Laboring under Documentary

2019 ◽  
pp. 103-148
Author(s):  
Angela J. Aguayo

The impulse to record and document labor struggle is almost as old as the concept of documentary itself. From the Worker’s Film and Photo League to the activist programming of Labor Beat, documentary has had an intimate relationship with the labor struggle. This chapter addresses the history of labor documentary production in the United States as an expression of radical ideology. Challenging the aesthetic form and content of the mainstream media, the labor movement is a loosely connected network of activists and artists across the country, engaged in efforts to produce media outside mainstream institutions. Specifically, this chapter focuses on elements of labor history that made significant contributions but are now largely ignored and undocumented: the efforts of radical women, rank-and-file amateur videographers, and undocumented workers. Existing on the fringes of the mainstream and counterculture, the work of women in alternative media in the early 1970s reflected a direct relationship between their lived experience, the camera, and political engagement, embodying a liberated agency that is magnified by the documentary camera. The chapter creates a portrait of the documentary commons as it expands and works for citizens in their daily lives. They represent a whole population of radical activists carving out a space for themselves to engage labor and social change with their cameras.

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
John J. Swab

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Fire insurance maps produced by the American firm the Sanborn Map Company have long served as cartographic guides to understanding the history of urban America. Primarily used by cultural and historical geographers, historians, historic preservationists, and environmental consultants; historians of cartography have little explored the history of this company. While this scholarship has addressed various facets of Sanborn’s history (Ristow, 1968), no scholarly piece has explored the lived experience of being a Sanborn surveyor. This lack of scholarship comes not from any significant oversight but rather from the fact that the contributions of most Sanborn surveyors were anonymous and little recorded on the maps themselves. Moreover, the company itself has done little to save its own history, thus little is known of their individual stories and experiences. The exception to this is perhaps the most famous Sanborn surveyor of all: Daniel Carter Beard.</p><p>Over the course of his nine-decade life, Daniel Carter Beard held several prominent positions including the co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America and the lead illustrator for many of Mark Twain’s novels. However, he got his start as a surveyor for the Sanborn Map Company in the 1870s, just a few years after its founding. His papers, housed at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, includes a variety of ephemera from his time with the Sanborn Map Company.</p><p>Trained in civil engineering, Beard got his start as a surveyor for the Cincinnati (Ohio) Office of Platting Commission, creating the first official plat map for the city. He was hired by Sanborn in 1874 and served as a surveyor until 1878, traveling extensively over the eastern half of the United States, parlaying his skills into creating fire insurance maps for Sanborn. Thus, this paper speaks to two main themes. The first theme traces the route of Beard during his early years with the company across the eastern half of the United States, documenting both the places he visited and the challenges he faced as a Sanborn surveyor. The second theme, interwoven through the paper, is an analysis of the innerworkings of Sanborn’s administrative structure and its relationship with the larger fire insurance market during the 1870s. Altogether, these documents present unique insight into the organization of the Sanborn Map Company and how it produced its maps during the second-half of the 19th century.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. 34-49
Author(s):  
Bartosz Kułan

The article presents the history of the children’s republic founded by William Ruben George (1866–1936). The first part of the article focuses on familiarising readers with the figure of William Ruben George – the founder of the George Junior Republic. This figure and his activities have not been known in the Polish scientific discourse so far. The following sections discuss the general characteristics of the fight against juvenile delinquency in the United States and the reasons for the creation of the George Junior Republic. The next part focuses on the governance system in the George Junior Republic and the daily lives of the pupils.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Hovey

By law, women seeking abortions in some US states must undergo compulsory ultrasound viewing. This article examines the moral significance of this practice, especially as understood by pro-life religious groups, in light of Foucault’s recently published lectures on ‘The Will to Know’ and the place of the aesthetic. How does the larger abortion-debate strategy of ‘showing’ and ‘seeing’ images—whether of living or dead fetuses—work as an aesthetic form of argument that intends to evoke a moral response in the absence of reason-giving? The article draws on recent, parallel debates regarding disgust before concluding with a theological response to the priority of will over knowledge and vision over action as commentary on the future of abortion debate and law, especially in the United States.


Author(s):  
Heather McKee Hurwitz

Mainstream media ignores the breadth and diversity of women’s activism and often features sexist, racist, and sexualized portrayals of women. Also, women hold disproportionately fewer jobs in media industries than men. Despite these challenges, women activists protest gender inequality and advocate a variety of other goals using traditional and new social media. This chapter examines the history of women’s media activism in the United States from women activists’ use of mainstream and alternative newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, to how activists adopted Internet technologies and new digital media strategies starting in the 1990s, to how contemporary feminists protest with Facebook and hashtag activism today. I argue that women activists’ use of new social media may necessitate significant shifts in how we research continuity and diversity in women’s and feminist movements, and how we conceptualize resources, micromobilization, and leadership in social movements broadly. I conclude with several suggestions for future research.


