Holocaust literature in its myriad forms, including the graphic narrative, belongs in its own category; the genre of rupture, which she locates in the nexus of two Jewish literary traditions; midrash and lamentations. Thus, she explores the graphic narrative as a sacred text, and the deeper analysis of them as midrashic, looking to fill in and interpret the fissures. Moreover, because of the hybrid, disruptive, and unconventional nature of graphic narratives, she contends, the genre parallels, in a sense, the struggle to plumb the depths of comprehending the unimaginable. Aarons argues persuasively that the graphic narrative is particularly conducive to personal retelling of Holocaust memory. Its very structure, designed around gaps, provides a natural ability to visually portray absence and loss. Some artists play with the gaps where empty or darkened pages confront the reader with the rupture and dislocation that was part of the Holocaust on both an individual and a meta level. Similarly, as Aarons observes, the authors' limited use of color is significant. While most of the artists' texts and drawings are composed in black and white or gray, some use color to contrast or even shock. For example, Katin's book in black and white includes a few pages in color that highlight a shift in time, signifying her life as a young mother in the safety of postwar America. Their pleasant sketches are a dramatic contrast to the darkly drawn past while serving as a stark reminder of the persistence of traumatic memory, even for child survivors like Katin who lived most of her life after the war. Aarons also calls the reader's attention to Kubert's startling and only use of color on the cover of Yossel: April 19, 1943. As Aarons points out, grappling with...

Calista McRae, Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America

Calista McRae, <i>Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America</i>

Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies

Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies

Prison Policy from the “Bottom Up”

Prison Policy from the “Bottom Up”

Reaching Back: Convict Leasing and the Trusty System in the Nineteenth Century

Reaching Back: Convict Leasing and the Trusty System in the Nineteenth Century

Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle by Barclay Key

Reviewed by: Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle by Barclay Key Joseph L. Locke Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle. By Barclay Key. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Barclay Key’s Race and Restoration examines the complicated racial politics of the Churches of Christ in post-World War II America. Imagining itself as a purer, “primitive” form of Christianity, the Church of Christ eschewed much of the entrenched bureaucracy or advanced hierarchies of its fellow Protestant sects. The book therefore offers a remarkably unmediated look at the ways in which every-day Christians—White and Black—grappled with segregation, civil rights, and the shifting racial norms of postwar America. The resulting portrait, which Key deftly reconstructs through a critical examination of printed sermons, church bulletins, school papers, and a series of manuscript collections, especially at Abilene Christian University in Texas and Harding University in Arkansas, captures both the terrible banality of an entrenched White supremacy and extraordinary moments of exceptions, protests, and possibilities. Throughout Race and Restoration, Key offers particular insights into the racial world of postwar Texas. He makes no overt grand gestures toward Texas as playing any specific or clearly differentiated role in the racial history of the Churches of Christ, but those churches were—and are—exceptionally strong and concentrated in North Texas and the Panhandle. Key’s narrative, therefore, necessarily returns to the state again and again. Much of the book, for instance, focuses on Abilene, and especially the segregation and desegregation of Abilene Christian College (now Abilene Christian University). While Key works to show how “relationships between churches and individual members sometimes operated apart from conventional racial customs both within and outside the South” (40), his broader narrative perhaps most usefully illustrates how theological commitments submitted to the social realities of the United States’ racial hierarchy. A folk culture of White supremacy, the inertia of political expediency, financial dependence on wealthy donors, concerns over student enrollments, and fears of alienating parishioners all conspired to prevent the Church of Christ’s abstract theological commitment to full equality from manifesting itself [End Page 144] in the form of racial justice. One Harding College professor, for instance, could proclaim in the 1940s that “the racial prejudices which are abroad in our land today are un-Christian” (28), but could also actively resist integration by privileging social stability over racial justice and, arguably, theological consistency. Others gave themselves over fully to White supremacy. When some White church members began attending Black churches to hear Marshall Keeble—not only a popular Black preacher, but for a time perhaps the most popular preacher in the entire denomination—church leaders such as Texan Foy Wallace Jr. were indignant that White women, in particular, had not only attended, but had actually shaken the popular evangelist’s hand afterward. By capturing the voices of Black leaders and church members, Key further exposes the contradictions of the Church of Christ’s theological commitments to spiritual equality. Key, for instance, provides a fascinating comparison of O. B. Porterfield, a White Montgomery pastor who ardently defended White supremacy, and Fred Gray, a Black civil rights attorney and Church of Christ pastor who worked with civil rights activists in Montgomery. Gray’s spiritual commitments sustained his civil rights activism, but, in Porterfield’s hands, the denomination’s restorationist theology only served to chastise activists, who, Porterfield argued, should have given up their freedom songs, marches, and criticisms of White politicians and not troubled themselves with worldly matters. They should have simply prayed, privately. “The Church of Christ deals with Godly things in Godly ways,” he preached (115). By critically yet empathetically examining a religious world committed to both spiritual equality and worldly segregation, Barclay Key has written not only a valuable denominational history, but also a useful entry point into the long and tangled history of race and religion in the United States. Joseph L. Locke University of Houston-Victoria Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Toward a History of Sexual Violence behind Bars

