Twentieth-Century American Research Articles

Clarence Streit and Twentieth-Century American Internationalism, written by Talbot C. Imlay

Clarence Streit and Twentieth-Century American Internationalism, written by Talbot C. Imlay

Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion by Erika Doss (review)

Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion by Erika Doss (review)

Pathologizing Pathos: Suffering, Technocentrism, and Law in Twentieth-Century American Medicine

Abstract In the second half of the twentieth century, concerns about problems in the doctor-patient relationship gave way to a new medical discourse on suffering, owed largely to the work of American physician Eric Cassell. This article tracks the development of his theory of suffering and its global success in transforming tragic medical experiences into diagnosable clinical entities. Beginning with his intellectual development in the 1960s, this article traces Cassell’s initial interest in suffering first to his early research on truth-telling and autonomy, followed by his pioneering work in bioethics. Although closely aligned with philosophy, much of the institutional success of bioethics came from American law, which affected Cassell’s theorizing. At the same time, doctors experienced a growth in medical malpractice lawsuits, driven in large part by costly “pain and suffering” awards, which the medical community sought to curb by encouraging legislatures to codify informed consent. The success of these efforts mandated that doctors disclose previously withheld bad news capable of causing suffering. The cultural changes that followed these disclosures became Cassell’s impetus, while legal pain and suffering supplied much of his theory’s language and concepts.

From Freak Shows to Freaknature

Within environmental discourses, more-than-human beings with corporeal differences are often represented and exhibited as unnatural, abnormal, monstrous, freakish, bizarre, and deformed—as freaknature—and ultimately used as evidence of the harms of human-caused environmental contamination. The article examines the construction of freaknature alongside histories of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American freak show to consider how these contemporary portrayals of the more-than-human not only reinvigorate the ableist tropes that were central to the freak show, but also reinforce logics of gender essentialism, transphobia, white supremacy, Orientalism, and racial purity. Both freak shows and freaknature operate/d as a scientific apparatus constructing and exhibiting some human and more-than-human beings as unnatural while shoring up other corporeal formations as normal/natural. Together, these crip figures on display call into question the binaries at the foundation of Western science.

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America

Holier Than Thou: Discussion of Hoard and Bland’s “How Am I Responsible?”: Evangelical White Rage and the Interpassive Perpetration of White-Body Supremacy

ABSTRACT This paper presents a brief sociocultural review of the development of the twentieth-century American Christian evangelical movement and its relationship to racism and structural racial inequality. It traces the evangelical movement’s hostility toward the organized civil rights movement, which it linked with the Soviet communist threat to Christianity and to American democracy; its organized legal opposition to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s which challenged its racist and discriminatory policies; and its increasingly powerful and organized political alliance with a Republican Party eager to harness white resentment of Black advancement, in order to gain and maintain power. Against the backdrop of this history, I critique Hoard and Bland’s mischaracterization of Carol Anderson’s (2016) concept of “white rage” as a symptom of Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress and their formulation of interpassivity as perpetration.

Anti-social socialization of the middle class?

Intensive parenting as a childrearing strategy and practice has gained territory in families of the Western world in recent decades and its ideologies have infiltrated popular culture and social policies. It has received an unprecedented amount of journalistic as well as academic attention. Nevertheless, little do we know about how these social practices and underlying ideologies are shaping the generations of children who are experiencing them (see, e.g., Schiffrin et al., 2014; Yerkes, et al., 2021). We know even less about how, in consequence, intensive parenting may influence the societies these children shall later inhabit as adults. Nancy McDermott’s The Problem with Parenting teases apart these recent childrearing practices that form a characteristic pattern she refers to as ‘Parenting’, with a capital P. The author traces how they have emerged in response to subsequent turning points in the development of the American (middle-class) family and how they have become woven into the fabric of late twentieth and early twenty-first century American (and Western middle-, and upper-middle class) society.

The Erwin Raisz plan to advance academic cartography in the United States

ABSTRACT Erwin Raisz represents the vanguard of early Twentieth Century American cartography. Raisz’s ultimate aim was to build academic cartography as its own sub-discipline in geography. Forged in the crucible of Columbia and Harvard, Raisz published his seminal 1938 textbook General Cartography and used it to galvanize his goal to establish courses in cartography at all academic institutions and to build a cartographic society to advance research. This paper examines his strategy and argues for Raisz’s academic life and background in the fertile grounds of Columbia University where geospatial thinking abounded in the 1920s. From there, how his textbook gave rise to the establishment of new cartography courses. Then, Raisz proposed his idea to organize cartographers into a new cartographic society in the early 1940s when he emerged as a leading voice in cartography and its human-networking champion. As chair of the Association of American Geographers’ Committee on Cartography, he used it as its own cartographic society to encourage the growth of academic cartography. He surveyed institutions post-World War II to understand where cartography courses were and their provenance to understand the progression of development. He acted as the networking glue to propel the academic cartography agenda forward beyond the 1950s.

