Twentieth-century North America Research Articles

Shé:kon yónnhe ne Kayanerekó:wa tahnon ka’nikonhrí:yo; Rotinonhsyóni wa’ontateri’wanontonhse’ tsi yontatekwenyénhstha’ raotiríhwa, 1924–1977 The Great Law of Peace is Still Alive and Well; the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Asked Them to Respect Their Business, 1924–1977

ABSTRACT This article examines the non-linear and often backwards development of universal human rights for Indigenous peoples in twentieth-century North America. It criticizes the failure of international bodies dedicated to upholding the so-called universal human right to self-determination in the wake of a Canadian military coup at Six Nations of the Grand River in 1924. By assessing the legal grounds upon which the Haudenosaunee Confederacy has repeatedly argued the need for international intervention, to both the League of Nations and the United Nations, the article asserts that international law has perpetually denied the Confederacy equal nationhood status on the world stage, despite meeting all recognized (and quasi-legal) criteria.

Migration, Kinship and Child Mortality in Early Twentieth-Century North America

AbstractThis article appraises kin availability and migration timing on French-Canadian child mortality in an early twentieth-century North American industrial city. The analysis is based on the exploitation of an original dataset constructed by linking the 1910 census data (IPUMS-Full Count) for Manchester, New Hampshire to Quebec Catholic marriage records (BALSAC) and geocoding census data at the household level (Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps). Our results suggest that the presence of maternal and paternal grandmothers in the city living in different households were associated with reduced child mortality and that French-Canadian women who arrived in the United States as children or young adults experienced higher child mortality compared to second-generation French Canadians and those who migrated at a later age.

Reasoned Flights beyond Reason

New religious movements in modern western culture often emphasize experience at the expense of reason; for that reason, some scholars have described their teachings as “flights from reason.” This description has been rightly criticized. Nevertheless, it is not entirely wrong. Many founders of new religious movements do claim immediate insight into a (divine) reality that transcends the intellect. And yet, they and their followers often spend much of their lives building an intellectual frame around this anti-intellectual claim. Why did such paradoxical “reasoned flights beyond reason” emerge? Based on the life and teachings of Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887–1985) and his Assembly of Man, the intellectualization of anti-intellectual claims by founders and followers of new religious movements in twentieth-century North America can be partly explained by three sociohistorical developments: (1) increasing access to an academic education, (2) increasing demand for a reflexive spirituality, and (3) increasing competition between eastern and western esoteric movements that answered this call for a reflexive spirituality.

Book Review: Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America by Michael Stamm

Book Review: <i>Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America</i> by Michael Stamm

Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America

Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America

About the Authors

Previous article FreeAbout the AuthorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreEliza Butler is a core lecturer in art history at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. Her research centers on the intersections of landscape, natural history, and material culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America. Her writing has also recently appeared in Winterthur Portfolio.Maggie M. Cao is the David G. Frey Assistant Professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (2018). Her research focuses on the intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Sophie Cras is a maître de conferences (assistant professor) in contemporary art history at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, with a special interest in intersections between art and economics. Her first book, The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s, will appear in an English translation from Yale University Press in 2019.Michael D’Alessandro is an assistant professor of English at Duke University. His articles have appeared in The New England Quarterly, Studies in American Naturalism, Mississippi Quarterly, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Currently, he is working on a book project titled “Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Literature and Theatre, 1835–1875.”Chris Dingwall is a lecturer at Oakland University and author of Selling Slavery: Race and the Industry of American Culture (forthcoming). He recently co-curated African American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce, and the Politics of Race, an exhibition held at Chicago Cultural Center.Diana Seave Greenwald is assistant curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford, where she also earned an M.Phil. in economic and social history. Her book Painting by Numbers: Economic Histories of Nineteenth Century Art is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.Diana L. Linden is an independent scholar. Her book Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (2015) was selected as a finalist by the National Jewish Book Awards. She was the co-editor of The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (2006). Her work has also appeared in Prospects and American Jewish History.David McCarthy is a professor of art history at Rhodes College. He is the author of The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980 (1998); Pop Art (2000); H. C. Westermann at War: Art and Manhood in Cold War America (2004); American Artists against War, 1935–2010 (2015); and numerous essays about American art of the mid-twentieth century.John Ott is a professor of art history at James Madison University and author of Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (2014). His current book project is “Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954.”Alex J. Taylor is an assistant professor and academic curator in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2014 to 2016, he was the Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art at Tate. He is currently completing a history of corporate art patronage in the 1960s.Anne Verplanck is an associate professor of American studies at Penn State, Harrisburg. She is writing “The Business of Art: Transforming the Graphic Arts in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which explores such areas as entrepreneurship, innovation, and marketing to more fully understand the interplay of economics, social forces, and art.Alan Wallach is the Ralph H. Wark Professor Emeritus of art and art history and professor emeritus of American studies at the College of William and Mary. His publications include studies of Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School, and art museums in the United States. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 33, Number 3Fall 2019 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707480 © 2019 by Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Is the Writing on the Wall for Current Medical Oaths? A Brief Historical Review of Oath Taking at Medical Schools.

