Creatures of Cain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Late Night ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
American Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.

Mind Cure

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
First Americans ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Political Economic

Mindfulness is widely claimed to improve health and performance, and historians typically say that efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically began in the 1970s. In fact, they began much earlier, and that early history offers important lessons for the present and future. This book traces the history of mind-body medicine from eighteenth-century Mesmerism to the current Mindfulness boom and reveals how religion, race, and gender have shaped events. Many of the first Americans to advocate meditation for healing were women leaders of the Mind Cure movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. They believed that by transforming their consciousness, they could also transform oppressive circumstances in which they lived, and some were activists for social reform. Trained by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, these women promoted meditation through personal networks, religious communities, and publications. Some influenced important African American religious movements, as well. For women and black men, Mind Cure meant not just happiness but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. The Mind Cure movement exerted enormous pressure on mainstream American religion and medicine, and in response, white, male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials appropriated some of its methods and channeled them into scientific psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized, individualized, and then commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell away. After tracing how we got from Mind Cure to Mindfulness, this book reveals what got lost in the process.

scholarly journals A Legal History of the New Zealand Jury Service - Introduction, Evolution, and Equality?

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Michèle Powles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Jury Service ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jury System ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Service Introduction

This article traces the development of the New Zealand jury system. Most noteworthy in thisdevelopment has been the lack of controversy the system has created. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of equality in the legal system generally led to debate and reform of juries in relation to representation, race and gender.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 134-138
Author(s):  
Quincy D. Newell
Keyword(s):  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Racially Diverse ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Mormon History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

After her death, Jane James faded into obscurity until the late twentieth century, when she gained new fame. Mormons used her story to reimagine their church as racially diverse and Joseph Smith as racially egalitarian. For historians of American religion and others, James’s story gives the history of Mormonism from below and shows the limits of Mormonism’s democratizing impulse. It illustrates the variety of Mormon religious experience and shows the limits of focusing on temple rituals and priesthood. James’s Mormonism differed from that of other Latter-day Saints and thus illustrates how race and gender shaped ways of being Mormon. James also shaped Mormon history in subtle but crucial ways. Her presence in present-day LDS discourses suggests that she has finally achieved what she worked so hard for during her life: Mormons of all races now hold her in “honourable remembrance,” as her second patriarchal blessing promised her.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Caroline Mezger
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
History Of Childhood ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Different Levels

This chapter introduces the book’s key themes, historiographic framework, and research questions. It situates the book at the confluence of studies on National Socialism from a transnational and comparative perspective, experiences of Axis occupation during World War II, minorities and borderland nationalism in Central and Southeastern Europe, and the history of childhood and youth. Upon providing a brief historic overview of the ethnic Germans (Donauschwaben) in northern Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina and outlining the book’s key historiographic contributions, it reflects on the book’s multiscalar approach of interweaving archival, press, and original oral history sources to juxtapose and intertwine different levels of analysis. The chapter suggests that studying childhood and youth mobilization enables insight into larger historic conundrums, such as the interplay between categories like age, (ascribed) nationality, and gender in shaping historical experiences; the interaction between nationalizing forces “from above” and the lived, subjective experience of nationality “from below”; and questions of individual and collective agency in contexts of occupation and war. It presents the book’s main argument, that children and youth confronted with nationalizing projects themselves became agents of nationalization.

Institutional Logics and the Limits of Social Science Knowledge

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-213
Author(s):  
Jessica Blatt
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Institutional Logics ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science Knowledge ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

As someone whose training is in political science and who writes about the history of my own discipline, I admit to some hesitation in recommending future avenues of research for historians of education. For that reason, the following thoughts are directed toward disciplinary history broadly and social science history specifically. Moreover, the three articles that contributors to this forum were asked to use as inspiration suggest that any future I would recommend has been under way in one form or another for a while. For those reasons, I want to reframe my contribution as a reflection on a particular mode of analysis all three authors employed and how it may be particularly useful for exploring the questions of power, exclusion, and race- and gender-making in the academy that are present in all three articles and that explicitly animate two of them.