Toward a History of Sexual Violence behind Bars

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

“Functional Fashions for the Physically Handicapped”: Disability and Dress in Postwar America

In this essay, I argue that clothing played an important role in the establishment and maintenance of the postwar American project of independence and “normalcy.” Using previously unpublished sources, I trace the history of Functional Fashions, a clothing line of accessible garments for disabled persons in the United States that existed from 1958 to 1976. Designer Helen Cookman created the line as well as the associated non-profit Clothing Research and Development Foundation (CRDF). This essay establishes a history of both the Functional Fashions line and the CRDF, including Cookman’s design methodology behind the garments, how CRDF partnered with other important sportswear designers, and how they created the ideal Functional Fashions user. I ultimately show that the goal of the line was for Functional Fashions users to participate in the postwar American culture of bodily autonomy and that CRDF leadership framed this participation as a form of psychological rehabilitation.

Review: The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America and The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York

Book Review| June 01 2022 Review: The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America and The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York Joy Knoblauch The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020, 264 pp., 72 b/w illus. $55 (cloth), ISBN 9780822945734Mariana Mogilevich The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020, 240 pp., 10 color and 75 b/w illus. $124 (cloth), ISBN 9781517905750; $30 (paper), ISBN 9781517905767 Susanne Schindler Susanne Schindler ETH Zurich Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2022) 81 (2): 247–250. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.2.247 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Susanne Schindler; Review: The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America and The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 June 2022; 81 (2): 247–250. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.2.247 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search Two new books, similar in size and structure, explore the relationships among social science research, design, and users’ experiences of the built environment. The central concern of both books is the question of how architects and their clients have used psychological, ethnographic, or sociological studies to legitimate design proposals, and in turn to effect behavioral change. In The Architecture of Good Behavior, Joy Knoblauch focuses on the design of institutions across the United States from 1945 to the mid-1970s, in particular those that exert governmental power through the application of expertise and a certain measure of coercion—namely, institutions of health care, criminal justice, and housing. In The Invention of Public Space, Mariana Mogilevich looks at how people negotiate citizenship and selfhood through the open spaces between buildings, including plazas, playgrounds, streets, and parks, analyzing projects in New York City conceived during John Lindsay’s mayoral administration (1966–73). The two... You do not currently have access to this content.

Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America by Caley Horan

<i>Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America</i> by Caley Horan

Helmi’s Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American West by David Horgan

Reviewed by: Helmi’s Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American West by David Horgan David Rio David Horgan, Helmi’s Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American West. Reno and Las Vegas: U of Nevada P, 2021. 270 pp. Paper $28. In Helmi’s Shadow David Horgan chronicles the lives of two Russian Jewish women (his mother, Helmi, and his grandmother, Rachel) who lived as stateless refugees in China and Japan during the first half of the twentieth century, undergoing years of privation and prejudice, until they became American citizens, settling finally in Reno (Nevada). “This is an intimate story about my family, not a scholarly history. Nevertheless, I have made every effort to describe events, places, and people as accurately as possible,” writes Horgan (xi). Certainly, the book, written in a spare prose and with plenty of illustrations, succeeds in combining the author’s compelling personal exploration of his family’s past with a historically grounded narrative that gives visibility to overlooked stories of immigrants in the American West. The first section of the book, covering 1896 to 1946, focuses on the fight for survival of a family forced to leave Russia during the pogroms and living through war and hardship in East Asia. Horgan offers a detailed account of his family’s harsh times in cities such as Odessa, Harbin, Shanghai, and Kobe, revealing the complex construction of an identity for these stateless refugees: “They had no citizenship anywhere. They had no true home” (xvii). It may be argued that the author himself first has to come to terms with his family past and, in particular, with his immigrant heritage in order to be able to construct his personal and cultural identity because, after all, progression forward often coexists with remembering and understanding the past. [End Page 205] The second part of this memoir addresses the experiences of Helmi and her family in the American West and, in particular, in Reno, the author’s birthplace. This section sharply contrasts with the previous one because it takes place almost entirely in this single setting of Reno. Furthermore, in this part the author also becomes a character in the story. Although this change of roles may seem somewhat problematic, particularly as the author grows older and becomes more visible in the memoir, in general Horgan manages to offer a proper transition between the different chapters of this section, refusing to make himself the center of his family’s story. He offers a vivid portrait of the experience of immigration in postwar America, illustrated by a family that epitomizes multiculturalism and religious diversity at different levels (including a Jewish mother born in Japan, a Russian grandmother, and an Irish Catholic American father). Horgan’s description of his family’s immigrant life in the American West resonates with authenticity, capturing his mother’s quick assimilation into American society and his grandmother’s fears and difficult adjustment. Their Reno life includes joys and tragedies, even a few episodes of prejudice and rejection, often linked to their Jewish identities. However, the family soon becomes “a somewhat normal 1950s middle-class family” (173), and they achieve both acceptance and respect by the mainstream Reno community. Interestingly enough, Horgan’s memoir does not emphasize the traditional topics of vice, gambling, and divorce as the basis of the Reno lifestyle, drawing attention instead to the ordinary lives of its inhabitants. Thus, the book provides the reader with engaging descriptions of family celebrations, theater productions, school, illnesses, and Helmi’s new marriage after her husband’s death. Horgan’s departure from overused views of Reno as “the sin city” and of Nevada in general as “the sin state” and his emphasis on the daily struggles of immigrants who manage to overcome hardships and prejudice to succeed in the Silver State place his book close to other remarkable memoirs on immigration in Nevada, such as Robert Laxalt’s Sweet Promised Land (1957) or Emma Sepúlveda-Pulvirenti’s From Border Crossings to Campaign Trail: Chronicle of a Latina in Politics (1998). [End Page 206] Readers seeking personal approaches to immigration in the American West will certainly...

