Showing papers in "The Journal of American History in 1993"

Protecting soldiers and mothers : the political origins of social policy in the United States

Abstract: It is generally believed that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled and dependent citizens. During the late 19th century, competitive party politics in American democracy led to the rapid expansion of benefits for Union Civil War veterans and their families. Some Americans hoped to expand veterans' benefits into pensions for all of the needy elderly and social insurance for workingmen and their families. But such hopes went against the logic of political reform in the Progressive era. Generous social spending faded along with the Civil War generation. Instead, the U.S. nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than 40 states enacted social spending, labour regulations, and health education programmes to assist American mothers and children. As Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of women's clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country. Blending original historical research with political analysis, Skocpol shows how governmental institutions, electoral rules, political parties and earlier public policies combined to determine both the opportunities and the limits within which social policies were devised and changed by reformers and politically active social groups over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gender in international relations : feminist perspectives on achieving global security

Abstract: Engendered insecurities man, the state and war - gendered perspectives on national security three models of man - gendered perspectives on global economy security man over nature - gendered perspectives on ecological security toward a nongendered perspective on global security.

The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games.

Abstract: Glories and fiascos, triumphs and tragedies, records and near misses--all are included in this vivid history of the modern Olympics. Using as a backdrop the athletic events that draw television audiences in the billions, Allen Guttmann has written an interpretive social history of the games. What did the founders of the Olympic Games intend them to mean? And what have they, in the course of a century of tumultuous change, become? Guttmann probes the political, economic, social, and even religious significance of the games, presenting the most complete and readable account to date. In the broadest sense, Guttmann argues, politics has always been a part of the Olympics, not an occasional intruder whose presence may take the form of a boycott, protest, or act of terrorism. The book includes lively accounts of individual competitions. An early marathon through the streets of Paris, for example, brought complaints from the U.S. team that the course had been designed to allow French contestants to take shortcuts. Guttmann also provides insight into the behind-the-scenes maneuvering involved in site selection, as well as little-known facts about the general history of the games and about longtime IOC leader Avery Brundage.

Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958

Abstract: In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, an instant best seller. Friedan argued, often brilliantly, that American women, especially suburban women, suffered from deep discontent. In the postwar era, she wrote, journalists, educators, advertisers, and social scientists had pulled women into the home with an ideological stranglehold, the "feminine mystique." This repressive "image" held that women could "find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love." It denied "women careers or any commitment outside the home" and "narrowed woman's world down to the home, cut her role back to housewife." In Friedan's formulation, the writers and editors of mass-circulation magazines, especially women's magazines, were the "Frankensteins" who had created this "feminine monster." In her defense of women, Friedan did not choose a typical liberal feminist language of rights, equality, or even justice. Influenced by the new human potential psychology, she argued instead that full-time domesticity stunted women and denied their "basic human need to grow." For Friedan, women and men found personal identity and fulfillment through individual achievement, most notably through careers. Without such growth, she claimed, women would remain unfulfilled and unhappy, and children would suffer at the hands of neurotic mothers.' The Feminine Mystique had an indisputable impact. Hundreds of women have testified that the book changed their lives, and historical accounts often credit it

Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations. By Peter Dobkin Hall. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. xvi + 349 pp. $36.95, ISBN 0-80184272-7.)

Abstract: Philanthropy and voluntarism are among the most familiar and least understood of American institutions. The oldest American nonprofit corporation -- Harvard College -- dates from 1636, but most of the million or so nonprofits currently in existence were established after 1960. In \"Inventing the Nonprofit Sector\" and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations, cultural historian Peter Dobkin Hall describes and analyzes the development of America's fastest growing institutional sector.

Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. By Michael Kammen. New York: Knopf and Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. By John Bodnar. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Abstract: Eventually, you will agreed discover a supplementary experience and capability by spending more cash. nevertheless when? accomplish you acknowledge that you require to acquire those every needs in the same way as having significantly cash? Why dont you attempt to acquire something basic in the beginning? Thats something that will guide you to understand even more not far off from the globe, experience, some places, following history, amusement, and a lot more?

