scholarly journals “Our one great national malady”: Neurasthenia and American Imperial and Masculine Anxiety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-432
Author(s):  
Yeonsik JUNG
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
White Women ◽  
Clinical Laboratory ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Clinical Laboratory Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

White upper middle-class Americans at the turn of the twentieth century were entrenched in a battle with a newly discovered, or invented, mental illness called neurasthenia. This essay examines the ways in which the medical discourse of neurasthenia reflected late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white Anglo-Saxon men’s belief in, as well as anxiety over, American values bolstered by their idea of cultural, racial, and sexual superiority and consolidated through a conjunction of medicine and politics. The idea of neurasthenia as white American men’s malady functioned as a mark both of whites’ racial superiority to the “new” immigrants and African Americans as well as of women’s intellectual inferiority to the opposite sex of their own race. Imposing a subtle distortion on the etiology and diagnosis of neurasthenia and associating it with specific groups of people, the “American disease” constituted the era’s representative pathological symptoms which addressed Anglo-Saxon American men’s anxieties about overcivilized effeminacy and racial and national decadence which was originated as a response to the racial and sexual heterogeneity. This essay also argues that neurasthenia was an imagined disease which addressed late nineteenth-century American men’s spatial anxiety about the decline of the American pastoral ideal caused by the closure of the frontier. Given that the treatment for neurasthenic men was an escape to the frontier in the West in which they could rejuvenate withered American masculinity, their uneasiness about barbarous, unhygienic, and prolific immigrants and unruly white women, in fact, was tied to their spatial anxiety which symptomatically signifies the crisis of American masculinity. Channeled through the medical knowledge of neurology, it made American men’s racial, sexual, and spatial anxieties function to act out their racist, misogynist, nativist, and imperialist impulses which legitimized exclusionary political techniques toward the racial and sexual others such as the U.S. imperial expansion in the 1890s and 1900s and a eugenic-influenced immigration policy from the 1900s through the1920s. In this sense, the decline of neurasthenia around 1920 should not be attributed solely to the continued efforts to professionalize American medicine accompanied by recent discoveries of chemical factors such as hormones and vitamins and the rise of psychiatry and psychology which offered physicians with a more specific theory of health built on clinical laboratory science. Like its rise, the decision to move away from the neurasthenic diagnosis was rather a cultural phenomenon, which reflected the American ascendancy to global power in the early twentieth century, particularly after the First World War. Sustaining a political order rested on racial and sexual hierarchies both within and outside the American continent, American men felt that they were no longer liable to specific, time-tested anxiety and somatic symptoms of neurasthenia, which was more an ideological and cultural construct than a clinical entity that dramatizes the racial, sexual, and imperial politics of the-turn-of-the-twentieth-century America.

Making a Space for Antisemitism: The Catholic Hierarchy and the Jews in the Early Twentieth Century

2003 ◽  
pp. 415-430
Author(s):  
Brian Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This chapter argues that as recently as the 1880s, Catholicism, as it existed in Poland at the time, was still somewhat resistant to expressions of antisemitism. Catholicism, in other words, was configured in such a way in the late nineteenth century as to make it hard for antisemites to express their views without moving to the very edges of the Catholic framework. Catholicism and antisemitism did overlap at the time, but the common ground was much more confined than it would later become. If one moves forward fifty years, to the 1930s, one sees a different picture: the discursive boundaries of Catholicism in Poland had shifted to such a degree that antisemitism became not only possible, but also difficult to avoid. The upshot of this argument is that Catholicism in Poland is not antisemitic in any sort of essential way, and that religion did not directly generate the forms of hatred that would become so deadly and virulent in the early twentieth century. None the less, Catholicism did become amenable to antisemitism in Poland, so much so that the Church in Poland between the wars was one of the country's leading sources of prejudice and animosity.

Concepts of race in the Historicography of northeast Africa

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt Macgaffey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Physical Anthropology ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.

“An Extraordinary Feeling for Ornament”: Elena Polenova and the Neo-Russian Style in Embroideries and Painted Textile Panels

Experiment ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-71
Author(s):  
Louise Hardiman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Important Process ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
British Art ◽  
National Movement ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines several important designs by Elena Dmitrievna Polenova (1850-1898) for art embroideries and textile panels. These are the least studied of Polenova’s works, but offer new insights into the artist’s role as a leader of the neo-national movement in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Russian art. Linking extant designs with photographs of exhibition displays and unpublished archival sources, including contemporary accounts by the British art journalist Netta Peacock (1864-1938), this project seeks to initiate the important process of identifying and analysing Polenova’s designs within the context of the movement.

Volksconcerte in Vienna and Late Nineteenth-Century Ideology of the Symphony

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 421-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Notley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

Late nineteenth-century journalistic criticism in Vienna offers many precedents for Paul Bekker's interpretation of the symphony. Beethoven's symphonies provided the model for an aesthetics of the genre-couched in metaphors connecting it to "the people"-that motivated the reception of works by Brahms and Bruckner. Activists who wished to inaugurate symphonic Volksconcerte in the city took the figurative utopian function of the genre literally. Though their efforts were confounded not only by institutionalized elitism but also by the preferences of the Viennese Volk for other kinds of music, their work bore fruit in the early twentieth century with the founding of the Wiener Konzertverein and the Arbeiter-Symphonie-Konzerte.

Main Trends of Islamic Theological Thought from the Late Nineteenth Century to Present Times

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rotraud Wielandt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Theological Thought ◽  
Islamic Modernism

This chapter examines the main trends of Islamic theological thought from the late nineteenth century to the present times, tracing developments in various Arab countries, in Turkey, Iran and India, Central Asia and Indonesia. It begins by tackling the question of the relation between indigenous roots and modern Western stimuli, tradition and innovation in Islamic theology during this period. Subsequently the author discussed the innovative trends. An overview of the theological ideas of the pioneers of Islamic modernism, the Indian Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Egyptian Muḥammad ʿAbduh, is given, followed by an analysis of the views of modernist theological thinkers of the early twentieth century. Next the theology of the Indian philosopher and poet Muhammad Iqbal, an eminent example of theological modernism between the two world wars, is addressed. Another section deals with new hermeneutical and epistemological approaches to the Qurʾānic revelation. Finally the development of the interest in a new kind of philosophy-basedkalāmis delineated from their beginnings with Sayyid Ahmad Khan up to their present-day Iranian, Turkish and Arab protagonists.

scholarly journals Ontario Retailers in the Early Twentieth Century: Dismantling the Social Bridge

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-227
Author(s):  
David Monod
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working People ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract This article explores the theory that late-nineteenth century and eary-twentieth century retailing served as an avenue to upward mobility. An examination of retailing in Ontario suggests two things: first, that shopkeeping was a deeply stratified occupation in which the poor remained marginalized at the bottom: and second, that over the course of the early twentieth century interest in retailing declined among working people as the business of storekeeping “professionalized”.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document