History Commons^™

Portrait Of A Nation: A Review Of Claude Fischer's 'Made In America: A Social History Of American Culture And Character', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

The distinguished University of California sociologist Claude Fischer is unhappy with historians' failure to provide the grand narrative — in this case the grand narrative of American history. But instead of waiting for recalcitrant historians to tie up the "loose threads that comprise the study of American social history,'' Fischer provides his own metanarrative, neatly laid out in the introduction.

Fischer is convinced that there is an American national character that makes America exceptional and that its central feature is voluntarism, defined here as something like individualistic collegiality: We are "sovereign individuals,'' but we love to be in groups that …

Waving The Bloody Newsprint: Partisan Coverage Of Populism In Ellis County, Kansas 1891-1896, Brian Gribben M.A.

History Faculty Publications

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, a new pugilist in the arena of democracy threatened traditional dual-party politics in rural America. What began as an agrarian lobby soon combined with the remnants of single-issue parties from the recent past and manifested itself in the Populist, or People's Party (both supporters and critics would use the two terms interchangeably). During its brief existence, the People's Party captured the imagination of both the downtrodden and idealist and made considerable gains on the state and federal level before imploding like a political nova after the election of 1896. How then did …

The Penumbra Of Weimar Political Culture: Pacifism, Feminism, And Social Democracy, Shelley Rose

History Faculty Publications

This article offers a new reading of Germany’s complex political culture, exploring the contributions of pacifists, international feminists, and Social Democrats as proactive, yet marginalized, participants in Weimar-era politics. Through a series of historical events including the No-More-War protests, international education courses, pacifist reading sessions, and a transnational peace exhibit, the author demonstrates dynamic exchanges between party and informal politics on the political Left. This interaction, as well as expanding transnational networks and awareness, opened new political spaces for peace activism in the Weimar Republic, the effects of which still endure today.

Review: 'Wheels Of Change: From Zero To 600 M.P.H.: The Amazing Story Of California And The Automobile', John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

Histories of the automobile in America often begin with the all-too-familiar observation that “the Automobile is European by birth and American by adoption.” And while that generalization certainly is useful in explaining things to undergraduate students, it rings particularly true in the case of the state of California, where beginning with the car’s appearance on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco, late nineteenth-century society and culture were rapidly and markedly transformed into a twentieth-century machine age. Indeed, the automobile is the perfect technological symbol of American culture, a tangible expression of our quest to level space, time, and …

Review Of Sensibility And The American Revolution, By S. Knott, Thomas J. Humphrey

History Faculty Publications

Review of Sensibility and the American Revolution, by S. Knott

A Fellowship In Learning: Kalamazoo College, 1833-2008 (Book Review), Julie Mujic

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Julie Mujic.

Francis, Marlene Crandell. A Fellowship in Learning: Kalamazoo College, 1833-2008. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Kalamazoo College, 2008.

(Review) The Negotiated Reformation: Imperial Cities And The Politics Of Urban Reform, 1525–1550, Marc R. Forster

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Acropolis Of The Middle-West: Decay, Renewal, And Boosterism In Cleveland’S University Circle, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

In the mid-twentieth century, Cleveland, Ohio’s University Circle exemplified an emerging trend in which urban universities and other private institutions engaged in urban renewal. Situating the story of University Circle within the context of contemporary concerns about urban decay, deindustrialization, and suburbanization, the author argues that University Circle institutions were not simply trying to facilitate their own expansion. Rather, they were equally determined to create a setting appropriate to their regional, national, and even international reputations, as well as to advance the idea that an educational, medical, and cultural district could help reposition and rebrand a …

Little Founders On The Small Screen: Interpreting A Multicultural American Revolution For Children’S Television, Andrew M. Schocket

History Faculty Publications

From 2002 to 2004, the children’s animated series Liberty’s Kids aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the United States’ public television network. It runs over forty half-hour episodes and features a stellar cast, including such celebrities as Walter Cronkite, Michael Douglas, Yolanda King, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liam Neeson, and Annette Bening. Television critics generally loved it, and there are now college students who can trace their interest in the American Revolution to having watched this series when they were children. At the turn of the twenty-first century, it is the most extended and in-depth encounter with …

Church Burnings, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

On 15 September 1963 a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The ensuing fire and death of four little girls placed the violence of white supremacy on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. It also entered the 16^th Street Church into a long history of attacks against houses of worship in the American South. Though churches burn for any number of reasons, including accident and insurance fraud, church arson in southern culture has frequently been associated with a symbolic assault on a community’s core institution.

