Download or read book A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era written by Christopher McKnight Nichols and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power. The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches In today’s era, often referred to as a “second Gilded Age,” this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections

Download or read book Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth written by Paula Marantz Cohen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-03 with total page 1286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth connects the rise of film and the rise of America as a cultural center and twentieth-century world power. Silent film, Paula Cohen reveals, allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and answer the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. When film finally began to talk in 1927, the medium had already done its work. It had helped translate representation into a dynamic visual form and had "Americanized" the world. Cohen explores the way film emerged as an American medium through its synthesis of three basic elements: the body, the landscape, and the face. Nineteenth-century American culture had already charged these elements with meaning--the body through vaudeville and burlesque, landscape through landscape painting and moving panoramas, and the face through portrait photography. Integrating these popular forms, silent film also developed genres that showcased each of its basic elements: the body in comedy, the landscape in the western, and the face in melodrama. At the same time, it helped produce a new idea of character, embodied in the American movie star. Cohen's book offers a fascinating new perspective on American cultural history. It shows how nineteenth-century literature can be said to anticipate twentieth-century film--how Douglas Fairbanks was, in a sense, successor to Walt Whitman. And rather than condemning the culture of celebrity and consumption that early Hollywood helped inspire, the book highlights the creative and democratic features of the silent-film ethos. Just as notable, Cohen champions the concept of the "American myth" in the wake of recent attempts to discredit it. She maintains that American silent film helped consolidate and promote a myth of possibility and self-making that continues to dominate the public imagination and stands behind the best impulses of our contemporary world.

Download or read book The Progressive Era s Health Reform Movement written by Ruth Clifford Engs and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious, political, social, and health reform earmarked the Progressive Era. The era's health reform movement—like today's clean living movement—saw campaigns against alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and sexuality. It included crusades for exercise, vegetarian diets, and alternative health care and concerns about eugenics and new diseases. Covering the years leading up to the Progressive Era through the 1920s, this book provides entries on the central figures, events, crusades, legislation, publications and terms of the health reform movements, while a detailed timeline ties health reform to political, social, and religious movements. A valuable resource for scholars, students, and laymen interested in earlier health reform movements.

Download or read book The Gilded Age Progressive Era written by Elisabeth Israels Perry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-30 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion is an alphabetical encyclopedia of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era (GAPE) in the United States, beginning in 1877 with the end of Reconstruction and extending to 1919-20, the end of World War I and the beginning of the Harding administration. Combining materials from traditional political history with newer materials from social, ethnic, and cultural history, the book reflects historiographic trends that have influenced the writing of Gilded Age and Progressive Era histories in recent years. These include revisiting major events with gender and race at the center; asking new questions about the role of economic change and social movements; using literary and critical race theories to read traditional evidence, such as court records and military and diplomatic reports, in new ways; understanding the growing connections in this period of the United States with other parts of the world (globalism); and emphasizing the connection between labor and economic trends and social and political movements. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A Student Companion includes articles on overall trends (immigration, education, music, sports), social movements (anarchism, child labor movement, consumer movement, conservation movement), terms (armistice, chain store, chautauqua), organizations (American Expeditionary Force, Knights of Labor, Republican party), issues (gender relations, race relations), events (Haymarket Square massacre, Palmer raids, Pullman strike), legal cases (Lochner v. New York), laws (Chinese Exclusion Act, Meat Inspection Act, Selective Service Act), ethnic groups (Mexicans, Chinese), economic issues (trusts, scientific management), and biographies. The articles are cross-referenced and have sources for specific further reading. Backmatter consists of chronology, general further reading and websites, and index. Black-and-white illustrations--including photographs, maps, fine arts, and graphics--complement the text. Oxford's Student Companions to American History are state-of-the-art references for school and home, specifically designed and written for ages 12 through adult. Each book is a concise but comprehensive A-to-Z guide to a major historical period or theme in U.S. history, with articles on key issues and prominent individuals. The authors--distinguished scholars well-known in their areas of expertise--ensure that the entries are accurate, up-to-date, and accessible. Special features include an introductory section on how to use the book, further reading lists, cross-references, chronology, and full index.

Download or read book The Disfranchisement Myth written by Glenn Feldman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study challenges decades of scholarship on an ever-topical but misunderstood impulse behind disfranchisement in America: racism. Drawing on court documents, voting statistics, civil rights and labor records, and many other sources, Feldman shows that the racist appeals of Alabama's white planters, industrialists, and other conservatives motivated poor whites in far greater numbers and for more-complex reasons than received knowledge concedes. The seemingly natural allies of blacks, poor whites constituted most of the white opposition to disfranchisement, says Feldman. Yet the number of poor whites who backed the new constitution was greater. Ultimately, many would be disfranchised by the very measures they had believed were aimed only at blacks. In that sense, says Feldman, poor whites were "more parties to their own demise than the mere victims of circumstance."