Oaths recited in medical schools provide valuable insight into the medical profession's evolving core of ethical commitments. This study presents a brief overview of medical oaths, and how they came to attain their current prominence. The authors examine medical oaths used in twentieth-century North America (the USA and Canada) through a critical review of six studies on oath administration and content that were undertaken between 1928 and 2004. While oath-taking became almost universally prevalent in twentieth-century North American medical schools, the ethical content of oaths grew increasingly heterogeneous. The findings challenge assumptions about the content of medical oaths. They also create dynamic markers for gauging the variability in the current ethical milieus of medical education, providing a basis for evaluating future direction.

Bundling, Reprinting, and Reframing: Serial Practices Across Borders

ABSTRACT This article explores the circulation of periodical material between metropolitan and regional locations in early twentieth-century North America. It asks how the globalized consumer technology of the household magazine was being taken up outside of cosmopolitan centers through the framework of local, regional, or national concerns. For example, mainstream Canadian monthlies such as The Western Home Monthly and Maclean's frequently engaged with, or re-used, content and formats taken from New York publications. To understand these transnational publishing dynamics, we argue, it is crucial to attend to the material practices of magazines. The article analyzes several such practices, including both editorial and sales strategies. We look at the reprinting or reframing of complete features and of excerpts from other periodicals. We examine the simultaneous serialization of novels in American and Canadian publications, using a case study of Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese. And we offer the first critical discussion of “bundling,” whereby US and Canadian titles were packaged together as a single subscription. It argues that the affordances of seriality, particularly timeliness and increased circulation through decreasing prices, allowed editors to redeploy metropolitan print materials for a regional readership eager to imagine themselves as participants in the new project of modernity.

The fabric of irregular labor migration in twentieth-century Western Europe and North America: a comparative approach

This paper investigates the role government policies and non-state actors have played in determining irregular migration in both Western Europe and North America. While immigration restriction is admitted to have generated illegality throughout the twentieth century, receiving-oriented regulatory policies have also produced flows of irregular migrants. Though differences in migration regimes should not be minimized, our primary intent is to highlight similarities in the way irregular migration was legally and politically produced in the post-World War II years. By focusing on the management of labor migration at that time, it is possible to understand how both the US and the main European receiving countries secured legal migrants rights at the same time as they created unintended irregularity by entering into international agreements. With a view to analyzing the determinants of labor migrant illegality in a comparative perspective, our paper examines the guestworker programs implemented throughout the Eastern and Western hemispheres in the labor shortage post-war years.

Music Theory and Analysis (MTA) International Journal of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory ed. by Pieter Bergé, Steven Vande Moortele, and Nathan J. Martin (review)

Music Theory and Analysis (MTA) International Journal of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory. Edited by Pieter Berge, Steven Vande Moortele, and Nathan J. Martin. Published bi-annually. Vol 1, Issue 1 (September 2014). ISSN: 2295-5917 (print) / ISSN: 2295-5925 (online). Print-only subscriptions are not offered. Pricing varies based on institutional or individual subscriptions and discounts are available for members of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory and for literary agents. Inquiries or submissions: Music Theory & Analysis, Leuven University Press, Minderbroedersstraat 4, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. Email: mta@lup.be. As a music theorist writing a review for a journal read largely by music librarians, 1 fear abrogating the first dictum of all effective communication: know your audience. For that reason, I will strive to avoid analytic jargon and theoretic hypothesizing as much as possible, viciously redacting terms like Auskompenierung, Klumpenhouwer Networks, and medial caesura, wherever I might be tempted to use them, in favor of articulating how the first issue of the Music Theory and Analysis International Journal of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory (herein MTA) fits into the larger universe of English-language music-theory journals and--most importantly--whether or not it is the best interests of inquiring music librarians to scrape together the dregs of the acquisition budget to subscribe to yet another specialist publication. I suspect if you have made it this far into my review, then you might be wondering, the successor to the Dutch Journal of Music Theory (Tijdschrift voor Muzietheorie) worth purchasing? My answer, in a word, is yes. Yes, that is, if your library serves any population of faculty, students, musicians, or community members with an interest (professional or otherwise) in music theory and analysis. While any self-respecting music library will carry top-tier titles like Music Theory Spectrum, The Journal of Music Theory, and Music Theory Analysis, musicologists in general (and music theorists, specifically) publish analytic work in a wide variety of places. Those same populations often seek to read the work of their peers (and assign it to their students), so it's important to know which journals will deliver the most bang for the buck. Simply put, I expect MTA to provide a good return on investment. First, the preliminaries. This is a peer-reviewed journal with an international editorship, advisory board, list of contributors, and intended audience. Its focus--music theory and analysis--is evident in the title. Unlike many other similar journals, however, MTA attempts something novel: fostering discussion and interaction between scholars and musicians working both in North America and in Europe. Said discussion and interaction is long overdue, for ever since the middle of the twentieth century North America and England (and, one might mention, Finland) adopted Viennese theorist Heinrich Schenker as the flag-bearer for tonal analysis, while Germany remained wedded to the writings of its native son, Hugo Riemann, and other countries like France and Italy reworked time-honored traditions based on practical methods like partimenti. In short, the present day bears witness to a Tower-of-Babel situation in the field, with scholars interested in the same body of musical works often unable or unwilling to understand and value what one another is doing when it comes to theory and analysis. Delving deeper, how does MTA propose to rectify the current state of affairs? Is simply juxtaposing work by scholars trained in different traditions enough to stimulate real dialogue and interaction? Juxtaposition is a starting point, and there have been plenty of anthologies including works by a variety of scholars publishing on a topic of similar interest that do just that. It seems, however, that this has not been enough to stimulate lasting engagement between diverse approaches. …