Transmitting The Ideal Of Enlightenment: Chinese Universities Since The Late Nineteenth Century (Book Review), Thomas D. Curran

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Mak, Ricarado K. S., ed. Transmitting the Ideal of Enlightenment: Chinese Universities Since the Late Nineteenth Century. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009.

ISBN 9780761847267

Leaping In Utah: Lessons Learned Along The Way, Norman L. Jones

History Faculty Publications

Utah’s road to LEAP was accidental. We did not set out to be a LEAP state. We set out to create a faculty-led system of articulation and assessment for general education (GE) in the Utah System of Higher Education. Or at least that is what we were doing before the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), with whom we had been working for years, invited us to become the fifth LEAP state.

Catholic Studies In The Spirit Of 'Do Whatever He Tells You', Una M. Cadegan

History Faculty Publications

During the University of Dayton's sesquicentennial in the year 2000, the singer-songwriter alumnus who headed the university's Center for Social Concern performed a song he written for the occasion, "Do Whatever He Tells You." At the reception after the celebration, a colleague still fairly new to the university, nonreligious but with an evident affinity for the university's mission and commitments, commented that he thought the song was little odd; hadn't something like "do whatever he tells you" been written over the gates of Soviet labor camps? My first response to the remark, phrased more wittily than I can recall here, …

Book Review: Derelict Paradise: Homelessness And Urban Development In Cleveland, Ohio, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"American Examples For German Universities: Admitting Women Before World War I", Charles E. Mcclelland

History Faculty Publications

Women were not allowed to enroll a regular students in Prussian universities until 1909, although most other German states had already changed this policy. This chapter analyzes the terms of controversy swirling around the issue, and how American university policies ultimately helped bring about the change.

The Village As Cold War Site: Experts, Development, And The History Of Rural Reconstruction, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

This article examines ‘the village’ as a category of development knowledge used by policymakers and experts to remake the ‘Third World’ during the Cold War. The idea of the village as a universal category of underdevelopment, capable of being remade by expert-led social reform, structured efforts to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of people from Asia to Latin America and Africa. Rooted in a transnational interwar movement for rural reconstruction, village projects were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by a scientization of development that narrowed the range of experts in the field and by Cold War politics that increasingly …

Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, And The Making Of Modern China, Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas Curran.

MacKinnon, Stephen R. Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. (ISBN 9780520254459)

The United States On The Eve Of The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The four-year war that eventually descended on the nation seemed impossible only months before it began. Powerful conflicts pulled the United States apart in the decades before 1860, but shared interests, cultures, and identities tied the country together, sometimes in new ways. So confident were they in the future that Americans expected that the forces of cohesion would triumph over the forces of division.

Mapping Time, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Our tools for dealing with terrestrial space are well-developed and becoming more refined and ubiquitous every day. GIS has long established its dominion, Google permits us to range over the world and down to our very rooftops, and cars and cell phones locate us in space at every moment. It is hardly surprising that geography and mapping suddenly seem important in new ways. Historians have always loved maps and have long felt a kinship with geographers. The very first atlases, compiled six hundred years ago, were historical atlases. But space and time remain uncomfortable—if ever-present and ever-active—companions in the human …

Peace Corps At 50: Bringing The World Back Home, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

Both the critics and defenders of the Peace Corps judge the organization on its ability to change other nations' views of the United States, either by offering technical assistance or by making friends for the United States in the world. What is missing from these debates is a frank acknowledgment that the Peace Corps teaches Americans as much as it serves the world. The organization's greatest value may be in "bringing the world back home" through its more than 200,000 former volunteers.