The Gay South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Watkins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Gay History ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
The Cold War

Regional variation, race, gender presentation, and class differences mean that there are many “Gay Souths.” Same-sex desire has been a feature of the human experience since the beginning, but the meanings, expressions, and ability to organize one’s life around desire have shifted profoundly since the invention of sexuality in the mid-19th century. World War II represented a key transition in gay history, as it gave many people a language for their desires. During the Cold War, government officials elided sex, race, and gender transgression with subversion and punished accordingly by state committees. These forces profoundly shaped gay social life, and rather than a straight line from closet to liberation, gays in the South have meandered. Movement rather than stasis, circulation rather than congregation, and the local rather than the stranger as well as creative uses of space and place mean that the gay South is distinctive, though not wholly unique, from the rest of the country.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Army Nurse Corps ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
Military Nursing ◽  
And Gender

This book examines the battles over race and gender discrimination and social justice by linking the civil rights story of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) to critical events in the United States between World War II and the Vietnam War. Using the microcosm of military nursing, it considers how agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when some of the same women who challenged their exclusion from the military or civilian nursing profession, or those who had gained considerable status within the profession, were unwilling to extend the opportunities to men who sought out military nursing careers. The book also explores the connection between the campaigns to integrate the ANC and the domestic and international anxieties during the Cold War by suggesting that anticommunism both hindered and supported the prospect for gender and race equality within the ANC and, by extension, civilian society.

Disruption in Detroit

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J Clark
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
White Women ◽  
Cold Weather ◽  
United Auto Workers ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
Hot Weather ◽  
Job Instability ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Almost All

It is conventional wisdom that because of lucrative contracts negotiated by the United Auto Workers (UAW) under Walter Reuther's leadership, most autoworkers in the U.S. enjoyed steady work, increasing wages, and improved benefits in the postwar boom following World War II. In short, autoworkers entered the middle class. In contrast, this book argues that for Detroit autoworkers there was no postwar boom. Instead, the years from 1945 to 1960 were dominated by job instability and economic insecurity. This argument is based largely on oral history interviews and research in local newspapers, which covered the auto industry extensively. Conditions were worse for African Americans and white women, but almost all autoworkers experienced precarious, often dire circumstances. Recessions, automation, decentralization, and the collapse of independent automakers in Detroit are part of the story, but materials shortages, steel, coal, and copper strikes, parts supplier strikes, wildcat strikes, overproduction (especially in 1955), hot weather, cold weather, plant explosions, age, race, and gender workplace discrimination, and the inability of autoworkers to afford new cars contributed to instability and insecurity. Hardly anyone in the 1950s—whether ordinary autoworkers, union leaders, auto company executives, business analysts, or local shopkeepers—thought that the decade was marked by steady work, improving wages, or anything resembling predictable income for autoworkers.

Beatles 2000: International Cross-disciplinary Conference, 15-18 June 2000, Jyvaskyla, Finland

Popular Music ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-119
Author(s):  
K S
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Gender Prejudice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Civilisation ◽  
And Gender

There’s no doubt about it. A Conference with a single theme is amazingly comforting. If the theme is centred on a group as well known as the Beatles, then it is doubly so. ‘Journalistic texts on popular music are often disposed towards music which they themselves like and would listen to by choice (often thinly veiling race and gender prejudice). This is characterised by their attraction to a certain type of more subversive-seeming, more lyrically and structurally complex music.’ ‘You want a piece of music to encapsulate the period it was written in, and Sgt. Pepper does seem to do that.’ `It was a decisive moment in the history of Western Civilisation.’ Although these somewhat eulogistic reflections were written in the early 1970s, the attraction to the Beatles has continued unabated. Richard Lloyd Perry, writing in The Independent on Sunday, 21 February 1999, observed: ‘Ironically, given their reputation at the time as slurring Scousers, the Beatles are honoured as custodians of linguistic clarity - an observation echoed in many of the papers presented at the Conference.

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