The Laurent's Grad School Experience
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Goassmar Musings: Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England by Anne Marie Plane
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Gossamer Musings, Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England by Anne Marie Plane
Dreams are ephemeral things, and yet they have an importance in human culture, and thus human history, that is often overlooked. Yet in the difficulties that Anne Plane has faced in this fascinating and yet limited work, one can begin to understand why. As she herself says in her conclusion "the historian can only paint a partial, necessarily patchy image." This problem, of limited sources and yet deep claims that seem to flow from them, is never fully resolved.
On the one hand, her argument, which traces the way that people viewed the possibility and power of dreams, is very carefully and delicately laid out in thematic but vaguely chronological chapters detailing both Colonial and Native perspectives as they change through time. She claims that despite claims otherwise, colonists were willing to believe that dreams could be of God… and yet feared that they might be false. Trust, but verify, and that this viewpoint on dreams both meshed with and clashed against a Native view in which dreams of significance were something to seek out, and something that can grant spiritual power in a way that fit into the colonial witch myths.
By highlighting their understanding of dreams, she creates a narrative of human spirituality, native resistance, and human belief that moves beyond the idea of increased naturalism of dream-interpretation over time. Instead, the combination of skepticism and yet belief seemed to stretch well into the 18th century. Similarly, just like the Native Americans themselves, their perceptions on dreams, she demonstrates, persisted long after they were declared vanished. Through all of this her analysis, at once psychological but thankfully post-freudian, is careful to tease out cultural meaning.
Yet she is working with very little. For instance, Quakers were reckoned by Puritans to believe too strongly in dreams, yet we have few Quaker dreams: dreams were invisible, often orally presented if at all, and submerged. Moving beyond Freudian dream universalism, she reasonably intuits that any dream symbolism must be through culturally recognized symbols… such as "Dream Key" interpretation books, which circulated in England. Yet there is no evidence left of their existence in New England, thus raising questions about a method of interpretation that she uses several times. There is just so little information on the ground, and this gives each dream we do have more weight than they perhaps deserves, and leads to the spectacle of her analyzing dreams she admits might well be entirely false. In this, she still captures what the idea of dreams means to the colonists, but her recovery of native dreams is suspect through all the mediums they must travel, as she herself concedes. These limitations hover over her narrative, making it as rich and meaningful as the most powerful dream at places, and yet in others fleeting and ephemeral, soon forgotten.
But her work, in examining the psychology and history of dreams, serves as an important contribution in an understudied field, and helps begin to create--though the sources might make completion impossible--an understanding of dreams in the colonial period.
Dreams are ephemeral things, and yet they have an importance in human culture, and thus human history, that is often overlooked. Yet in the difficulties that Anne Plane has faced in this fascinating and yet limited work, one can begin to understand why. As she herself says in her conclusion "the historian can only paint a partial, necessarily patchy image." This problem, of limited sources and yet deep claims that seem to flow from them, is never fully resolved.
On the one hand, her argument, which traces the way that people viewed the possibility and power of dreams, is very carefully and delicately laid out in thematic but vaguely chronological chapters detailing both Colonial and Native perspectives as they change through time. She claims that despite claims otherwise, colonists were willing to believe that dreams could be of God… and yet feared that they might be false. Trust, but verify, and that this viewpoint on dreams both meshed with and clashed against a Native view in which dreams of significance were something to seek out, and something that can grant spiritual power in a way that fit into the colonial witch myths.
By highlighting their understanding of dreams, she creates a narrative of human spirituality, native resistance, and human belief that moves beyond the idea of increased naturalism of dream-interpretation over time. Instead, the combination of skepticism and yet belief seemed to stretch well into the 18th century. Similarly, just like the Native Americans themselves, their perceptions on dreams, she demonstrates, persisted long after they were declared vanished. Through all of this her analysis, at once psychological but thankfully post-freudian, is careful to tease out cultural meaning.
Yet she is working with very little. For instance, Quakers were reckoned by Puritans to believe too strongly in dreams, yet we have few Quaker dreams: dreams were invisible, often orally presented if at all, and submerged. Moving beyond Freudian dream universalism, she reasonably intuits that any dream symbolism must be through culturally recognized symbols… such as "Dream Key" interpretation books, which circulated in England. Yet there is no evidence left of their existence in New England, thus raising questions about a method of interpretation that she uses several times. There is just so little information on the ground, and this gives each dream we do have more weight than they perhaps deserves, and leads to the spectacle of her analyzing dreams she admits might well be entirely false. In this, she still captures what the idea of dreams means to the colonists, but her recovery of native dreams is suspect through all the mediums they must travel, as she herself concedes. These limitations hover over her narrative, making it as rich and meaningful as the most powerful dream at places, and yet in others fleeting and ephemeral, soon forgotten.
But her work, in examining the psychology and history of dreams, serves as an important contribution in an understudied field, and helps begin to create--though the sources might make completion impossible--an understanding of dreams in the colonial period.
Review--American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Review--American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Laurent
What was the American Revolution? Was it just one event, or thousands? These questions have been asked many times, and in his syncretic and yet ultimately focused work, Alan Taylor grapples successfully with just these questions.
The work itself, starting in 1750, takes time to pick up steam. At first, a reader might feel as if there's a little too much generalization, and the format of the chapters (at once thematic and yet chronological, but with each chapter divided into segments) can often feel segmented and scattershot. Yet slowly, as the war advances, his arguments begin to become more clear, and what seemed at first a dry recounting of events becomes something deeper.
The American Revolution, he argues, came from top and bottom, elites dissatisfied with British policy using the disaffected masses, whose grievances were economic and land based, with a racially-tinged desire to move westward. This process was difficult, and in the post-war the elites struggled to justify their authority and defuse the very forces they called up. These forces demanded an increased white male suffrage even as they discounted and rolled back the rights of slaves, women, and Native Americans: this compromise became embodied in the two-party system. Far from being a heroic nationalist uprising, the Revolutionary war was a bloody, divided mess that led to a more-taxed and more-miserable population. The Revolution was a continuation of some changes, and an acceleration of others, invested with a vast number of meanings by a vast number of people, in which the "terms of political and social debates" were changed over decades, but not even close to resolved.
The work manages deftly the international dimension of the war, the continental elements such as the Westward tensions, and the economic implications, including the divide between rich speculators and rich elites, and the average settlers, especially in the West. However, while his treatment of slavery was strong, such as the way he carefully recounted how British emancipation, always highly limited, managed to save too few people while alienating too many in failed compromise, his analysis of women is somewhat more cursory. It's not that he doesn't address gender conceptions and women, but there's a disconnect. Whereas for the larger narrative the seemingly separate segments within each chapter held together and created a narrative with important arguments about the revolution, the women's sections felt somewhat more disconnected. This is a shame because a lot of the overall data and studies of this might have fit his arguments, but as it is, compared to the voluminous bibliographic citation of books on both Native Americans and slaves, as well as race in general, among the exhaustive fifty-four page bibliography, a total of fifteen sources specifically about women's experiences are cited. Thus the analysis is not so much incorrect as incomplete.
Yet this book is a masterful and gripping read, which manages to make narrative history more pressing, immediate, and meaningful, and in his American Revolutions, Alan Taylor has created a work worthy of accolade.
What was the American Revolution? Was it just one event, or thousands? These questions have been asked many times, and in his syncretic and yet ultimately focused work, Alan Taylor grapples successfully with just these questions.
The work itself, starting in 1750, takes time to pick up steam. At first, a reader might feel as if there's a little too much generalization, and the format of the chapters (at once thematic and yet chronological, but with each chapter divided into segments) can often feel segmented and scattershot. Yet slowly, as the war advances, his arguments begin to become more clear, and what seemed at first a dry recounting of events becomes something deeper.
The American Revolution, he argues, came from top and bottom, elites dissatisfied with British policy using the disaffected masses, whose grievances were economic and land based, with a racially-tinged desire to move westward. This process was difficult, and in the post-war the elites struggled to justify their authority and defuse the very forces they called up. These forces demanded an increased white male suffrage even as they discounted and rolled back the rights of slaves, women, and Native Americans: this compromise became embodied in the two-party system. Far from being a heroic nationalist uprising, the Revolutionary war was a bloody, divided mess that led to a more-taxed and more-miserable population. The Revolution was a continuation of some changes, and an acceleration of others, invested with a vast number of meanings by a vast number of people, in which the "terms of political and social debates" were changed over decades, but not even close to resolved.
The work manages deftly the international dimension of the war, the continental elements such as the Westward tensions, and the economic implications, including the divide between rich speculators and rich elites, and the average settlers, especially in the West. However, while his treatment of slavery was strong, such as the way he carefully recounted how British emancipation, always highly limited, managed to save too few people while alienating too many in failed compromise, his analysis of women is somewhat more cursory. It's not that he doesn't address gender conceptions and women, but there's a disconnect. Whereas for the larger narrative the seemingly separate segments within each chapter held together and created a narrative with important arguments about the revolution, the women's sections felt somewhat more disconnected. This is a shame because a lot of the overall data and studies of this might have fit his arguments, but as it is, compared to the voluminous bibliographic citation of books on both Native Americans and slaves, as well as race in general, among the exhaustive fifty-four page bibliography, a total of fifteen sources specifically about women's experiences are cited. Thus the analysis is not so much incorrect as incomplete.
Yet this book is a masterful and gripping read, which manages to make narrative history more pressing, immediate, and meaningful, and in his American Revolutions, Alan Taylor has created a work worthy of accolade.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I'm currently reading Cradle of the Middle Class. It's something of an Old Skool feel. I mean, it's a Social History from 1981 by a woman about gender, but with all of the Social History statistical goodness.
Book Review: ‘From Eve to Evolution’ and ‘The Book That Changed The World’
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Book Review: 'From Eve to Evolution' and 'The Book That Changed The World'
by The_Laurent, written for Darwinian Revolution Class
Science has always had a complicated history with human rights and dignities, one filled with misunderstanding, and engendering of controversies about its study. For scientific language, methods, and even discoveries have been so often used by bigots of all stripes as cover that some have argued that science itself is a subjective, societally-driven field.[1] While others would not go that far, it is very evident that far from static, a pure thing corrupted by chance from its true course, science is political and culturally shaped, if not always defined. Thus, throughout history, many have used moments of scientific discovery or consensus as a tool in their aim of defining society. This includes racists and sexists, whose arguments usually try to place the justification of their beliefs in the realm of hard and solid facts. The inferiority of the group was written in their bodies, or the environment, and therefore attempts towards equality were both doomed and harmful. It can often seem, especially in the way that racism and science moved together in some minds during the 19th and 20th centuries, that science was exclusively a justification for the rather bad status quo. To this day you can find examples of people using science to justify their beliefs involving women and minorities, such as the ways in which some have used evolutionary psychology, or the IQ studies that try to demonstrate a racialized difference in intelligence. [2]
Darwin's proposal of evolution was one such scientific moment. Much attention has been given to the rise of evolutionary racism and sexism, Darwin's own complicated views on each, and the power that evolution had to reinforce the status quo or even strengthen it. Yet there is another thread within history and science, one that existed then and exists now, because people didn't just nod along to the claims of racists or sexists. Resistance exists, and science itself is often employed to demonstrate the falsity of such assumptions.[3] This action and reaction, between those who'd use science to justify the status quo or argue that inequality was natural and good, and those who disagree, isn't new. In 'The Book That Changed America' by Randall Fuller, and 'From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America' by Kimberly A. Hamlin, the picture is far more complicated than one might at first think, as antislavery advocates, transcendentalists, feminists and scientists (and many that are more than one of these) struggle over just what Darwin's discoveries truly meant.
In 1859, America was on the edge of cataclysmic changes, ones that would transform how it saw itself for all history, from that point on. The world would seem to divide into before or after, and the nation itself would be haunted by what happened. And into this world on the edge of Civil War came Darwin's little book. First introduced to America through a very few copies that were often heavily annotated and passed along, the work was immediately viewed within the American context it had entered. Specifically, Darwin seemed to shed light on a scientific controversy involving the origin of races. Men like Louis Agassiz, a prominent believed in polygeny, that the human races were created or arised separately, a theory with deeply racist implications, for if created separately then one might be more human than the other. [4] Meanwhile many people, including Asa Gray, a biologist and early adopter of a form of Darwinism, viewed the Origin as a strong statement for the "Unity of mankind." [5] Such a dividing line made the science anything but apolitical, and Fuller traces this as one of the fault lines upon which people divided over Darwin.
But it was not the only one. Origins, with its materialist philosophy, often sat uneasy in the company of a nation which was, at least in the North-East, in thrall to both the transcendentalists and the more traditionally religious. Both groups had those who were reluctant to digest the Origins, or only after retrofitting it to relate with their prejudices and ideas, such as Emerson's use of it as fuel for his ideas. [6] Fuller, an English Professor, is strongest when he's analyzing the interplay of ideas and writers, the way they agreed with evolution or didn't, and the fundamental disconnect between the pure materialism of Evolution and the spiritualism and idealism of so many Americans of all stripes. He has a grasp and an understanding, even a sympathy, for essentially every figure in the book, no matter how absurd. He gently ribs Bronson Alcott, a figure of some absurdity, an extreme idealist whose quibbles with Darwin revealed his own inconsistency and lack of clarity. Yet his heart, in Fuller's narrative, was often in the right place. Alcott ultimately is merely a figure out of step with his time, arguing a philosophy that had become unfashionable. [7]
His most striking and excellent individual portrait is of Thoreau. Fuller is careful to sketch how Darwin's ideas managed to catch Thoreau. Thoreau had been studying his woods for quite some time in a way that is positively Humboldtian in its detail, and Darwin's ideas gave these measurements a purpose. [8] His later work, whether on 'Wild Apples' or the careful way he was portraying the struggle for survival among trees, hint at a man slowly starting to understand and contextualize that the struggle of nature was everywhere, even around Walden pond. While an amateur, Thoreau's "Succession of Forest Trees" carefully examined the methods by which seeds from plants dispersed, and which managed to combine his philosophy with his science in such a way as to make even the purely physical transcendental. [9] Thoreau, who was far from done, then began to work on drochronology (tree ring dating), trying to determine the age of the forests around his home, and create a sort of biological biography of the area.[10] The book thus presents Thoreau's premature sickness and death as a real blow, and makes the unexpected case for Thoreau as an environmental scientist, a take on him that I've never seen before. For that alone the book might have been a worthwhile read.
While often fruitful, this focus on big ideas and individual reactions can often obscure the larger picture. How, for instance, did the public at large react to Darwinism? What were the immediate impacts of the book? Did it start to create changes in higher education? Even on seemingly salient topics for an intellectual history, there are sometimes blank spaces. For instance, what did polygenists do to react to evolution? At what point did they start to adapt their theories to fit evolution, for it was a shift that happened at some point. Polygyny was still advanced as late as the 1960s, by such figures as Carleton Coon the anthropologist, largely for the purpose of covertly preserving racist structures.[11] Fuller's book is silent on that, leaving Agassiz mid-debate with Gray to shift his focus more towards the transcendentalists. This is ultimately a focus that makes his work more friendly to general readers, perhaps, and yet leaves significant questions even about its title. I believe that it probably did change America, and yet he only sometimes grapples with how, leaving out important details. Instead he uses the book as a way to plum and explore the depths of literary and philosophical trends of the time period, and how the Origin of Species shaped these.
This is not a small task, and it is one that is ably done. Yet I find myself wishing for more, hoping that he would turn his not inconsiderable talents a little more carefully towards the kinds of problems that he could have addressed. The book, which is so strong overall, and so revelatory, could have been a book that changed lives, as Origins did for many, including Thoreau.[12] It falls slightly short of the mark, and yet it cannot help but be recommended, especially for its treatment of Transcendentalism.
After Darwin was promulgated, he was interpreted by practically everyone, as Fuller so ably demonstrated. But it is the interpretation of a certain group of feminists that concerns Hamlin in From Eve To Evolution who, despite the gendered beliefs of Darwin himself, embraced Evolution as a liberating force. Understanding this, and the ways that feminists interested in science used Evolution in the late 19th century is the purpose of her work, and one that she explores in four chapters, each addressing a theme or element of the overall picture. It is a tale worth telling, and one that has long been obscured by the later--sometimes justified-- skepticism of some feminists towards science and scientific inquiry whereas it related to gender.
