scholarly journals A great race of drinkers? Irish interpretations of alcoholism and drinking stereotypes, 1945–1975

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-89
Author(s):  
Alice Mauger

AbstractFrom the 1930s, psychiatrists and sociologists documented the prevalence of Irish alcohol-related psychiatric admissions in the United States. These studies seemed to suggest that the Irish, as a race, had a remarkable relationship with drink, therefore reinforcing the enduring ‘drunken Irish’ stereotype. By the 1960s, the alleged Irish susceptibility to alcoholism gained increasing attention from researchers and officials in Ireland itself. Significantly, this renewed awareness coincided with a shift in Ireland’s place on the international landscape and was intertwined with the broader social, cultural and political environment. While anxieties about the apparently rising incidence of alcoholism and alcohol-related harm were not unique to Ireland, the specific cultural meanings attached to excessive drinking in a nation internationally renowned for this problem mapped onto shifting international frameworks, informing medical perceptions and shaping policy developments. This article explores expert and official interpretations of alcoholism and the ‘drunken Irish’ stereotype from 1945 to 1975. This period saw a number of important developments, including the introduction of the Irish Mental Treatment Act of 1945, the establishment of the Irish National Council on Alcoholism in 1966 and the creation of specialist alcohol treatment facilities in several psychiatric hospitals. In the same era, the contexts for understanding problem drinking began to shift from the disease concept of alcoholism towards the public health perspective on alcohol. As will be argued, in Ireland, these frameworks were coloured by concerns that social and cultural factors were contributing to rising levels of alcohol consumption and psychiatric admissions for alcoholism.

Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri

When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own women's conference for the very next day. Defying the march's male organizers, Height helped harness the womanpower waiting in the wings. Height’s careful tactics and quiet determination come to the fore in this first history of the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Offering a sweeping view of the NCNW's behind-the-scenes efforts to fight racism, poverty, and sexism in the late twentieth century, Rebecca Tuuri examines how the group teamed with U.S. presidents, foundations, and grassroots activists alike to implement a number of important domestic development and international aid projects. Drawing on original interviews, extensive organizational records, and other rich sources, Tuuri’s work narrates the achievements of a set of seemingly moderate, elite activists who were able to use their personal, financial, and social connections to push for change as they facilitated grassroots, cooperative, and radical activism.


2019 ◽  
Vol Special Issue ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Piotr Kardela

The article presents the activity of Wacław Szyszkowski, a lawyer, an emigration independence activist and an outstanding scientist, who fought in the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920 and, after Poland regained independence, was active in a secret Union of the Polish Youth “Zet” and a public Union of the Polish Democratic Youth. Until 1939 W. Szyszkowski was a defence lawyer in Warsaw, supporting the activities of the Central Union of the Rural Youth “Siew” and the Work Cooperative “Grupa Techniczna”. Published articles in political and legal journals, such as “Przełom”, “Naród i Państwo”, “Palestra”, “Głos Prawa”. During World War II — a conspirator of the Union for Defense of the Republic of Poland, soldier of the Union of Armed Struggle and Home Army, assigned to the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Home Army Headquarters. Fought in the Warsaw Uprising, after which he was deported by Germans to the Murnau oflag in Bavaria. For helping Jews during the occupation, the Yad Vashem Institute awarded him and his wife Irena the title of Righteous Among the Nations. After 1945, he remained in the West, engaging in the life of the Polish war exile in France, Great Britain and the United States. He received a doctorate in law at the Sorbonne. He belonged to the People’s Party “Wolność”, the Association of Polish Combatants. He was a member of the National Council of the Republic of Poland in Exile. As an anti-communist, he was invigilated by the communist intelligence of the People’s Republic of Poland. In the 1960s, after returning to Poland, as a lawyer and scientist, he was first affiliated with the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University of Lublin, and then with Nicolaus Copernicus University of Toruń. W. Szyszkowski is the author of nearly two hundred scientific and journalistic publications printed in Poland and abroad.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Adolphus G. Belk ◽  
Robert C. Smith ◽  
Sherri L. Wallace

In general, the founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists were “movement people.” Powerful agents of socialization such as the uprisings of the 1960s molded them into scholars with tremendous resolve to tackle systemic inequalities in the political science discipline. In forming NCOBPS as an independent organization, many sought to develop a Black perspective in political science to push the boundaries of knowledge and to use that scholarship to ameliorate the adverse conditions confronting Black people in the United States and around the globe. This paper utilizes historical documents, speeches, interviews, and other scholarly works to detail the lasting contributions of the founders and Black political scientists to the discipline, paying particular attention to their scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and civic engagement. It finds that while political science is much improved as a result of their efforts, there is still work to do if their goals are to be achieved.


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Jones

The chapter examines green business during the 1960s and 1970, decades of new environmental awareness. In organic food natural beauty, a number of commercially viable green businesses and brands began to be built, and distribution channels created. There was significant innovation in wind and solar energy in the wake of the first oil crises although they remained marginal in the energy industry. Green entrepreneurs still faced huge obstacles finding both capital and consumers. In the case of the capital-intensive solar energy business, the main solution was to sell start-ups to cash-rich oil companies. Green businesses clustered in hubs of environmental and social activism, such as Berkeley and Boulder in the United States, Allgäu in Germany, and rural areas of Denmark. These clusters enabled small firms to build skills and competences which could eventually be used to expand into more mainstream locations.