2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner

The origins of women's pioneering contributions to the repertoire and history of electroacoustic music can often be linked to the growth of academic and commercial electronic and computer music studios in North America. A signific ant number of early female composers in the medium received their initial training and experience in the United States and their accomplishments begin in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. Women's achievements in the educational and entertainment sectors have laid the foundation for subsequent generations who have influenced the aesthetic and technical path of electroacoustic music.Excerpted from several chapters of the author's historical series on women composers and music technology, the article outlines the contributions of several of the earliest women in the United States to the utilisation of music technology in creative work. Also discussed are research precedents in this area and issues regarding women and music technology in the United States today. With the creation of her book series outlining the achievements of women working with music technology, the author hopes to offer a valuable contribution to research on the history of electroacoustic music in general and women's representation in the genre in particular.


Author(s):  
Denis Nikolaevich Demenev

The subject of this research is the interaction of the ideal and the material, which ensures unity of the process of creating a fine art painting. The object of this research is the dynamics of this process, which gradually materializes the ideal through poetic transformation of the objective reality. In the course of creating a fine art painting, the author underlines the importance of ontological-phenomenological and socio-gnoseological aspects of human existence, which in many ways determine the technical and technological means of solution of the artistic and creative tasks. Special attention is given to contemplation of the objective world, purposive action of the artistic will, establishment of the artistic image as interrelated stages of objectification of the ideal. The novelty of this article consists in interpretation of the phenomenon of the ideal, reflected in painting via integrated will. The latter is the synthesis of artistic will and subjective will of the painter. The author describes a &ldquo;shuttle principle&rdquo; in objectification of the ideal in the works of art within the framework of the history of development of painting, as well as within a single process: 1) from the aesthetic form to the embodiment of universality of the content; 2) from the universal content to aesthetic embodiment. The following conclusions were made: 1) the objectively ideal in a painting is an aesthetically perceived (visually, mentally, and spiritually) boundary of beauty and beautiful depicted via perfect, absolute unity of the artistic form and content, artistically and graphically, adequate to its concept in its material outcome, in reality. It is of rare occurrence in the works of art, something to be sought for; 2) an artistic form should be correlated in the artwork with universality of its content, which results in the fusion of the ideal and the real, and forms their indifference; 3) the universal meanings, ideologically underlying the content of a fine art painting, deepen and broaden the possibilities of artistic matter for objectification of the ideal in aesthetic form.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdullah Lux

Excerpted from the manuscript of a forthcoming book project, this article provides essential English-language source material on Ḥusayn Badr al-Dīn al-Ḥūthī and an alternative framework to that of the mainstream media for exploring what are likely the genuine causes and nature of the wars against Ṣaʿdah, Yemen, undertaken with backing and technical assistance from the United States, if not direct complicity in the name of then President George W. Bush's administration's ‘war on terror’. In addition to shedding light on the voluminous Malāzim of Ḥusayn Badr al-Dīn and providing analysis of its various influences including Khomeini and Lebanon's Ḥizb Allāh, while at the same time demonstrating a lack of evidence for direct support by either Ḥizb Allāh or Iran, the article examines the distinct Jārūdī Zaydī nature of the only contemporary Zaydī political discourse and formulation of its kind, which is distinct from Twelver Shīʿism and antithetical to the ‘wilāyat al-faqīh’ in Iran. The article examines the origins of the Lebanese group known as al-Shabāb al-Muʾmin that would later evolve into Ḥizb Allāh and the history of Yemen's Tanẓīm al-Shabāb al-Muʾmin from which al-Ḥūthī would draw his core group of supporters, and it aims to decipher the nature of the relation between al-Ḥūthī's thought and Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran as well as its grounding in the Jārūdī Zaydī sect and the Zaydīyah at large. The article includes excerpts from an interview with Ayatollah Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍlallah on the subject, new statements from the Office of ʿAbd al-Mālik al-Ḥūthī in Ṣaʿdah, and in-depth analysis of the Malāzim with exhaustive citations in translation – all never before published – all of which provide essential reading for understanding the objective historical conditions as well as the political, cultural, tribal, ideological, and sectarian dimensions of the wars against Ṣaʿdah.


Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth ◽  
Basile Chopas

Chapter 4 is a social history of the daily lives of the internees in INS camps and Army camps. It shows how many internees developed a sense of powerlessness as requests for a reevaluation of their situation went unanswered. The United States chose to extend prisoner of war protections in the 1929 Geneva Convention to enemy aliens in internment camps, allowing them to refer to the convention’s guarantees of safe and humane treatment and a good standard of living to redress complaints. This chapter shows how the internees exercised agency by finding ways to prove that they could be loyal American citizens, particularly by exhibiting a good work ethic. Although the balance of power still weighed heavily in favor of the government, the personal letters of internees tell a story of resiliency in the bleak setting of internment.


Author(s):  
Thomas Neville Bonner

Written by eminent education scholar Thomas Neville Bonner, Becoming A Physician is a groundbreaking, comprehensive history of Western medical education. The only work of its kind, it covers the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. Comparative in focus, the narrative unfolds within the context of social, political, and intellectual transformations that occurred in Europe and North America between the Enlightenment and Nazi Germany. Viewing the late eighteenth century as a watershed in the development of medical education, Bonner begins by describing how earlier practices evolved in the 1800s with the introduction of clinical practices. He then traces the growth of laboratory teaching in the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century preoccupation with establishing a university standard of medical education. Throughout, Bonner pays particular attention to the students, chronicling their daily lives and discussing changes in the medical school population and the various biases-- class, gender, racial, and religious--students and prospective students faced.


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