scholarly journals From the Editor

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 75-76
Author(s):  
David A. Goss
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Creation Myth ◽  
Sporting Goods ◽  
Origin Story

Historical narratives reflect the biases of their creators. In order to promote his own interests, sporting goods magnate A.G. Spalding created a "creation myth" that baseball was a uniquely American sport which evolved from the English game "rounders." While historians later debunked this assertion and established an earlier and more complicated origin story for baseball, Spalding's historical narrative persists in popular culture. Optometry has a similar "creation myth" which holds that the profession began at the turn-of-the 20th century in the United States with the founding members of the American Optometric Association (AOA) and the move to make optometry a legislated profession. However, optometry's origins are much older, beginning in the late 13th century and, therefore, can be divided into periods. The period beginning in 1890 and which saw the founding of the AOA should be viewed as the beginning of "modern optometry." Optometry historians should recognize the importance of all periods of optometry history.

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Salvation Army ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sunday Evening

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

Capturing the Art of Public Service: The Government’s Perspective

Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Tony Carrizales
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Public Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Virtual Museum ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Government Institutions ◽  
Art Forms

Public Service, in popular culture, can be viewed through many artistic lenses. Although there has been a consistent negative portrayal of government through art forms such as film and television, this research looks to review how government institutions in the United States have used art to provide a positive portrayal of public service. Eight forms of public service art are outlined through a content analysis of the holdings at the Virtual Museum of Public Service. The findings show that government and public entities have historically and continually engaged in promoting public service through art. Many of these public art examples are accessible year round, without limitations, such as buildings, statues, and public structures.

The connection between the «color revolutions» and the strategic doctrines of the United States (late 20th century — 2014)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Igorevna Filimonova
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Time Interval ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Us ◽  
Color Revolutions ◽  
The Right

After the collapse of the USSR, fundamentally new phenomena appeared on the world arena, which became a watershed separating the bipolar order from the monopolar order associated with the establishment of the US global hegemony. Such phenomena were the events that are most often called «revolutions» in connection with the scale of the changes being made — «velvet revolutions» in the former Eastern Bloc, as well as revolutions of a different type, which ended in a change in the current regimes with such serious consequences that we are also talking about revolutionary transformations. These are technologies of «color revolutions» that allow organizing artificial and seemingly spontaneous mass protests leading to the removal of the legitimate government operating in the country and, in fact, to the seizure of power by a pro-American forces that ensure the Westernization of the country and the implementation of "neoliberal modernization", which essentially means the opening of national markets and the provision of natural resources for the undivided use of the Western factor (TNC and TNB). «Color revolutions» are inseparable from the strategic documents of the United States, in which, from the end of the 20th century, even before the collapse of the USSR, two main tendencies were clearly traced: the expansion of the right to unilateral use of force up to a preemptive strike, which is inextricably linked with the ideological justification of «missionary» American foreign policy, and the right to «assess» the internal state of affairs in countries and change it to a «democratic format», that is, «democratization». «Color revolutions», although they are not directly mentioned in strategic documents, but, being a «technical package of actions», straightforwardly follow from the right, assigned to itself by Washington, to unilateral use of force, which is gradually expanding from exclusively military actions to a comprehensive impact on an opponent country, i.e. essentially a hybrid war. Thus, the «color revolutions» clearly fit into the strategic concept of Washington on the use of force across the entire spectrum (conventional and unconventional war) under the pretext of «democratization». The article examines the period of registration and expansion of the US right to use force (which, according to the current international law, is a crime without a statute of limitations) in the time interval from the end of the twentieth century until 2014, filling semantic content about the need for «democratic transformations» of other states, with which the United States approached the key point of the events of the «Arab spring» and «color revolutions» in the post-Soviet space, the last and most ambitious of which was the «Euromaidan» in Ukraine in 2014. The article presents the material for the preparation of lectures and seminars in the framework of the training fields «International Relations» and «Political Science».

Good Neighbor in the American Historical Imagination: Mexican American Intellectual Thought in the Fight for Civil Rights, 1930s–1940s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Mendoza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Good Neighbor

Abstract This article argues that historical narrative has held a significant role in Mexican American identity formation and civil rights activism by examining the way Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s used history to claim full citizenship status in Texas. In particular, it centers on how George I. Sánchez (1906–1972), a scholar of Latin American education, revised historical narrative by weaving history and foreign policy together through a pragmatic lens. To educators and federal officials, Sánchez used this revisionist history to advocate for Mexican Americans, insisting that the Good Neighbor policy presented the United States with the chance to translate into reality the democratic ideals long professed in the American historical imagination. The example of Sánchez also prompts us to reexamine the historiography in our present day: How do we define the tradition and trajectory of Mexican American intellectual thought in U.S. history? This article posits that when Sánchez and other Mexican Americans thought about their community’s collective identity and civil rights issues through history, they were contributing to a longer conversation driven by questions about identity formation and equality that first emerged at the end of the U.S. War with Mexico in 1848. These questions remain salient in the present, indicating the need for a historiographic examination that will change how we imagine the tradition of intellectual thought in the United States.