In order to understand how revolutionary evolution could be, one has to understand what was already there. The traditional Judeo-Christian conception of the female gender was of course complicated and varied by nation and was changed by cultural history, and yet was often rooted in a single book, the Bible. One of the two creation stories claimed that Eve, the first woman, was merely one of Adam's ribs. Meanwhile, in Genesis 3:16, God cursed Eve and all women to follow her in harsh words. As the King James Bible puts it: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrows and they conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children' and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." For many throughout history, this was all the justification they needed for female inferiority. But Darwin with his hints of human evolution, didn't believe in the Garden. If humans were animals, born of evolutionary processes, they could be debated by and within science, instead of being automatically dismissed by religion, especially the religious conservatism that began to dominate in the 1880s and 1890s.[13]
Prominent and educated women used sexual selection and nature to argue their case. Humans were the only species, at least according to Darwin, where men were the ones practicing sexual selection, a process he explained as being somehow key to our superiority.[14] Women such as Eliza Burt Gamble rejected this understanding, instead arguing that women not having a choice as to who to marry was unnatural and, worse off, harmful for the species. She interpreted evolution --as did most Americans, as Fuller demonstrated--in a progressive, upward moving sense.[15] Additionally, since in nature female animals did not merely tend house, but instead engaged in important evolutionary work, so too did evolutionary feminists argue that preventing women from being educated and partaking in human society was wrong because it was unnatural. These arguments taken together were justification for female education, female marriage choice, and a re-evaluation of when a woman's working life was supposed to end, and if marriage was meant to end it. [16]
The women who were engaged in this evolutionary thinking were both some still famous today, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and those whose reputations haven't echoed to this day, such as Gamble and Helen Gardener, who famously donated her brain to be weighed in an attempt to prove female equality.[17] These women were not operating against a blank canvas. Many of them, in addition to presenting their own views on the nature of society and women, had to respond to attempts to use science to validate sexism and the limitation of women's roles in public. They operated in a field still largely flooded with amateurs, and thus not closed despite the fact that many didn't have what would soon be viewed as the requisite scientific education. Women were, of course, societally discouraged from partaking in such education, yet they tried to obtain it anyways. By using the language and tactics of science against their many enemies, they sometimes even succeeded.
While all aspects of the book were enthralling, certainly two of the most enlightening--in part from how little the tactics of such people have changed from the 19th century--are the discussion of the arguments for scientifically validated sexism, and the brief but interesting look at the rise of women's spaces in scientific education, such as the Lilly Hall of Science in Smith College, a prestigious women's university.[18] Thinkers such as Darwin often thought that female biology, especially their reproductive biology, limited their intellectual capacity.[19] Edward Clarke, a doctor and professor at Harvard, argued that because of their menstrual biology, women couldn't healthily, and thus should not, survive the course loads at Harvard, and thus shouldn't be admitted co-educationally. Women, he further contended, could either be successful mothers or successful academics: they didn't have the brain-power for both.[20]
Feminists who questioned his conclusions did so not only from an ethical perspective, but also asked about whether it was scientifically valid, creating a groundswell of opposition and, at first, anecdotal evidence against his sweeping claims.[21] Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi even designed a survey and handed it out to 268 women of all classes, demonstrating in a roughly empirical-adjacent way that there was no correlation between higher education and sickness or difficulty menstruating, and even making the claim that it was the inverse.[22]
Similarly, when Clarke again showed up, citing Dr. William Hammond and arguing that because women's brains were supposedly smaller than men's they were less intelligent[23], evolutionary feminists again responded in the language of science and data, putting to the question the assumptions that you can tell female and male brains apart, and also bringing up problems of sample size and methodology.[24] What matters most about Hamlin's exploration of these sections are not the specific arguments but the way she establishes a pattern in which these women addressed the issue in the form of science, trusting its impartiality to get towards the truth. Sometimes, this assumption would be wrong, and yet before the professionalization of science began to further lock women out of the field, women were often very successful at using science against those who, in their view, were misusing it.
These scientific feminists, despite their successes, had both a limited view, and a limited shelf life. Hamlin does emphasize, if sometimes not enough, the extent to which these women, upper-class white feminists most of them, built their arguments for equality on class and race based prejudices. They sometimes essentially argued that being white and rich should make them the equal of any man, though she does make the point that in this, they were far from alone.[25] Similarly, she contends, and backs up well, her claims that this scientific feminism faded in the last part of the 19th century, due both to pressures from a growing feminist mainstream that pushed evolutionary (and often anti-biblical) feminists into the ranks of counterculture socialists, and pressures from scientists who increasingly guarded and professionalized their standards, thus implicitly excluding most women from the conversation.[26] But she doesn't explore this process, and while it is understandably not her focus, it does raise many follow-up questions as to the nature of this shift and its meaning and implications. These are questions that are beyond the scope of her fascinating study, which uses countless forgotten sources and blends together the latest secondary research with careful analysis of the interplay of ideas and scientific politics. That I wish so much to learn about a shift that I hadn't even imagined happened until I read this book is a testament to her skill as an informative and readable historian, and one whose focus allows them to delve far deeper into these issues than they might have if they'd tried to answer some of my follow-up questions.
The history of science runs both ways. Science, such as it is, influences culture, and culture influences and defines what questions science can ask and what its answers might be. Certainly political debate regarding guns, abortion, and climate change have all shaped the pattern of, for instance, grant money and research. Similarly, science is a 'tool' that has been used both by racists and anti-racists, sexists and feminists, its language, aesthetics and methods defined and utilized for essential cultural purposes. This is not, at least inherently, a bad thing: or perhaps it is better to say that it's an inevitable thing. While focus has often been given to the negative uses of science in general and evolution in particular, that, as these books demonstrates, is not all it is good for. People worked to adapt to Darwin, and adapted to him in turn, attempting to understand and shape the world in the process. People worked, and people work, for as I argued early in the paper, this same act of claim, counterclaim has continued to today, and seems unlikely to end anytime soon. In looking towards the past, one can read the trends of the present and, hopefully, understand the future, or even avoid the doubt and distrust that is sometimes leveled towards science when it shouldn't be doubted, and understand the cultural and sociological forces at work when it should. Perhaps we can transcend past patterns, and even if we cannot, these two books are worthy and informative reads that I heartily recommend.
******
Endnotes--
[1] Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: the history of an idea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009,16-18.
[2] Prominent examples include James Damore's memo in 2017, a copy of which can be found here: https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320 . It cites, at points, a number of evolutionary psychology claims. For race and IQ, one of the most well known controversial works would be The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, published in 1994 and immediately controversial for its discussion of an inherent IQ difference among races, among other claims.
[3] The 'Bell Curve' controversy resulted in a number of works disputing it, from a revised edition of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, to works directly addressing the book, such as The Bell Curve Wars, pointing out significant flaws in the science and argumentation. Meanwhile, Damore's Memo had many responses, including scientific rebuttals of some of his points. A prominent and readable example is by a PhD student, Erin Giglio, called "The Truth Has Got Its Boots On: What the evidence says about Mr. Damore's Google Memo".
[4] Fuller, Randall. The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. Penguin Group USA, 2018, 90.
[5] Fuller, 104.
[6] Fuller, 147-150.
[7] Fuller, 234-237.
[8] Fuller 71-74.
[9] Fuller 190-195.
[10] Fuller 243-4.
[11] Jackson, John P. (2001). ""In Ways Unacademical": The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races" (PDF). Journal of the History of Biology. 34 (2): 247–285. Wayback Machine Archived from the original (PDF) on May 14, 2013.
[12] Fuller 74.
[13] Hamlin, Kimberly A. From Eve to evolution: Darwin, science, and womens rights in Gilded Age America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 33-40.
[14] Hamlin 132-4.
[15] Hamlin 134-141.
[16] Hamiln 102-106.
[17] Hamlin 57.
[18] Hamlin 63-4.
[19] Hamlin 71-2.
[20] Hamlin 73-5.
[21] Hamlin 75-7.
[22] Hamlin 77-8.
[23] A fact we now know has, scientifically, nothing to do with intelligence, and yet was an almost-reasonable guess.
[24] Hamlin 81-6.
[25] Hamlin 19-21.
[26] Hamlin 51, 92-3, 171.
Works Cited
Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: the history of an idea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009,16-18.
Fuller, Randall. The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. Penguin Group USA, 2018.
Hamlin, Kimberly A. From Eve to evolution: Darwin, science, and womens rights in Gilded Age America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015
Jackson, John P. (2001). ""In Ways Unacademical": The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races" (PDF). Journal of the History of Biology. 34 (2): 247–285. Wayback Machine Archived from the original (PDF) on May 14, 2013.
*****
So here's a paper I turned in. It was meant to be slightly informal in ways, which is why I'm allowed to use "I" statements.
by The_Laurent, written for Darwinian Revolution Class
Science has always had a complicated history with human rights and dignities, one filled with misunderstanding, and engendering of controversies about its study. For scientific language, methods, and even discoveries have been so often used by bigots of all stripes as cover that some have argued that science itself is a subjective, societally-driven field.[1] While others would not go that far, it is very evident that far from static, a pure thing corrupted by chance from its true course, science is political and culturally shaped, if not always defined. Thus, throughout history, many have used moments of scientific discovery or consensus as a tool in their aim of defining society. This includes racists and sexists, whose arguments usually try to place the justification of their beliefs in the realm of hard and solid facts. The inferiority of the group was written in their bodies, or the environment, and therefore attempts towards equality were both doomed and harmful. It can often seem, especially in the way that racism and science moved together in some minds during the 19th and 20th centuries, that science was exclusively a justification for the rather bad status quo. To this day you can find examples of people using science to justify their beliefs involving women and minorities, such as the ways in which some have used evolutionary psychology, or the IQ studies that try to demonstrate a racialized difference in intelligence. [2]
Darwin's proposal of evolution was one such scientific moment. Much attention has been given to the rise of evolutionary racism and sexism, Darwin's own complicated views on each, and the power that evolution had to reinforce the status quo or even strengthen it. Yet there is another thread within history and science, one that existed then and exists now, because people didn't just nod along to the claims of racists or sexists. Resistance exists, and science itself is often employed to demonstrate the falsity of such assumptions.[3] This action and reaction, between those who'd use science to justify the status quo or argue that inequality was natural and good, and those who disagree, isn't new. In 'The Book That Changed America' by Randall Fuller, and 'From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America' by Kimberly A. Hamlin, the picture is far more complicated than one might at first think, as antislavery advocates, transcendentalists, feminists and scientists (and many that are more than one of these) struggle over just what Darwin's discoveries truly meant.
In 1859, America was on the edge of cataclysmic changes, ones that would transform how it saw itself for all history, from that point on. The world would seem to divide into before or after, and the nation itself would be haunted by what happened. And into this world on the edge of Civil War came Darwin's little book. First introduced to America through a very few copies that were often heavily annotated and passed along, the work was immediately viewed within the American context it had entered. Specifically, Darwin seemed to shed light on a scientific controversy involving the origin of races. Men like Louis Agassiz, a prominent believed in polygeny, that the human races were created or arised separately, a theory with deeply racist implications, for if created separately then one might be more human than the other. [4] Meanwhile many people, including Asa Gray, a biologist and early adopter of a form of Darwinism, viewed the Origin as a strong statement for the "Unity of mankind." [5] Such a dividing line made the science anything but apolitical, and Fuller traces this as one of the fault lines upon which people divided over Darwin.
But it was not the only one. Origins, with its materialist philosophy, often sat uneasy in the company of a nation which was, at least in the North-East, in thrall to both the transcendentalists and the more traditionally religious. Both groups had those who were reluctant to digest the Origins, or only after retrofitting it to relate with their prejudices and ideas, such as Emerson's use of it as fuel for his ideas. [6] Fuller, an English Professor, is strongest when he's analyzing the interplay of ideas and writers, the way they agreed with evolution or didn't, and the fundamental disconnect between the pure materialism of Evolution and the spiritualism and idealism of so many Americans of all stripes. He has a grasp and an understanding, even a sympathy, for essentially every figure in the book, no matter how absurd. He gently ribs Bronson Alcott, a figure of some absurdity, an extreme idealist whose quibbles with Darwin revealed his own inconsistency and lack of clarity. Yet his heart, in Fuller's narrative, was often in the right place. Alcott ultimately is merely a figure out of step with his time, arguing a philosophy that had become unfashionable. [7]
His most striking and excellent individual portrait is of Thoreau. Fuller is careful to sketch how Darwin's ideas managed to catch Thoreau. Thoreau had been studying his woods for quite some time in a way that is positively Humboldtian in its detail, and Darwin's ideas gave these measurements a purpose. [8] His later work, whether on 'Wild Apples' or the careful way he was portraying the struggle for survival among trees, hint at a man slowly starting to understand and contextualize that the struggle of nature was everywhere, even around Walden pond. While an amateur, Thoreau's "Succession of Forest Trees" carefully examined the methods by which seeds from plants dispersed, and which managed to combine his philosophy with his science in such a way as to make even the purely physical transcendental. [9] Thoreau, who was far from done, then began to work on drochronology (tree ring dating), trying to determine the age of the forests around his home, and create a sort of biological biography of the area.[10] The book thus presents Thoreau's premature sickness and death as a real blow, and makes the unexpected case for Thoreau as an environmental scientist, a take on him that I've never seen before. For that alone the book might have been a worthwhile read.
While often fruitful, this focus on big ideas and individual reactions can often obscure the larger picture. How, for instance, did the public at large react to Darwinism? What were the immediate impacts of the book? Did it start to create changes in higher education? Even on seemingly salient topics for an intellectual history, there are sometimes blank spaces. For instance, what did polygenists do to react to evolution? At what point did they start to adapt their theories to fit evolution, for it was a shift that happened at some point. Polygyny was still advanced as late as the 1960s, by such figures as Carleton Coon the anthropologist, largely for the purpose of covertly preserving racist structures.[11] Fuller's book is silent on that, leaving Agassiz mid-debate with Gray to shift his focus more towards the transcendentalists. This is ultimately a focus that makes his work more friendly to general readers, perhaps, and yet leaves significant questions even about its title. I believe that it probably did change America, and yet he only sometimes grapples with how, leaving out important details. Instead he uses the book as a way to plum and explore the depths of literary and philosophical trends of the time period, and how the Origin of Species shaped these.
This is not a small task, and it is one that is ably done. Yet I find myself wishing for more, hoping that he would turn his not inconsiderable talents a little more carefully towards the kinds of problems that he could have addressed. The book, which is so strong overall, and so revelatory, could have been a book that changed lives, as Origins did for many, including Thoreau.[12] It falls slightly short of the mark, and yet it cannot help but be recommended, especially for its treatment of Transcendentalism.
After Darwin was promulgated, he was interpreted by practically everyone, as Fuller so ably demonstrated. But it is the interpretation of a certain group of feminists that concerns Hamlin in From Eve To Evolution who, despite the gendered beliefs of Darwin himself, embraced Evolution as a liberating force. Understanding this, and the ways that feminists interested in science used Evolution in the late 19th century is the purpose of her work, and one that she explores in four chapters, each addressing a theme or element of the overall picture. It is a tale worth telling, and one that has long been obscured by the later--sometimes justified-- skepticism of some feminists towards science and scientific inquiry whereas it related to gender.
In order to understand how revolutionary evolution could be, one has to understand what was already there. The traditional Judeo-Christian conception of the female gender was of course complicated and varied by nation and was changed by cultural history, and yet was often rooted in a single book, the Bible. One of the two creation stories claimed that Eve, the first woman, was merely one of Adam's ribs. Meanwhile, in Genesis 3:16, God cursed Eve and all women to follow her in harsh words. As the King James Bible puts it: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrows and they conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children' and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." For many throughout history, this was all the justification they needed for female inferiority. But Darwin with his hints of human evolution, didn't believe in the Garden. If humans were animals, born of evolutionary processes, they could be debated by and within science, instead of being automatically dismissed by religion, especially the religious conservatism that began to dominate in the 1880s and 1890s.[13]
Prominent and educated women used sexual selection and nature to argue their case. Humans were the only species, at least according to Darwin, where men were the ones practicing sexual selection, a process he explained as being somehow key to our superiority.[14] Women such as Eliza Burt Gamble rejected this understanding, instead arguing that women not having a choice as to who to marry was unnatural and, worse off, harmful for the species. She interpreted evolution --as did most Americans, as Fuller demonstrated--in a progressive, upward moving sense.[15] Additionally, since in nature female animals did not merely tend house, but instead engaged in important evolutionary work, so too did evolutionary feminists argue that preventing women from being educated and partaking in human society was wrong because it was unnatural. These arguments taken together were justification for female education, female marriage choice, and a re-evaluation of when a woman's working life was supposed to end, and if marriage was meant to end it. [16]
The women who were engaged in this evolutionary thinking were both some still famous today, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and those whose reputations haven't echoed to this day, such as Gamble and Helen Gardener, who famously donated her brain to be weighed in an attempt to prove female equality.[17] These women were not operating against a blank canvas. Many of them, in addition to presenting their own views on the nature of society and women, had to respond to attempts to use science to validate sexism and the limitation of women's roles in public. They operated in a field still largely flooded with amateurs, and thus not closed despite the fact that many didn't have what would soon be viewed as the requisite scientific education. Women were, of course, societally discouraged from partaking in such education, yet they tried to obtain it anyways. By using the language and tactics of science against their many enemies, they sometimes even succeeded.