1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Rosenthal

This paper deals with the constitutionality of involuntary treatment of opiate addicts. Although the first laws permitting involuntary treatment of opiate addicts were enacted in the second half of the nineteenth century, addicts were not committed in large numbers until California and New York enacted new civil commitment legislation in the 1960s. Inevitably, the courts were called upon to decide if involuntary treatment was constitutional. Both the California and New York courts decided that it was. These decisions were heavily influenced by statements made by the United States Supreme Court in Robinson v. California. The Robinson case did not actually involve the constitutionality of involuntary treatment; it involved the question of whether it was constitutional for a state to make addiction a crime. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court declared (in a dictum) that a state might establish a program of compulsory treatment for opiate addicts either to discourage violation of its criminal laws against narcotic trafficking or to safeguard the general health or welfare of its inhabitants. Presumably because the Robinson case did not involve the constitutionality of involuntary treatment of opiate addicts, the Supreme Court did not go into that question as deeply as it might have. The California and New York courts, in turn, relied too much on this dictum and did not delve deeply into the question. The New York courts did a better job than the California courts, but their work too was not as good as it should have been.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-429
Author(s):  
Robert N. McCauley

Abstract Since the late 1950s, the rest of the world has come to use the dollar to an extent that justifies speaking of the dollar’s global domain. The rest of the world denominates much debt in U.S. dollars, extending U.S. monetary policy’s sway. In addition, in outstanding foreign exchange deals, the rest of the world has undertaken to pay still more in U.S. dollars: off-balance-sheet dollar debts buried in footnotes. Consistent with the scale of dollar debt, most of the world economic activity takes place in countries with currencies tied to or relatively stable against the dollar, forming a dollar zone much larger than the euro zone. Even though the dollar assets of the world (minus the United States) exceed dollar liabilities, corporate sector dollar debts seem to make dollar appreciation akin to a global tightening of credit. Since the 1960s, claims that the dollar’s global role suffers from instability and confers great benefits on the U.S. economy have attracted much support. However, evidence that demand for dollars from official reserve managers forces unsustainable U.S. current account or fiscal deficits is not strong. The so-called exorbitant privilege is small or shared. In 2008 and again in 2020, the Federal Reserve demonstrated a willingness and capacity to backstop the global domain of the dollar. Politics could constrain the Fed’s ability to backstop the growing share of the domain of the dollar accounted for by countries that are not on such friendly terms with the U.S.


2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Steven Ruggles

AbstractQuantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.


1981 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Rips

What was known in the United States as the ‘underground press’ – self-published newspapers of the youth counterculture sold at street corners and around campuses in American cities during the 1960s and early 70 s – was once a significant network estimated at over 400 publications. Their hallmark was opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War, criticism of the authorities, of uncontrolled technology and big business, advocacy of sexual freedom and artistic experimentation and, frequently, the advocacy of marijuana, LSD and other psychedelic drugs. Few of these publications have survived the past ten years, and their disappearance has been variously attributed to the cooling of radical interest after the American withdrawal from Vietnam, as well as to the vague and shifting nature of the ‘hippie’ scene. Complaints by their publishers during the early and mid-seventies that printers refused their business, that office rents suddenly doubled, that advertising was cancelled, that papers were lost – these were seen as local accidents and were rarely reported by the established media. Claims of official or officially-sanctioned harassment were dismissed – even by fellow radicals – as paranoid. Recent research by Geoffrey Rips of the PEN American Center has revealed the extent and variety of official pressure exerted against alternative publications during the Vietnam War period. Using evidence from government hearings like the Church Committee, which reported in 1976, actual FBI documents released to American PEN under the Freedom of Information Act, and other sources, Mr Rips argues that such harassment contributed materially to the closure of certain publications and in general terms constituted a gross infringement on the protection afforded to dissenting opinion and to a free press under the US constitution. We publish edited extracts here from Geoffrey Rips' report which will be published in full by the PEN American Center and the City Lights Press.


Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
Linda K. Kerber

The old law of domestic relations and the system known as coverture have shaped marriage practices in the United States and have limited women's membership in the constitutional community. This system of law predates the Revolution, but it lingers in U.S. legal tradition even today. After describing coverture and the old law of domestic relations, this essay considers how the received narrative of women's place in U.S. history often obscures the story of women's and men's efforts to overthrow this oppressive regime, and also the story of the continuing efforts of men and some women to stabilize and protect it. The essay also questions the paradoxes built into American law: for example, how do we reconcile the strictures of coverture with the founders' care in defining rights-holders as “persons” rather than “men”? Citing a number of court cases from the early days of the republic to the present, the essay describes the 1960s and 1970s shift in legal interpretation of women's rights and obligations. However, recent developments – in abortion laws, for example – invite inquiry as to how full the change is that we have accomplished. The history of coverture and the way it affects legal, political, and cultural practice today is another American narrative that needs to be better understood.


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