Exchange Value: British “Scholarship Boys” in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. L. LEMAHIEU
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
First Americans ◽  
Twentieth Century America

In the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of British “scholarship boys” traveled to America sponsored by British and American foundations. Their experiences in the United States qualify and complicate existing narratives about upwardly mobile meritocrats. First, Americans regarded these figures in a manner that helped alter their view of themselves. Distinctions that mattered in Britain became less significant in America, though scholarship boys remained shrewd enough to penetrate the veneer of a superficial egalitarianism. National identity became a marker that sidelined residual anxieties about social hierarchy. Second, American prosperity affected the bias against consumerism shared by many British intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century. As professionals supported by government or educational institutions, these visitors differentiated themselves from those in the private sector, which pursued other goals. America exposed scholarship boys to a system that assimilated consumerism without sacrificing professionalism and a commitment to social progress.

The Lucrative Business of the Cyrus Cylinder

2020 ◽  
pp. 299-301
Author(s):  
Kamyar Abdi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
International Business ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The United States

This chapter focuses on the Cylinder of Cyrus the Great (c. 600–530 BCE) of Persia. More commonly known as the “Cyrus Cylinder,” this archaeological find housed in the British Museum is about 22 centimeters long, made of baked clay, and covered in cuneiform writing that has been noted by biblical scholars to corroborate the story of Cyrus’s liberation of the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity. Since the mid-twentieth century, it has been (mis/ab)used as a political tool to promote Iranian national identity. With its exhibition in Iran in 2010 and in the United States in 2013, it has also become a commodified icon in a lucrative international business.

Teaching National Identity and Alterity

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-126
Author(s):  
Bahar Gürsel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Race Ethnicity

The swift and profound transformations in technology and industry that the United States began to experience in the late 1800s manifested themselves in school textbooks, which presented different patterns of race, ethnicity, and otherness. They also displayed concepts like national identity, exceptionalism, and the superiority of Euro-American civilization. This article aims to demonstrate, via an analysis of two textbooks, how world geography was taught to children in primary schools in nineteenth century America. It shows that the development of American identity coincided with the emergence of the realm of the “other,” that is, with the intensification of racial attitudes and prejudices, some of which were to persist well into the twentieth century.

A Worthwhile Effort? History of Organized Youth Sport in the United States

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Wiggins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Youth Sports ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Youth Sport ◽  
The United States ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Sports Programs ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the evolution of highly organized youth sports in the United States. Through an examination of both secondary and primary source material, an analysis is made of children's participation in sport from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Particular attention is paid to the types of sports programs established for children as well as the various discussions involving the supposed benefits and negative aspects of youth sports. Included is information on Progressive Reformers, youth sport programs outside of educational institutions, and guidelines, reports, assessments, and scholarly evaluation of children and their involvement in sport.

scholarly journals Mexican Village: Josefina Niggli’s Border Crossing Narrative

Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 353-364
Author(s):  
Jadwiga Maszewska
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Mexican Culture ◽  
The Times

The paper presents Josefina Niggli (1910–83), an American mid-twentieth-century writer who was born and grew up in Mexico, and her novel Mexican Village (1945). A connoisseur of Mexican culture and tradition, and at the same time conscious of the stereotypical perceptions of Mexico in the United States, Niggli saw it as her literary goal to “reveal” the “true” Mexico as she remembered it to her American readers. Somewhat forgotten for several decades, Niggli, preoccupied with issues of marginalization, hybridization, and ambiguity, is now becoming of interest to literary critics as a forerunner of Chicano/a literature. In her novel Mexican Village, set in the times of the Mexican Revolution, she creates a prototypical bicultural and bilingual Chicano protagonist, who becomes witness to the rise of Mexico’s modern national identity.

scholarly journals Democratic Decline and the Politics of the Upswing: How the United States May Have Come Together a Century Ago but Can It Do It Again?

2021 ◽  
pp. 147892992110318
Author(s):  
Matthew Flinders
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Economic

Robert Putman’s The Upswing (written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) provides a powerful meta-analysis of American social, political, economic and cultural change throughout the twentieth century. What this analysis reveals is the existence of an almost perfect arc of social progress which begins from a low position around the Gilded Age at the beginning of the twentieth century and then climbs across all variables until reaching a highpoint around 1960. The Progressive Era, Putnam argues, engineered an ‘upswing’ against inequality, polarisation, social disarray and a culture of self-centredness. Since then, however, the data suggest that a severe downswing has occurred which explains the existence of deep divisions and polarised politics in the United States. Putnam’s core argument is simple: The United States has pulled itself out of a trough before and it can do it again. In a post-Trump context, this argument could hardly be more welcome which may explain the rave reviews this book has generally received. Nevertheless, the core weakness of The Upswing is that it arguably tells us far more about how the United States ‘came together a century ago’ but far less about how it ‘can do it again’ in the future.

His-Panic / My Panic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isar P. Godreau
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Affiliation

This chapter explores the Hispanophobia of U.S. colonial officials and of those working-class Puerto Ricans who supported annexation to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. For both of these groups, Spain represented a backward, antidemocratic influence and—albeit for different reasons—a suspect source of whiteness. San Antón residents expressed disdain for Spaniards in various ways in formal and informal conversations, regardless of their political affiliation. These stories do not portray Spaniards as a civilizing source of national identity but rather as a barbaric people engaged in gruesome practices. However, opinions about Spaniards were less negative in narratives of older residents who were more specifically grounded in San Antón and who personalized stories through telling about their own families.

scholarly journals Through A Xenophobic Lens

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Savage Lee ◽  
Tamas Z. Csabafi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Social Concerns ◽  
The Alamo ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Race Suicide

At the turn of the twentieth century, social theories developed in both the U.S. and Europe suggested that those at the top, or those most well endowed with good genetics, would stay that way, while those with poor genetics had little hope of changing their circumstances.  Degeneration theory, as this concept was called when it took root in the United States from the late 1890s, before it had evolved to formally become eugenics in the 1910s, and beyond. While eugenics offices opened in Berlin in 1905, in England in 1907-08, and in the United States in 1910, there were many forms of it, including degeneration theory. What bound all the theories together was the notion of biology and heredity.             Westerns like Martyrs of the Alamo became a vehicle to explore these concerns because they inundated everyday Americans with illustrations of national identity. Films like these often mixed fantasy with ideology. This is clearly evident in W. Christy Cabanne’s anti-Mexican sentiment in Martyrs of the Alamo. Examining Cabanne’s film through the lens of degeneracy theory provides a greater understanding of American social concerns in the 1910s. These concerns, characterized by xenophobic depictions of immigrants, particularly Mexicans, culminated in the linking of immigrant bodies and disease with heredity and genetics, namely through theories of degeneration . Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo suggests, through the reproduction of the conflict surrounding the Alamo Mission, that the alternative to “race suicide” is a fantasy of American heroism, collectivism, and cultural exclusion. (SS and TZCS)

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