While all aspects of the book were enthralling, certainly two of the most enlightening--in part from how little the tactics of such people have changed from the 19th century--are the discussion of the arguments for scientifically validated sexism, and the brief but interesting look at the rise of women's spaces in scientific education, such as the Lilly Hall of Science in Smith College, a prestigious women's university.[18] Thinkers such as Darwin often thought that female biology, especially their reproductive biology, limited their intellectual capacity.[19] Edward Clarke, a doctor and professor at Harvard, argued that because of their menstrual biology, women couldn't healthily, and thus should not, survive the course loads at Harvard, and thus shouldn't be admitted co-educationally. Women, he further contended, could either be successful mothers or successful academics: they didn't have the brain-power for both.[20]
Feminists who questioned his conclusions did so not only from an ethical perspective, but also asked about whether it was scientifically valid, creating a groundswell of opposition and, at first, anecdotal evidence against his sweeping claims.[21] Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi even designed a survey and handed it out to 268 women of all classes, demonstrating in a roughly empirical-adjacent way that there was no correlation between higher education and sickness or difficulty menstruating, and even making the claim that it was the inverse.[22]
Similarly, when Clarke again showed up, citing Dr. William Hammond and arguing that because women's brains were supposedly smaller than men's they were less intelligent[23], evolutionary feminists again responded in the language of science and data, putting to the question the assumptions that you can tell female and male brains apart, and also bringing up problems of sample size and methodology.[24] What matters most about Hamlin's exploration of these sections are not the specific arguments but the way she establishes a pattern in which these women addressed the issue in the form of science, trusting its impartiality to get towards the truth. Sometimes, this assumption would be wrong, and yet before the professionalization of science began to further lock women out of the field, women were often very successful at using science against those who, in their view, were misusing it.
These scientific feminists, despite their successes, had both a limited view, and a limited shelf life. Hamlin does emphasize, if sometimes not enough, the extent to which these women, upper-class white feminists most of them, built their arguments for equality on class and race based prejudices. They sometimes essentially argued that being white and rich should make them the equal of any man, though she does make the point that in this, they were far from alone.[25] Similarly, she contends, and backs up well, her claims that this scientific feminism faded in the last part of the 19th century, due both to pressures from a growing feminist mainstream that pushed evolutionary (and often anti-biblical) feminists into the ranks of counterculture socialists, and pressures from scientists who increasingly guarded and professionalized their standards, thus implicitly excluding most women from the conversation.[26] But she doesn't explore this process, and while it is understandably not her focus, it does raise many follow-up questions as to the nature of this shift and its meaning and implications. These are questions that are beyond the scope of her fascinating study, which uses countless forgotten sources and blends together the latest secondary research with careful analysis of the interplay of ideas and scientific politics. That I wish so much to learn about a shift that I hadn't even imagined happened until I read this book is a testament to her skill as an informative and readable historian, and one whose focus allows them to delve far deeper into these issues than they might have if they'd tried to answer some of my follow-up questions.
The history of science runs both ways. Science, such as it is, influences culture, and culture influences and defines what questions science can ask and what its answers might be. Certainly political debate regarding guns, abortion, and climate change have all shaped the pattern of, for instance, grant money and research. Similarly, science is a 'tool' that has been used both by racists and anti-racists, sexists and feminists, its language, aesthetics and methods defined and utilized for essential cultural purposes. This is not, at least inherently, a bad thing: or perhaps it is better to say that it's an inevitable thing. While focus has often been given to the negative uses of science in general and evolution in particular, that, as these books demonstrates, is not all it is good for. People worked to adapt to Darwin, and adapted to him in turn, attempting to understand and shape the world in the process. People worked, and people work, for as I argued early in the paper, this same act of claim, counterclaim has continued to today, and seems unlikely to end anytime soon. In looking towards the past, one can read the trends of the present and, hopefully, understand the future, or even avoid the doubt and distrust that is sometimes leveled towards science when it shouldn't be doubted, and understand the cultural and sociological forces at work when it should. Perhaps we can transcend past patterns, and even if we cannot, these two books are worthy and informative reads that I heartily recommend.
******
Endnotes--
[1] Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: the history of an idea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009,16-18.
[2] Prominent examples include James Damore's memo in 2017, a copy of which can be found here: https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320 . It cites, at points, a number of evolutionary psychology claims. For race and IQ, one of the most well known controversial works would be The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, published in 1994 and immediately controversial for its discussion of an inherent IQ difference among races, among other claims.
[3] The 'Bell Curve' controversy resulted in a number of works disputing it, from a revised edition of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, to works directly addressing the book, such as The Bell Curve Wars, pointing out significant flaws in the science and argumentation. Meanwhile, Damore's Memo had many responses, including scientific rebuttals of some of his points. A prominent and readable example is by a PhD student, Erin Giglio, called "The Truth Has Got Its Boots On: What the evidence says about Mr. Damore's Google Memo".
[4] Fuller, Randall. The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. Penguin Group USA, 2018, 90.
[5] Fuller, 104.
[6] Fuller, 147-150.
[7] Fuller, 234-237.
[8] Fuller 71-74.
[9] Fuller 190-195.
[10] Fuller 243-4.
[11] Jackson, John P. (2001). ""In Ways Unacademical": The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races" (PDF). Journal of the History of Biology. 34 (2): 247–285. Wayback Machine Archived from the original (PDF) on May 14, 2013.
[12] Fuller 74.
[13] Hamlin, Kimberly A. From Eve to evolution: Darwin, science, and womens rights in Gilded Age America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 33-40.
[14] Hamlin 132-4.
[15] Hamlin 134-141.
[16] Hamiln 102-106.
[17] Hamlin 57.
[18] Hamlin 63-4.
[19] Hamlin 71-2.
[20] Hamlin 73-5.
[21] Hamlin 75-7.
[22] Hamlin 77-8.
[23] A fact we now know has, scientifically, nothing to do with intelligence, and yet was an almost-reasonable guess.
[24] Hamlin 81-6.
[25] Hamlin 19-21.
[26] Hamlin 51, 92-3, 171.
Works Cited
Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: the history of an idea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009,16-18.
Fuller, Randall. The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. Penguin Group USA, 2018.
Hamlin, Kimberly A. From Eve to evolution: Darwin, science, and womens rights in Gilded Age America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015
Jackson, John P. (2001). ""In Ways Unacademical": The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races" (PDF). Journal of the History of Biology. 34 (2): 247–285. Wayback Machine Archived from the original (PDF) on May 14, 2013.
*****
So here's a paper I turned in. It was meant to be slightly informal in ways, which is why I'm allowed to use "I" statements.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
Also, I had an incredible, if very impractical, idea. Well, actually, it was all done in class last night.
The Professor asked, if we were trying to remake a basic American Survey 101 (thru 1877), but make it into a Continental History, what would we do?
And we went week by week, and it was just... kinda brilliant as a perspective shift? Which of course is what Continental history is.
(Wait, does anyone not know what Continental History is, does anyone want to share for the class, or should I?)
The Professor asked, if we were trying to remake a basic American Survey 101 (thru 1877), but make it into a Continental History, what would we do?
And we went week by week, and it was just... kinda brilliant as a perspective shift? Which of course is what Continental history is.
(Wait, does anyone not know what Continental History is, does anyone want to share for the class, or should I?)
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
History of North America as a continent rather than United States of America as a single country with occasional guest appearances from the Commonwealth and Mexico?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Yep, exactly! I mean, there might be a greater focus to some relative extent on the area that became the United States, but typical United States history talks only about the eastern seaboard... until America gets to a place, and then it's suddenly worth talking about. If that makes sense?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I need to post the rest of my papers here, don't I? Or, I want to, but I keep on getting distracted.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Shoot, btw, I really do need to post the essays. Maybe... Saturday? I got an A in all three of my Grad School classes, btw.
- Location
- Austria
Congratulations!
Marriage, Colonial Women, and Historiography: A Historiographical Review Of Four Books
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Marriage, Colonial Women, and Historiography: Four Books Reviewed
By Laurent
A good wife was a good mother was a good woman: so the traditional litany went. The virtues and vices of the woman all seemed to come back to these roles and expectations, especially in colonial times, but still lingering even today. By examining four works of historical scholarship,we can better understanding each of these issues. The four works are very different in many ways, and also cover different time periods. Two cover colonial eras, those being Good Wives: Image and Reality by Laurel Ulrich and Good Wives, Nasty Wenches And Anxious Patriarchs by Kathleen Brown, while Revolutionary Conceptions by Susan Klepp starts before and ends after the American Revolution, and the fourth Cradle of The Middle Class by Mary Ryan, covers from the end of the 18th well into the 19th century. But besides time, these works are divided in other ways: Ulrich's work covers New England, Brown's looks at Virginia and Klepp's is more universal, while Ryan's looks at a single place in New York, almost laser-focused. Some of the works are more theoretical than others, and were written at very different times: from Ulrich and Ryan's books in the 1980s to Brown's in the 1990s, and Klepp's in 2009. These four books can thus also represent the evolution of the topic and the way that the field has and hasn't changed. To some extent they could be seen as building on each other, for all that they--such as in Klepp's intersectionality as compared to earlier works--are also very rooted in their time. Each work will be examined in turn, in the order of the world they try to illustrate. While each will be examined as its own work, they will contextualize and build on each other in order to create a more complete, or at least more complex, picture.
Good Wives: Images and Reality in the Lives of Women In Northern New England was published in 1981, thus making it in something of the forebearer to many other works. It was written by Laura Ulrich, who once famously said that well-behaved women seldom made history. Here she attempted to look into women both well-behaved and not, in her first monograph. The work's ambition and detail mark it as worth reading, deeply founded in a sociological and sometimes theoretical worldview.
The frame through which she views the colonial women of the period is a focus not on a dichotomy such as male or female. Instead she focuses on a wide variety of roles which allowed a woman to, at different times, play many parts while while still fundamentally accepting and being subject to hierarchical and patriarchal control. A woman might in one moment be a Deputy Husband, the next a Mistress of Servants, and always a mother, wife, and neighbor: sometimes she could even be a heroine. These frameworks are broadly convincing, though as with all such theoretical frameworks--and she utilizes and creates several such schemas--one questions the extent to which they can truly be viewed as different roles. Yet she takes great care in highlighting the way these myriad roles work together, teasing out from somewhat limited data fascinating impressions of women's lives. These impressions are so fascinating that one wishes she had more to work with. An example is when she examined the possibility of a weaning trip, in which mothers left their homes and their child in order that it might wean. The evidence she has for this is somewhat thin, and yet very enticing, and this is a hallmark of her work at several points. But she wisely does not step beyond her evidence into idle speculation, merely raising a possibility and leaving it to others.
But what Ulrich does have, especially thanks to good old probates, is a handle on the daily tasks and work that a housewife involved. In the first section she outlined the different duties, difficulties, and complexities of life--from managing fires to cooking food to washing and sewing constantly--with a care and attention that brings the period to life and allows one to understand the centrality of such duties to many women's lives. This very focus is, of course, the result of a greater emphasis placed on women's lives in academia in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. Similarly, her insights on the way that childcare and birth were viewed holds up in later works. For instance, her classification of childcare in this time period as being extensive (number based) rather than intensive fits with the insights of Revolutionary Conceptions.
Her work also correctly identifies the importance of religion in the life of women, but while housewifery and childcare get long segments, the chapter towards the end of the book where she examined this issue could have been longer. Similarly, one assumes that if this book was written in the 90s there would be a greater focus on both class (though it is brought up) and race and their intersections with gender. Still, by focusing on these roles and grounding her work in both literature, lived experience, and statistics, she creates a compelling portrait only somewhat marred by thin evidence in some areas. This is history that might have once been dismissed, wrongly, as insignificant "pots and pans history." She makes it important and relevant, and even if her results only speak to a relatively small area, they might have applicability elsewhere. Certainly, the information her book presents about the lived reality of the average woman is at times missing or implicitly assumed in some of later works. They build on her base in order to examine other questions.
Moving south, and written fifteen years later, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs by Kathleen Brown shows both how much the scholarship had changed. But it also clearly had a very strong debt to Ulrich's Good Wives, especially in its theoretical and sociological focus. Its essential argument involved a shift embodied in its name: from a time in which poor white women were wenches, to a time where only African-American women were wenches, and all white women were, in public discourse, closer to good wives than wenches. But in examining this issue, she's also looking at the discourse on power, about the way that the elite first grounded their sense of power in gendered hierarchies, comparing Natives to women and marking inferiors as unmanly. By the end of the time period covered in the book, the elite instead grounded it primarily, though not entirely, in a racialized hierarchy that included and incorporated the gendered hierarchy. This change strengthened Virginia's hierarchies and the power of the planter elite, by and large. This was not somehow natural or inevitable, in her analysis. Brown demonstrates ably in her first four chapters both the way the social structure worked, and the way in which race itself was a category that they constructed in order to strengthen their own power and justify the structure.
By her recounting, the shifts of what it meant to be of the upper class, to be a man, and to be a woman all changed over the decades as slavery grew more and more important to Virginia. This required the laws to be changed to prevent interracial couplings, or to be more harsh on free African-Americans even as they began to lighten at least some of their gendered language and worked towards racialized inter-class solidarity. African-American women were separated out from white women as being somehow different in nature, and thus not subject to the same protections and stereotypes that white women were. An example of this was the way that while white women worked in the fields often in the 17th century, this began to fall off. Instead, slaves of both genders increasingly worked in the fields. By the middle of the 18th century, white male elite planters were in a stronger position than ever before, backed up by a racialized social order that allowed them to change the face--but not the essential character--of patriarchy. It was dressed up as a 'softer' paternalism. Similarly, their conception of male and female, while still class bound, became somewhat more universal… but only by the important act of exclusion from such categories.
The work's strongest points are a result Brown's understanding of the intersection of race, gender, and class. It's an understanding whose conclusions in some cases seem like commonplaces today, such as the way in which elites can use race and gender to reconcile class differences. This represents an evolution from the take (or lack thereof) on race in the two books written in the 1980s. By weaving the three together, she is able to discover fascinating combinations, and strangely revealing facts. One such fact was that a slave brought to trial had a fifty-fifty chance of being sentenced to death if they were owned by a woman, but only a 20% chance if they were owned by men. In this example, all three elements come together to illuminate the past in a way no two of them could. But this very complicated dance of the intersection of such three vast concepts sometimes means that one or two are neglected, set aside in the monograph for greater focus on a single topic for a time. This sometimes leaves stones unturned, or issues that could be more strongly explored.
As well, while hard data is not neglected, the theoretical focus of the book leads to a plague of "may haves" in which her theorizing comes face to face with a lack of conclusive data.. This leads her at times to go out on a limb, weakening the well-supported claims she has with speculation, however well-argued. Yet when dealing in such a topic, and with the close cultural and social shifts that the society in question was undergoing, a little bit of speculation is inevitable. It only slightly mars what is an excellent contribution to a understanding of race, gender, and class in colonial Virginia, and one which might speak to similar questions in other regions.
Compared to either of the previous works, Revolutionary Conceptions by Susan Klepp is far more centered on the non-theoretical, or rather it tries to reach theory from the ground up. Instead of using a conception and comparing it to reality, she analyzes a whole host of demographic studies from the 18th and early 19th century to build up a larger conclusion. This conclusion requires her to look at portraits, diaries, novels, and cartoons. These are sources that in many cases could seem gossamer thin and yet were some of the most fascinating, though it has been argued that her analysis of portraits was perhaps stretching slightly too far in a few of its interpretations.
All of this analysis is in service of a seemingly modest argument, that the technology and drive for fewer births evolved alongside and inseparable from the cultural and social changes that led to and followed the American Revolution. And that, moreover, these helped to cause a shift from, to use Ulrich's phrasing, extensive to intensive views of motherhood.
There are other arguments, but this is one that turns out to be far more ambitious in practice. Her basic claim is that this shift, which occurred separately from any comparative shift in Europe, cannot merely be explained through the oft-traditional method of fiscal and financial historiography. In such historiography, declining farm space and the rise of cities are direct causes for the decrease in family size: Klepp disagreed, voluminously. Instead she posits that there was a cultural process. This process was able to be seen--at least allegedly--even in the way that portraits began to focus on the intellectual capacities of the women and less on using careful framing to create a visual language of pregnancy as central to her womanness. Indeed, this switch from focusing on being a child-bearer to being a mother, with an increased use of personalized language for children and a stronger and more accepted distaste for pregnancy is central to her fundamental narrative. Klepp manages to make all of these points so strongly that one can almost bury the recurring question of whether there might not be something in the economic narrative that she places as secondary to her detailed examination of changing gender roles. At times this question does rear its ugly head, but her monograph keeps a strong pace. It managed never to lose this reader's attention, and built on the main arguments without getting distracted by side-alleys that didn't ultimately contribute to understanding the issues she addressed. This includes the chapters on "Potions, Pills, and Jumping Ropes: The Technology of Birth Control" and the large segment of "Beauty and the Bestial" which focused on the visual presentation of women in colonial America. They all seem to contribute to her overall argument, being strong chapters even in their own right, and this is part of what makes her case so convincing.
There was one area where her claims were somewhat less convincing: into this demographic analysis she brought enslaved people, and analyzed their family sizes and its change. This itself is far from invalid, but in focusing solely on family formation, she can't help but discount the different nature of enslaved black conception, pregnancy, and families. These differences make it difficult to fit into her narrative. While she has some poignant observations about these trends, it does not entirely fit with the rest of her book. It feels, at worst, as an afterthought. At best, it's an area where further research would be valued. It's just not entirely convincing, the concept that slaves were part of the revolution in conception she outlines.
