The Limits of Possibility: Rand McNally in American Culture, 1898-1929

2000 ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Susan Schulten

In the early twentieth century, Rand McNally held a large share of the commercial market for maps and atlases in the United States. How the company built its reputation as an American cartographic authority—by both accepting and resisting change—is the subject of this essay. Critical to the company’s success was its ability to design materials that reinforced American notions of how the world ought to appear, an indication that the history of cartography is governed not just by technological and scientific advances, but also by a complex interplay between mapmakers and consumers.

2021 ◽  

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.


Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174-179
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig

This chapter considers the overall impact of the twentieth-century proliferation of archive activities in Jewish life and the rising paradigm of total archives in particular. By looking at the development of Jewish archiving in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine, we see the concrete manifestation of the impulses of a “time to gather” in Jewish cultures around the world. These efforts represent a kind of community-based archives, but also the internal tensions: What happens when there is a widespread understanding of the value of archives, and they represent resources of cultural capital worth fighting for? This conclusion also places the history of Jewish archives and the struggles to “own” the past in the broader context of the emerging information society. Altogether, this history indicates contentious struggles over what it means to have control over history in its most practical terms.


2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 123-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra White

Although Hansen's disease (leprosy) is still a significant problem in many parts of the world, the effectiveness of multidrug therapy has allowed people affected by this disease to be treated on an outpatient basis. However, throughout much of the twentieth century, people diagnosed with Hansen's disease were isolated from their families in facilities known as 'leprosaria'. This article presents a brief history of isolation policies and the development of community structures at two such facilities, Carville and Curupaiti, in the United States and Brazil, respectively. The modern dilemmas faced by the administration, staff, and residents of these institutions will also be discussed.


2001 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamás Szmrecsányi

This article intends to assess and compare the main contributions to our discipline of two major authors and authorities. Both of them originated in Central Europe and, later on, went to work in the United States, where their most important books on the subject were published posthumously during the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, besides pertaining to different generations, they also were very unlike from each other.The eldest, Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), remains much better known among contemporary economists, although very few of them seem to have read in its entirety his imposing History of Economic Analysis (1954a), still a model of our trade. The same probably also applies to his shorter and previous book on the same subject, Economic Doctrine and Method, which had been initially published in Germany forty years earlier, as well as to the essays collected in his Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes.


2021 ◽  

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.


Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck

Since its founding more than one hundred years ago, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has been a fulcrum in debates over what constitutes proper boyhood and manhood. Although the BSA developed a strong national identity, these debates had implications that extended far beyond the borders of the United States. Writing the global back into the history of one of the country’s largest youth organizations, Our Frontier is the World details how the BSA operated as a vehicle of empire from the Progressive Era to the countercultural movements of the second half of the twentieth century. American boys and men wearing the Scout uniform never simply hiked local trails to citizenship; they forged ties with their international peers, camped in foreign lands, started troops on overseas military bases, traveled to Africa, and even sailed to icy Antarctica. Weaving together these stories of youthful border-crossings, this book demonstrates how the BSA presented America’s complex engagements with the world as an honorable and playful masculine adventure.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ines Prodöhl

AbstractThis article traces the complex and shifting organization of soy's production and consumption from Northeast China to Europe and the United States. It focuses on a set of national and transnational actors with differing interests in the global and national spread of soybeans. The combination of these actors in certain spatiotemporal contexts enabled a fundamental change in soy from an Asian to an American cash crop. At the beginning of the twentieth century, soy rapidly became Northeast China's cash crop, owing to steadily increasing Western demand. However, the versatility of soy – and soy oil in particular – offered a highly successful response to the agricultural and industrial challenges that the United States faced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. By the end of the war, American farmers in the Midwest cultivated more soybeans than their Chinese counterparts.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.


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