Surprising History Research Articles

History, Memory and Bad Memories: Noliwe M. Rooks' White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education

America, it would be a fair description of what she has contributed. However, it is impossible to assess, much less appreciate the saliency of that message unless it is unpacked and decoupled from a series of distorted and misleading constructions that begin on the book cover itself. title, White Money/ Black Power is provocative to the point of being salacious, intimating some startling or sensational revelation to come. This notion is reinforced in the subtitle, The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in American

A Cow's Life: The Surprising History of Cattle and How the Black Angus Came to Be Home on the Range

A Cow's Life: The Surprising History of Cattle and How the Black Angus Came to Be Home on the Range

The Sex of Food and Ernest Dichter: The Illusion of Inevitability

The Sex of Food and Ernest Dichter: The Illusion of Inevitability Katherine Parkin (bio) Abstract Market researchers and advertisers have historically encouraged Americans to make gendered and sexual associations about food. The founder of motivational research, Ernest Dichter, was a critical force in encouraging advertisers to promote a food’s sex. He believed that advertisers could fulfill consumers’ needs by affirming gender roles through particular foods, so he encouraged them to promote foods as feminine or masculine. Dichter also promoted a belief in the sexual qualities of various foods. Examining his research and twentieth-century food ads, however, reveals all of the ways these gendered and sexual attributes were concocted and manipulated. From his insights into Rice Krispies as a “bubbling, vivacious, young woman” to his advice on how to masculinize fish, this study analyzes Dichter’s pronouncements about the sex of food and his efforts to create the illusion of inevitability. Food advertisements and Ernest Dichter’s writings contain a surprising history of concocted and encouraged associations between food and sex roles. In the second half of the 20th century, motivational researchers like Ernest Dichter encouraged advertisers to portray food as gendered and sexual. Dichter believed that by convincing Americans of a food’s sex and its resultant gendered identity, as well as its sensuality, advertisers could suggest their foods to meet consumers’ need to fulfill their gender roles. Using depth interviews and other techniques to understand the consumer psyche, he sought to understand what types of feelings motivated particular kinds of purchases. Probing into consumers’ inner-psyche seems, in retrospect, like an inevitable course of events. However, trying to capture those thoughts and feelings and doing so effectively required a vision and a plan. Rarely do ideas, particularly big and important ideas, find their genesis in a research proposal, and yet that was exactly what Ernest Dichter laid out in 1944, just six years after immigrating to the United States from Austria. With his PhD in psychology, Dichter published a brief, one-page research proposal in the American Sociological Association’s journal, Sociometry.1 Its overly complex title, “The Psychodramatic Research Project on Commodities as Intersocial Media,” gave way to a fairly simple idea: study peoples’ attitudes when they buy things. Without denying the importance of researchers’ traditional ways of classifying consumers, such as age, income, and education, Dichter envisioned a means by which social scientists could better understand the “psychodramatic” process of buying. He opined about the market transaction, “Every buying act is a highly dramatic event, full of spontaneity and emotion. A representation of this act on the stage under controlled conditions should prove a new tool for observing people’s relation to products in all their subtle details.”2 Dichter believed that by adding a psychological dimension to the market research already taking place, advertisers would have a fuller, more accurate picture of their consumers. Moreover, this motivational research would give advertisers new avenues to reach potential buyers and shore up their consumer base. According to Dichter, factors like age, religion, or occupation could tell you a lot about a consumer, but those characteristics did not “reveal why people buy in terms of the meanings the purchased product or brand had for them.” The question of why was the psychodrama. The mystery of why fueled Dichter until his death in 1991 and continues to compel researchers and advertisers into the 21st century.3 Advertisers have long turned to psychologists in their efforts to understand how to motivate human desires. Earlier than most, for example, the influential advertising couple, Stanley and Helen Resor, saw the advantages of employing someone who claimed to have some understanding of human behavior. In the 1920s, their agency, the J. Walter Thompson Company, hired the renowned father of behaviorism, John B. Watson, away from the Johns Hopkins University Psychology Department to serve as a vice president.4 Over the course of the 20th century, psychology and psychiatry grew in respectability. During the postwar era, they became an accepted facet of elite life in New York City, the headquarters for most advertising agencies. Many advertising historians have explored the significance of advertising heads who were disproportionately wealthy as compared...