Ultimately, the outcome of this potentially revolutionary process was in some ways a trade. In this, she was perhaps bucking the trend as to how women and the post-revolution have been traditionally viewed. On the one hand, pregnancy became viewed as something not to be talked about. But on the other hand, women were no longer regarded as "the sex", as brutish and sexually controlled figures that were often heavily dehumanized. A greater focus on controlled births--ones she argues came from both sexes, but which was often led by women--allowed women more time to eventually participate in what historians of the 19th century would call the women's sphere. These same historians talk about how this sphere expanded and changed through the century, as will be seen in Ryan's work. Klepp's narrative provides an alternate sort of origin, or at least places the story in a very different context than often before. It is a context that warrants further studies to examine just where the chicken and the egg of cultural and economic factors truly come in. But it is also a context that makes one grateful for the understanding that its author has brought to a topic that already has a vast and wide range of literature. Yet despite that, the field has likely benefited from her examination of the process of family limitation, pregnancy, and cultural and social changes.
The fourth book, Cradle of the Middle Class by Mary Ryan is rather unlike all of the other four that come before it. It is focused on a single area, and the monograph felt deeply rooted in the 1970s, and yet just like Ulrich's book, it has had considerable future impact on the field. Its take on the 19th century narrative has, in many ways, become the standard one. An examination of her point about the theoretical de-economization of women's work, for instance, would show up as a central point in a monograph on women's war work in the Civil War. By looking at one community in upstate New York (Utica), Mary Ryan managed to chart a very particular set of changes. Her narrative progresses through several stages and help define the ways in which the gender structure of the middle of the century came to be. She is strongest when she's talking about the intricate patterns, often backed up by data. For instance, she makes the point that the revivals of the 1810s, 20s, and 30s and the charitable associations of the 30s and 40s are central and connected to a shift of gender role definition. In this case it was a move towards a more private definition of gender roles and home life, a definition which in the modernizing town (then a small city) was very fluid. In this way revivals and associations are both a reaction to and a cause of greater privacy in the women's sphere.
One area where she differs from later historians is in her identification of the chronology of such a sphere, placing it firmly in the 19th century. She justifies this by charting and counting carefully the changes in the middle-class. In Utica, women were married, on average, near their mid-twenties. Unlike earlier, she claims, both men and women spent a significant portion of their life as both single and public. This led to an associational phase, but perhaps also a perception of marriage as being justifiably more private after a public youth. As well, when people did marry, they had fewer kids than in the early 19th century, let alone the 18th.
The world Ryan portrays is one far more female-driven than, or so she seemed to assume, many of her contemporaries believed. Carefully she recounts the female charitable societies, and the way that the religious revivals in the Burned-Over District were often largely staffed by women. These revivals were driven by the unmarried, though there was a family connection, in this case involving relatives rather than marriage. In fact, revivals and associations might be seen as a substitute for marriage in an often-lonely growing town. Similarly, the associations--such as to distribute bibles, help the poor, or speak out against slavery or intemperance--all drew on women's work, whose definition was mobile and sometimes even flexible. But the biggest transformation of all was one that started as a small element in the monograph, but by the final chapters is central to her argument. This argument is about the structure of patriarchy and how it changed. These changes included different child rearing, the extended boyhood of many men, or the way in which being charitable, religious, and maternal were integrated into the whole. Rather than being inverted, the gender roles that reigned early in the 19th century were shifted a few degrees, changed enough to be softer and less obvious. This itself matches both Revolutionary Conception's claims as well as the process that Good Wives, Nasty Wenches recounts. In such a process, patriarchy changes its face while only somewhat changing its methods.
But even more than those works, she pays close and careful attention to issues of patriarchy, often to the exclusion of race as a category of examination. But by considering patriarchy and women's roles so openly, it allows one to look at untapped areas of inquiry. For one, while Ulrich's work says too little on women and religion, this one rectifies that balance, and in doing so helps to create a greater understanding of women's lives. It is an understanding that builds on the evidence and information that comes before it chronologically in this paper, even as it is in some ways complicated. For instance, Revolutionary Conceptions places some of the change earlier than Ryan notices it in Utica, but that could very well be a matter of geography or focus. Similarly, the broad range of time and the many different twists and turns of community formation can at times make it hard to view it as a cohesive whole. However, she manages to wrap it all up relatively effectively in the conclusion, which largely exists as a remediation and contextualization of the overall narrative which she believed best fit her data. In this sense, it is successful, though one wonders at the imposed narrative at points, such as the the class-based dimensions which, as she admits in the introduction, she lacks evidence to truly analyze.
Each of these four books helps to create an overall timeline, and a means--ever evolving, sometimes contradicting--to understand the changes and differences in the experience of women, especially in marriage and in families, from the colonial through the antebellum period. They each come at the same kinds of problems involving sources, involving prejudice, and involving the presence of some kinds of data and the absence of others. But they come to very different conclusions. In this, one can see how broad primarily-social Histories can truly be. All four works used a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to come to their conclusions, and several directly cite sociology. They create both a history, and a coherent set of things to study in order to understand their own historiography. This historiography has importance in helping to tease out important questions about the past, questions that even fifty years ago were too rarely asked. Even now there is much work to do, but it is only by studying the historiographic past that one can truly know how to do that.
By Laurent
A good wife was a good mother was a good woman: so the traditional litany went. The virtues and vices of the woman all seemed to come back to these roles and expectations, especially in colonial times, but still lingering even today. By examining four works of historical scholarship,we can better understanding each of these issues. The four works are very different in many ways, and also cover different time periods. Two cover colonial eras, those being Good Wives: Image and Reality by Laurel Ulrich and Good Wives, Nasty Wenches And Anxious Patriarchs by Kathleen Brown, while Revolutionary Conceptions by Susan Klepp starts before and ends after the American Revolution, and the fourth Cradle of The Middle Class by Mary Ryan, covers from the end of the 18th well into the 19th century. But besides time, these works are divided in other ways: Ulrich's work covers New England, Brown's looks at Virginia and Klepp's is more universal, while Ryan's looks at a single place in New York, almost laser-focused. Some of the works are more theoretical than others, and were written at very different times: from Ulrich and Ryan's books in the 1980s to Brown's in the 1990s, and Klepp's in 2009. These four books can thus also represent the evolution of the topic and the way that the field has and hasn't changed. To some extent they could be seen as building on each other, for all that they--such as in Klepp's intersectionality as compared to earlier works--are also very rooted in their time. Each work will be examined in turn, in the order of the world they try to illustrate. While each will be examined as its own work, they will contextualize and build on each other in order to create a more complete, or at least more complex, picture.
Good Wives: Images and Reality in the Lives of Women In Northern New England was published in 1981, thus making it in something of the forebearer to many other works. It was written by Laura Ulrich, who once famously said that well-behaved women seldom made history. Here she attempted to look into women both well-behaved and not, in her first monograph. The work's ambition and detail mark it as worth reading, deeply founded in a sociological and sometimes theoretical worldview.
The frame through which she views the colonial women of the period is a focus not on a dichotomy such as male or female. Instead she focuses on a wide variety of roles which allowed a woman to, at different times, play many parts while while still fundamentally accepting and being subject to hierarchical and patriarchal control. A woman might in one moment be a Deputy Husband, the next a Mistress of Servants, and always a mother, wife, and neighbor: sometimes she could even be a heroine. These frameworks are broadly convincing, though as with all such theoretical frameworks--and she utilizes and creates several such schemas--one questions the extent to which they can truly be viewed as different roles. Yet she takes great care in highlighting the way these myriad roles work together, teasing out from somewhat limited data fascinating impressions of women's lives. These impressions are so fascinating that one wishes she had more to work with. An example is when she examined the possibility of a weaning trip, in which mothers left their homes and their child in order that it might wean. The evidence she has for this is somewhat thin, and yet very enticing, and this is a hallmark of her work at several points. But she wisely does not step beyond her evidence into idle speculation, merely raising a possibility and leaving it to others.
But what Ulrich does have, especially thanks to good old probates, is a handle on the daily tasks and work that a housewife involved. In the first section she outlined the different duties, difficulties, and complexities of life--from managing fires to cooking food to washing and sewing constantly--with a care and attention that brings the period to life and allows one to understand the centrality of such duties to many women's lives. This very focus is, of course, the result of a greater emphasis placed on women's lives in academia in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. Similarly, her insights on the way that childcare and birth were viewed holds up in later works. For instance, her classification of childcare in this time period as being extensive (number based) rather than intensive fits with the insights of Revolutionary Conceptions.
Her work also correctly identifies the importance of religion in the life of women, but while housewifery and childcare get long segments, the chapter towards the end of the book where she examined this issue could have been longer. Similarly, one assumes that if this book was written in the 90s there would be a greater focus on both class (though it is brought up) and race and their intersections with gender. Still, by focusing on these roles and grounding her work in both literature, lived experience, and statistics, she creates a compelling portrait only somewhat marred by thin evidence in some areas. This is history that might have once been dismissed, wrongly, as insignificant "pots and pans history." She makes it important and relevant, and even if her results only speak to a relatively small area, they might have applicability elsewhere. Certainly, the information her book presents about the lived reality of the average woman is at times missing or implicitly assumed in some of later works. They build on her base in order to examine other questions.
Moving south, and written fifteen years later, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs by Kathleen Brown shows both how much the scholarship had changed. But it also clearly had a very strong debt to Ulrich's Good Wives, especially in its theoretical and sociological focus. Its essential argument involved a shift embodied in its name: from a time in which poor white women were wenches, to a time where only African-American women were wenches, and all white women were, in public discourse, closer to good wives than wenches. But in examining this issue, she's also looking at the discourse on power, about the way that the elite first grounded their sense of power in gendered hierarchies, comparing Natives to women and marking inferiors as unmanly. By the end of the time period covered in the book, the elite instead grounded it primarily, though not entirely, in a racialized hierarchy that included and incorporated the gendered hierarchy. This change strengthened Virginia's hierarchies and the power of the planter elite, by and large. This was not somehow natural or inevitable, in her analysis. Brown demonstrates ably in her first four chapters both the way the social structure worked, and the way in which race itself was a category that they constructed in order to strengthen their own power and justify the structure.
By her recounting, the shifts of what it meant to be of the upper class, to be a man, and to be a woman all changed over the decades as slavery grew more and more important to Virginia. This required the laws to be changed to prevent interracial couplings, or to be more harsh on free African-Americans even as they began to lighten at least some of their gendered language and worked towards racialized inter-class solidarity. African-American women were separated out from white women as being somehow different in nature, and thus not subject to the same protections and stereotypes that white women were. An example of this was the way that while white women worked in the fields often in the 17th century, this began to fall off. Instead, slaves of both genders increasingly worked in the fields. By the middle of the 18th century, white male elite planters were in a stronger position than ever before, backed up by a racialized social order that allowed them to change the face--but not the essential character--of patriarchy. It was dressed up as a 'softer' paternalism. Similarly, their conception of male and female, while still class bound, became somewhat more universal… but only by the important act of exclusion from such categories.
The work's strongest points are a result Brown's understanding of the intersection of race, gender, and class. It's an understanding whose conclusions in some cases seem like commonplaces today, such as the way in which elites can use race and gender to reconcile class differences. This represents an evolution from the take (or lack thereof) on race in the two books written in the 1980s. By weaving the three together, she is able to discover fascinating combinations, and strangely revealing facts. One such fact was that a slave brought to trial had a fifty-fifty chance of being sentenced to death if they were owned by a woman, but only a 20% chance if they were owned by men. In this example, all three elements come together to illuminate the past in a way no two of them could. But this very complicated dance of the intersection of such three vast concepts sometimes means that one or two are neglected, set aside in the monograph for greater focus on a single topic for a time. This sometimes leaves stones unturned, or issues that could be more strongly explored.
As well, while hard data is not neglected, the theoretical focus of the book leads to a plague of "may haves" in which her theorizing comes face to face with a lack of conclusive data.. This leads her at times to go out on a limb, weakening the well-supported claims she has with speculation, however well-argued. Yet when dealing in such a topic, and with the close cultural and social shifts that the society in question was undergoing, a little bit of speculation is inevitable. It only slightly mars what is an excellent contribution to a understanding of race, gender, and class in colonial Virginia, and one which might speak to similar questions in other regions.
Compared to either of the previous works, Revolutionary Conceptions by Susan Klepp is far more centered on the non-theoretical, or rather it tries to reach theory from the ground up. Instead of using a conception and comparing it to reality, she analyzes a whole host of demographic studies from the 18th and early 19th century to build up a larger conclusion. This conclusion requires her to look at portraits, diaries, novels, and cartoons. These are sources that in many cases could seem gossamer thin and yet were some of the most fascinating, though it has been argued that her analysis of portraits was perhaps stretching slightly too far in a few of its interpretations.
All of this analysis is in service of a seemingly modest argument, that the technology and drive for fewer births evolved alongside and inseparable from the cultural and social changes that led to and followed the American Revolution. And that, moreover, these helped to cause a shift from, to use Ulrich's phrasing, extensive to intensive views of motherhood.
There are other arguments, but this is one that turns out to be far more ambitious in practice. Her basic claim is that this shift, which occurred separately from any comparative shift in Europe, cannot merely be explained through the oft-traditional method of fiscal and financial historiography. In such historiography, declining farm space and the rise of cities are direct causes for the decrease in family size: Klepp disagreed, voluminously. Instead she posits that there was a cultural process. This process was able to be seen--at least allegedly--even in the way that portraits began to focus on the intellectual capacities of the women and less on using careful framing to create a visual language of pregnancy as central to her womanness. Indeed, this switch from focusing on being a child-bearer to being a mother, with an increased use of personalized language for children and a stronger and more accepted distaste for pregnancy is central to her fundamental narrative. Klepp manages to make all of these points so strongly that one can almost bury the recurring question of whether there might not be something in the economic narrative that she places as secondary to her detailed examination of changing gender roles. At times this question does rear its ugly head, but her monograph keeps a strong pace. It managed never to lose this reader's attention, and built on the main arguments without getting distracted by side-alleys that didn't ultimately contribute to understanding the issues she addressed. This includes the chapters on "Potions, Pills, and Jumping Ropes: The Technology of Birth Control" and the large segment of "Beauty and the Bestial" which focused on the visual presentation of women in colonial America. They all seem to contribute to her overall argument, being strong chapters even in their own right, and this is part of what makes her case so convincing.
There was one area where her claims were somewhat less convincing: into this demographic analysis she brought enslaved people, and analyzed their family sizes and its change. This itself is far from invalid, but in focusing solely on family formation, she can't help but discount the different nature of enslaved black conception, pregnancy, and families. These differences make it difficult to fit into her narrative. While she has some poignant observations about these trends, it does not entirely fit with the rest of her book. It feels, at worst, as an afterthought. At best, it's an area where further research would be valued. It's just not entirely convincing, the concept that slaves were part of the revolution in conception she outlines.
Ultimately, the outcome of this potentially revolutionary process was in some ways a trade. In this, she was perhaps bucking the trend as to how women and the post-revolution have been traditionally viewed. On the one hand, pregnancy became viewed as something not to be talked about. But on the other hand, women were no longer regarded as "the sex", as brutish and sexually controlled figures that were often heavily dehumanized. A greater focus on controlled births--ones she argues came from both sexes, but which was often led by women--allowed women more time to eventually participate in what historians of the 19th century would call the women's sphere. These same historians talk about how this sphere expanded and changed through the century, as will be seen in Ryan's work. Klepp's narrative provides an alternate sort of origin, or at least places the story in a very different context than often before. It is a context that warrants further studies to examine just where the chicken and the egg of cultural and economic factors truly come in. But it is also a context that makes one grateful for the understanding that its author has brought to a topic that already has a vast and wide range of literature. Yet despite that, the field has likely benefited from her examination of the process of family limitation, pregnancy, and cultural and social changes.
The fourth book, Cradle of the Middle Class by Mary Ryan is rather unlike all of the other four that come before it. It is focused on a single area, and the monograph felt deeply rooted in the 1970s, and yet just like Ulrich's book, it has had considerable future impact on the field. Its take on the 19th century narrative has, in many ways, become the standard one. An examination of her point about the theoretical de-economization of women's work, for instance, would show up as a central point in a monograph on women's war work in the Civil War. By looking at one community in upstate New York (Utica), Mary Ryan managed to chart a very particular set of changes. Her narrative progresses through several stages and help define the ways in which the gender structure of the middle of the century came to be. She is strongest when she's talking about the intricate patterns, often backed up by data. For instance, she makes the point that the revivals of the 1810s, 20s, and 30s and the charitable associations of the 30s and 40s are central and connected to a shift of gender role definition. In this case it was a move towards a more private definition of gender roles and home life, a definition which in the modernizing town (then a small city) was very fluid. In this way revivals and associations are both a reaction to and a cause of greater privacy in the women's sphere.