Why the Jews? How Jewish Values Transformed Twentieth Century American Pop Culture by Robert Cherry (review)

Why the Jews? How Jewish Values Transformed Twentieth Century American Pop Culture by Robert Cherry (review)

Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in the Twentieth-Century American West by Sherry L. Smith (review)

Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in the Twentieth-Century American West by Sherry L. Smith (review)

Review: Rails East to Ogden: Utah’s Transcontinental Railroad Story, by Michael R. Polk and Christopher W. Merritt

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Rails East to Ogden: Utah’s Transcontinental Railroad Story, by Michael R. Polk and Christopher W. Merritt Michael R. Polk and Christopher W. Merritt. Rails East to Ogden: Utah’s Transcontinental Railroad Story. Salt Lake City, UT: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, 2021. 322 pp. Free online at https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/rails_east_to_ogden. Daniel Milowski Daniel Milowski DANIEL MILOWSKI is a historian of Route 66 and community development in the twentieth-century American Southwest whose research interests include transportation infrastructure, race and ethnicity, and southwestern American community development. His first book, Mother Road Mythos: The Rise and Fall of Route 66 and the Formation of an American Cultural Icon, will be released in early 2023 by Lexington Books. His current research project—the Route 66 Memory Project, https://route66memoryproject.org—is focused on digitally documenting public memory of Route 66. He has a PhD in history from Arizona State University, a master’s in history from Arizona State University, a master’s in journalism from the University of Oregon, and a BA in history from Minnesota State University–Bemidji. He has presented papers at conferences of the Western History Association, Social Science History Association (SSHA), American History Association Pacific Coast Branch (PCB-AHA), American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), and National Council on Public History (NCPH). He has won numerous grants to support his research, including awards from the Grand Canyon Historical Society, PCB-AHA, ASEH, SSHA, NCPH, and Arizona State University. He teaches U.S. history at Arizona State University and Chandler-Gilbert Community College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2022) 99 (3): 77–79. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.77 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Daniel Milowski; Review: Rails East to Ogden: Utah’s Transcontinental Railroad Story, by Michael R. Polk and Christopher W. Merritt. California History 1 August 2022; 99 (3): 77–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.77 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 ContentCalifornia History Search Readers are likely familiar with the famous meeting of competing rail lines at Promontory Summit that first ushered in American transcontinental railroad travel. Part of the Bureau of Land Management’s Cultural Resource Series, Rails East to Ogden explores Utah’s place within this history. The publication is part national railroad history, part regional railroad history, and part field guide documenting each stop along the original transcontinental route in Utah. It is a follow-up to an earlier BLM book on the same topic, Rails East to Promontory: The Utah Stations (first published in 1981, updated in 1994, and still available as a digital download from the BLM website), updating that work with new research data as well as documentation on public outreach celebrating the contributions of numerous ethnic, racial, and religious communities whose history in Utah is fused with the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Ambitious in scope, this 322-page book brings... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Godfather and Sicily: Power, Honor, Family, and Evil

The Godfather and Sicily: Power, Honor, Family, and Evil

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists

The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists

Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild

Reviewed by: Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild Ashley Walters (bio) Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes. By Adam Hochschild. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 303 pp. On April 6, 1905, the American press was consumed by news of the young millionaire James Graham Phelps Stokes's engagement to a twenty-five year old former factory worker and Jewish immigrant named Rose Pastor. Newspapers recounted in detail the unlikely origins of Stokes's intended—a working-class Jew from the Polish region of the Russian Empire—and waxed poetic about the couple's shared mission to ameliorate [End Page 85] the plight of the immigrant poor. At a time when the US was undergoing immense social and economic dislocation and being torn apart by heated debates about inequality, immigration, and the future character of the country, the story of a kindly aristocrat falling in love with an immigrant factory worker was one that the American public was eager to digest. Adam Hochschild's recent biography of Rose Pastor Stokes is a welcome arrival given the relative dearth of publications about one of the most captivating early twentieth-century Americans. Born in Augustowa, a shtetl in the northeastern region of Polish Russia, Pastor spent eight years living in extreme poverty in London's notorious East End before immigrating to Cleveland. At the age of eleven, Pastor went to work in the first of several cigar factories, where she would spend twelve years in order to support her mother, an alcoholic stepfather, and six siblings. Chance took her to New York when an editor at the Jewish Daily News discovered her literary talents and offered her a job. Several months later, she was assigned to investigate rumors of turmoil at the University Settlement on the Lower East Side, where she met its most prominent resident worker, the fabulously wealthy Stokes. In July 1905, the two wed at the Phelps Stokes family's estate in Connecticut amidst an unusual mix of guests hailing from the upper crust of Madison Avenue and the tenements of the Lower East Side. Hochschild explains that the Pastor-Stokes marriage immediately became the stuff of legend—a veritable Cinderella story similar to the romantic plots of the cheap dime novels that Pastor's fellow factory workers would have read—and catapulted the two to instant celebrity status. It was the postnuptial activities of the couple, Hochschild notes, that are actually the more interesting part of the story. Shortly after their wedding they joined the Socialist Party and quickly became two of its most popular speakers, dedicating the prewar years to traversing the country and speaking about the injustices of capitalism. They even established a retreat on a private island off the coast of Stamford, Connecticut, where they hosted an illustrious array of socialist intellectuals, writers, and artists. Hochschild deftly uses the constraints placed upon radical intermarriages like Pastor and Stokes (there were several such couples) as a window into the complicated attitudes that Americans harbored toward capitalism, global warfare, and the Russian Revolution. He is clearly most in his element when situating their story in the broader context of Progressive Era politics. He recounts in detail the various major labor disputes in which Pastor assumed an active role, such as the Uprising of 20,000 (1909) and the New York City Waiters' Strike (1912), in addition [End Page 86] to the dramatic 1916 birth control rally at Carnegie Hall where Pastor incited a mob. Additionally, he captures the spirit of America's entry into the First World War and its devastating impact on the radical left from 1917 onward. Hochschild's rich narration of major world events at times overshadows Pastor and her own various doings. America's entry into the war in 1917 marked a pivotal moment when members of the radical left were forced to choose between hewing to a nationalist party line or risk becoming an enemy of the state. While Stokes wholeheartedly embraced the US war effort, Pastor became a vocal critic and began her descent from America's sweetheart to national threat...

