Struggles over Individual Rights and State Power in the Progressive Era

Author(s):  
Michael Willrich

From the 1890s to World War I, progressive reformers in the United States called upon their local, state, and federal governments to revitalize American democracy and address the most harmful social consequences of industrialization. The emergence of an increasingly powerful administrative state, which intervened on behalf of the public welfare in the economy and society, generated significant levels of conflict. Some of the opposition came from conservative business interests, who denounced state labor laws and other market regulations as meddlesome interferences with liberty of contract. But the historical record of the Progressive Era also reveals a broad undercurrent of resistance from ordinary Americans, who fought for personal liberty against the growth of police power in such areas as public health administration and the regulation of radical speech. Their struggles in the streets, statehouses, and courtrooms of the United States in the early 20th century shaped the legal culture of the period and revealed the contested meaning of individual liberty in a new social age.

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-192
Author(s):  
Sebastian Rosato

This chapter examines Franco-German and U.S.-Japanese relations in the early interwar period (1919-30). The chapter begins by drawing on the primary and secondary historical record to evaluate how key French and German decision makers thought about each other’s intentions, focusing on these episodes: the negotiation, signature, and aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles; the onset, development, and resolution of the Ruhr Crisis; and the Locarno era. Were they confident that their counterparts had benign intentions—that is, did they trust each other—as asserted by intentions optimists? Or were they uncertain about each other’s intentions, which is to say that they mistrusted each other, as suggested by intentions pessimism? Having shown that Paris and Berlin were far from confident that the other side had benign intentions throughout the early interwar period, the chapter then describes the shape of the resulting Franco-German security competition. The second half of the chapter repeats the analysis performed in the first half, this time with respect to the United States and Japan, focusing on the following episodes: the aftermath of World War I; the creation and operation of the Washington Treaty system; and the three years between the Geneva and London Naval conferences.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
James C. Nicholson

On October 20, 1923, at Belmont Park in New York, Kentucky Derby champion Zev toed the starting line alongside Epsom Derby winner Papyrus, England's top three-year-old colt. Few happenings had ever been covered so closely by American newspapers as the spectacle officially dubbed the International Race. The extraordinary hype surrounding the event was even more notable considering that only a few years earlier Thoroughbred racing had been on the brink of Progressive-era extinction in the United States. But following a post-World War I political sea change in the United States, in what would later be remembered as a "golden age" of sport, Americans rallied around the horse that was, in the words of its owner Harry F. Sinclair, "racing for America," while Sinclair was engaged in a scheme to defraud the United States of millions of barrels of publicly owned oil in one of the most notorious instances of political corruption in American history -- the Teapot Dome scandal. America First examines the postwar revival of American horseracing, culminating in the intercontinental showdown between Zev and Papyrus, that captured some of the incongruity and contradiction of 1920s America.


Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.


1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Nix ◽  
David E. Nix

This study reviews the literature and the practice of accounting for research and development (R&D) costs from the first reference in 1917 to the current treatment. The conceptual treatment of R&D is compared to current financial accounting rules and explanation of the evolution of the current rules is presented. The economic and social consequences of the current rules which require R&D costs to be expressed are examined. The paper explores possible alternative treatment of R&D costs. As a contrast to U.S. practice, the accounting treatment of R&D costs in other countries is discussed. Given the findings of this paper, a strong case can be made for changing the way that R&D costs are accounted for in the United States.


Author(s):  
Ellen Carol DuBois

The United States was a pioneer in the development of women’s rights ideas and activism. Far-seeing women, determined to find an active and equal place in the nation’s political affairs, pushed long and hard to realize America’s democratic promise. Over three-quarters of a century, women’s rights and suffrage leaders steadily agitated their cause through a shifting American political landscape, from the careful innovations of the early national period, through the expansive involvements of antebellum politics, into the dramatic shifts of revolution and reaction in the post–Civil War years, up to the modernization of the Progressive Era. The meaning and content of “womanhood,” the sign under which these campaigns were conducted, also shifted. Labor, class, and especially race inclusions and exclusions were contentious dimensions of the American women’s rights movement, as they were of American liberal democracy in general.


1981 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Arthur S. Link ◽  
Paul L. Murphy

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Phillips Newton

In Latin America, international rivalry over aviation followed World War I. In its early form, it consisted of a commercial scramble among several Western European nations and the United States to sell airplanes and aviation products and to establish airlines in Latin America. Somewhat later, expanding European aviation activities posed an implicit threat to the Panama Canal.Before World War I, certain aerophiles had sought to advance the airplane as the panacea for the transportation problem in Latin America. The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil and the Aero Club of America, an influential private United States association, were in the van. In 1916, efforts by these enthusiasts led to the formation of the Pan American Aviation Federation, which they envisioned as the means of promoting and publicizing aviation throughout the Western Hemisphere.


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