Christ of the American Road: E. Stanley Jones, India, and Civil Rights

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 1117-1138
Author(s):  
DAVID R. SWARTZ
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This article, which emphasizes the importance of transnational history, tracks the influence of E. Stanley Jones, a missionary to India in the early twentieth century, on evangelicals in the United States. It contends that global encounters pushed Jones to hold integrated ashrams, conduct evangelistic crusades, and participate in the Congress on Racial Equality. During his time abroad, he discovered that racial segregation at home hurt the causes of missions and democracy abroad. Using this Cold War logic, Jones in turn provoked American evangelicals to consider more fully questions of racial inequality.

Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan J. Dominy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Societal Pressure ◽  
The Cold War

The formalized study of southern literature in the mid-twentieth century is an example of scholars formalizing the study of modernist aesthetics in order to suppress leftist politics and sentiments in literature and art. This formalized, institutional study was initiated in a climate in which intellectuals were under societal pressure, created by the Cold War, to praise literary and artistic production representative of American values. This even in southern literary studies occurred roughly at the same time that the United States sought to extoll the virtues of America’s free, democratic society abroad. In this manner, southern studies and American studies become two sides of the same coin. Intellectuals and writers that promoted American exceptionalism dealt with the rising Civil Rights Movement and the nation’s complicated history with race and poverty by casting the issues as moral rather than political problems that were distinctly southern and could therefore be corrected by drawing on “exceptional” southern values, such as tradition and honor. The result of such maneuvering is that over the course of the twentieth century, “south” becomes more than a geographical identity. Ultimately, “south” becomes a socio-political and cultural identity associated with modern conservatism with no geographical boundaries. Rather than a country divided into south and north, the United States is divided in the twenty-first century into red and blue states. The result of using southern literature to present southern values as appropriate, moderate values for the whole nation during the Cold War is to associate these values with nationalism and conservatism today.

A Century of America on Chinese Screens

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
American People ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Films ◽  
New Millennium

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.

American Legal Thought in Transatlantic Context, 1870-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Rabban
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Historical School ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sociological Jurisprudence

Most American legal scholars have described their nineteenth-century predecessors as deductive formalists. In my recent book, Law’s History : American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History, I demonstrate instead that the first generation of professional legal scholars in the United States, who wrote during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, viewed law as a historically based inductive science. They constituted a distinctive historical school of American jurisprudence that was superseded by the development of sociological jurisprudence in the early twentieth century. This article focuses on the transatlantic context, involving connections between European and American scholars, in which the historical school of American jurisprudence emerged, flourished, and eventually declined.

scholarly journals PLAYING ON UNCLE SAM'S TEAM: AMERICAN CHILDHOODS DURING WORLD WAR I

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
World War I ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
Constructions Of Childhood

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.

scholarly journals The Trumpet of the Swan

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-186
Author(s):  
Karen Ann Donnachie ◽  
Andy Simionato
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Autonomous Robot ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Twitter Account ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
Natural Media

This paper will outline the ideation, background and development of the electronic artwork The Trumpet of the Swan (Donnachie & Simionato, 2017) presented by the authors at the Electronic Literature Organisation conference in Porto, Portugal in 2017. The artwork is a custom-coded drawing-robot which automatically inscribes in natural media, every post published from the personal Twitter profile of the 45th President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, identified on Twitter as @realDonaldTrump. The machine, which has the appearance reminiscent of a swan, including a broad “body” balanced on two short legs that end in webbed “feet”, is a semi-autonomous robot that writes in a pen, crowned by a long white plume, on a continuous scroll of paper while producing bird-like sounds. The drawing-robot remains permanently in a state of attention and the demonstrated sequence of actions can only be triggered remotely and by the 45th President of the U.S.A. himself (or more precisely, by whomever publishes a new tweet through his Twitter account ‘@realDonaldTrump’). In other words, to borrow a popular phrase taken from twentieth century cold-war propaganda: only the President has the ability to “launch” this artwork which otherwise remains dormant, in waiting.

The Informational Economy of Vaudeville and the Business of American Entertainment

2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-446
Author(s):  
Samuel E. Backer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Internal Market ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Informational Economy ◽  
Analyze Data

In the early twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States. Operating before the rise of mechanically reproduced entertainment, its centralized booking offices moved tens of thousands of performers across hundreds of stages to an audience of millions. Designed to gather and analyze data about both audiences and performers, these offices created a complex informational economy that defined the genre—an internal market that sought to transform culture into a commodity. By reconstructing the concrete details of these business practices, it is possible to develop a new understanding of both the success of the vaudeville industry and its influence on the evolution of American mass culture.

Science as the Key to Modern Progress

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Motoe Sasaki
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women Missionaries ◽  
New Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modernization Process

This chapter shows how the notion of modern science brought to China by American New Women missionaries in the form of medicine and nursing generated concrete responses from their Chinese counterparts. The notion of science as a universally applicable and fundamentally egalitarian element for the development of a modern society and its constituents was increasingly influential in both the United States and China during the early twentieth century. Consequently, American New Women missionaries were able to establish their status as scientific professionals whose expertise could contribute to China's modernization process. At the same time, however, their faith in the new notion of science brought with it the idea of “separate but equal” gender roles, which brought them into conflict with many of their male counterparts from the United States who wanted to compete with other imperial powers to gain influence in China.

An Agitator Abroad

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Clayworth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Compulsory Arbitration ◽  
Transnational Network

Patrick Hodgens Hickey, a New Zealander, was a labor activist who introduced American ideas of revolutionary industrial unionism and socialist political action to the country of his birth. Hickey grew up in rural New Zealand at a time of industrial peace under a compulsory arbitration system and initially had little interest in unions or socialism. He learned mining skills while working as an itinerant laborer in the United States, becoming part of a transnational network of mine workers. He was radicalized by his experiences of American class conflict and his involvement with the militant Western Federation of Miners. Returning to New Zealand, he became a leader of a workers’ revolt against the compulsory arbitration system in the period from 1907 through to 1914. Hickey was a key organizer of the union peak body that became the New Zealand Federation of Labour, the “Red Feds.” Following the defeats of the Waihi strike of 1912 and the Great Strike of 1913, Hickey suffered blacklisting. He went to Australia in 1915 to escape the blacklist and the threat of wartime conscription. In Australia he worked as a union activist and anticonscription campaigner. Hickey’s life and career illustrate the transnational migration of workers and their ideas in the early twentieth century.

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