One area where she differs from later historians is in her identification of the chronology of such a sphere, placing it firmly in the 19th century. She justifies this by charting and counting carefully the changes in the middle-class. In Utica, women were married, on average, near their mid-twenties. Unlike earlier, she claims, both men and women spent a significant portion of their life as both single and public. This led to an associational phase, but perhaps also a perception of marriage as being justifiably more private after a public youth. As well, when people did marry, they had fewer kids than in the early 19th century, let alone the 18th.
The world Ryan portrays is one far more female-driven than, or so she seemed to assume, many of her contemporaries believed. Carefully she recounts the female charitable societies, and the way that the religious revivals in the Burned-Over District were often largely staffed by women. These revivals were driven by the unmarried, though there was a family connection, in this case involving relatives rather than marriage. In fact, revivals and associations might be seen as a substitute for marriage in an often-lonely growing town. Similarly, the associations--such as to distribute bibles, help the poor, or speak out against slavery or intemperance--all drew on women's work, whose definition was mobile and sometimes even flexible. But the biggest transformation of all was one that started as a small element in the monograph, but by the final chapters is central to her argument. This argument is about the structure of patriarchy and how it changed. These changes included different child rearing, the extended boyhood of many men, or the way in which being charitable, religious, and maternal were integrated into the whole. Rather than being inverted, the gender roles that reigned early in the 19th century were shifted a few degrees, changed enough to be softer and less obvious. This itself matches both Revolutionary Conception's claims as well as the process that Good Wives, Nasty Wenches recounts. In such a process, patriarchy changes its face while only somewhat changing its methods.
But even more than those works, she pays close and careful attention to issues of patriarchy, often to the exclusion of race as a category of examination. But by considering patriarchy and women's roles so openly, it allows one to look at untapped areas of inquiry. For one, while Ulrich's work says too little on women and religion, this one rectifies that balance, and in doing so helps to create a greater understanding of women's lives. It is an understanding that builds on the evidence and information that comes before it chronologically in this paper, even as it is in some ways complicated. For instance, Revolutionary Conceptions places some of the change earlier than Ryan notices it in Utica, but that could very well be a matter of geography or focus. Similarly, the broad range of time and the many different twists and turns of community formation can at times make it hard to view it as a cohesive whole. However, she manages to wrap it all up relatively effectively in the conclusion, which largely exists as a remediation and contextualization of the overall narrative which she believed best fit her data. In this sense, it is successful, though one wonders at the imposed narrative at points, such as the the class-based dimensions which, as she admits in the introduction, she lacks evidence to truly analyze.
Each of these four books helps to create an overall timeline, and a means--ever evolving, sometimes contradicting--to understand the changes and differences in the experience of women, especially in marriage and in families, from the colonial through the antebellum period. They each come at the same kinds of problems involving sources, involving prejudice, and involving the presence of some kinds of data and the absence of others. But they come to very different conclusions. In this, one can see how broad primarily-social Histories can truly be. All four works used a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to come to their conclusions, and several directly cite sociology. They create both a history, and a coherent set of things to study in order to understand their own historiography. This historiography has importance in helping to tease out important questions about the past, questions that even fifty years ago were too rarely asked. Even now there is much work to do, but it is only by studying the historiographic past that one can truly know how to do that.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Reading Edward Said's 2003 "Preface" to Orientalism (1978) is pretty damn depressing, because a whole lot of nothing's really gotten better, and in many places and ways it's gotten worse.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Also, I'm freakishly rusty. Like, in getting into the right mindset to read hundreds of pages every week. I need to read faster, but I'm still stuck in summer mode. School starts technically tomorrow, so I have time. But, geeze. Right now, even reading I like feels like a slog (well, non-fiction reading, as opposed to fan-fiction.)
Oh, classes!
I have Women In Early American (Online)
U.S. History Colloquium (which seems to be focusing on the 20th century)
How To History 1
Oh, classes!
I have Women In Early American (Online)
U.S. History Colloquium (which seems to be focusing on the 20th century)
How To History 1
- Pronouns
- They/Them
"In 1800...in the province of Caracas...the population combrised nearly half a million people... Some 4,000 people, around .5% of the population, held all of the usable land."--Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt.
What the hell?!
What the hell?!
- Pronouns
- They/Them
TIL: About Hustle.
I listened to a talk about how a documentary/oral history film project got made, and it involved talking to hundreds of people, spending hundreds of hours *just* copying stuff from archives, travelling to Maine (and having to snow-shoe to town because it's January), to California, to...
It was exhausting just listening to the story.
You apparently really gotta have hustle.
I listened to a talk about how a documentary/oral history film project got made, and it involved talking to hundreds of people, spending hundreds of hours *just* copying stuff from archives, travelling to Maine (and having to snow-shoe to town because it's January), to California, to...
It was exhausting just listening to the story.
You apparently really gotta have hustle.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Oh God this is great. This is amazing.
American Boosters for the Annexation of various parts of Central America in the 1840s-50s would travel there and make up a bunch of things about how great and perfect it was. And more than that, they'd fail to mention, or even deny, that mosquitos or disease were even concerns! Just, baldly deny it all, and talk about now Panama was practically American and how really, they were naturally part of each other because of something something sea-trade routes.
(I mean, the results of this sort of thinking was eventually pretty shitty, but it's amusing, imagining some asshole imperialist beating off Yellow Fever carrying mosquitos with a stick while writing paeans to the healthfulness of the climes.)
American Boosters for the Annexation of various parts of Central America in the 1840s-50s would travel there and make up a bunch of things about how great and perfect it was. And more than that, they'd fail to mention, or even deny, that mosquitos or disease were even concerns! Just, baldly deny it all, and talk about now Panama was practically American and how really, they were naturally part of each other because of something something sea-trade routes.
(I mean, the results of this sort of thinking was eventually pretty shitty, but it's amusing, imagining some asshole imperialist beating off Yellow Fever carrying mosquitos with a stick while writing paeans to the healthfulness of the climes.)
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
One wonders if maybe history would have turned out better in the long run had they been a little more persuasive.
IMPERIALIST BOOSTER: "Come, my friends, to the land where everything is pleasant in all of the ways, all the time."
FELLOW IMPERIALISTS: * arrive en masse *
FELLOW IMPERIALISTS: * die from heat stroke and mosquitoes, every last one *
Meanwhile, in America...
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Would anyone be interested in seeing the Annotated Bibliography I've been doing? I've had to write 300-word Abstracts for each of the twenty books or articles (but mostly books, monographs in fact.) I haven't actually read all the books, but I've read the intro, conclusion, and Bibliography for all of the books, which is all you need to do a beginner sort of Abstract.
I'm supposed to narrow it down to five works that I *will* read, and those will be the basif of a Literary Review.
So I thought that any fellow historians, or even people interested about New Deal Culture, might at least see what's recent. Because one of the rules is that as much of the work as possible should be within the last five years, and if not, still *very* recent.
So it's the latest and greatest of the Academic American Consensus, etc, etc.
I'm supposed to narrow it down to five works that I *will* read, and those will be the basif of a Literary Review.
So I thought that any fellow historians, or even people interested about New Deal Culture, might at least see what's recent. Because one of the rules is that as much of the work as possible should be within the last five years, and if not, still *very* recent.
So it's the latest and greatest of the Academic American Consensus, etc, etc.
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
Sounds fantastic. By all means, drop that on us.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Warning: The copy-paste job stripped some of the formatting out, like italics for book titles, and for that and other reasons, I've numbered the books/articles, with the space between the numbers holding the abstracts. Capiche?
Edit: Also, the last sentence is something I wouldn't have in a normal Abstract, but is required in this version of it, because I need to explain my thinking about how five of these would fit into a Literature Review.
Edit: Also, the last sentence is something I wouldn't have in a normal Abstract, but is required in this version of it, because I need to explain my thinking about how five of these would fit into a Literature Review.
Last edited:
Annotated Bibliography (with Abstracts): Society and Culture in New Deal America
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Annotated Bibliography: Society and Culture in New Deal America
Laurent
1) Adams, Katherine H., and Michael L. Keene. Women, Art and the New Deal. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,, Publishers, 2016.
There are only so many ways to express the simple truth that the New Deal was a unique and startlingly different time in American history: certainly the investment in arts was part of it, and a part often overlooked. In this cultural monograph, the authors examine the experiences of, and art of all kinds produced by, female artists and writers in the New Deal, as well as how this contributed to the development of new genres and new conceptions of art. While many people have examined the women in a specific project, relatively little work has been done to consider the overall impact of female New Deal artists up to this point, and that's where the authors come in. The monograph examines both the documents and art themselves, the reaction at the time, and a very wide variety of secondary literature, some of it penned by the authors themselves, on related topics. The work begins by examining the manner in which New Deal narratives and art were often documentary, meant to present a picture of the way life and the world is. It continues by examining the life and experience of many of the women artists, and the second half of the book moves from topic to topic, cutting across the divides in order to examine the various reactions by women to issues such as birth control, romance, class, the modern woman, work, and even aging. Far from being simple, the variety of female contributions to the cultural discourse speaks both of the possible impact that women had on it, and also the variety of women themselves, as well as the knowledge and education of at least some. Thus, ultimately, while I think this might be more appropriate in a "New Deal Art" Literary Review, it would be interesting as well as a mirror towards New Deal gender.
2) Allen, Holly. Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives. Ithaca: Cornell University, 2015.
The stories people tell are often lost to history, and yet in these stories and representations, Holly Allen has found a way to examine how the Depression and New Deal programs were viewed, as shaped by gendered, racial, and sexual beliefs, and how these views influenced their implementation and ultimately helped shape WWII views of civic identity. While some historians have examined the formation of civic identity in the 1930s, few have talked about the sexual politics and anxieties of the New Deal, which Allen places as important in understanding its formation. This new emphasis, as well as a broad intersectionality, combines with the focus on the civic narrative as the central source of this monograph in order to create a political and cultural history of surprising depth. Allen's work operates both chronologically and thematically, with each of the six main chapters on a different topic, such as chapter three "'Builder of Men': Homosociality and the Nationalist Accents of the Civilian Conservation Corps" or the sixth chapter "The Citizen-Soldier and the Citizen-Internee: Fraternity, Race, and American Nationhood, 1942-46." This process of civic narrative ultimately constructed a view of citizenship that decentered or even excluded women, so-called sexual deviants, and non-whites from their view of the depression and then the New Deal, and then ultimately from--in many ways--the second world war. Far from being of little import, these civic narratives shaped how relief was given out, the way programs were constructed, and the power of bias and bigotry in New Deal programs, and as such warrant much further study building on the very solid and cogent foundation that Allen has laid out on this topic, especially in capturing the places where gender, race, and sexuality combined to create novel narratives. I believe, especially for the impact of these stories on the government and overall culture, that this would be a good contribution to 'the public' side of culture-making, as it were.
3) Bégin, Camille. Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for Americas Food. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
If you are what you eat, then what is America? In this "cultural, social, and sensory" history, Camille Begin examines the way that the Federal Writer's Project attempted to portray and emphasize the diversity and plenty of American cuisine of the 1930s, and acted as an attempt at nostalgia and renewal in an age of increasingly standardized eating. In this project, Begin follows in the footsteps of other writers of food history in recognizing this rather common call to unity, but emphasizes the gendered and racial components of the FWP studies, and the fluidity of the definition of "American food." Begin works from FWP writings, for the never-released America Eats book primarily, especially analyzing it through the concept of taste (physiological, cultural, and specific, what they call "sensory economies"). Additionally they use copious copious secondary sources from within the field, and other notes, Begin adeptly argues their points on taste, senses, and culture, while keeping the writings in careful context with their time. Begin starts with an overview of the America Eats project, before delving into an examination of how the drive for regional food interacted with industrialization, with reference to race and gender as well. From there, Begin expands beyond America Eats into a wide variety of related food-writing projects in order to look even more specifically at region and race. In the third chapter, Begin examines the sensory economy of "black food" and how this led to culinary segregation between African-American Southern cuisine and the white version supposedly so separate. Following up on a similar topic, the fourth chapter examines Mexican food and the Southwest, while the fifth considers the ethnography and centrality of food. I'm kinda stunned by how amazing this looks, considering what I expected: the only real question is whether it fits in with four other books.
4) Bindas, Kenneth J. Modernity and the Great Depression: The Transformation of American Society, 1930-1941. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2017.
What is modernism and modernity: ask a dozen scholars across a half-dozen fields, and one would find that there were just as many answers. In this monograph, Kenneth Bindas examines how Americans, both in the government and outside of it, tried to embrace modernism as a solution to the Depression, and in doing so defined and shaped the history of the New Deal. Drawing on decades of research as to the nature of modernity, Bindas is adding his stone to the pile by examining modernity in a very specific and limited setting, arguing that it is different from modernity both before and since. He argues that modernity's influence and nature are shaped by, and draw from, the American religious traditions, both their structures and their language. To argue this, he ranges the disciplines to bring sources and chapters ranging from the Civilian Conservation Corps to Interior Decorators, all held together by their faith in modernity, which had, according to Bindas, reached its nadir in the 1930s with the New Deal programs. Ideas have power, especially when placed in a wide-ranging and carefully selected historical context so as to not seem to float above the action, and a belief in modernity (and belief is the right one) certainly has some explanatory power in relating the cultural and social shifts that were going on in America at the time. This portrayal moves beyond a simple exposition of elite intellectual faith in the New Deal, and chapters such as that on expositions, world's fairs, and music all help to capture more fully the scope of his arguments in a way that a chapter on programs can't. However, one does wonder about modernity and the failures of the New Deal, and whether there was any relationship between the two. Overall, this monograph is one I've definitely chosen, if only for its cogent cultural writing and topic which diverges from that of some of the others, but can fit in with a many of them.
5) Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2010.
The picture of American culture in the 1930s has long been somewhat static, of great poverty and serious art, or of whimsy and escapism, both of which are at once true and far from adequate. In this fascinating cultural historical monograph, Morris Dickstein tries to capture something of the nature of Depression era cultures, especially emphasizing the combination of escapism and engagement, regionalism and new, modern technologies, that make it impossible to speak of the culture without examining it in depth. To do this, he examines, primarily, obvious cultural artifacts: newsreels, flims, paintings, books, songs, poetry, and plays. On the one hand, his search for the tension and disagreement within these sources elevates it above being a search for a Depression-era zeitgeist, but the emphasis on "enduring" sources runs the risk of creating a best-of culture, though the sheer scope of the sources helps. The monograph begins, surprisingly, in the 1890s with the discovery of poverty, and the way that this era and its lessons would be re-discovered or built on by later generations: social realism was the first topic, as well as the discovery of the needs and woes of depression. The first part being in one sense lower-class, the second part of the work focuses on the middle-class, looking at Hollywood and images of the American dream and how to achieve it, as well as how to uphold its power in a time of great upheaval. The third part focused on escapism and the "culture of elegance" that went on even amid the Depression, while the final part tried to weave these thread togethers into the "Search for community" in which these disparate elements come together, as well as the nature of populism in culture. Culture, in Dickstein's conception, is work and effort to maintain. This work would be good… but it's from 2009, so there's that.
6) Elridge, David. "We're Only Kids Now, But Someday …': Hollywood Musicals and the Great Depression 'Youth Crisis'." In Hollywood and the Great Depression : American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s, edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies, 216-38. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
One could say, of course, that the Youth was always in crisis, but during the 1930s in America, the perception of a crisis in so many areas was more acute than expected, coming up not only in serious social dramas, but even in some musicals. In this article of film history, David Eldridge examines the musical Babes In Arms, and its sequel musicals, to look at what it could teach about Hollywood and popular perceptions of a 'Youth Crisis.' Historians and Film Critics alike, owing to the way that Babes in Arms created a sort of musical cliche whose roots might well reach down to School of Rock (in a way), have discounted examining the musicals. But for Eldridge, their very popularity makes them worth subjects of inquiry and consideration. These films both acknowledged and yet defused the tensions of the 1930s, both hinting at a sort of showbiz Utopianism, while also celebrating the fundamental cultural status quo, and assuring adults that ultimately children were going to be able to step up and take the burdens of adulthood onto themselves. To make this argument, Eldridge spent the most time examining Babes In Arms, but all of the works receive some attention, such as an examination of what Girl Crazy (1943) said about Western College Failure, and how the movie's premise (failing college trying to survive) differs wildly from the musical it was based on (Dude Ranch becomes a Speakeasy, 1930). In regards to Babes In Arms, much time is spent on the finale, 'God's Country' and the way that its Christian and unifying messages contrast with some earlier songs, especially one scene which deliberately invokes Nazi Germany, but in child form. Ultimately, while it has plenty to say about culture in the 1930s, even if it wasn't an article, it'd be slightly left-field.
7) Gilbert, Jess. Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2016.
