Indian School, Company Town

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-321
Author(s):  
Kevin Whalen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Wage Labor ◽  
Company Town ◽  
Indian School ◽  
Sherman Institute ◽  
Indian Boarding School ◽  
Low Pay

During the early twentieth century, administrators at Sherman Institute, a federal Indian boarding school in Riverside, California, sent hundreds of students to work at Fontana Farms, a Southern California mega-ranch. Such work, they argued, would inculcate students with values of thrift and hard work, making them more like white, Protestant Americans. At Fontana, students faced low pay, racial discrimination, and difficult working conditions. Yet, when wage labor proved scarce on home reservations, many engaged the outing system with alacrity. In doing so, they moved beyond the spatial boundaries of the boarding school as historians have imagined it, and they used a program designed to erase native identities in order to carry their cultures forward into the twentieth century.

Indian Boarding School Gothic in Older than America and The Only Good Indian

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Kella
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Boarding Schools ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Native North American ◽  
Indian Boarding School ◽  
Visual Sovereignty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Boarding Schools

This article examines the appropriation and redirection of the Gothic in two contemporary, Native-centered feature films that concern a history that can be said to haunt many Native North American communities today: the history of Indian boarding schools. Georgina Lightning’s Older than America (2008) and Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009) make use of Gothic conventions and the figures of the ghost and the vampire to visually relate the history and horrors of Indian boarding schools. Each of these Native-centered films displays a cinematic desire to decenter Eurocentric histories and to counter mainstream American genres with histories and forms of importance to Native North American peoples. Willmott’s film critiques mythologies of the West and frontier heroism, and Lightning attempts to sensitize non-Native viewers to contemporary Native North American concerns while also asserting visual sovereignty and affirming spiritual values.

Smoking Bans and Shop Floor Resistance during the Early Twentieth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Wood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Large Mass ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Smoking Bans ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Paper Company ◽  
Time Away

This chapter explores early-twentieth-century employers' opposition to smoking in the workplace, focusing on a case study of smoking practices and shop floor disputes at the Hammermill Paper Company in Erie, Pennsylvania, during the long, hot summer of 1915. Uniquely detailed reports of working conditions and workers' behaviors in this large mass-production factory, written by a pair of curious labor spies, documented nicely the ongoing efforts of many workers to circumvent the company's prohibition of smoking. In response to the refusal of management to allow smoking, workers improvised an assortment of surreptitious strategies that would allow them to smoke at work and enjoy time away from their jobs. As the Hammermill case illustrates, the wide extent of worker subversion made the no-smoking rule a dead letter, much to the constant frustration of management and the spies themselves.

Boarding School Poetry, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and the Demands of Americanization Poetics and Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-143
Author(s):  
Cristina Stanciu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Original Poetry ◽  
School Personnel ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Native American Students ◽  
American Students ◽  
Carlisle Indian Industrial School ◽  
Industrial School

This chapter focuses on the under-examined corpus of Carlisle poetry, viewing it as a vital archive for theorizing the role of the American Indian intellectual tradition in negotiating Americanization discourses at the turn of the twentieth century. Materials published in newspapers and magazines at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania (1879–1918) include “Carlisle poetry,” which encompasses original poetry by Native American students, reprints of poems by Indian authors, poems by school personnel, and poems by well-known American authors. This poetry, along with the letters and articles published in Carlisle newspapers and magazines, is complicit with the ideological underpinnings of the institution’s ambitious goals of “making” Indian students into Americans, even as elements of this literature critique the Americanization that Carlisle boarding school demanded of its students.

scholarly journals Nineteenth Century Urban Labor Precursors of the Mexican Revolution: The Development of an Ideology

1974 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Hart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Urban Labor ◽  
New City

Mexican industrialization, which began during the second half of the nineteenth century, was paralleled by the appearance of an urban labor movement. Industrialization resulted in a sudden concentration of new workers from the countryside in a few urban areas—especially Mexico City. Living conditions for the new city dwellers were generally intolerable and were compounded by chronic economic and political instability. Crowning the laborer's difficulty were the almost impossible working conditions in the new factories. The working class, virtually in self-defense, began to organize. Because the urban labor movement during the last third of the nineteenth century was a prelude to similar and more famous developments during the violent years of the early twentieth century, analysis of its causes, nature, and significance is essential for understanding an important aspect of the Mexican Revolution.

The Power of the Dead’s Place

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Cultural Institution ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnicity And Race

This chapter examines how workers used the rituals of death to interpret, accommodate, and resist their living and working conditions during the period 1873–1913. It first traces the history of the American cemetery, and especially its rise as a cultural institution, before turning to Chicago's cemeteries as social and cultural spaces on the city's landscape. It then discusses how broader tensions in industrial society were reflected in the processes of death and burial. It also looks at the ways that Chicago's working classes turned to cemeteries to extend the terrain of contemplating the consequences of industrialization; the importance of religion, ethnicity, and race in the establishment and use of Chicago's cemeteries; and how Waldheim Cemetery became a space that linked anarchism, the labor movement, and radicalism in Chicago to similar movements across the globe. Finally, the chapter cites the case of the Haymarket memorial in Waldheim to show how the meanings of life and death came to be expressed in Chicago's cemeteries as the nation marched into the twentieth century.

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