Teaching Twentieth Century American History Topics Through the Rearview Mirror of Motorsports

Over the last forty years, motorsports has grown to become one of the most popular spectator sports in the United States, second only to professional football. Often motorsports reflected the narratives of the times. The authors of this article, one a historian and one a business professor, teamed up to teach an interdisciplinary history course at a Midwestern university that combined aspects of U.S. history and motorsports. The university offered an interdisciplinary program in motorsports management housed in the College of Business. The course earned foundational studies credit under the historical studies category and was available to all undergraduate students. As a result of enrolling and completing the course, students often demonstrated an even higher level of interdisciplinary learning and American history recall than expected by the two instructors.

The Old and the New Israel: The Cultural Origins of the Special Relationship

Abstract Understandings of the new American nation as a “Second Israel,” and a prevalent political discourse devoted to the narratives of the Old Testament, were a distinct trait of the early United States. Indeed, the images and narratives of the Old Testament were as common in the formative decades of the United States, in the words of the great historian Perry Miller, as “the air that the people breathed.” This attachment to the Old Testament, and the fact that American nationalism and twentieth century Zionism crystalized around the biblical history of the Israelites, bears considerably on the relationship of the two nations. The “special” bond between the modern countries, which is commonly understood in terms of pragmatism, interests, and shared ideologies, thus rests on a deep cultural connection. The American public’s consistent backing of the State of Israel (one that far surpasses the constituency of evangelical Christian Zionists), which politically translates into a robust, lasting and bi-partisan support that defies the arithmetic of appeals to Jewish voters (or donors) seems puzzling at times. It becomes more intelligible in light of the centuries-long tradition of American public speech describing the nation as a new incarnation of biblical Israel. This usable biblical past, which continues to influence American culture in meaningful ways, adds an important dimension for our understanding of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel.

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue

What “A Smile of Fortune” Has To Hide: An Intertextual And Comparative Reconsideration of the Texture and Theme of Conrad’s Tale

The present article is part of a larger project on Conrad’s less known short fiction, the area of his writing which is largely undervalued, and even deprecated at times. The paper’s aim is to enhance the appreciation of “A Smile of Fortune,” by drawing attention to its “inner texture” as representative of Conrad’s “art of expression,” especially in view of the writer’s own belief in the supremacy of form over content as well as “suggestiveness” over “explicitness” in his fiction. To achieve this aim a New Critical (“close reading”), intertextual and comparative approaches to Conrad’s story have been adopted, involving nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary texts, i.e., both those preceding and those following the publication of Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912) volume featuring the tale in question. The intertextual reading of “A Smile of Fortune” against Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel,” Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with Light in August as a point of reference, reveals the workings in Conrad’s story of the modernist device of denegation, which, alongside antithesis and oxymoron, seems to be largely responsible for the tale’s contradictions and ambiguities, which should thus be perceived as the story’s asset rather than flaw. The textual evidence of Conrad’s tale, as well as its comparison with three short stories: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” seem to confirm the presence of the implications of the theme of incest in Conrad’s text, heretofore unrecognized in criticism. Overall, the foregoing analysis of “A Smile of Fortune” hopes to account for, if not disentangle, the story’s complex narratological meanderings and seemingly insoluble ambiguities, particularly as regards character and motive, naming Conrad rather than Faulkner the precursor of denegation.

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue