Selling Historic Natchez to Depression-Era Pilgrims

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-210
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Cultural Image ◽  
The World ◽  
Depression Era

This chapter recounts the early years of the Natchez Pilgrimage, a heritage tourism enterprise created by the Natchez Garden Club at the height of the Great Depression. The Pilgrimage dramatized a mix of decades-old southern racial ideology and white historical memory that was repackaged for 1930s consumption. Pilgrimage founder Katherine Miller and other leading clubwomen defined their community’s cultural image, while also redefining the meaning of traditional southern womanhood. The Pilgrimage is also the story of how one southern community’s selective expression of historical memory captivated white tourists eager to immerse themselves in the world of the Old South so vividly portrayed by popular writers and entertainers of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the Pilgrimage home tours and pageant suggests the power of popular culture to shape a tenacious historical memory that remained in force for much of the twentieth century and lingers even today.

Learning about Growth and Democracy

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 1195-1212
Author(s):  
SCOTT F. ABRAMSON ◽  
SERGIO MONTERO
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
Past Experiences

We develop and estimate a model of learning that accounts for the observed correlation between economic development and democracy and for the clustering of democratization events. In our model, countries’ own and neighbors’ past experiences shape elites’ beliefs about the effects of democracy on economic growth and their likelihood of retaining power. These beliefs influence the choice to transition into or out of democracy. We show that learning is crucial to explaining observed transitions since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, our model predicts reversals to authoritarianism if the world experienced a growth shock the size of the Great Depression.

Economics in Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
Richard Parker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This book presents a compelling and accessible history of economic ideas, from Aristotle through the twentieth century. Examining theories of the past that have a continuing modern resonance, the book shows that economics is not a timeless, objective science, but is continually evolving as it is shaped by specific times and places. From Adam Smith's theories during the Industrial Revolution to those of John Maynard Keynes after the Great Depression, the book demonstrates that if economic ideas are to remain relevant, they must continually adapt to the world they inhabit. A lively examination of economic thought in historical context, the book shows how the field has evolved across the centuries.

Remembering Dixie

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
White Males ◽  
Historical Memories ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Over Time

Nearly seventy years after the Civil War, Natchez, Mississippi, sold itself to Depression-era tourists as a place “Where the Old South Still Lives.” Tourists flocked to view the town’s decaying antebellum mansions, hoop-skirted hostesses, and a pageant saturated in sentimental Lost Cause imagery. Organized by the town’s female garden club, the Pilgrimage created a popular culture experience that appealed to 1930s tourists. This book traces how the selective white historical memories of a small southern community originated from the hardships of the Civil War, changed over time, and culminated in a successful heritage tourism enterprise still in business today. Simultaneously, this study examines the ways in which Natchez African Americans contested this selective narrative to create a short lived but distinctive post-emancipation identity. This book demonstrates that southern memory making was never monolithic or static but was continuously shaped and reshaped by the unique dynamics of a community’s class, gender, racial, and social complexities. In the course of revealing how historical memory evolved in Natchez, this book contributes new insights on the periodization of Lost Cause ideology and the gendering of historical memory. Covering the period from the tumultuous early post-Civil War years through the economic hardships of the Great Depression, Remembering Dixie reveals that historical memory is often a contested process. Perhaps most importantly, this study helps to reclaim some of the earliest post-emancipation black memories that were nearly erased when white males reclaimed political power in the late 1870s.

scholarly journals Could the Great Depression Repeat Itself in the 21St Century?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quah Chee Heong ◽  
Mohd Nazari Ismail
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Financial Crises ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

By 2031, it will be a century since the Great Depression, touted as the most dreadful depression in the history of U.S. and the rest of the world, had taken place. In the final decades of last century and in the early years of this century, numerous financial crises and economic depressions, not as severe as the Depression, have occurred, particularly but not limited to, developing countries. Looking at the Depression and today’s arrangements, will a major global depression be looming? This paper begins with a refresher on the events of the Depression, which is followed by the Friedman and Schwartz hypothesis, criticisms against it, other contributing factors to the Depression, a reconciliation of the theories and finally ends with an assessment of the possibility of a return of the Depression in the 21st century based on today’s economic, financial, political, social, and technological considerations.  

You Can’t Shoot All of Us

2019 ◽  
pp. 56-90
Author(s):  
Simon Balto
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Political Radicalism

The book’s second chapter covers the decade of the Great Depression and the World War II years. One of its principal focuses is the rise of Chicago’s infamous Democratic machine, which emerged as the dominant force in Chicago machine politics after years of back-and-forth tussling with its Republican counterpart. Democratic leaders beginning in 1931 used the police force as a bludgeon against the Black community to try to force it to vote Democratic, and utilized it in other ways to control Black Chicago politically. This was seen most acutely within the context of the rising tide of political radicalism that shaped Black Chicago during this time, especially the labors of the Communist Party and, later, organizations with the Popular Front as they challenged Depression-era austerity and battled with the police as austerity’s frequent enforcers (as in the case of evictions). To check such radicalism, Democratic politicians unleashed the infamous Red Squad, which cracked down viciously on political dissidents, often violently and illegally, setting important precedents. The decade also saw the expansion of a practice known as “stop and seizure,” an antecedent to the infamous practice of “stop and frisk.”

Introduction

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Foreign Competition ◽  
Trade Restrictions ◽  
Great Problem ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Pork Barrel ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
The World

This introductory chapter discusses the background of the Smoot–Hawley tariff, which President Herbert Hoover signed into law on June 17, 1930. The Smoot–Hawley tariff ranks among the most infamous pieces of congressional legislation of the twentieth century. Although imports were not surging into the country or causing any great problem for the economy, Congress raised tariffs on imported goods with the intention of protecting farmers and manufacturers from what little foreign competition they faced. In doing so, they did not follow any economic logic or consider the interests of consumers and exporters who would be harmed by the tariffs. Instead, they engaged in the most blatant form of pork-barrel politics, catering to the demands of special interests that wanted to limit imports. Not surprisingly, several foreign countries retaliated by imposing duties on U.S. exports. These trade restrictions spread just as the world economy was beginning to sink into a depression. The contribution of the Smoot–Hawley tariff to the collapse of trade and the Great Depression of the 1930s has been debated ever since.

scholarly journals Heroes Sung and Unsung: Explorers’ Narratives of Mongolia, 1890s to the 1930s

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 761-798
Author(s):  
David Shearer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Government Official ◽  
Inner Asia ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The World

AbstractPetr Kuzmich Kozlov and Roy Chapman Andrews were well known figures in the world of popular culture, exploration, and science of their respective homelands, Imperial Russia and America. In the early years of the twentieth century, both were famous for spectacular discoveries in the deserts of Mongolia – Kozlov in archeology and Andrews in paleontology. Both were celebrity explorers in their native countries when they met in Mongolia in 1922, and both kept field journals and notes from which they produced popularly published accounts of their travels and exploits. Like all the great explorer-adventurers, Andrews and Kozlov made themselves the hero of their own narratives (Maclulich 1977). And yet, neither could have achieved what he did, nor likely have met, had it not been for a third individual, one who was indispensable to both explorers, but an individual who has nearly disappeared from the historical record. Tsokto Garmaevich Badmazhapov, a native of Buryatia, in Siberia, acted as an intermediary for both Kozlov and Andrews. He played a central role in the stories of the two explorers, the unsung hero in their narratives, but he was a remarkable individual in his own right – a successful and polyglot commercial agent, a go-between, an explorer, and a Mongolian government official. In the early 1920s all three individuals were prominent figures in Mongolia, and yet by the mid-1930s, all three had been excluded from the lands that drew them. This article explores the interaction of these three, the visions of Inner Asia that motivated and separated each, and the circumstances – scientific, geo-political, and personal – that both produced and then discarded these remarkable people.

scholarly journals From Material to Non-Material Needs? The Evolution of Mate Preferences through the Twentieth Century in France

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Quentin Lippmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Mate Preferences ◽  
Demographic Changes ◽  
French Society ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Economic Boom ◽  
Economic Criteria

This paper studies the evolution of mate preferences throughout the twentieth century in France. I digitized all the matrimonial ads published in France’s best-selling monthly magazine from 1928 to 1994. Using dictionary-based methods, I show that mate preferences were mostly stable during the Great Depression, WWII, and the ensuing economic boom. These preferences started transforming in the late 1960s when economic criteria were progressively replaced by personality criteria. The timing coincides with profound family and demographic changes in French society. These findings suggest that, in the search for a long-term partner, non-material needs have replaced material ones.

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