scholarly journals Assembly Lines and Contra Dance Lines: The Ford Motor Company Music Department and Leisure Reform

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 470-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHERINE BRUCHER

AbstractThe automaker Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company Music Department in 1924 with the goal of reviving what he called “old-fashioned dancing and early American music.” Ford's interest in the Anglo-American social dances of his youth quickly grew from dances hosted by the Fords for company executives to a nationwide dance education program. This article traces the history of the Music Department's dance education program and examines the parallels between it and the company's earlier efforts in social engineering—namely the Ford Profit Sharing Plan (better known as the “Five Dollar Day”) and the Ford English School. The Music Department's activities offer an opportunity to explore how industry sought to shape music and dance through Americanization efforts and leisure reform as Detroit rapidly urbanized during the first decades of the twentieth century. Supporters of Ford's revival viewed the restrained musical accompaniment and dance movements as an antidote to jazz music and dances, but more importantly, music and dance served as an object lesson in the physical discipline necessary for assembly line labor. Ford's dance education campaign reveals the degree to which industry was once entwined with leisure reform in southeast Michigan.

2020 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Ji Eun Yun ◽  
Hwa Jung Yoo ◽  
Hyunjung Kim

Author(s):  
Angela Calcaterra

Although cross-cultural encounter is often considered an economic or political matter, beauty, taste, and artistry were central to cultural exchange and political negotiation in early and nineteenth-century America. Part of a new wave of scholarship in early American studies that contextualizes American writing in Indigenous space, Literary Indians highlights the significance of Indigenous aesthetic practices to American literary production. Countering the prevailing notion of the “literary Indian” as a construct of the white American literary imagination, Angela Calcaterra reveals how Native people’s pre-existing and evolving aesthetic practices influenced Anglo-American writing in precise ways. Indigenous aesthetics helped to establish borders and foster alliances that pushed against Anglo-American settlement practices and contributed to the discursive, divided, unfinished aspects of American letters. Focusing on tribal histories and Indigenous artistry, Calcaterra locates surprising connections and important distinctions between Native and Anglo-American literary aesthetics in a new history of early American encounter, identity, literature, and culture.


Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler

Habeas Corpus in Wartime unearths and presents a comprehensive account of the legal and political history of habeas corpus in wartime in the Anglo-American legal tradition. The book begins by tracing the origins of the habeas privilege in English law, giving special attention to the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which limited the scope of executive detention and used the machinery of the English courts to enforce its terms. It also explores the circumstances that led Parliament to invent the concept of suspension as a tool for setting aside the protections of the Habeas Corpus Act in wartime. Turning to the United States, the book highlights how the English suspension framework greatly influenced the development of early American habeas law before and after the American Revolution and during the Founding period, when the United States Constitution enshrined a habeas privilege in its Suspension Clause. The book then chronicles the story of the habeas privilege and suspension over the course of American history, giving special attention to the Civil War period. The final chapters explore how the challenges posed by modern warfare during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have placed great strain on the previously well-settled understanding of the role of the habeas privilege and suspension in American constitutional law. Throughout, the book draws upon a wealth of original and heretofore untapped historical resources to shed light on the purpose and role of the Suspension Clause in the United States Constitution, revealing all along that many of the questions that arise today regarding the scope of executive power to arrest and detain in wartime are not new ones.


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