Spirits of Transnationalism: Gender, Race and Cross-Correspondence in Early Twentieth-Century North America and Europe

Gender & HistoryVolume 27, Issue 1 p. 151-170 Article Spirits of Transnationalism: Gender, Race and Cross-Correspondence in Early Twentieth-Century North America and Europe Beth A. Robertson, Beth A. RobertsonSearch for more papers by this author Beth A. Robertson, Beth A. RobertsonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 March 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12105Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume27, Issue1April 2015Pages 151-170 RelatedInformation

Randall Hansen and Desmond King. Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America.

New books on the eugenics movement have appeared with increasing frequency in the past decade. Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America by Randall Hansen and Desmond King is one of the more important contributions, as it provides a readable and concise history of sterilization in twentieth-century North America. In the first eight chapters, Hansen and King mine the secondary literature to recount the history of the eugenics movement before the Second World War. They highlight the role played by superintendents of institutions for the feebleminded in enacting and implementing sterilization legislation, using as case studies the states of Indiana, California, Michigan, Vermont, Alabama, Oregon, and Mississippi, as well as the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Indeed, the theme of the first half of the book is that the key to understanding how and why coerced sterilization was so prevalent in North America is to focus on the superintendents. Not only did they lobby state legislatures to enact eugenic sterilization laws, but “[o]nce a law was passed, superintendents [also] determined its implementation: who would be sterilized, how many people would be sterilized, by what means the procedure would be carried out” (p. 20). As a result, “[t]he United States forcibly sterilized at least 60,000 feebleminded patients from the 1910s to the 1970s,” and another 3,000 victims were eugenically sterilized in Canada (p. 3). And even after the 1970s, tens of thousands of people continued to be sterilized under quasi-voluntary conditions.

Randall Hansen and Desmond King,Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America

Randall Hansen and Desmond King,<i>Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America</i>

Second-rate victims: the forced sterilization of Indigenous peoples in the USA and Canada

This essay explores a particular aspect of the twentieth-century history of Indigenous peoples. The forced sterilization campaign that targeted Indian women in twentieth-century North America and its links to eugenic ideologies remain understudied. While the US and Canadian governments funded these campaigns, according to available estimates, tens of thousands of Indigenous women were compulsorily sterilized. This decades-long campaign reached its peak between the immediate aftermath of WWII and the 1970s, at a time when the native population – after the demographic collapse of the previous centuries – had begun to increase significantly. Indigenous population growth troubled eugenicists determined to safeguard the racial ‘purity’ of the white nations and corporate interests targeting resource-rich Native lands.

Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America, by Randall Hansen and Desmond King

Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America, by Randall Hansen and Desmond King. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, viii, 303 pp. $30.95 US (paper). Hansen and King combine their strengths in political history and policy studies to produce a careful study of eugenics side-by-side with a history of rights-based discourse. In doing so, they convincingly demonstrate how eugenics, particularly in the United States and to a lesser degree in Canada, altered its language to appease rights-based critics as it continued to advocate for coercive sterilizations in the post-World War Two period. In this way, they show the endurance of eugenics and indeed its intensification as it embraced new tactics for appealing to society as a progressive solution to fears about population control in the first half of the century then population growth in the second half. The book is divided into three parts. Part A includes seven chapters that provide the intellectual background, including its start in Britain and its adaptation in the United States. This section covers some well-trod ground for readers familiar with eugenics scholarship, notably Daniel Kevles' In the Name of Eugenics. Where Hansen and King diverge, however, is in their careful analysis of the interplay between American and German eugenicists and the extension of that analysis beyond the war. These chapters describe the main players or leaders in the eugenics movement, drawn primarily from Britain and the United States. They explain the origins of key institutions, including the research station at Cold Spring Harbor, the Eugenics Research Office, and the rising rates of institutionalization for people deemed feebleminded. While concentrating on the early applications of eugenics in the United States they lay the framework for the policy, legal, scientific, and intellectual framework leading up to the Second World War. Part B is only three chapters but introduces a significant part of their main argument. It begins by exploring the German experience, but instead of highlighting it as a critical turning point, as several historians have done (including Kevles), they show how Germany was in many ways an aberration. Here Hansen and King effectively draw on the secondary literature and bring their considerable talents to bear. They clearly show how German intellectuals and scientists were not, in fact, masterminds behind the eugenics programs, but rather that a perfect storm emerged that placed German race hygienists in unprecedented positions of power due to an ideological commitment to killing, manufactured by a strong and unopposed government. The success of the many killing programs, of which eugenics was merely a small part, had much less to do with science and much more to do with politics and timing. What is more, the authors then demonstrate the close relationship between American reformers (and philanthropists) and Gennan eugenicists. In spite of the spectre of Anti-Semitism that coursed through the German program, they argue that Americans applauded the program and looked seriously into replicating it in the United States. …

Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America

Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America

Sterilized by the state: eugenics, race, and the population scare in twentieth-century North America

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of eugenics in North America focused on the second half of the twentieth century. Based on new research, Randall Hansen and Desmond King show why eugenic sterilization policies persisted after the 1940s in the United States and Canada. Through extensive archival research, King and Hansen show how both superintendents at homes for the 'feebleminded' and pro-sterilization advocates repositioned themselves after 1945 to avoid the taint of Nazi eugenics. Drawing on interviews with victims of sterilization and primary documents, this book traces the post-1940s development of eugenic policy and shows that both eugenic arguments and committed eugenicists informed population, welfare, and birth control policy in postwar America. In providing revisionist histories of the choice movement, the anti-population growth movement, and the Great Society programs, this book contributes to public policy and political and intellectual history.

‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’: Histories of the placental barrier

This article appraises the late twentieth century maxim that prior to thalidomide’s clarion call in 1961, a generic “we” believed that the fetus was protected from external insult by the placental barrier. Complicating this truism, we demonstrate that the placenta was, since early in the twentieth century, conceived of as a site of constant passage of entities both necessary to, and dangerous for, fetal development. Moving between evidence from specialist journals, obstetrics textbooks, and pregnancy advice manuals, we argue that the placental barrier writ large only emerged as an explicit actor after the medical community was disillusioned with it: it became something that does not exist. The article proposes that the nostalgia for a barrier lost constructs the modern-day fetus as more exposed and vulnerable than if “we” had never imagined this protection in the first place. The rhetorical shorthand of the erstwhile placental barrier has both deflected more nuanced accounts of the thalidomide story and contributed to the increasing surveillance of pregnant women’s behavior, particularly in late twentieth century North America.

Camping with Bigfoot: Sasquatch and the Varieties of Middle‐Class Resistance to Consumer Culture in Late Twentieth‐Century North America

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 46, Issue 1 p. 38-58 Article Camping with Bigfoot: Sasquatch and the Varieties of Middle-Class Resistance to Consumer Culture in Late Twentieth-Century North America Joshua Blu Buhs, Joshua Blu BuhsSearch for more papers by this author Joshua Blu Buhs, Joshua Blu BuhsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 February 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12015Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume46, Issue1February 2013Pages 38-58 RelatedInformation

The Object of Therapy:

ABSTRACT This article will examine the career of weaver and occupational therapist Mary E. Black (1885–1988) by using her life as a lens through which to explore the intersection of arts and crafts revivalism with occupational therapy in early twentiethcentury northeastern North America. Born in Massachusetts, Black grew up in and was educated in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. She trained as ward's aide in Montreal in 1919 and worked in a string of hospitals and sanitariums throughout the United States and Nova Scotia. Indeed, Black understood her work as an occupational therapist and what she described as “the therapeutics of weaving” to be intertwined. Like many arts and crafts revivalists of her period, Black saw the teaching of skilled craftmaking as a means to generate self-sufficiency, since it provided a way for displaced and injured people to make salable goods in the face of industrialization, war, and inadequate medical care. In Black's case, the utopian social mission of the new professional field of occupational therapy provided just the institutional means to disseminate the remunerative qualities of craftwork on a broad scale.