The Saturday Evening Girls: A Progressive Era Library Club and the Intellectual Life of Working Class and Immigrant Girls in Turn-of-the-Century Boston

2001 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-230 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Saturday Evening

Becoming What You Eat: The New England Kitchen and the Body as a Site of Social Reform

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-460
Author(s):  
Nicholas J.P. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
New England ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Social Reform Movements ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractReformers at the turn of the century struggled to understand why people were the way they were and whether they could really be changed. The reformers behind the New England Kitchen (NEK), a dietary reform experiment in 1890s Boston that hoped to change working-class diets, dedicated much of its efforts to answering the question at the heart of all social reform movements: Were people's behaviors determined by biological or social factors? In the course of their work, these reformers came to understand the relationship between food and bodies as central to social reform and sought to use dietary reform to change working-class bodies. Their actions and ideas disrupt the neat categories historians have come to rely upon when discussing reformist thought and push us to embrace the messiness of ideas as they are being worked out. This article explores these messy ideas, using four conceptions of the body that emerged from the NEK efforts—the caloric body, the changing body, the citizen body, and the managed body—to make sense of ideas that were later taken up by the USDA and the Children's Bureau, as well as other reform efforts in the Progressive Era.

THE USE OF ACCOUNTING INFORMATION IN GOVERNMENTAL REGULATION AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: THE IMPACT OF JOHN R. COMMONS AND EARLY INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMISTS

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Covaleski ◽  
Mark W. Dirsmith ◽  
Sajay Samuel
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Accounting Information ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Governmental Regulation ◽  
Calculative Practices ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Return Regulation ◽  
Intrinsic Measure

This paper examines the socio-political process by which an ensemble of such calculative practices and techniques as accounting came to be developed, adopted, and justified within turn-of-the-century public administration. We are particularly concerned with examining the influence of John R. Commons and other early institutional economists during this Progressive era. Using primary and secondary archival materials, our purpose is to make three main contributions to the literature. First, the paper explores Commons' contribution to the debates over “value” which seems to be somewhat unique in that he explicitly recognized that there exists no unproblematic, intrinsic measure of value, but rather that it must be socially constituted as “reasonable” with reference to common law. To illustrate this point, this paper explores Commons' role in the historical development and implementation of rate of return regulation for utilities. Second, the paper describes the contradictory role accounting played during this period in ostensibly fostering administrative objectivity while accommodating a more pragmatic rhetoric of “realpolitik” in its development and deployment. The third contribution is to establish a linkage between current work in economics and accounting concerned with utility regulation and the debates of ninety years ago, noting that Commons' contribution has not been fully explored or recognized within the accounting literature.

Race, Work, and Disability in Progressive Era United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lawrie
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Assembly Lines ◽  
Actuarial Science ◽  
World War ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Mental Testing ◽  
Twentieth Century America

Throughout U.S. history, the production of difference, whether along racial or disability lines, has been inextricably tied to the imperatives of labor economy. From the plantations of the antebellum era through the assembly lines and trenches of early-twentieth-century America, ideologies of race and disability have delineated which peoples could do which kinds of work. The ideologies and identities of race, work, and the “fit” ’ or “unfit” body informed Progressive Era labor economies. Here the processes of racializing or disabling certain bodies are charted from turn-of-the-century actuarial science, which monetized blacks as a degenerate, dying race, through the standardized physical and mental testing and rehabilitation methods developed by the U.S. army during World War I. Efforts to quantify, poke, prod, or mend black bodies reshaped contemporary understandings of labor, race, the state, and the working body.

The Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Institute

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-21
Author(s):  
Victoria de Grazia
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Made In

The Feltrinelli Institute was founded in 1949 by the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – its aim “to promote the knowledge and study – carried out in accordance with strictly scientific criteria and complete ideological autonomy – of the history, the political and economic thought and the social ideas of the modern and contemporary eras; particular importance is to be given to Italy and to the economic phenomena, political doctrines and more historically important social movements of the country.” Feltrinelli's initiative, which began with the library and a rich collection of materials on French socialism, was an important first step toward filling the vacuum in documentation and research on the Italian working class and socialist movements left by two decades of Fascist government. In the following years, the library and research activities of the Institute played a leading role in the reconstruction of intellectual life and political debate in Italy. Its publications, especially Movimento Operaio (1947–1955) and the Annali (1958-) contained some of the most important contributions to the study of the Italian working class and peasantry, and socialist movements made in the postwar period.

“The Workingman's Bible”: Robert Blatchford's Merrie England, Radical Literacy, and the Making of Debsian Socialism, 1895–1900

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason D. Martinek
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social System ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Moral Indignation ◽  
Missionary Zeal ◽  
The People ◽  
Adequate Food

Turn-of-the-century socialists radicalized literacy. Unlike middle-class reformers, whose desire for mass literacy arose from the need for a hardworking, compliant workforce, socialists used it to undermine capitalism. Through their printed culture of dissent, they not only sought to transform individual lives, but an entire social system. They took up the task of using literacy to convert workers with a missionary zeal. Moral indignation fueled their crusade. In a nation of such wealth, they asked, why was it that so many industrious people did not have enough to provide themselves and their families with adequate food, clothing, and shelter? Their answer was that America's political and economic institutions had been corrupted by the nation's monied power. In their minds, only an enlightened, educated working-class could challenge the prerogatives of capital and make these institutions fully socially accountable to the people.

scholarly journals Claude McKay, The Workers' Dreadnought, and collaborative poetics

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Stephanie J Brown
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Judgment ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Arts ◽  
East End ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Holistic Representation

This paper considers the journalism and poetry Claude McKay produced for Sylvia Pankhurst's communist weekly Workers' Dreadnought in 1920 as a collaboratively produced body of work. This allowed Pankhurst to have a Black communist commentator on hand to cover workers' issues, and McKay used Pankhurst's periodical as a platform from which to dramatise the aesthetic and political potential inherent in collaboration between working-class activists, journalists, and artists for the paper's readers. In the Dreadnought's pages, McKay's poems very publicly weighed the value of collaborative labour and considered the arts' place in the class struggle. He simultaneously produced journalism that advocated collaboration among races to resist the racial antagonism that sparked violence in the most impoverished East End communities in the summers of 1919 and 1920. Ultimately, McKay's work for the Dreadnought produced a holistic representation of working-class intellectual life founded on the production of beauty and the exercise of aesthetic as well as political judgment, one that depicts these activities as inevitably commingled and collaboratively produced.

The Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Institute

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-21
Author(s):  
Victoria de Grazia
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Made In

The Feltrinelli Institute was founded in 1949 by the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – its aim “to promote the knowledge and study – carried out in accordance with strictly scientific criteria and complete ideological autonomy – of the history, the political and economic thought and the social ideas of the modern and contemporary eras; particular importance is to be given to Italy and to the economic phenomena, political doctrines and more historically important social movements of the country.” Feltrinelli's initiative, which began with the library and a rich collection of materials on French socialism, was an important first step toward filling the vacuum in documentation and research on the Italian working class and socialist movements left by two decades of Fascist government. In the following years, the library and research activities of the Institute played a leading role in the reconstruction of intellectual life and political debate in Italy. Its publications, especially Movimento Operaio (1947–1955) and the Annali (1958-) contained some of the most important contributions to the study of the Italian working class and peasantry, and socialist movements made in the postwar period.

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