Wireless nation: the frenzied launch of the cellular revolution in America

The sensational story of the entrepreneurs and corporate raiders who built America's thriving wireless industry. The wireless industry was built by a motley band of characters who, from the beginning, have fought unrelentingly against one another for a cut of the business. It's a surprising history full of winners, losers, and lucky first-time entrepreneurs who made millions.Wireless Nation chronicles the unique genesis of the wireless industry in America and the protagonists who brought it to life. In the mix is the inimitable Seattle entrepreneur Craig McCaw; John Kluge of Metromedia, whose deft trading in cellular properties made him the richest man in America; and also Norma Rea, the unassuming Detroit secretary whose bizarre wireless bid was tainted by scandal and a battle with a powerful newspaper chain. Murray tells the story as only an insider can, detailing the incredible circumstances that shaped and defined the coming century's most promising business. It is a must-read for anyone interested in new technology and the American business landscape.

Frege and the Surprising History of Logic: Introduction to Claude Imbert, ?Gottlob Frege, One More Time?

Frege and the Surprising History of Logic: Introduction to Claude Imbert, ?Gottlob Frege, One More Time?

Frege and the Surprising History of Logic: Introduction to Claude Imbert, "Gottlob Frege, One More Time"

Convinced that logic has a history and that its history always manages to surprise the philosophers, Claude Imbert has devoted much of her work to the study of the Stoic school and of the late-nineteenth-century German logician Gottlob Frege. In the fifth chapter of her book Pour une histoire de la logique, she examines the trajectory of Frege's awareness of what his new logic entails, in particular the way it subverts the project of Kant.

Frege and the Surprising History of Logic: Introduction to Claude Imbert, “Gottlob Frege, One More Time”

Convinced that logic has a history and that its history always manages to surprise the philosophers, Claude Imbert has devoted much of her work to the study of the Stoic school and of the late-nineteenth-century German logician Gottlob Frege. In the fifth chapter of her book Pour une histoire de la logique, she examines the trajectory of Frege's awareness of what his new logic entails, in particular the way it subverts the project of Kant.

Atmospheric Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is the source of indispensable results that are used daily in the atmospheric sciences. The approximate conservation of potential temperature is only one example. But thermodynamics also has the reputation for being dry, abstract, and difficult, a tool that only a few adepts can wield except by recipe. In Atmospheric Thermodynamics, Craig Bohren and Bruce Albrecht set about to demolish the subject's forbidding reputation and present it instead as an accessible tool, a ready source of physical insight, useful for understanding everyday phenomena as for research and applications, and a living subject with open problems and a sometimes surprising history.

From teaching to learning: technological potential and sustainable, supported open learning

The central theme of this paper is the current interest in most educational institutions in moving from teaching to learning as their main system model and the implications which technology media have for unravelling the debate and influencing the resulting practice (for example see Active Learning: Using the Internet for Teaching, Number 2, July, 1995), Our chosen strategy for dealing with the central theme is to consider how we use language, metaphor and models to describe systems for teaching and learning and what is the role of technology in these systems. In particular we describe how the Open University is moving from an analysis of individual technologies to a synthesis of the educational ideas into a sustainable system that conforms to the University's policy of supported open learning. This includes focusing on open and equal access to courses, considerable attention to staff development and training (specifically in core teaching areas such as face to face tuition, correspondence tuition, student support, telephone and other media supported communication) as well as the necessity and value of reflection on practice (e.g. see Baker, Tomlinson et al,, 1996). In this first section, taking as our starting point the traditional linear view of educational structures, we build upon the notion of the learning system and describe this as an approach with a somewhat long and surprising history originating in the Socratic method. An eductive, cyclic learning model is introduced, and the historical impact of technology on this model is briefly reviewed in a global context by addressing the specific issue of access from the developing countries. Following from this, in sections two and three two types of teaching are described, under the labels of ‘conventional’ and ‘distance’. It is argued that each has strengths and tendencies towards the eductive learning system introduced in section one. However, it is also argued that each has flaws which provide problems for the development of a learning system which can be sustained at distance. An analysis based upon metaphor is applied. In section four, it is then argued that in the conventional model there is a system with excellent learning potential but with an organisational structure which often does not encourage it whereas in the distance model there is the potential organisation for providing feedback but often little effective use made of it. That lack of use includes the new technologies which are now being focused on by the Open University, both in terms of the INSTILL initiative (Integrate New Systems and Technologies Into Lifelong Learning) and the ‘Technology Strategy for Academic Advantage’ (Laurillard, Christmas et al., 1996). These technologies are argued, in section five, to be capable of being tactically effective in stimulating and supporting the strategic aim of learning. Technology mediation is discussed both in terms of course-based teaching and in terms of research opportunities. In section six a range of problem/opportunity areas of immediate concern for the extension of this technologically mediated system to the developing countries are discussed, while policy implications for the extension of supported open learning are drawn out in section seven. These include policies toward co-learning, access to learning, quality standards and the authorship of educational material.

: Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease . Joan Jacobs Brumberg. ; Fasting Girls: The Surprising History of Anorexia Nervosa . Joan Jacobs Brumberg. ; iQue Gordita! A Study of Weight among Women in a Puerto Rican Community . Emily Bradley Massara. ; Never Too Thin: Why Women Are at War with Their Bodies .

Book reviewed in this article: Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Joan Jacobs Brumberg. Fasting Girls: The Surprising History of Anorexia Nervosa. Joan Jacobs Brumberg. ¡Qué Gordita! A Study of Weight among Women in a Puerto Rican Community. Emily Bradley Massara. Never Too Thin: Why Women Are at War with Their Bodies. Roberta Pollack Seid.

The Problem of the Fetish, I

Fetish has always been a word of sinister pedigree. Discursively promiscuous and theoretically suggestive, it has always been a word with a past, forever becoming embarrassment1 to disciplines in the human sciences that seek to contain and control its sense. Yet anthropologists of primitive religion, sociologists of political economy, psychiatrists of sexual deviance, and philosophers of modernist aesthetics have never ceased using the term, even as they testify to its conceptual doubtfulness and referential uncertainty. It seems this word's usage is always somewhat indiscriminate, always threatening to slide, as in Merleau-Ponty's tentative proposition, into an impossibly general theory. Yet it is precisely in the surprising history of this word as a comprehensive theoretical term indispensable to such crucial thinkers as Comte, Marx, and Freud that the real interdisciplinary interest of lies. This essay is intended to provide the introductory discussion to an extensive exploration of this history, an exploration that must begin with a study of the origin of the fetish as a word and as a historically significant object. My thesis is that the fetish, as an idea and a problem, and as a novel object not proper to any prior discrete society, originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course, origins are never absolute. While I argue that the fetish originated within a novel social formation during this period through the development of the pidgin word Fetisso, this word in turn has a linguistic and accompanying conceptual lineage that may be traced. Fetisso derives from the Portuguese word feiti?o, which in the late Middle Ages meant magical practice or witchcraft performed, often innocently, by the simple, ignorant classes.2 Feiti?o in turn derives from the Latin adjective facticius, which originally meant manufactured. The historical study of the fetish must begin by considering these words in some detail, only then going on to examine the initial application of feiti?o on the African coast, its subsequent development into Fetisso, and finally that word's textual dissemination into the languages of northern Europe, where national versions of the word developed during the seventeenth century. The study of the origin of the fetish concludes at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the text of Willem Bosman, for his Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea provided the image and conception of fetishes on which Enlightenment intellectuals based their elaboration of the notion into a general theory of primitive religion.3 The elaboration of this general Enlightenment theory, as developed from Bayle to de Brosses and then adopted by philosophers of the late eighteenth century, constitutes a second period of the history of the Its dissemination into a host of popular and social scientific discourses in the nineteenth century marks a third large period, and one could view twentieth-century theoretical discourses that seek to make a unity out of the diversity of earlier fetish discourses as the last historical development of this idea. The essentially theoretical nature of the interest in the history of the term, as well as the need for an initial schematism to establish criteria of relevance for the subsequent historical discussion, call for a preliminary consideration of the nature of the problem named by the word fetish.