Conclusion: Abled, Racialized, and Gendered Power in the Making of the Twentieth Century American State

In 1917 Congress passed the Trading with the Enemy Act to prevent trade with Germany and the Central Powers. It was a wartime law designed for wartime conditions but one that, over the course of the following century, took on a secret, surprising life of its own. Eventually it became the basis for a project of worldwide economic sanctions applied by the United States at the discretion of the president during times of both war and peace. This article traces the history of the law in order to explore how the expansion of American power in the twentieth century required a transformation of the American state and the extensive use of executive powers justified by repeated declarations of national emergency.

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Paranoid Masculinity in a Woman’s Mansion: Henry James’ “The Aspern Papers”

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik ◽

10.1515/zaa-2017-0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 65 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Gero Bauer

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Henry James ◽

Power Relations ◽

Literary Scholarship ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

The Dead ◽

Gendered Power

AbstractOver the last decades, literary scholarship has increasingly recognised the importance of Henry James’ fiction for an understanding of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century dynamics of genders and sexualities. In his writing, James repeatedly demonstrates how modern patriarchal masculinities fail to establish themselves as stable identities. On a textual level, he employs a ‘queer rhetoric’ that allows for readings beyond the normative axes masculine-feminine/homosexual-heterosexual. In this paper, I discuss how James, in his tale “The Aspern Papers” (1888), turns traditionally gendered power relations upside-down: while the patriarchal home is the domestic centre of the narrative, it is two women who are in control of its secrets. The male protagonist, a nameless editor, has to rely on the women’s willingness to let him in on their secret, allow him access to the letters of the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern, which he assumes to be in their possession, and, hence, let him face his own unspeakable secret in a ‘closet’ that is not his own.

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Introduction

Between Citizens and the State ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691148274.003.0001 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

Christopher P. Loss

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

The State ◽

American Higher Education ◽

Lyndon Johnson ◽

National Leaders ◽

Political Commitments ◽

Franklin Roosevelt ◽

Do So ◽

American State

This chapter lays out the history and background of the federal government's growing involvement in American higher education, arguing that the latter had emerged as a predominant “parastate” in the twentieth century. Situated between citizens and the state, completely beholden to neither party but expected and committed to serve both, higher education proved perfectly suited for the task. The potential for higher education's ideas and individuals to migrate into the heart of society proved particularly seductive to state builders. That higher education could be used to shape citizens' political commitments resonated with national leaders, such as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to build a new and more powerful state but had to do so using homegrown materials, all the more effective if they were locally produced. From such stuff was the American state made.

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Constitutionalization as Statecraft: Vagrant Nation and the Modern American State

Law & Social Inquiry ◽

10.1111/lsi.12375 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 43 (04) ◽

pp. 1646-1657 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Karen M. Tani

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Constitutional Law ◽

Federal Courts ◽

Court Decisions ◽

Nation State ◽

Individual Rights ◽

Historical Literature ◽

Modes Of Governance ◽

American State

This essay showcases the contribution of Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation (2016) to one field of scholarship that the book scarcely mentions: the historical literature on the American state. In Goluboff's account of the fall of the “vagrancy law regime” in the “long 1960s” I see vital questions about the nature of the modern American state and the endurance of older, seemingly antithetical modes of governance. Given the trends that state-focused scholars have illuminated—for example, toward centralization of power and the protection of individual rights—what allowed for vague, locally enforced vagrancy laws to survive so late into the twentieth century? What ultimately triggered their demise? In mining Vagrant Nation for answers, this essay also urges scholars to contemplate “constitutionalization” as a form of statecraft. In giving a constitutional law framing to the grievances of “vagrants,” federal courts reinforced key tenets of the modern American state, including the supremacy of national law over competing legal orders and the desirability of being a rights-bearing member of the nation-state. Simultaneously, these court decisions left open other, more “modern” possibilities for regulating the kinds of people (poor, nonwhite, unpopular) whom vagrancy laws once ensnared.

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Capitalist Development in the Twentieth Century: An Evolutionary-Keynesian Analysis. By John Cornwall and Wendy Cornwall. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. 269. $59.95.

The Journal of Economic History ◽

10.1017/s0022050703542462 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 63 (3) ◽

pp. 927-928

Author(s):

GEOFFREY M. HODGSON

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Capitalist Development ◽

Cambridge University

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Some Polish Composers of To-Day

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s0040298200053596 ◽

1948 ◽

pp. 25-28

Author(s):

Andrzej Panufnik

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Fertile Soil ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Progressive Group ◽

Karol Szymanowski

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.

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