Geeking and Freaking

This article explores the intersection of race, class, and gender to demonstrate how inner-city, crack-addicted black women, in particular mothers, were seen by the American public as the antithesis of the “traditional conservative family values” that emerged politically in the 1980s. Black women addicted to crack cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s were objects of public contempt, largely due to negative media portrayals and the political agenda of the religious New Right. As a result, they faced harsh criticism and systemic mistreatment. Through an examination of a variety of media outlets, legislation, and political agendas, as well as scholarship from fields such as public health, sociology, and criminology, this work orients the mistreatment of crack-addicted women within the greater historical context of both the backlash against women’s rights and the desire to cling to conservative family values established in postwar America.

Louisa May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask, or a Woman’s Power”: The Woman as an Actress, Femininity as a Mask

This essay discusses the ways in which Louisa May Alcott?s 1866 novella “Behind a Mask, or a Woman?s Power” expresses the author’s frustration with her familial, social, and cultural reality. It explains the numerous feminist implications of the Gothic tale, in which Alcott, more or less directly, tackles the issue of female labor in post Civil War America, mocks the basic assumptions of the sentimental revolution and challenges contemporary notions regarding femininity.

Introduction

Roman Conrad Pucinski was born into the Polish American community in Buffalo, New York, in 1919. Moving to Chicago as a child, he grew up in the Polish Downtown neighborhood before enrolling in Northwestern University in nearby Evanston in 1938. After graduating in 1941 he served in the US Army Air Corps during World War II, during which he was the lead bombardier on the first B-29 mission to Tokyo. Following the war, he attended John Marshall Law School in Chicago from 1945 to 1949 while simultaneously pursuing a journalistic career with the Chicago Times, later to become the Chicago Sun-Times. As a reporter, he covered city hall, which one observer described as “a plum assignment that included covering the city's Byzantine politics and a host of characters, many crooked but nearly all colorful.”1Pucinski's first appearance on the national stage came in 1952 when he took a leave of absence from his position with the newspaper to accept an assignment as chief investigator for a special committee of Congress formed to investigate the mass murder of Polish officers and officials by the Soviets during World War II, a topic of singular interest to him given his Polish ancestry and ties to the ethnic community. Not only did the Katyń investigation vault Pucinski's name into national prominence, it also solidified his position in the Polish ethnic community that would form the basis of his political support in his rise to national influence. The 11th Congressional District in Illinois, from which Pucinski gained election to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1959, has been characterized as “the ultimate ethnic American district.” The 1970 census revealed that nearly half of its 454,329 residents had been born outside the United States.2Pucinski's fourteen years in Congress (1959–73) spanned some of the most turbulent and transformative times in postwar America with him taking a leading part in a host of important initiatives. Likewise, after leaving Congress he served for eighteen years (1973–91) as a Chicago alderman at a time when the city was also undergoing significant, economic, ethnic, and political change. Not only did he take a leading part in addressing the resulting issues, he also engaged as a leader in the local and national Polish American community. Seldom has a person been presented with opportunities to make substantial contributions within an ethnic community, on a citywide level, and on the national level and risen to the occasion in each instance.In this special issue of Polish American Studies, we begin with an original primary source prepared for this issue, a memoir of Roman Pucinski's daughter, who shares her recollections of her father, his work in the Polish community, and his feelings and motivations during his career in Congress and as alderman. Since Pucinski's well-developed sense of Polishness (Polskość) was formed early in life, we next move to an article on his mother, Lidia Pucińska, herself a prominent Chicago radio figure and ethnic leader, contributed by historian Joanna Wojdon, who conducted extensive research in the Pucińska Papers in the Polish Museum of America in Chicago.Pucinski's Congressional years marked a turning point in many important domestic concerns in which he was intimately involved. His leadership in these is examined by James S. Pula, while his interactions with the Polish American community, both during his congressional and subsequent years, is the topic of an interview with Richard Owsiany, who worked closely with him in the Polish American Congress and on various community projects. In the closing article, Dominic A. Pacyga delves into the world of Chicago politics to examine Pucinski's role during the critical changes the city underwent while he served as alderman. We hope that this special issue will shed light on an important figure in Polonia who also wielded considerable influence in local and national politics.We wish to thank the editor, Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, and the members of the editorial board for their support in this project, as well as Richard Owsiany and the Polish Museum of America for permission to use photographs from the museum collections.