Download or read book Illiberal Reformers written by Thomas C. Leonard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo American Thought written by Marouf Arif Hasian and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging in subject from England's poor laws to the Human Genome Project, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought is one of the first books to look at the history and development of the eugenics movement in Anglo-American culture. Unlike other works that focus on the movement's historical aberrancies or the claims of its hardline proponents, this study highlights the often unnoticed ways in which the language and ideas of eugenics have permeated democratic discourse. Marouf A. Hasian, Jr. not only examines the attempts of philosophers, scientists, and politicians to balance the rights of the individual against the duties of the state, but also shows how African Americans, Catholics, women, and other communities--dominant and marginalized--have appropriated or confronted the rhetoric of eugenics. Hasian contends that "eugenics" is an ambiguous term that has allowed people to voice their concerns on a number of social issues--a form of discourse that influences the way ordinary citizens make sense of their material and spiritual world. While biological determinism and social necessity are discussed in the works of Plato, Malthus, and Darwin, among others, with theories ranging from equality for all to natural superiority, it is Galton's observations on "positive" and "negative" eugenics that have been widely used to justify a variety of social and political projects--including the sterilization and segregation of the unfit, immigration restrictions, marriage regulations, substance abuse, physical and mental testing, and the establishment of health programs that sought to improve "hygiene." Women, African Americans, and other marginalized communities, for instance, have at times lost reproductive rights in the name of "liberty," "opportunity," or "necessity." Eugenical arguments are more than a creation of pseudo-science or misapplied genetical analysis, Hasian determines; they are also rhetorical fragments, representing the ideologies of multitudes of social actors who, across time, have reconfigured these ideas to legitimize many agendas.

Download or read book Myths of Europe written by Richard Littlejohns and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myths of Europe focuses on the identity of Europe, seeking to re-assess its cultural, literary and political traditions in the context of the 21st century. Over 20 authors - historians, political scientists, literary scholars, art and cultural historians - from five countries here enter into a debate. How far are the myths by which Europe has defined itself for centuries relevant to its role in global politics after 9/11? Can 'Old Europe' maintain its traditional identity now that the European Union includes countries previously supposed to be on its periphery? How has Europe handled relations with the non-European Other in the past and how is it reacting now to an influx of immigrants and asylum seekers? It becomes clear that founding myths such as Hamlet and St Nicholas have helped construct the European consciousness but also that these and other European myths have disturbing Eurocentric implications. Are these myths still viable today and, if so, to what extent and for what purpose? This volume sits on the interface between culture and politics and is important reading for all those interested in the transmission of myth and in both the past and the future of Europe.

Download or read book Race and the Making of American Political Science written by Jessica Blatt and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race and the Making of American Political Science shows that racial thought was central to the academic study of politics in the United States at its origins, shaping the discipline's core categories and questions in fundamental and lasting ways.

Download or read book The Lost History of Liberalism written by Helena Rosenblatt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry - and a term of derision - in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism," revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights. It was only during the Cold War and America's growing world hegemony that liberalism was refashioned into an American ideology focused so strongly on individual freedoms."--

Download or read book Pluralism and Progressives written by Rivka Shpak Lissak and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989-11-09 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The settlement house movement, launched at the end of the nineteenth century by men and women of the upper middle class, began as an attempt to understand and improve the social conditions of the working class. It gradually came to focus on the "new immigrants"—mainly Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and Jews—who figured so prominently in this changing working class. Hull House, one of the first and best-known settlement houses in the United States, was founded in September 1889 on Chicago's West Side by Jane Addams and Ellen G. Starr. In a major new study of this famous institution and its place in the movement, Rivka Shpak Lissak reassesses the impact of Hull House on the nationwide debate over the place of immigrants in American society.

Download or read book The Color of Race in America 1900 1940 written by Matthew Pratt Guterl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-30 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the social change brought on by the Great Migration of African Americans into the urban northeast after the Great War came the surge of a biracial sensibility that made America different from other Western nations. How white and black people thought about race and how both groups understood and attempted to define and control the demographic transformation are the subjects of this new book by a rising star in American history. An elegant account of the roiling environment that witnessed the shift from the multiplicity of white races to the arrival of biracialism, this book focuses on four representative spokesmen for the transforming age: Daniel Cohalan, the Irish-American nationalist, Tammany Hall man, and ruthless politician; Madison Grant, the patrician eugenicist and noisy white supremacist; W. E. B. Du Bois, the African-American social scientist and advocate of social justice; and Jean Toomer, the American pluralist and novelist of the interior life. Race, politics, and classification were their intense and troubling preoccupations in a world they did not create, would not accept, and tried to change.