The anatomy of the Nuremberg trials : a personal memoir

Abstract: A history of the Nuremberg war-crimes trials by one of the key participants, Telford Taylor, the distinguished American lawyer who was a member of the prosecution staff and eventually became chief counsel. His legal expertise is complemented by an intimate knowledge of what took place outside the courtroom before and during the trials, which began in November 1945. Taylor reveals details of fierce infighting and personal vendettas among the Allied representatives; the prosecutors brilliance and their astonishing blunders; the judges private observations on the daily proceedings; and the negotiations that preceded the sentencing. This book makes clear the magnitude of the clashes that took place between those determined to secure justice and those bent solely on retribution. No less riveting are the author's portrayals of Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop and Speer as the trials progressed. What unfolded in the courtroom exposed the full horror of the acts that had been committed. The chamber was reduced to silence when an SS officer recounted impassively how his troops had rounded up and killed 90,000 Jews; panic overcame the head of the German State Bank as it became apparent that he had knowingly received jewels and other valuables taken from the bodies of concentration camp victims; and the judges departed visibly shaken by the first public showing of films depicting the concentration camps and their inmates as they were when liberated. Taylor also provides new details regarding Goering's suicide.

Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan

Abstract: Many contemporary oral histories are rooted in principles of progressive and feminist politics, particularly in a respect for the truth of each informant's life experiences and a quest to preserve the memory of ordinary people's lives. Feminist scholars have been in the forefront of efforts to elaborate these ideals as methodological principles, seeking ways to dissolve the traditional distinction between historian-as-authority and informant-as-subject and to create what the sociologist Judith Stacey calls "an egalitarian research process characterized by authenticity, reciprocity, and intersubjectivity between the researcher and her 'subjects.',"1 Such oral history practices have been designed primarily to study and record the lives of "people who, historically speaking, would otherwise remain inarticulate."2 From this tradition of history from the bottom up has come a rich and sensitive body of interviews with union organizers, feminist activists, civil rights workers, and others whose experience progressive and feminist scholars share and whose life stories and world views they often find laudable. Historians have paid less attention to the life stories of ordinary people whose political agendas they find unsavory, dangerous, or deliberately deceptive.3 Oral history is a particularly valuable source for rectifying this scholarly lacuna since rightwing, reactionary, and racial hate groups tend to be secretive and highly transient, limiting the availability and usefulness of traditional documentary sources. But

Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West. By Donald Worster. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xii + 292 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-19-505820-8.)

Abstract: For decades, the story of the American West has been told as a glorious tale of conquest and rugged individualism--the triumph of progress. But recently, a new school of historians has challenged this view, creating what is known as the \"new western history,\" an approach that gives a central role to the environment, native peoples, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Foremost among these historians is Donald Worster. In Worster's writings, the western past emerges not as a march of Manifest Destiny but rather as an unfolding relationship between humankind and nature. In Under Western Skies, Worster provides an eloquent introduction to the changing traditions of western historical writing and then demonstrates his own approach through fascinating case studies. For example, he takes a hard look at the struggle by the Lakota to regain ownership of the Black Hills, examining not only the legal history of treaties and court cases but also the importance of the Black Hills in Indian religion and the way they have been mismanaged by the U.S. government. He discusses the cowboy in terms of the new ecology that arose from livestock ranching--the endless miles of fences, the changes in the environment wrought by extensive grazing, certain species of animals almost wiped out because they were considered a danger to sheep and cattle. But Worster's view of nature is not as simple or as, linear as for instance, Bill McKibben's stark picture in The End of Nature, a picture Worster argues against. From the mining ghost towns of the Rockies to the uprooted farm families of the Dust Bowl, nature sometimes wins the struggle. Even the Hoover Dam, he reminds us, may one day be overcome by the patient Colorado River. Under Western Skies both offers intriguing insights into important aspects of our history and instills a new appreciation for the place of nature, native peoples, and the struggles over money and power in the western past.

Hollywood in the Age of Television

Abstract: Part 1 Responding to network television: from "Frontal Lobes" to the "Bob and Bob" show - NBC management and programming strategies, 1949-1965, Vance Kepley Jr. building the world's largest advertising medium - CBS and television, 1940-1960, William Boddy the weakest chain and the strongest link - the American Broadcasting Company and the motion picture industry, 1952-1960, James L.Baughman network oligopoly power - an economic analysis, Barry Litman Hollywood's attempt at appropriating television - the case of Paramount Pictures, Timothy R.White new producers for old - United Artists and the shift to independent production, Tino Balio glorious technicolour, breathtaking cinemascope and stereophonic sound, John Belton red, blue and lots of green - the impact of colour television on feature film production, Brad Chisholm feature films on prime time television, William Lafferty. Part 2 Responding to new television technologies: pay television - breaking the broadcast bottleneck, Michele Hilmes home video - the second run "Theatre" of the 1990's, Bruce A Austin the made-for-television movie - industrial practice, cultural form, popular reception, Laurie Schulze building a movie theatre giant - the rise of the cineplex Odeon, Douglas Gomery Coca Cola satellites? Hollywood and the deregulation of European television, Edward Buscombe.