Questioning Similarities: Prohibition in the United States and Finland

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Mark C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Women's Christian Temperance Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Alcohol Prohibition

Only two republics have ever adopted national alcohol prohibition in peacetime, and they did so at almost exactly the same time. For these reasons and others, historians of temperance have considered prohibition in Finland and the United States to be essentially similar. In fact, despite originating at the same time, the two are quite dissimilar. American prohibition came out of Protestant revivalism and a capitalist desire for worker efficiency. By the late nineteenth century two powerful temperance organizations, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti- Saloon League, had emerged to lead the movement for domestic prohibition and to evangelize for prohibition abroad. Prohibition in Finland came out of the movement to achieve a cultural and political nationalism. Temperance was part of the Turku academics’ attempt to create a virtuous unified peasantry and working class. The working class, in particular, used the temperance movement to organize their movements. While the United States and Finland were the only two republics to undertake national prohibition, the US largely ignored the Finnish experiment. They praised it in the early 1920s only to emphasize its later failures as a way of trying to obscure their own inability to achieve a viable policy.

Forever Prisoners

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliott Young
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Federal Bureau Of Investigation ◽  
Federal Prisons ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Detention Facilities

The United States locks up more than half a million non-citizens every year for immigration-related offenses; on any given day, more than 50,000 immigrants are held in detention in hundreds of ICE detention facilities spread across the country. This book provides an explanation of how, where, and why non-citizens were put behind bars in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through select granular experiences of detention over the course of more than 140 years, this book explains how America built the world’s largest system for imprisoning immigrants. From the late nineteenth century, when the US government held hundreds of Chinese in federal prisons pending deportation, to the early twentieth century, when it caged hundreds of thousands of immigrants in insane asylums, to World Wars I and II, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declared tens of thousands of foreigners “enemy aliens” and locked them up in Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) camps in Texas and New Mexico, and through the 1980s detention of over 125,000 Cuban and almost 23,000 Haitian refugees, the incarceration of foreigners nationally has ebbed and flowed. In the last three decades, tough-on-crime laws intersected with harsh immigration policies to make millions of immigrants vulnerable to deportation based on criminal acts, even minor ones, that had been committed years or decades earlier. Although far more immigrants are being held in prison today than at any other time in US history, earlier moments of immigrant incarceration echo present-day patterns.

The Temperance Movement in India: Politics and Social Reform

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Carroll
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The temperance/prohibition agitation represents a fascinating chapter in the social and political history of India which has been largely ignored. If any notice is taken of this movement, it is generally dismissed (or elevated) as an example of the uniquely Indian process of ‘sanskritization’ or as an equally unique component of ‘Gandhianism’—in spite of the fact that the liquor question has not been without political importance in the history either of England or of the United States. And in spite of the fact that the temperance agitation in India in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century was intimately connected with temperance agitation in England. Indeed the temperance movement in India was organized, patronized, and instructed by English temperance agitators.

Rebuilding the City, Leaving it behind

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wells
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Fringe ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Suburban Developments ◽  
The City

As U.S. cities burgeoned in the late nineteenth century, their environmental problems multiplied. In response, some urban elites worked to rebuild the city to alleviate its environmental ills; others relocated to more environmentally enticing surroundings in new suburban developments. For members of both groups, new forms of transportation infrastructure profoundly shaped how they responded to the era's environmental crisis. Whereas efforts to rebuild and retrofit downtown were hampered by the difficulties and expense of working in densely built and populated areas, efforts to build on the urban fringe faced few serious obstacles. As a result, the most significant late nineteenth-century attempts to use transportation to remake city dwellers' relationships with nature in the United States - including tools developed with an eye on rebuilding dense city centers - exercised far greater influence on the expanding periphery of cities than on their environmentally fraught cores.

John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.

The Empire's New Frontiers

2003 ◽  
Vol 102 (667) ◽  
pp. 383-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael T. Klare
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Behavior ◽  
Central Eurasia ◽  
South Central ◽  
Strategic Position ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The United States … wants to enhance its own strategic position in south-central Eurasia, much as Great Britain attempted in the late nineteenth century. This effort encompasses anti-terrorism and the pursuit of oil, but many in Washington also see it as an end in itself—as the natural behavior of a global superpower engaged in global dominance.

A Theater of Violence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter 5 examines lynching, a longstanding practice in the United States that became more regionally associated with the South in the late nineteenth century, as a force in film history from the earliest days of the medium through a cycle of anti-lynching films during the years around midcentury. Paradoxically, the Western genre is important here, absorbing many of the common rituals and generating a powerful ideological defense of lynching. During different periods across this half-century, different attitudes about lynching led to a variety of film representations, culminating with a number of films in the late 1930s and beyond questioning both lynching and its cinematic traces.

A Discussion of Jessica Blatt's Race and the Making of American Political Science

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 808-809
Author(s):  
James Farr
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Political Science

In Race and the Making of American Political Science, Jessica Blatt argues that the professionalization of the discipline was deeply entwined with ideas about racial difference, and the concomitant attempt by leading scholars to define and defend a system of racial hierarchy in the United States and beyond. Although it focuses on the period from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, the book also raises fundamental questions about the historical legacy of racialist arguments for professional political science, the extent of their continuing resonance, and contemporary implications for both academic and broader civic discourse. We have asked a range of leading political scientists to consider and respond to Professor Blatt’s important call for scholarly self-reflexivity.

RACE, EMPIRE, AND THE LIMITS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH NATIONHOOD

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 873-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
COLIN KIDD
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Scotland's Unionist culture has already become a world we have lost, investigation of which is hampered by the misleading notion of a ‘Celtic fringe’. Nineteenth-century Lowland Scots were not classified as Celts; indeed they vociferously projected a Teutonic racial identity. Several Scots went so far as to claim not only that the Saxon Scots of the Lowlands were superior to the Celts of the Highlands, but that the people of the Lowlands came from a more purely Anglian stock than the population of southern England. For some Scots the glory of Scottish identity resided in the boast that Lowlanders were more authentically ‘English’ than the English themselves. Moreover, Scottish historians reinterpreted the nation's medieval War of Independence – otherwise a cynosure of patriotism – as an unfortunate civil war within the Saxon race. Curiously, racialism – which was far from monolithic – worked at times both to support and to subvert Scottish involvement in empire. The late nineteenth century also saw the formulation of Scottish proposals for an Anglo-Saxon racial empire including the United States; while Teutonic racialism inflected the nascent Scottish home rule movement as well as the Udal League in Orkney and Shetland.

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