Download or read book Notes on the State of Virginia written by Thomas Jefferson and published by . This book was released on 1787 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book We Are All Americans Pure and Simple written by Leroy G. Dorsey and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The turn of the 20th century represented one of the most chaotic periods in the nation's history, as immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans struggled with their roles as Americans while white America feared their encroachments on national identity. This book examines Theodore Roosevelt’s public rhetoric—speeches, essays, and narrative histories—as he attempted to craft one people out of many. Leroy G. Dorsey observes that Roosevelt's solution to the problem appeared straightforward: everyone could become "Americans, pure and simple" if they embraced his notion of "Americanism." Roosevelt grounded his idea of Americanism in myth, particularly the frontier myth—a heroic combination of individual strength and character. When nonwhites and immigrants demonstrated these traits, they would become true Americans, earning an exalted status that they had heretofore been denied. Dorsey’s analysis illuminates how Roosevelt's rhetoric achieved a number of delicate, if problematic, balancing acts. Roosevelt gave his audiences the opportunity to accept a national identity that allowed "some" room for immigrants and nonwhites, while reinforcing their status as others, thereby reassuring white Americans of their superior place in the nation. Roosevelt’s belief in an ordered and unified nation did not overwhelm his private racist attitudes, Dorsey argues, but certainly competed with them. Despite his private sentiments, he recognized that racist beliefs and rhetoric were divisive and bad for the nation’s progress. The resulting message he chose to propagate was thus one of a rhetorical, if not literal, melting pot. By focusing on Roosevelt’s rhetorical constructions of national identity, as opposed to his personal exploits or his role as a policy maker, We Are All Americans offers new insights into Roosevelt’s use of public discourse to bind the nation together during one of the most polarized periods in its history.

Download or read book Home without Walls written by Carol Crawford Holcomb and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical examination of the Woman’s Missionary Union and how it shaped the views of Southern Baptist women The Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), founded in 1888, carved out a uniquely feminine space within the Southern Baptist Convention during the tumultuous years of the Progressive Era when American theologians were formulating the social gospel. These women represented the Southern Baptist elite and as such had the time to read, write, and discuss ideas with other Southern progressives. They rubbed shoulders with more progressive Methodist and Presbyterian women in clubs and ecumenical missionary meetings. Baptist women studied the missionary publications of these other denominations and adopted ideas for a Southern Baptist audience. Home without Walls: Southern Baptist Women and Social Reform in the Progressive Era shows how the social attitudes of women were shaped at the time. By studying primary documents—including personal letters, official exchanges and memoranda, magazine publications, newsletters, and editorials—Carol Crawford Holcomb uncovers ample evidence that WMU leaders, aware of the social gospel and sympathetic to social reform, appropriated the tools of social work and social service to carry out their missionary work. Southern Baptist women united to build a financial empire that would sustain the Southern Baptists through the Great Depression and beyond. Their social attitudes represented a kaleidoscope of contrasting opinions. By no stretch of the imagination could WMU leaders be characterized as liberal social gospel advocates. However, it would also be wrong to depict them as uniformly hostile to progressivism or ignorant of contemporary theological ideas. In the end, they were practical feminists in their determination to provide a platform for women’s views and a space for women to do meaningful work.

Download or read book Normans and Saxons written by Ritchie Devon Watson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 1856, southerners viewed the attack as a triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown's raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom as southerners excoriated him as a consciousness fanatic. These events opened American minds to the possibility that North and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie's defenders were willing to go one step further -- to propose that northerners and southerners represented not just a "divided people" but two scientifically distinct races. In Normans and Saxons, Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil War. This mythology cast southerners as descendants of the Normans of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in mythic terms, by Saxons -- Englishmen of German descent -- some of whose descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as two separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and dashing Normans versus the common and venal Saxons. According to Watson, southern polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, De Bow's Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in "Lost Cause" thought and how the myth has affected ideas about southern sectionalism of today. Normans and Saxons provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences in racial temperament -- differences that made civil war inevitable.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Anglo America written by Eric P. KAUFMANN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the 2000 census resoundingly demonstrated, the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the United States has all but dissolved. In a country founded and settled by their ancestors, British Protestants now make up less than a fifth of the population. This demographic shift has spawned a culture war within white America. While liberals seek to diversify society toward a cosmopolitan endpoint, some conservatives strive to maintain an American ethno-national identity. Eric Kaufmann traces the roots of this culture war from the rise of WASP America after the Revolution to its fall in the 1960s, when social institutions finally began to reflect the nation's ethnic composition. Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.