By the time of the Great Depression, a majority of the American population was technically urban, by a very loose definition, and yet, stung by the 1920s and still sizeable in number, the rural areas received plenty of attention from New Deal planners. In this intellectual and social history, Jess Gilbert examines the goals of, and attempts at, planned rural democracy that they believe underly New Deal Agrarian policy and help define it. While previous scholars have examined Agrarian Policy, and even some of the same intellectuals and planners, few have centered their analysis on the idea of economic democracy and citizen involvement in agricultural decision-making as being central to the efforts to remake America. In order to examine this, Gilbert looks at government statistics, secondary sources often well outside history and stretching into agricultural and economic policy, and documents relating to some of the major Agrarian Intellectuals' whose perspective helped drive the conception of the reforms. By providing a sort of biography of these intellectuals' and the society which influenced them, it allows a narrative sort of through line to enliven the discussion and classification of intellectuals, as well as the recounting of all three Agrarian New Deals, the last of which is the focus of Gilbert's efforts. Caught up as it was in the second world war, and taking part in the last portion of the New Deal, it is often ignored, and yet its existence and nature were, to Gilbert, signs of the real potential and actual reforms towards greater economic democracy. These reforms, however, fell apart both because of conservative opposition, but also in the face of the pressures of the world war. The work manages in one sense to be too optimistic, because the suddenness of the program's collapse contrasts with a description of its success, but it is nonetheless excellently argued. I think that while very good, there are other works on rural life that fit more with the themes of the literary review.
8) Gough, Peter, and Peggy Seeger. Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
The New Deal truly did attempt to involve itself in every facet of culture, and not surprisingly music wasn't exempt in this. Peter Gough attempts, in this monograph, to shed light on a previously ignored and often dismissed part of the New Deal project, highlighting the regionalism, political importance, and advancement of folk music that resulted from the various programs, whether the Federal Music Project or its successors. Historians, Gough claims, often dismiss the project as being, not only a failure, but as resulting into the homogenization of American music in a way that had long-term consequences. Gough, alternately, stresses the multiplicity and value that the project placed on preserving regional music culture and ultimately promote multiculturalism, and does so in the context of several different regions in the west. This socio-cultural history uses government documents as well as letters and secondary sources to sketch its overall narrative. First Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada, then California, and finally Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington. After these studies, which highlight the effect of the program and the differences between how they program functioned based on location, which is of course a vital distinction in his argument. It continues with a look at the racialized portion of the project, especially in relation to African-American music styles, as well as its (leftist) political aspects and the formation of folk music. The program itself foundered as World War ramped up and anti-communism reigned, but, according to Gough, the effects and long-term impact of the project were felt in the folk music revival and the survival of music-ways that might have otherwise been lost. Similar to Democratic Art, and yet notably different, this monograph could help look into the effect of government on an entire category of art and culture, impacts that are only recently coming back into the light.
9) Greene, Alison Collis. No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. UK: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Those who know history are doomed to watch others forget and repeat it, and the New Deal, the site of so much historical refashioning, is no exception. Allison Collis Green's religious, cultural, and social history chronicles the impact of the Great Depression on the South, specifically the Delta, both in terms of social reactions and poverty, but also the way religion was viewed and acted. Whereas after the Depression ended, mainline, white (supremacist) Protestant churches constructed narratives of a less startling and destructive Depression, and churches that were always opposed to government interference and help. This narrative is contradicted by a stunning collection of primary sources (newspapers, church papers, government documents, published sources) and a healthy smattering of secondary sources, all of which point towards the unexpected and desperate religious, social, and economic situation of the Depression. Far from rejecting governmental aid, they realized they were unable to do this on their own, and many entered a sort of partnership with the government, one that foundered eventually on the secularism of the government, as well as its non-total surrender to White Supremacy, something that many prominent southern white Protestants disliked, even as Democratic control persisted for decades to come. Thus it it a narrative of the limits of religious charity and support for the poor in the face of a crisis bigger than anyone could have imagined. Her bold arguments come in part from a frustration at the narratives of the present, and at the end of the book she declares that America was "haunted by a past it refused to remember" (201). Cogent, bold, and well backed, it challenges a common historical view and highlights religious and social history, both from the perspective of the elite, the government, and the lay people of faith that that I believe could be very helpful interesting when combined with sources looking at other aspects of religion, or at other influencers on culture.
10) Kasson, John F. The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
In 1934, the Depression was at its height, and poverty was rampant; in 1934 Bright Eyes was released and Shirley Temple sang of the "Good Ship Lollipop." In this work somewhere between cultural history and narrative biography, John Kasson argues that these two occurrences aren't nearly so unrelated as one might think. Using a combination of scripts, newspaper articles, and a wide variety of secondary sources (as well as Temple's own biography), Kasson attempts to capture most of all the public perception, more than a story of her life specifically. The story focuses on a single decade of her work, though it begins with her parents, and ends with the vast majority of her life in a conclusion. Most of all, his argument is that Shirley Temple was deployed, in large part, as part of a cultural project of "smile diplomacy" that mirrored the efforts of Roosevelt. Shirley Temple in her stories captured the hearts of young and old, united them with her innocence, regardless of factors that might be significant: even the racism of several of her movies was the sort that presented a harmless and submissive (and thus nonthreatening) view of Blacks. In other words, all sections and creeds could be united for their appreciation for a smile, a song, and a little dance, and this appeal towards a certain kind of unity was part of a strategy of distraction, not in a conspiratorial sense, but simply in that this was what the markets demanded, for a time. And Hollywood delivered, whether it wrung her out to do it or not, her smile worthy of note, her life an open book for others to peruse. In this, she was in some ways the forerunner of later cultural movements which would emphasize the importance of being chipper in the face of all evidence. This work, while interesting for the parallels it brings up, would not be a good choice for the literature review.
11) Kelly, Timothy, Margaret Power, and Michael Carey. Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community during the Great Depression. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016.
The New-Deal era federal homestead-style projects were not merely a southern project, and just as they varied by region, so do does the interpretation of their impact. In this study of Norvelt, Pennsylvania (renamed after Eleanor Roosevelt shortly into its existence), Timothy Kelly, Margaret Power, and Michael Cary have come to a very different conclusion than Smith's Trouble in Goshen about similar communities in the South, as well the opinions of other prominent scholars. They argue for the moderate success and efficacy of the program to create and sustain Norvelt, and argue for its status as an example of successful governmental relief and its ability to be instructive about the structuring of middle-class life in the 1930s. Using personal interview with children of the first homesteaders in Norvelt, as well as census data, governmental data, and newspapers, this social-historical monograph studies community creation in all of its forms. It begins with an examination of the homesteaders' backgrounds and the difficulties the working-class faced in the 1920s and 1930s, and how that would lead to them being willing to take part in this experiment, for an experiment it most certainly was, with potentially unpredictable results. The community began, had its detractors (as did most New Deal programs) and was visited by Eleanor Roosevelt, and within this process of community formation, the authors look at architecture, laws, and socializing to paint a picture of what it was like, before finally taking Norvelt into today (it is still a town, however small and dying.) The monograph sometimes is too enthusiastic in declaring success, such as admitting but not dwelling on the racial homogeneity of Norvelt (one black family… ever) and other potential failings. But despite that, it is an interesting read, and if used it would have to be in comparison to Troubles in Goshen.
12) McGregor, Alexander. The Catholic Church and Hollywood: Censorship and Morality in 1930s Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Neither culture war nor moral guardians are particularly new in American history, no matter how prominent they have become in the past decades, despite our overwhelming desire to view our time as new in unique. In his work of cultural history, Alexander McGregor charts the complex relationship between Catholicism and Hollywood in the 1930s, and the way that, far from being a reactive force, they were, in his description, a proactive force waging a cultural war for influence on American culture. In this, he contracts those who view the Church fundamentally as defensive, as well as those who suspect that an institution hated by many bigoted Americans could play such a role. In countering this, he draws upon their unity and their common mission from higher-ups to emphasize that through sophisticated and careful influence, the Church was able to shape Hollywood. It did so both through the growth of the Hays code, written by two Catholics in order to set guidelines as to what should and should not be portrayed in film, as well as the League of Decency, which boycotted and acted as an economic check on films it found to be immoral. While the timespan in which the Catholic Church had this much influence was brief, the potential impact of it on Hollywood on issues such as abortion, homosexuality, sexuality in general, and its portrayal of the church itself could last far longer. The work itself declares its interest in the formation of the themes, message, and iconography, instead of trying to examine the impact it had outside of Hollywood on the populace, in doing so it limits itself to a single discreet but broad-reaching and relevant topic of religious influence on media in a time of great upheaval and self-definition for a still-fledgling industry. I believe, as a way of indicating how private institutions can shape high-cultural constructions, it could be part of the list, easily.
13) McLerran, Jennifer. A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933-1943. Tucson, Ar.: University of Arizona Press, 2012.
Once Native-Americans were conquered and subjugated, they could be safely commodified, and in fact were in many ways, including through the New Deal art investment in native art. In this monograph, Jennifer McLerran examines the attempt by New Deal creators of 'Indian Policy' to create and market Native art in an attempt to thread the needle between preserving folkways and providing capital and economic engagement to Native communities. This commodification of Native art helped strengthen a view of Natives that emphasized "primitive romanticism" in their art, and otherwise placed them outside the modern world by creating a binary in which there was merely the choice between full embrasure of white modernity and maintenance of traditional cultural ways, a binary that didn't reflect the full range of cultural possibilities. This history of art, politics and culture draws on contemporary and modern art studies, as well as conceptions that owe much to bell hooks idea of cultural commoditization of outsiders, in order to make its specific and yet sweeping arguments. Disagreeing with other monographs in the bibliography, McLerran views a focus on (Native) folk culture as potentially problematic and flawed. McLerran concludes that while New Deal programs were beneficial to Indian painting, but even there emphasized the primitive nature of said Indians, while having, in the name of driving off tourists and preserving native folk ways, effects that in other respects were negative. The volume contributes to the overall discussion, but calls for more detailed and incisive study, serving to fill in the picture for others to build off of and interpret, and makes no premature declaration of a total evaluation of the success and failure of all of the programs. While I enjoyed the work and believe it deserves its place in the Bibliography, its art history seems slightly peripheral to the most-specific question that would have to be examined in the five-book literary review.
14) Mollet, Tracey Louise. Cartoons in Hard Times: The Animated Shorts of Disney and Warner Brothers in Depression and War 1932-1945. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Animation is no laughing matter, and in the 1930s it could reveal cultural and social realities, or even help in some ways to define and contextualize them. Mollet examines the animated shorts of Fleischer and Disney from the Great Depression through the second world war in America, in order to show the ways that they reflected the times they were in, how they imagined and in some ways argued for America's place in the world, and then how these strands of political and cultural engagement (domestic and foreign) combined in the making of WWII animated shorts and propaganda. While animation has been studied before as a historical phenomenon, studies have been focused either on a different form (long-form animations) or on a more limited time period, as with Michael Shull's Doing Their Bit: Wartime Animated Short Films, whose work Mollet respects but believes could be better understood by also looking at their pre-war evolution. This cultural history uses the techniques of film study and a bevy of secondary sources and contextual footnotes to look from short to short, capturing a picture of dozens of still frames, a short of its own. Ultimately, Mollet is trying to get at the root of wartime animated short propaganda, and in doing so she pushes back the timeline and examines these animated shorts always as, in some way, propaganda in a mostly non-pejorative sense. Operating chronologically, the work benefits from its examination of two very different studios, with two rather different animation practices, in order to construct a total picture of a very popular genre of entertainment and its impact both on culture and politics towards American engagement on the world stage. I believe that this work would do well, potentially, as one of the books that mine the private corporate and governmental side of cultural influence, contrasted both with works on other forms of entertainment, and works on popular engagement and agency in culture.
15) Musher, Sharon Ann. Democratic Art: The New Deals Influence on American Culture. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
In some ways, a New Deal for art is so odd of a concept for our present minds, inundated as they are by the power of anti-intellectualism in government and a concept of a free-market of art, to grasp that it cries out for explanation. Musher, writing at the tail end of yet another recession, ultimately engages in an examination of just how this investment happened, its impact, and why it ended up in seeming failure. Historians have had a mixed opinion on New Deal art, and much of the work thus far has been to recover and celebrate its achievements. Musher wishes to move beyond that, and address the programs as a whole, as well as a startlingly diverse and sometimes democratized body of disparate work, in order to get at its fundamental nature, whether it was as some Leftist critics claimed, a deradicalizing and hegemonic exercise or not. This cultural art history looks at specific government-funded works of art, divided by aesthetic vision rather than genre, with primary sources such as documentation, journalist's responses, letters and even exhibit response cards available to provide context both on the making of the work and the public's interaction with it. Musher concludes that, ultimately, this public art funding was a "pin of an oscillating hinge" opening the door on ways that the state could interact with the arts, but ultimately closing after a brief window. This closing, Musher argues, has to do with three factors: first, worries about the racial and political background of the artists, second 'supposed' in Musher's words concern about the content and form of the art, and third, the conflict between their interest in lay participation in art over marketability challenged established art norms. This work would be valuable as an example of how the government influences public culture through the New Deal programs, as contrasted with monographs on the public and various private/corporate programs.
16) Sharpless, Rebecca, and Melissa Walker. "Inside the Farmhouse : Ruth Allen and Margaret Jarman Hagood Confront Rural Realities." In Reassessing the 1930s South, edited by Karen L. Cox and Sarah E. Gardner. Baton Rouge, Louis: Lousiana State University Press, 2018.
Historians, as simple as it is to say, are also part of history, as are those whose mere act is to study what is: observation changes a thing, and defines the observer. This article by Rebecca Sharpless and Melissa Walker examines the sociological research of two women, Ruth Allen and Margaret Hagood, in the 1930s, each separately examining the lives and plights of Southern farm women, each coming to their own conclusions both on the nature of the problems facing these women and their solutions, and both of them somewhat influential in helping to understand the topic. The authors examine their background and the work they did in order to create a picture of how they came to their conclusions: both were the daughters of educators, intelligent, well-learned women, and both, for all their differences, argued against the thesis that individual failing was the reason for rural women's poverty. Hagood's research looked at childbirth and motherhood, and included only White women, supposedly owing to the fact that her somewhat qualitative research method relied on a rapport and comfort that she was unsure she could achieve with Black women. This research uncovered hard-working women, trapped in an economic system of tenancy that was almost-impossible to escape and part of a cash-crop system that left the entire region (North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama) impoverished in some way. This work culminated in a very well known and academically influential book on the subject in 1939. Allen, on the other hand, used quantitative studies to examine women's labor in Texas, and while she is fair-handed to her African-American respondents, she was very dismissive of Mexican women. Her ultimate conclusion was that women needed to be paid for their work making cotton, instead of being a mere supplement to their husband's income. This fascinating article tells one much, but it is an article, so I won't be using it on the review.
17) Smith, Fred C. Trouble in Goshen: Plain Folk, Roosevelt, Jesus, and Marx in the Great Depression South. Jackson, Miss: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.
The New Deal had at times radical and startling experiments, and while some of them worked, not all of them clearly did. In this social historical monograph, Fred C. Smith looks at the Tulepo Homesteads, Dyess Colony, and, outside governmental control but along those same lines, the Delta Cooperative Farm, all of which were created in the 1930s in order to be model communities of one kind or another, and all of which, he argued, faced significant problems and ultimately failed in their purpose. In arguing this, he stands against some historians who have had a more positive read on it, as well as those who have studied other such communities in other areas (such as Norvelt) and came away with a more positive legacy. Using a balanced approach that seems to try to describe and classify as much as rush ahead in judgement, as well as letters, newspapers, and contemporary interviews, he comes eventually to why and what these communities were, and why they failed. Smith lays the blame at the feet of the government, which failed both to make itself understood and speak in a language and way that the poor of the South would understand and respect, and a lack of attractive benefits to either of the communities, both of which offered small and inadequate farms and support in exchange for decades of marginal labor and control by the government. It was not truly possible to create a cotton yeomanry, Smith claims, and all three attempts failed to realize that, radical Christian and Socialist private communes being just as likely to fail as New Deal model communities. In sussing out the lives, thoughts, and experiences of the downtrodden as viewed through this failed hope off a better life, Smith's work seems excellent, but I am unsure as to whether it'd fit the more cultural focus of the literature review.
18) Smith, J.E. "Organisation Women and Belle Rebels: Hollywood's Working Women in the 1930s." In Hollywood In the Great Depression: American Film, Politics, and Society in the 1930s, edited by Iwan Morgon and Phillip John Davies, 66-85. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
The old paradigm of waves of feminism leaves the 1930s stuck between two great movements, inconsequential or even a time of retreat. By examining the portrayal of women in 1930s Hollywood films, J.E. Smith uses this exhaustive article to look at the portrayal of working women in media, as well as the possibilities that were open to female actresses in the 1930s to work in Hollywood. Bucking historiography on women in Hollywood, which emphasises a time of promise early in the medium, before it became profitable and male-dominated, Smith contends that even in the 1930s there was extensive opportunity, and that far from being discouraged, at least publicly, female editors such as Anne Bauchens and Barbara McLean could be praised or even awarded for their efforts. Starlets in Hollywood, for all the possibility of amazing pay, ultimately worked long and hard, as did all of the women who were more "invisible" and yet contributed to the making of movies, and were recognized, at least in Hollywood, as worthy of more in the way of promotion and consideration than American culture as a whole afforded at the time. Not only through work, but through the movies of the 1930s, heavy on adaptations of women's fiction, and works such as A Woman Rebels and Kitty Foyle, whose portrayal of a woman working her way through life is notably sympathetic. Meanwhile Gone With The Wind portrayed women as being part of the working world, even as it didn't challenge many of the racial and gender-based conceptions of popular culture. There was, Smith concludes reasonably, a meaningful argument for both a surprisingly high for its time number of women in important Hollywood positions, and a female audience willing to pay the money to see films that portrayed working women in a less than negative light. In arguing this, I think it does help highlight the difference between Hollywood and other parts of the culture… but as an article, I can't and won't use it.
