SCHOOL REFORM AS PROGRESSIVE STATECRAFT: EDUCATION POLICY IN NEW YORK UNDER GOVERNOR ALFRED E. SMITH, 1919–1928

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-398
Author(s):  
Robert Chiles
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
School Reform ◽  
Education Policy ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Child Labor ◽  
Progressive Education ◽  
Socially Responsible ◽  
Country Life ◽  
Progressive Education Movement

Since the Progressive Era itself, scholars have exhibited strong interest in the connections between progressivism and education. Historical studies have elucidated countless ways that such reformist impulses as the settlement house movement, the country life movement, the progressive education movement, the “cult of efficiency,” and battles against social ills like child labor influenced early twentieth-century education policy.1Indeed, as historian Lawrence Cremin has contended, “the Progressive mind was ultimately an educator's mind, and … its characteristic contribution was that of a socially responsible reformist pedagogue.”2

scholarly journals Virtual revisions and the vernacular image: the photographs of Elizabeth Howe Bliss

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate M. Fogle
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Child Labor ◽  
Social Worker ◽  
York City ◽  
Smithsonian Institution ◽  
Education Needs ◽  
Made In ◽  
Virtual Exhibition

In the waning years of the Progressive Era, an American social worker named Elizabeth Howe Bliss (1886-1974) traveled to Oklahoma and Kentucky on behalf of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to report on child labourers and their education needs. During her investigations, Bliss photographed her subjects and surroundings, and these images, among others made in New York City and war-torn France, were recently acquired by the Smithsonian Institution despite their vernacular status. This thesis establishes a biographical trajectory for the previously unresearched life of Bliss and considers the bulk of, and impetus behind, her photographs, with an additional focus on those printed in The Child Labor Bulletin in 1917 and 1919, respectively. Further, this thesis argues for the virtual exhibition of vernacular images as a means for increasing their visibility amongst a diverse online audience, while simultaneously challenging norms that have persisted in downplaying their photo-historical value.

scholarly journals Virtual revisions and the vernacular image: the photographs of Elizabeth Howe Bliss

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate M. Fogle
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Child Labor ◽  
Social Worker ◽  
York City ◽  
Smithsonian Institution ◽  
Education Needs ◽  
Made In ◽  
Virtual Exhibition

In the waning years of the Progressive Era, an American social worker named Elizabeth Howe Bliss (1886-1974) traveled to Oklahoma and Kentucky on behalf of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to report on child labourers and their education needs. During her investigations, Bliss photographed her subjects and surroundings, and these images, among others made in New York City and war-torn France, were recently acquired by the Smithsonian Institution despite their vernacular status. This thesis establishes a biographical trajectory for the previously unresearched life of Bliss and considers the bulk of, and impetus behind, her photographs, with an additional focus on those printed in The Child Labor Bulletin in 1917 and 1919, respectively. Further, this thesis argues for the virtual exhibition of vernacular images as a means for increasing their visibility amongst a diverse online audience, while simultaneously challenging norms that have persisted in downplaying their photo-historical value.

The Petticoat Inspectors: Women Boarding Inspectors and the Gendered Exercise of Federal Authority

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Pliley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Port Of New York ◽  
Government Authority ◽  
The U.S

In the early twentieth century, anti-white-slavery activists sought to construct a new position for women inspectors in the Immigration Bureau. These activists asserted that immigrant girls traveling without a family patriarch deserved the U.S. government's paternal protection, yet they argued that women would be best suited to provide this protection because of women's purported maternal abilities to perceive feminine distress. By wielding paternal government authority—marked by a badge, the ability to detain, and presumably the power to punish—these women could most effectively protect the nation's moral boundaries from immoral prostitutes while also protecting innocent immigrant girls from the dangers posed by solitary travel. In 1903 the Immigration Bureau launched an experiment of placing women among the boarding teams at the port of New York. The experiment, however, was short-lived, as opponents of the placement of women in such visible positions campaigned against them. This episode reminds us that the ability to represent and exercise federal authority in the early twentieth century was profoundly gendered; and women's increased participation in government positions during the Progressive Era was deeply contested.

Ghetto Realism—and Beyond

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-218
Author(s):  
Lori Harrison-Kahan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth

By focusing on the reception of Yekl, Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel of immigrant life in New York, this chapter considers the turn-of-the-twentieth-century controversy surrounding depictions of Jews in ghetto literature, arguing that this debate illuminates not only the challenges of ethno-racial representation and self-representation but also the slipperiness of realism itself. The chapter also posits a more inclusive interpretation of Jewish American realism by demonstrating the importance of an overlooked late nineteenth-century realist writer, Emma Wolf. It explores how Wolf’s novels Other Things Being Equal (1892) and Heirs of Yesterday (1900), which focus on experiences of Jewish families in San Francisco during the Progressive Era, offer important alternatives to the New York–centric ghetto genre, expanding the parameters of Jewish American literature in terms of region, class, gender, and religion.

scholarly journals Plainclothes Policewomen on the Trail: NYPD Undercover Investigations of Abortionists and Queer Women, 1913–1926

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Evens
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Queer Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Female Immigrant ◽  
Marginalized Women ◽  
Intimate Encounters

In early twentieth-century New York City, policewomen went undercover to investigate abortion and queer women. These early female entrants to the New York Police Department were not the middle class reformers typically associated with Progressive Era vice reform; they tended to be working class white widows who carved out a gendered expertise that relied upon their unique capacity and willingness to extend surveillance over the female, immigrant spaces that eluded their male counterparts. The NYPD instrumentalized policewomen's bodies; investigations of criminalized female sexuality required policewomen participate in intimate encounters, exposing their own precarity in the masculine world of policing. But plainclothes work also furnished policewomen with a rare route to professional renown and social mobility, “success” they won at the expense of more marginalized women. Their work reveals that the early twentieth-century state was more innovative and invested in methods to police “disorderly” female heterosexuality and same sex desire than previously understood.

Authenticity and Ethnicity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Ray Herzogenrath
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Young Women ◽  
The Body ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
Settlement House ◽  
Settlement Houses ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Settlement Movement

During the Progressive Era, settlement workers attempted to regulate dance both within and outside settlement house walls as a method to instill proper “American” body behaviors, particularly in immigrant bodies. This essay examines the paradoxes of folk dance as encouraged by settlement workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago and New York. Settlement workers aimed to assimilate immigrants to American ideals of health, refinement, and respectability through the body; in folk dance they found a satisfying mode of nonsexualized dance, which also acted out a romanticized desire for simplicity in the midst of rapid modernization. The evidence reveals that folk dance in settlement houses traveled two paths: ethnic clubs devoted to the practice of immigrant traditions and structured classes offered to girls and young women. These developments fulfilled the project of Americanization prescribed by the settlement movement and provided a means for immigrants to continue folk practices from their home countries.

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