History Commons^™

"Spitting Positively Forbidden": The Anti-Spitting Campaign, 1896-1910, Patrick J. O'Connor

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

"Why Wait Until They Commit A Crime?": Moral Imbecility And The Problem Of Knowledge In Progressive America, 1880-1920, Chelsea D. Chamberlain

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Focusing on the forty-year period from 1880 to 1920, this thesis explores moral imbecility--the lack of a moral sense at birth--as a contested medical diagnosis that embodied many of modernizing America's greatest fears. It argues that moral imbecility played a pivotal role in facilitating the emergence of several hallmarks of modern America. The diagnosis legitimated medical experts’ far-reaching cultural authority, encouraged the rise of a surveillance society, and secured the growth of a medicalized bureaucratic state responsible for institutionalizing hundreds of thousands of people. As a potent medico-cultural threat based upon new and disputed knowledge claims, it became an important …

We Are Against Socialized Medicine, But What Are We For?: Federal Health Reinsurance, National Health Policy, And The Eisenhower Presidency, Jordan M. Graham

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project investigates the foundations of post-war health care in the United States by examining the first major proposal for federal involvement in health insurance, after the defeat of national health insurance in 1949. In doing so, this project aims to also illustrate Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency as one of limited liberal, or “Tory,” reform. The majority of primary sources were located at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. Secondary sources were chosen based on the frequency with which contemporary scholarship continues to rely upon and engage with them.

In the first two chapters, the thesis examines the …