19) Stewart, Catherine A. Long past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers Project. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Among historians of American slavery, the slave narratives gathered during the Federal Writers' Project during the 1930s are regarded rightfully as a very rich and important source for slave experience, and a signal achievement in, among other things, oral history. Yet in this monograph, Catherine Stewart examines the way that the project reflected the agendas both of its diverse gatherers, the government, and the interviewees as well in ways that complicate our understanding of them. Some historians have written about the biases from the interviewers part, the ways that the interviews were shaped by what they were looking for, but less has been done towards examining the cultural disjunctions between interviewer and interviewee, which allowed the ladder to use black oral-cultural constructs to sneak hidden meaning beneath them. Using black literary criticism and an understanding of the oral culture of the time, Stewart charts the culture's impact on the project in seven chapters. First, on the changing views of the directors, drawing on the governmental and intellectual sources most often addressed in this topic, and highlighting how the change in directors and the flow of the project shifted things. The second half of the book focuses on how African-Americans attempted to influence and possess "authority over prevailing discourse" on the nature of black culture (Stewart, 9). While middle-class black intellectuals shaped it in their image, the interviewees used vernacular cultural conditions to attempt to seize control and agency in their own narrative. The results are a complex combination of documents that have greatly influenced the way that people wrote slavery history and understood it for many decades to come, into the modern day. As an examination of race, one of the more fascinating New Deal projects, and a cultural history with teeth in it, I think this would be a good choice in combination with works on the struggle within New Deal initiatives.
20) Whisenhunt, Donald W. Utopian Movements and Ideas of the Great Depression: Dreamers, Believers, and Madmen. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.
Utopia, if Whisenhunt is to be believed, is a very common sort of affliction in American life and thought. In this intellectual history, Whisenhunt examines a variety of Utopian or quasi-Utopian figures who attempted to come to a solution to the Depression, and most of whom were marginal at best in the political or even cultural sense. In doing so, he's throwing light on some fascinatingly odd figures, and doing so in light of his view on the inherent American drive towards Utopia and towards "progress" in history. This view seems as much prescriptive and complimentary as it is descriptive, and the monograph itself seems to use the variety of the radical figures to suppose a fundamental intellectual and cultural American unity. Relying primarily on newspapers and letters, Whisenhunt's work attempts to engage in the narrative and ideas of each of the thinkers, whether they are wildly popular (by marginal radical standards) or entirely unknown. The Utopian movement withered and died by 1936, but was at least theoretically a movement, for all that their radicalism and grand promises didn't get too far, while someone like Henry McCowen, advocate of Moneyless Government, is remembered and included because the author encountered him in his old age, and was fascinated by this strange character. Such division defines the work, the historical importance as much in its failure and existence as any impact other than secondary on American history. In doing so without noticing the unifying narrative of American Utopianism, the work can seem at times like a collection of entirely separate and almost-unrelated stories, and yet it does hold together in the face of the tragedy, the Depression, that all were reacting to and trying to overcome. While this work is interesting, the totality of the intellectual vision of American thought implied here, as well as its lack of socio-cultural relevance, make it worthy of inclusion but not review.
Laurent
1) Adams, Katherine H., and Michael L. Keene. Women, Art and the New Deal. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,, Publishers, 2016.
There are only so many ways to express the simple truth that the New Deal was a unique and startlingly different time in American history: certainly the investment in arts was part of it, and a part often overlooked. In this cultural monograph, the authors examine the experiences of, and art of all kinds produced by, female artists and writers in the New Deal, as well as how this contributed to the development of new genres and new conceptions of art. While many people have examined the women in a specific project, relatively little work has been done to consider the overall impact of female New Deal artists up to this point, and that's where the authors come in. The monograph examines both the documents and art themselves, the reaction at the time, and a very wide variety of secondary literature, some of it penned by the authors themselves, on related topics. The work begins by examining the manner in which New Deal narratives and art were often documentary, meant to present a picture of the way life and the world is. It continues by examining the life and experience of many of the women artists, and the second half of the book moves from topic to topic, cutting across the divides in order to examine the various reactions by women to issues such as birth control, romance, class, the modern woman, work, and even aging. Far from being simple, the variety of female contributions to the cultural discourse speaks both of the possible impact that women had on it, and also the variety of women themselves, as well as the knowledge and education of at least some. Thus, ultimately, while I think this might be more appropriate in a "New Deal Art" Literary Review, it would be interesting as well as a mirror towards New Deal gender.
2) Allen, Holly. Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives. Ithaca: Cornell University, 2015.
The stories people tell are often lost to history, and yet in these stories and representations, Holly Allen has found a way to examine how the Depression and New Deal programs were viewed, as shaped by gendered, racial, and sexual beliefs, and how these views influenced their implementation and ultimately helped shape WWII views of civic identity. While some historians have examined the formation of civic identity in the 1930s, few have talked about the sexual politics and anxieties of the New Deal, which Allen places as important in understanding its formation. This new emphasis, as well as a broad intersectionality, combines with the focus on the civic narrative as the central source of this monograph in order to create a political and cultural history of surprising depth. Allen's work operates both chronologically and thematically, with each of the six main chapters on a different topic, such as chapter three "'Builder of Men': Homosociality and the Nationalist Accents of the Civilian Conservation Corps" or the sixth chapter "The Citizen-Soldier and the Citizen-Internee: Fraternity, Race, and American Nationhood, 1942-46." This process of civic narrative ultimately constructed a view of citizenship that decentered or even excluded women, so-called sexual deviants, and non-whites from their view of the depression and then the New Deal, and then ultimately from--in many ways--the second world war. Far from being of little import, these civic narratives shaped how relief was given out, the way programs were constructed, and the power of bias and bigotry in New Deal programs, and as such warrant much further study building on the very solid and cogent foundation that Allen has laid out on this topic, especially in capturing the places where gender, race, and sexuality combined to create novel narratives. I believe, especially for the impact of these stories on the government and overall culture, that this would be a good contribution to 'the public' side of culture-making, as it were.
3) Bégin, Camille. Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for Americas Food. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
If you are what you eat, then what is America? In this "cultural, social, and sensory" history, Camille Begin examines the way that the Federal Writer's Project attempted to portray and emphasize the diversity and plenty of American cuisine of the 1930s, and acted as an attempt at nostalgia and renewal in an age of increasingly standardized eating. In this project, Begin follows in the footsteps of other writers of food history in recognizing this rather common call to unity, but emphasizes the gendered and racial components of the FWP studies, and the fluidity of the definition of "American food." Begin works from FWP writings, for the never-released America Eats book primarily, especially analyzing it through the concept of taste (physiological, cultural, and specific, what they call "sensory economies"). Additionally they use copious copious secondary sources from within the field, and other notes, Begin adeptly argues their points on taste, senses, and culture, while keeping the writings in careful context with their time. Begin starts with an overview of the America Eats project, before delving into an examination of how the drive for regional food interacted with industrialization, with reference to race and gender as well. From there, Begin expands beyond America Eats into a wide variety of related food-writing projects in order to look even more specifically at region and race. In the third chapter, Begin examines the sensory economy of "black food" and how this led to culinary segregation between African-American Southern cuisine and the white version supposedly so separate. Following up on a similar topic, the fourth chapter examines Mexican food and the Southwest, while the fifth considers the ethnography and centrality of food. I'm kinda stunned by how amazing this looks, considering what I expected: the only real question is whether it fits in with four other books.
4) Bindas, Kenneth J. Modernity and the Great Depression: The Transformation of American Society, 1930-1941. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2017.
What is modernism and modernity: ask a dozen scholars across a half-dozen fields, and one would find that there were just as many answers. In this monograph, Kenneth Bindas examines how Americans, both in the government and outside of it, tried to embrace modernism as a solution to the Depression, and in doing so defined and shaped the history of the New Deal. Drawing on decades of research as to the nature of modernity, Bindas is adding his stone to the pile by examining modernity in a very specific and limited setting, arguing that it is different from modernity both before and since. He argues that modernity's influence and nature are shaped by, and draw from, the American religious traditions, both their structures and their language. To argue this, he ranges the disciplines to bring sources and chapters ranging from the Civilian Conservation Corps to Interior Decorators, all held together by their faith in modernity, which had, according to Bindas, reached its nadir in the 1930s with the New Deal programs. Ideas have power, especially when placed in a wide-ranging and carefully selected historical context so as to not seem to float above the action, and a belief in modernity (and belief is the right one) certainly has some explanatory power in relating the cultural and social shifts that were going on in America at the time. This portrayal moves beyond a simple exposition of elite intellectual faith in the New Deal, and chapters such as that on expositions, world's fairs, and music all help to capture more fully the scope of his arguments in a way that a chapter on programs can't. However, one does wonder about modernity and the failures of the New Deal, and whether there was any relationship between the two. Overall, this monograph is one I've definitely chosen, if only for its cogent cultural writing and topic which diverges from that of some of the others, but can fit in with a many of them.
5) Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2010.
The picture of American culture in the 1930s has long been somewhat static, of great poverty and serious art, or of whimsy and escapism, both of which are at once true and far from adequate. In this fascinating cultural historical monograph, Morris Dickstein tries to capture something of the nature of Depression era cultures, especially emphasizing the combination of escapism and engagement, regionalism and new, modern technologies, that make it impossible to speak of the culture without examining it in depth. To do this, he examines, primarily, obvious cultural artifacts: newsreels, flims, paintings, books, songs, poetry, and plays. On the one hand, his search for the tension and disagreement within these sources elevates it above being a search for a Depression-era zeitgeist, but the emphasis on "enduring" sources runs the risk of creating a best-of culture, though the sheer scope of the sources helps. The monograph begins, surprisingly, in the 1890s with the discovery of poverty, and the way that this era and its lessons would be re-discovered or built on by later generations: social realism was the first topic, as well as the discovery of the needs and woes of depression. The first part being in one sense lower-class, the second part of the work focuses on the middle-class, looking at Hollywood and images of the American dream and how to achieve it, as well as how to uphold its power in a time of great upheaval. The third part focused on escapism and the "culture of elegance" that went on even amid the Depression, while the final part tried to weave these thread togethers into the "Search for community" in which these disparate elements come together, as well as the nature of populism in culture. Culture, in Dickstein's conception, is work and effort to maintain. This work would be good… but it's from 2009, so there's that.
6) Elridge, David. "We're Only Kids Now, But Someday …': Hollywood Musicals and the Great Depression 'Youth Crisis'." In Hollywood and the Great Depression : American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s, edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies, 216-38. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
One could say, of course, that the Youth was always in crisis, but during the 1930s in America, the perception of a crisis in so many areas was more acute than expected, coming up not only in serious social dramas, but even in some musicals. In this article of film history, David Eldridge examines the musical Babes In Arms, and its sequel musicals, to look at what it could teach about Hollywood and popular perceptions of a 'Youth Crisis.' Historians and Film Critics alike, owing to the way that Babes in Arms created a sort of musical cliche whose roots might well reach down to School of Rock (in a way), have discounted examining the musicals. But for Eldridge, their very popularity makes them worth subjects of inquiry and consideration. These films both acknowledged and yet defused the tensions of the 1930s, both hinting at a sort of showbiz Utopianism, while also celebrating the fundamental cultural status quo, and assuring adults that ultimately children were going to be able to step up and take the burdens of adulthood onto themselves. To make this argument, Eldridge spent the most time examining Babes In Arms, but all of the works receive some attention, such as an examination of what Girl Crazy (1943) said about Western College Failure, and how the movie's premise (failing college trying to survive) differs wildly from the musical it was based on (Dude Ranch becomes a Speakeasy, 1930). In regards to Babes In Arms, much time is spent on the finale, 'God's Country' and the way that its Christian and unifying messages contrast with some earlier songs, especially one scene which deliberately invokes Nazi Germany, but in child form. Ultimately, while it has plenty to say about culture in the 1930s, even if it wasn't an article, it'd be slightly left-field.
7) Gilbert, Jess. Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2016.
By the time of the Great Depression, a majority of the American population was technically urban, by a very loose definition, and yet, stung by the 1920s and still sizeable in number, the rural areas received plenty of attention from New Deal planners. In this intellectual and social history, Jess Gilbert examines the goals of, and attempts at, planned rural democracy that they believe underly New Deal Agrarian policy and help define it. While previous scholars have examined Agrarian Policy, and even some of the same intellectuals and planners, few have centered their analysis on the idea of economic democracy and citizen involvement in agricultural decision-making as being central to the efforts to remake America. In order to examine this, Gilbert looks at government statistics, secondary sources often well outside history and stretching into agricultural and economic policy, and documents relating to some of the major Agrarian Intellectuals' whose perspective helped drive the conception of the reforms. By providing a sort of biography of these intellectuals' and the society which influenced them, it allows a narrative sort of through line to enliven the discussion and classification of intellectuals, as well as the recounting of all three Agrarian New Deals, the last of which is the focus of Gilbert's efforts. Caught up as it was in the second world war, and taking part in the last portion of the New Deal, it is often ignored, and yet its existence and nature were, to Gilbert, signs of the real potential and actual reforms towards greater economic democracy. These reforms, however, fell apart both because of conservative opposition, but also in the face of the pressures of the world war. The work manages in one sense to be too optimistic, because the suddenness of the program's collapse contrasts with a description of its success, but it is nonetheless excellently argued. I think that while very good, there are other works on rural life that fit more with the themes of the literary review.
8) Gough, Peter, and Peggy Seeger. Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
The New Deal truly did attempt to involve itself in every facet of culture, and not surprisingly music wasn't exempt in this. Peter Gough attempts, in this monograph, to shed light on a previously ignored and often dismissed part of the New Deal project, highlighting the regionalism, political importance, and advancement of folk music that resulted from the various programs, whether the Federal Music Project or its successors. Historians, Gough claims, often dismiss the project as being, not only a failure, but as resulting into the homogenization of American music in a way that had long-term consequences. Gough, alternately, stresses the multiplicity and value that the project placed on preserving regional music culture and ultimately promote multiculturalism, and does so in the context of several different regions in the west. This socio-cultural history uses government documents as well as letters and secondary sources to sketch its overall narrative. First Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada, then California, and finally Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington. After these studies, which highlight the effect of the program and the differences between how they program functioned based on location, which is of course a vital distinction in his argument. It continues with a look at the racialized portion of the project, especially in relation to African-American music styles, as well as its (leftist) political aspects and the formation of folk music. The program itself foundered as World War ramped up and anti-communism reigned, but, according to Gough, the effects and long-term impact of the project were felt in the folk music revival and the survival of music-ways that might have otherwise been lost. Similar to Democratic Art, and yet notably different, this monograph could help look into the effect of government on an entire category of art and culture, impacts that are only recently coming back into the light.
9) Greene, Alison Collis. No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. UK: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Those who know history are doomed to watch others forget and repeat it, and the New Deal, the site of so much historical refashioning, is no exception. Allison Collis Green's religious, cultural, and social history chronicles the impact of the Great Depression on the South, specifically the Delta, both in terms of social reactions and poverty, but also the way religion was viewed and acted. Whereas after the Depression ended, mainline, white (supremacist) Protestant churches constructed narratives of a less startling and destructive Depression, and churches that were always opposed to government interference and help. This narrative is contradicted by a stunning collection of primary sources (newspapers, church papers, government documents, published sources) and a healthy smattering of secondary sources, all of which point towards the unexpected and desperate religious, social, and economic situation of the Depression. Far from rejecting governmental aid, they realized they were unable to do this on their own, and many entered a sort of partnership with the government, one that foundered eventually on the secularism of the government, as well as its non-total surrender to White Supremacy, something that many prominent southern white Protestants disliked, even as Democratic control persisted for decades to come. Thus it it a narrative of the limits of religious charity and support for the poor in the face of a crisis bigger than anyone could have imagined. Her bold arguments come in part from a frustration at the narratives of the present, and at the end of the book she declares that America was "haunted by a past it refused to remember" (201). Cogent, bold, and well backed, it challenges a common historical view and highlights religious and social history, both from the perspective of the elite, the government, and the lay people of faith that that I believe could be very helpful interesting when combined with sources looking at other aspects of religion, or at other influencers on culture.