American Urban History

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social History ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Population Distribution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial Development ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Historical Profession

American urban history embraces all historiography related to towns, cities, and metropolitan regions in the United States. American urban history includes the examination of places, processes, and ways of life through a broad and diverse range of themes including immigration, migration, population distribution, economic and spatial development, politics, planning, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Urban history emerged as an identifiable subfield of United States history in the mid-20th century, admittedly well after the establishment of similar areas of inquiry in other professional fields and academic disciplines, particularly sociology. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, a small number of academics, led by noted social historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., commenced the first wave of scholarly interest in American urban history with works on colonial seaports and select 19th-century cities. By the 1950s, urban history coalesced as a recognizable subfield around a reformulation of American history, emphasizing the establishment of towns, rather than the pursuit of agriculture, as the spearhead for the formation and growth of the nation. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a second round of interest in American urban history, set against the backdrop of the tremendous political and social changes that swept the nation and transformed the historical profession. Through innovative models of scholarship that broke with traditional consensus history, notably pioneering quantitative research methods, a self-identified “new urban history” emerged that emphasized spatial development as well as social, economic, and political mobility, conflict, and change. Over time, this new urban history was largely subsumed within social history, given the fields’ intersecting and overlapping interests in social and political issues viewed through the lenses of race, class, and gender. Social history’s broad focus resulted in an explosion of scholarship that all but dominated the American historical profession by the late 20th century. From the mid-1970s through the 1990s, books with urban settings and themes, most of them well within the camp of social history, won an impressive number of Bancroft prizes and other prestigious awards. Urban history itself has survived—even thrived—without a widely agreed upon canon or dominant research methodology. Scholars continue to make significant contributions to urban history, whether or not they embrace the title of urbanist. Note that attendance at the biannual meetings of the Urban History Association has grown significantly over the last two decades. The sources in this article’s twenty subject headings have been arranged to illustrate the depth and breadth of each prominent theme in the field and are by no means an exhaustive list of such scholarship, but rather a sampling of the most influential and innovative examinations of America’s urban canvas.

One Hundred Years of Empirical Aesthetics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Nadal ◽  
Esther Ureña
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gestalt Psychology ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Motivational Theory ◽  
Reward Value ◽  
History Of ◽  
Functional Psychology

This article reviews the history of empirical aesthetics since its foundation by Fechner in 1876 to Berlyne’s new empirical aesthetics in the 1970s. The authors explain why and how Fechner founded the field, and how Wundt and Müller’s students continued his work in the early 20th century. In the United States, empirical aesthetics flourished as part of American functional psychology at first, and later as part of behaviorists’ interest in reward value. The heyday of behaviorism was also a golden age for the development of all sorts of tests for artistic and aesthetic aptitudes. The authors end the article by covering the contributions of Gestalt psychology and Berlyne’s motivational theory to empirical aesthetics.

The Business of Rhyming: Burma-Shave Poetry and Popular Culture

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-47
Author(s):  
Mike Chasar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
The Core ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Creative Forces

This essay uses the example of the long‐lived and popular Burma‐Shave advertising campaign to argue that literary critics should extend their attention to the vast amounts of poetry written for advertising purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Burma‐Shave campaign—which featured sequences of rhyming billboards erected along highways in the United States from 1926 to 1963—not only cultivated characteristics of literary and even avantgarde writing but effectively pressured that literariness into serving the commercial marketplace. At the same time, as the campaign's reception history shows, the spirit of linguistic play and innovation at the core of Burma‐Shave's poetry unintentionally distracted consumers' attention away from the commercial message and toward the creative forces of reading and writing poetry. A striking example of popular reading practices at work, this history shows how poetry created even in the most commercial contexts might resist the commodification that many twentieth‐century poets and critics feared. (MC)

Diaspora in the United States: Chinese and Indians Compared

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Skop ◽  
Wei Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Migration Rates ◽  
China And India ◽  
History Of ◽  
Migrant Groups ◽  
The U.S

AbstractIn recent years, the migration rates from both China and India to the U.S. have accelerated. Since 2000 more than a third of foreign-born Chinese and 40% of foreign-born Indians have arrived in that country. This paper will document the evolving patterns of immigration from China and India to the U.S. by tracing the history of immigration and racial discrimination, the dramatic transitions that have occurred since the mid-20th century, and the current demographic and socioeconomic profiles of these two migrant groups.

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