The Visual Pedagogy of Reform: Picturing White Slavery in America

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 854-888
Author(s):  
Amy Lippert
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Rural Families ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
World War ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
True Crime ◽  
The City

The Progressive-Era movement to end enforced prostitution—hyperbolically termed “white slavery”—achieved substantial and enduring legislative and political victories by the onset of World War I. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, images provided a potent but heretofore overlooked vehicle for the most prominent white slavery activists, a means of picturing the city with all its dangers and temptations, and an effective means of competing with the spectacles of modern society. The visual propaganda of white slavery demonstrates the extent to which prominent members of this reform movement—and several impostors masquerading as earnest reformers—engaged in controversial, explicit tactics in the vein of contemporary true-crime stories. Whether these methods were in the service of arming rural families with valuable knowledge or simply generating attention and profit, they reveal the internal contradictions that threatened to undermine or even undo the reformist message.

3. The challenges of citizenship, 1848–1920

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Ware
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
World War I ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
World War ◽  
New Public ◽  
Female Wage

‘The challenges of citizenship, 1848–1920’ outlines the pressing issues of American life from the Civil War through to World War I. The activism of women such as Ida Wells-Barnet describes the struggle for African Americans to find political and economic justice after emancipation. Jim Crow segregation and hardening racial attitudes made free life for African Americans very difficult. The Civil War also acted as an important spur to industrialization. Immigration and female wage labor was central to this surge. The growth of higher education was an important precondition for women's new public engagement. The final push for suffrage, which was part of the larger Progressive era reform movement, is also described.

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.

International Opera in Nineteenth-century New York

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-269
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
World War ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The City

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

Commentary: ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’: Queensland’s experience of the influenza pandemic of 1918–20

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-165
Author(s):  
Patrick Hodgson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Influenza Pandemic ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Coastal Shipping ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article provides a synopsis of the spread of epidemic influenza throughout Queensland in 1919–20.1 Statewide the story was, to a greater or lesser extent, the same – regardless of occupation or whether one was from the city or the bush, on the coast or in the far west, no one was immune; even being 300 kilometres from the nearest epicentre of the outbreak was no guarantee of safety. An examination of the state’s newspapers, particularly the Brisbane Courier, makes it evident that outbreaks of influenza erupted almost simultaneously throughout the state. Aided and abetted by Queensland’s network of railways and coastal shipping, together with the crowding of people at country shows, race meetings and celebrations of the formal conclusion of World War I, the disease was swiftly diffused throughout the state. This article hopes to give the reader a sense of how the sheer scale and urgency of the crisis at times overwhelmed authorities and communities.

scholarly journals Religion and Reform in the City: The Re-Thinking Chicago Movement of the 1930s

1986 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-337
Author(s):  
Jacob H. Dorn
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Machines ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Leaders ◽  
First World ◽  
Urban Civilization

Historians have produced a rich and sophisticated literature on urban reform in the progressive era before the First World War. It includes numerous studies of individual cities, biographies of urban leaders, and analyses of particular movements and organizations. This literature illuminates important variations among reformers and their achievements, the relationships between urban growth and reform, and the functional role of the old-style political machines against which progressives battled. Similarly, there are many examinations of progressive-era reformers' ideas about and attitudes toward the burgeoning industrial cities that had come into being with disquieting rapidity during their own lifetimes. Some of these works go well beyond the controversial conclusions of Morton and Lucia White in The Intellectual Versus the City (1964) to find more complex—and sometimes more positive—assessments of the new urban civilization.

THE NEW ERA AND THE NEW WOMAN

2004 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. A. CLEMENTS
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Professional Education ◽  
World War ◽  
New Era ◽  
New Women ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Domestic Roles

Lou Henry Hoover, wife of Herbert Hoover, demonstrated the strengths and limitations of the expanded social de�nition of womanhood that had been won by reformers during the Progressive Era and World War I. As a leader of several business and women's social welfare organizations, she urged young women to follow her example in seeking professional education and careers as well as upholding traditional domestic roles. Protected by wealth and social status from the most burdensome aspects of domesticity, her public position emphasized the opportunities but understated problems faced by the "new women" in the 1920s and later generations.

World War I and the Roaring Twenties, 1915–1929

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-171
Author(s):  
Robert G. Spinney
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War I ◽  
German Population ◽  
World War ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
Indirect Impact ◽  
The City

This chapter explores the effects and significant indirect impact of World War I on Chicago. It points out how America was only a combatant in the war for slightly longer than a year, which is a period of time insufficient for the nation to mobilize fully for the war. It also discusses how the World War unleashed anti-German sentiments that severely affected the Chicago's sizeable German population. The chapter analyzes how the war drove Chicago employers to hire large numbers of African American laborers, which triggered a historic migration of southern blacks to the city. It also specifies how the war convinced politicians for ethnic and national allegiances to remain strong among the city's numerous immigrants.

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