10) Kasson, John F. The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
In 1934, the Depression was at its height, and poverty was rampant; in 1934 Bright Eyes was released and Shirley Temple sang of the "Good Ship Lollipop." In this work somewhere between cultural history and narrative biography, John Kasson argues that these two occurrences aren't nearly so unrelated as one might think. Using a combination of scripts, newspaper articles, and a wide variety of secondary sources (as well as Temple's own biography), Kasson attempts to capture most of all the public perception, more than a story of her life specifically. The story focuses on a single decade of her work, though it begins with her parents, and ends with the vast majority of her life in a conclusion. Most of all, his argument is that Shirley Temple was deployed, in large part, as part of a cultural project of "smile diplomacy" that mirrored the efforts of Roosevelt. Shirley Temple in her stories captured the hearts of young and old, united them with her innocence, regardless of factors that might be significant: even the racism of several of her movies was the sort that presented a harmless and submissive (and thus nonthreatening) view of Blacks. In other words, all sections and creeds could be united for their appreciation for a smile, a song, and a little dance, and this appeal towards a certain kind of unity was part of a strategy of distraction, not in a conspiratorial sense, but simply in that this was what the markets demanded, for a time. And Hollywood delivered, whether it wrung her out to do it or not, her smile worthy of note, her life an open book for others to peruse. In this, she was in some ways the forerunner of later cultural movements which would emphasize the importance of being chipper in the face of all evidence. This work, while interesting for the parallels it brings up, would not be a good choice for the literature review.
11) Kelly, Timothy, Margaret Power, and Michael Carey. Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community during the Great Depression. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016.
The New-Deal era federal homestead-style projects were not merely a southern project, and just as they varied by region, so do does the interpretation of their impact. In this study of Norvelt, Pennsylvania (renamed after Eleanor Roosevelt shortly into its existence), Timothy Kelly, Margaret Power, and Michael Cary have come to a very different conclusion than Smith's Trouble in Goshen about similar communities in the South, as well the opinions of other prominent scholars. They argue for the moderate success and efficacy of the program to create and sustain Norvelt, and argue for its status as an example of successful governmental relief and its ability to be instructive about the structuring of middle-class life in the 1930s. Using personal interview with children of the first homesteaders in Norvelt, as well as census data, governmental data, and newspapers, this social-historical monograph studies community creation in all of its forms. It begins with an examination of the homesteaders' backgrounds and the difficulties the working-class faced in the 1920s and 1930s, and how that would lead to them being willing to take part in this experiment, for an experiment it most certainly was, with potentially unpredictable results. The community began, had its detractors (as did most New Deal programs) and was visited by Eleanor Roosevelt, and within this process of community formation, the authors look at architecture, laws, and socializing to paint a picture of what it was like, before finally taking Norvelt into today (it is still a town, however small and dying.) The monograph sometimes is too enthusiastic in declaring success, such as admitting but not dwelling on the racial homogeneity of Norvelt (one black family… ever) and other potential failings. But despite that, it is an interesting read, and if used it would have to be in comparison to Troubles in Goshen.
12) McGregor, Alexander. The Catholic Church and Hollywood: Censorship and Morality in 1930s Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Neither culture war nor moral guardians are particularly new in American history, no matter how prominent they have become in the past decades, despite our overwhelming desire to view our time as new in unique. In his work of cultural history, Alexander McGregor charts the complex relationship between Catholicism and Hollywood in the 1930s, and the way that, far from being a reactive force, they were, in his description, a proactive force waging a cultural war for influence on American culture. In this, he contracts those who view the Church fundamentally as defensive, as well as those who suspect that an institution hated by many bigoted Americans could play such a role. In countering this, he draws upon their unity and their common mission from higher-ups to emphasize that through sophisticated and careful influence, the Church was able to shape Hollywood. It did so both through the growth of the Hays code, written by two Catholics in order to set guidelines as to what should and should not be portrayed in film, as well as the League of Decency, which boycotted and acted as an economic check on films it found to be immoral. While the timespan in which the Catholic Church had this much influence was brief, the potential impact of it on Hollywood on issues such as abortion, homosexuality, sexuality in general, and its portrayal of the church itself could last far longer. The work itself declares its interest in the formation of the themes, message, and iconography, instead of trying to examine the impact it had outside of Hollywood on the populace, in doing so it limits itself to a single discreet but broad-reaching and relevant topic of religious influence on media in a time of great upheaval and self-definition for a still-fledgling industry. I believe, as a way of indicating how private institutions can shape high-cultural constructions, it could be part of the list, easily.
13) McLerran, Jennifer. A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933-1943. Tucson, Ar.: University of Arizona Press, 2012.
Once Native-Americans were conquered and subjugated, they could be safely commodified, and in fact were in many ways, including through the New Deal art investment in native art. In this monograph, Jennifer McLerran examines the attempt by New Deal creators of 'Indian Policy' to create and market Native art in an attempt to thread the needle between preserving folkways and providing capital and economic engagement to Native communities. This commodification of Native art helped strengthen a view of Natives that emphasized "primitive romanticism" in their art, and otherwise placed them outside the modern world by creating a binary in which there was merely the choice between full embrasure of white modernity and maintenance of traditional cultural ways, a binary that didn't reflect the full range of cultural possibilities. This history of art, politics and culture draws on contemporary and modern art studies, as well as conceptions that owe much to bell hooks idea of cultural commoditization of outsiders, in order to make its specific and yet sweeping arguments. Disagreeing with other monographs in the bibliography, McLerran views a focus on (Native) folk culture as potentially problematic and flawed. McLerran concludes that while New Deal programs were beneficial to Indian painting, but even there emphasized the primitive nature of said Indians, while having, in the name of driving off tourists and preserving native folk ways, effects that in other respects were negative. The volume contributes to the overall discussion, but calls for more detailed and incisive study, serving to fill in the picture for others to build off of and interpret, and makes no premature declaration of a total evaluation of the success and failure of all of the programs. While I enjoyed the work and believe it deserves its place in the Bibliography, its art history seems slightly peripheral to the most-specific question that would have to be examined in the five-book literary review.
14) Mollet, Tracey Louise. Cartoons in Hard Times: The Animated Shorts of Disney and Warner Brothers in Depression and War 1932-1945. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Animation is no laughing matter, and in the 1930s it could reveal cultural and social realities, or even help in some ways to define and contextualize them. Mollet examines the animated shorts of Fleischer and Disney from the Great Depression through the second world war in America, in order to show the ways that they reflected the times they were in, how they imagined and in some ways argued for America's place in the world, and then how these strands of political and cultural engagement (domestic and foreign) combined in the making of WWII animated shorts and propaganda. While animation has been studied before as a historical phenomenon, studies have been focused either on a different form (long-form animations) or on a more limited time period, as with Michael Shull's Doing Their Bit: Wartime Animated Short Films, whose work Mollet respects but believes could be better understood by also looking at their pre-war evolution. This cultural history uses the techniques of film study and a bevy of secondary sources and contextual footnotes to look from short to short, capturing a picture of dozens of still frames, a short of its own. Ultimately, Mollet is trying to get at the root of wartime animated short propaganda, and in doing so she pushes back the timeline and examines these animated shorts always as, in some way, propaganda in a mostly non-pejorative sense. Operating chronologically, the work benefits from its examination of two very different studios, with two rather different animation practices, in order to construct a total picture of a very popular genre of entertainment and its impact both on culture and politics towards American engagement on the world stage. I believe that this work would do well, potentially, as one of the books that mine the private corporate and governmental side of cultural influence, contrasted both with works on other forms of entertainment, and works on popular engagement and agency in culture.
15) Musher, Sharon Ann. Democratic Art: The New Deals Influence on American Culture. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
In some ways, a New Deal for art is so odd of a concept for our present minds, inundated as they are by the power of anti-intellectualism in government and a concept of a free-market of art, to grasp that it cries out for explanation. Musher, writing at the tail end of yet another recession, ultimately engages in an examination of just how this investment happened, its impact, and why it ended up in seeming failure. Historians have had a mixed opinion on New Deal art, and much of the work thus far has been to recover and celebrate its achievements. Musher wishes to move beyond that, and address the programs as a whole, as well as a startlingly diverse and sometimes democratized body of disparate work, in order to get at its fundamental nature, whether it was as some Leftist critics claimed, a deradicalizing and hegemonic exercise or not. This cultural art history looks at specific government-funded works of art, divided by aesthetic vision rather than genre, with primary sources such as documentation, journalist's responses, letters and even exhibit response cards available to provide context both on the making of the work and the public's interaction with it. Musher concludes that, ultimately, this public art funding was a "pin of an oscillating hinge" opening the door on ways that the state could interact with the arts, but ultimately closing after a brief window. This closing, Musher argues, has to do with three factors: first, worries about the racial and political background of the artists, second 'supposed' in Musher's words concern about the content and form of the art, and third, the conflict between their interest in lay participation in art over marketability challenged established art norms. This work would be valuable as an example of how the government influences public culture through the New Deal programs, as contrasted with monographs on the public and various private/corporate programs.
16) Sharpless, Rebecca, and Melissa Walker. "Inside the Farmhouse : Ruth Allen and Margaret Jarman Hagood Confront Rural Realities." In Reassessing the 1930s South, edited by Karen L. Cox and Sarah E. Gardner. Baton Rouge, Louis: Lousiana State University Press, 2018.
Historians, as simple as it is to say, are also part of history, as are those whose mere act is to study what is: observation changes a thing, and defines the observer. This article by Rebecca Sharpless and Melissa Walker examines the sociological research of two women, Ruth Allen and Margaret Hagood, in the 1930s, each separately examining the lives and plights of Southern farm women, each coming to their own conclusions both on the nature of the problems facing these women and their solutions, and both of them somewhat influential in helping to understand the topic. The authors examine their background and the work they did in order to create a picture of how they came to their conclusions: both were the daughters of educators, intelligent, well-learned women, and both, for all their differences, argued against the thesis that individual failing was the reason for rural women's poverty. Hagood's research looked at childbirth and motherhood, and included only White women, supposedly owing to the fact that her somewhat qualitative research method relied on a rapport and comfort that she was unsure she could achieve with Black women. This research uncovered hard-working women, trapped in an economic system of tenancy that was almost-impossible to escape and part of a cash-crop system that left the entire region (North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama) impoverished in some way. This work culminated in a very well known and academically influential book on the subject in 1939. Allen, on the other hand, used quantitative studies to examine women's labor in Texas, and while she is fair-handed to her African-American respondents, she was very dismissive of Mexican women. Her ultimate conclusion was that women needed to be paid for their work making cotton, instead of being a mere supplement to their husband's income. This fascinating article tells one much, but it is an article, so I won't be using it on the review.
17) Smith, Fred C. Trouble in Goshen: Plain Folk, Roosevelt, Jesus, and Marx in the Great Depression South. Jackson, Miss: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.
The New Deal had at times radical and startling experiments, and while some of them worked, not all of them clearly did. In this social historical monograph, Fred C. Smith looks at the Tulepo Homesteads, Dyess Colony, and, outside governmental control but along those same lines, the Delta Cooperative Farm, all of which were created in the 1930s in order to be model communities of one kind or another, and all of which, he argued, faced significant problems and ultimately failed in their purpose. In arguing this, he stands against some historians who have had a more positive read on it, as well as those who have studied other such communities in other areas (such as Norvelt) and came away with a more positive legacy. Using a balanced approach that seems to try to describe and classify as much as rush ahead in judgement, as well as letters, newspapers, and contemporary interviews, he comes eventually to why and what these communities were, and why they failed. Smith lays the blame at the feet of the government, which failed both to make itself understood and speak in a language and way that the poor of the South would understand and respect, and a lack of attractive benefits to either of the communities, both of which offered small and inadequate farms and support in exchange for decades of marginal labor and control by the government. It was not truly possible to create a cotton yeomanry, Smith claims, and all three attempts failed to realize that, radical Christian and Socialist private communes being just as likely to fail as New Deal model communities. In sussing out the lives, thoughts, and experiences of the downtrodden as viewed through this failed hope off a better life, Smith's work seems excellent, but I am unsure as to whether it'd fit the more cultural focus of the literature review.
18) Smith, J.E. "Organisation Women and Belle Rebels: Hollywood's Working Women in the 1930s." In Hollywood In the Great Depression: American Film, Politics, and Society in the 1930s, edited by Iwan Morgon and Phillip John Davies, 66-85. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
The old paradigm of waves of feminism leaves the 1930s stuck between two great movements, inconsequential or even a time of retreat. By examining the portrayal of women in 1930s Hollywood films, J.E. Smith uses this exhaustive article to look at the portrayal of working women in media, as well as the possibilities that were open to female actresses in the 1930s to work in Hollywood. Bucking historiography on women in Hollywood, which emphasises a time of promise early in the medium, before it became profitable and male-dominated, Smith contends that even in the 1930s there was extensive opportunity, and that far from being discouraged, at least publicly, female editors such as Anne Bauchens and Barbara McLean could be praised or even awarded for their efforts. Starlets in Hollywood, for all the possibility of amazing pay, ultimately worked long and hard, as did all of the women who were more "invisible" and yet contributed to the making of movies, and were recognized, at least in Hollywood, as worthy of more in the way of promotion and consideration than American culture as a whole afforded at the time. Not only through work, but through the movies of the 1930s, heavy on adaptations of women's fiction, and works such as A Woman Rebels and Kitty Foyle, whose portrayal of a woman working her way through life is notably sympathetic. Meanwhile Gone With The Wind portrayed women as being part of the working world, even as it didn't challenge many of the racial and gender-based conceptions of popular culture. There was, Smith concludes reasonably, a meaningful argument for both a surprisingly high for its time number of women in important Hollywood positions, and a female audience willing to pay the money to see films that portrayed working women in a less than negative light. In arguing this, I think it does help highlight the difference between Hollywood and other parts of the culture… but as an article, I can't and won't use it.
19) Stewart, Catherine A. Long past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers Project. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Among historians of American slavery, the slave narratives gathered during the Federal Writers' Project during the 1930s are regarded rightfully as a very rich and important source for slave experience, and a signal achievement in, among other things, oral history. Yet in this monograph, Catherine Stewart examines the way that the project reflected the agendas both of its diverse gatherers, the government, and the interviewees as well in ways that complicate our understanding of them. Some historians have written about the biases from the interviewers part, the ways that the interviews were shaped by what they were looking for, but less has been done towards examining the cultural disjunctions between interviewer and interviewee, which allowed the ladder to use black oral-cultural constructs to sneak hidden meaning beneath them. Using black literary criticism and an understanding of the oral culture of the time, Stewart charts the culture's impact on the project in seven chapters. First, on the changing views of the directors, drawing on the governmental and intellectual sources most often addressed in this topic, and highlighting how the change in directors and the flow of the project shifted things. The second half of the book focuses on how African-Americans attempted to influence and possess "authority over prevailing discourse" on the nature of black culture (Stewart, 9). While middle-class black intellectuals shaped it in their image, the interviewees used vernacular cultural conditions to attempt to seize control and agency in their own narrative. The results are a complex combination of documents that have greatly influenced the way that people wrote slavery history and understood it for many decades to come, into the modern day. As an examination of race, one of the more fascinating New Deal projects, and a cultural history with teeth in it, I think this would be a good choice in combination with works on the struggle within New Deal initiatives.
20) Whisenhunt, Donald W. Utopian Movements and Ideas of the Great Depression: Dreamers, Believers, and Madmen. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.
Utopia, if Whisenhunt is to be believed, is a very common sort of affliction in American life and thought. In this intellectual history, Whisenhunt examines a variety of Utopian or quasi-Utopian figures who attempted to come to a solution to the Depression, and most of whom were marginal at best in the political or even cultural sense. In doing so, he's throwing light on some fascinatingly odd figures, and doing so in light of his view on the inherent American drive towards Utopia and towards "progress" in history. This view seems as much prescriptive and complimentary as it is descriptive, and the monograph itself seems to use the variety of the radical figures to suppose a fundamental intellectual and cultural American unity. Relying primarily on newspapers and letters, Whisenhunt's work attempts to engage in the narrative and ideas of each of the thinkers, whether they are wildly popular (by marginal radical standards) or entirely unknown. The Utopian movement withered and died by 1936, but was at least theoretically a movement, for all that their radicalism and grand promises didn't get too far, while someone like Henry McCowen, advocate of Moneyless Government, is remembered and included because the author encountered him in his old age, and was fascinated by this strange character. Such division defines the work, the historical importance as much in its failure and existence as any impact other than secondary on American history. In doing so without noticing the unifying narrative of American Utopianism, the work can seem at times like a collection of entirely separate and almost-unrelated stories, and yet it does hold together in the face of the tragedy, the Depression, that all were reacting to and trying to overcome. While this work is interesting, the totality of the intellectual vision of American thought implied here, as well as its lack of socio-cultural relevance, make it worthy of inclusion but not review.
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
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- Burlington, Vermont
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- Any
I'm definitely going to have to check these out in the future, especially the one about food.
I'm amazed at how comprehensive the New Deal was; the way it was taught to me, the New Deal was just "Here's the Social Security program, and also we'll pay you to build roads or something if you don't have a job."
- Pronouns
- They/Them
The success of it is of course a topic of debate, but the ambition and scope are pretty evident. Also important to understand is that the New Deal had stages: there were multiple different Agricultural New Deals, for instance. And the FWP and etc only took shape after '35.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Remember that time that Henry Ford was called a class traitor by the Wall Street Journal for offering a $5 a day wage for eight hours of work?
I do now.
I do now.