Cultural Historical Contexts

Author(s):  
Misa Kayama ◽  
Wendy L. Haight ◽  
May-Lee Ku ◽  
Minhae Cho ◽  
Hee Yun Lee

This chapter introduces some of the cultural-historical background necessary to understanding the perspectives of educators in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the U.S. While recognizing the complex, evolving nature of culture, it provides an overview of some broadly shared, culturally embedded ideas about disability, stigmatization, and the self that are prevalent in East Asia and the U.S. In East Asian contexts, these include culturally specific folk beliefs, Confucianism, Buddhism, internationalism, and Westernization; as well as important historical events shaping modern educational systems put in place after World War II. In the multicultural U.S. context, common ideas and educational practices relevant to disability are shaped by ideas pertaining to individuality, independence, achievement, and internationalism, as well as important historical events such as the civil rights movement.

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-234
Author(s):  
Kurt Edward Kemper

Throughout much of the NCAA’s first half century, the organization maintained an uneasy collection of commercialized schools that pursued highly competitive athletics for publicity and profit; liberal arts colleges that saw college athletics as a component of their educational and leadership missions; and smaller and medium-size state schools that wanted to play athletics for competitive glory but lacked the size, resources, and finances of the big-time powers. Unable to balance those three interests, the NCAA largely ignored the concerns of the latter two while devoting itself to the service of commercialized athletics. This fraught arrangement finally came asunder in the years after World War II when multiple pressures from scandals, racial criticisms, and growing pressure for access to the NCAA Basketball Tournament finally forced concessions. The concessions made in the mid- to late-1950s, however, did not reshape the balance of power in the NCAA, as the organization remained wholly committed to serving the interests of big-time commercialized athletics. In this regard the challenges faced by the NCAA mirrored the larger social and cultural upheaval in the United States following World War II. The civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and opposition to the war in Vietnam all challenged the authority of existing political and economic elites yet did not mark any fundamental shift in power in American life. The question, then, is not really how did the NCAA manage to survive but, rather, how did its critics ever hope to succeed?


Author(s):  
Allan W. Austin

This is the first extensive study of the American Friends Service Committee's interracial activism in the first half of the twentieth century, filling a major gap in scholarship on the Quakers' race relations work from the AFSC's founding in 1917 to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s. The book tracks the evolution of key AFSC projects, such as the Interracial Section and the American Interracial Peace Committee, that demonstrate the tentativeness of the Friends' activism in the 1920s, as well as efforts in the 1930s to make scholarly ideas and activist work more theologically relevant for Friends. Documenting the AFSC's efforts to help European and Japanese American refugees during World War II, the book shows that by 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had honed a distinctly Friendly approach to interracial relations that combined scholarly understandings of race with their religious views. Highlighting the complicated and sometimes controversial connections between Quakers and race during this era, the book uncovers important aspects of the history of Friends, pacifism, feminism, American religion, immigration, ethnicity, and the early roots of multiculturalism.


Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat

This chapter examines the efforts by black female nurses and white male nurses to claim a space for themselves in a profession that relegated them to the margins. It begins with a discussion of the founding of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and the Army Nurse Corps (ANC), along with an overview of healthcare and home-front racial politics during World War II. It then turns to nurse shortages during World War I and World War II and proceeds by analyzing the World War II integration campaign by African American female nurses within the larger context of the civil rights movement. In an effort to break down racial barriers, the chapter shows that African American nurses co-opted traditional gender conventions to make the claim that the sex of the nurse, not race, should determine nursing care for soldiers. It also explores how African Americans used wartime rhetoric about equality and democracy on behalf of their campaign for equal rights, justice, and opportunity.


2010 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-327
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder

In this article, Zoë Burkholder explores the historical interplay of the emergence of tolerance education in the United States and the rise of black educational activism in Boston. By uncovering a pointed lack of tolerance education in Boston and a widespread promotion of tolerance education in other cities in the early half of the twentieth century, the author reveals how racial, historical, and political factors complicated tolerance education's local implementation in Boston. Informed by local racialized politics in the 1940s, the predominantly Irish Catholic teaching force in Boston declined to teach lessons on racial tolerance that were popular nationwide during World War II. Burkholder argues that this site of active teacher resistance against tolerance education provided fertile ground for black educational activism in Boston during the civil rights movement. These findings presage the well-documented virulence of white protest to school integration in Boston and complicate our understanding of integration in today's educational context.


MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Jose Fernandez

Abstract Critics have explored James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972) through the emergence of their protagonists as artists, while other scholars have focused on Tell Me How Long's emphasis on black nationalism or Bless Me, Ultima's engagement with Mexican American identity; however, the tensions between art and social protest in both novels has not been explored by scholars in relation to the novels' treatment of the experience of soldiers of color in World War II. This article focuses on the novels' depiction of the military service by soldiers of color, their transformation by those experiences, and how the protests and activism against the racism and discrimination experienced by soldiers of color contributed to the long civil rights movement. I argue that through the war experiences of the protagonists' older brothers in Tell Me How Long and Bless Me, Ultima, both narratives similarly present the contributions and experiences of soldiers of color during the war effort as they faced the dilemma of fighting a war for their country only to be denied full citizenship rights at home, which increased their social activism. Tell Me How Long describes the heroic service of an African American in battle in the Italian front that has a historical antecedent in the 92nd Infantry Division known as the Buffalo Soldiers, while Bless Me, Ultima focuses on the effects of the mobilization period in Mexican American communities in the Southwest and the war's psychological effects on returning soldiers.


Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove

As the city boomed during the New Deal and World War II, a new generation of black activists and their allies arose to challenge Jim Crow, find decent housing, and fight for economic survival. They used new forms of protest, including boycotts, union organizing, and sit-ins, and they formed interracial alliances with a growing number of white people, in Washington and around the country, who saw racial inequality in the nation’s capital as a stain on America’s reputation. This experimentation produced mixed results at the time, but the community activism and interracial organizing of the 1930s and 1940s helped lay the foundation for the postwar civil rights movement. Nonetheless, determined white resistance at the local and federal levels largely preserved segregation in the nation’s capital during the war years. In fights against employment discrimination, segregated public spaces, and inadequate housing, racial egalitarians often achieved symbolic or small-scale victories but ultimately failed to defeat Jim Crow. Despite the sweeping rhetoric about freedom, democracy, and the “American Way” that accompanied the U.S. war effort, World War II stalled racial progress in D.C.


Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow

This chapter discusses Texas's growing presence in national affairs. It explains the economic, demographic, and political contexts in which religion emerged from World War II and contributed to the further shaping of race relations, faith convictions, and power. Churches benefited from the population growth driven by the postwar baby boom as well as from prosperous economic conditions. In many ways, the late 1940s and 1950s were a time of calm serenity in which religious leaders could focus on church growth and family formation. That was certainly an image that made sense to later observers who viewed the period from the perspective of the more turbulent civil rights era that followed. And yet these were years of remarkable developments in religion, politics, and business—years of inequality, discrimination, and conflict. These as well as new discussions about the separation of church and state set the stage for the civil rights movement and shaped the response to it.


2021 ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
R. Keith Schoppa

In the aftermath of World War II, global realities seemed to have been grouped into binary formats: the United States and the USSR in a policy the United States called “containment” and included the establishment of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the Korean War. Violent decolonization rose for Great Britain in Malaysia and Kenya and for France in Vietnam and Algeria. Another chapter dichotomy was the general success of the civil rights movement in the United States and the concomitant strengthening of apartheid in South Africa.


2020 ◽  
pp. 180-240
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield

Chapter 5 highlights the wood industry, one of the largest industries in the country. Most of the woodworkers were located in the South, and half of those workers were African-American. Woodworkers successfully organized in the Northwest and Canada, the other two centers of the industry. Despite a perceived willingness of southern woodworkers to unionize, this did not happen. The chapter attributes most of the problems to an incompetent, right-wing, racially backward leadership, which was installed by the CIO national office before World War II. The chapter also argues that the successful organization of southern woodworkers had the potential to radically transform the civil rights movement.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document