Narratives Of Development: Models, Spectacles, And Calculability In Nick Cullather's The Hungry World, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

To describe The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia as a history of the green revolution does not begin to convey the ambition and rewards of Nick Cullather's new book. In less than three hundred pages, Hungry World offers a detailed diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural history that spans more than a century and three continents. Cullather deepens and revises our understanding of the "green revolution" as a history of the Rockefeller Foundation and its "transfer" of agricultural technology from Mexico to Asia, in part by showing how the green revolution's intellectual and political construction involved a …

At The Edge Of The Modern?: Diplomacy, Public Relations, And Media Practices During Houphouët-Boigny's 1962 Visit To The United States, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Toward the end of the first decade after the decolonization of most African countries, there emerged a scholarly polemic about the weight of bureaucratic politics in the making of foreign policy in the Third World. A mirror of the reigning modernization paradigm that informed most postwar area studies and social sciences, the discussion unintentionally indexed the narcissism of a hegemonic discourse on political development and statecraft. Graham Allison and Morton Halperin—the original proponents of the bureaucratic model—implied in their largely U.S.-centric model that such a paradigm was not applicable to non-industrialized countries since the newly decolonized countries, for the most …

Hakoah Vienna And The International Nature Of Interwar Austrian Sports, William Bowman

History Faculty Publications

Hakoah Vienna was the most important Jewish sports organization in interwar Austria. Indeed, Hakoah, which means strength or power in Hebrew, was one of the most significant sports clubs on the continent of Europe during that period. This article examines the early history of Hakoah, its rise to international fame, and its demise in 1938 at the hands of the Nazis and their sympathizers in Austria.

The Jesuits In Latin America, 1549 - 2000: 450 Years Of Inculturation, Defense Of Human Rights, And Prophetic Witness, Charlotte M. Gradie

History Faculty Publications

A review of the book "The Jesuits in Latin America, 1549-2000: 450 Years of Inculturation, Defense of Human Rights, and Prophetic Witness," by Jeffrey L. Klaiber is presented.

Village China Under Socialism And Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008 (Book Review), Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Li, Huaiyin. Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

ISBN 978-0-8047-5974-8

The Soviet State As Imperial Scavenger: "Catch Up And Surpass" In The Transnational Socialist Bloc, 1950-1960, Austin Jersild

History Faculty Publications

THE BIGGEST PRIZE SOUGHT by the Soviet Union in its newly acquired postwar territory was the bomb itself—or initially the defense‐related industries, research specialists, and scientists in the German zone deemed useful to achieving this goal.1 The Soviets similarly made arrangements to benefit from uranium deposits in Jáchymov, Czechoslovakia, from the fall of 1945.2 The effort to develop the bomb, however, was merely the most visible expression of the Soviet state at work in what would eventually become the socialist bloc. The Soviet technical and managerial elite routinely engaged in a similar search for useful forms of industrial …

"We Are No Grumblers": Negotiating State And Federal Military Service In The Pennsylvania Reserve Division, Timothy J. Orr

History Faculty Publications

The article discusses the status of state and federal military officers from Pennsylvania during the U.S. Civil War. It examines the alleged confusion as to the expiration of contracts for soldiers and sailors in the Pennsylvania Reserve Division who had enlisted in 1861. According to the article, the problems arose from organizational difficulties as the mobilization of the Union army fluctuated following the 1861 call to volunteer service from state governors. The article states that following that call, soldiers were transferred from state service into federal service. According to the article, the organizational dilemma caused discord among the Pennsylvania Reserve …

Dow Chemical Vs. ‘Coercive Utopians’: Constructing The Contested Ground Of Science And Government Regulation In 1970s America, Amy M. Hay

History Faculty Publications

In 1979, the Dow Chemical Company published an excerpt from a speech by H. Peter Metzger that announced an emerging conflict in American ideals and public policy. He stated that a new kind of individual inhabited Washington, people from the counterculture who were “coercive utopians” because they sought to achieve their agenda through covert actions and hoped to end the American free market economy. Following the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the subsequent banning of DDT in 1972, Dow and other chemical manufacturers fought to keep the regulatory climate favorable to industry. Dow found itself defending the …

Mobile Warriors And Cosmopolitan Intellectuals: The Legacy Of The Dutch Counterinsurgency In Colonial Aceh, Andrew Goss

History Faculty Publications

Starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands East Indies sought to bring all the people and territory of the Indonesian archipelago under colonial control. In 1873, they turned their attention to the sultanate of Aceh in northern Sumatra, and sent a small invasion force. Their defeat led to 3000 mean being dispatched the following year, and while this force took control of the capital city of Banda Aceh and the lowlands near the coast, they were able to seize the city only after it had been abandoned by the Acehnese, who retreated into the mountainous regions to …

Exiles At Home: The Struggle To Become American In Creole New Orleans (Book Review), Mary Niall Mitchell

History Faculty Publications

The article reviews the book "Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans," by Shirley Elizabeth Thompson.