Toxic Purity: The Progressive Era Origins of America' s Lead Paint Poisoning Epidemic

1999 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 705-736 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Warren

This paper examines a pivotal moment in the history of the built environment in America. At the beginning of the twentieth century, factions within the American paint industry fought in state and federal legislatures over the definition of paint: What was pure paint? Were new paint formulations to be encouraged, or labeled “adulterated”? Was the known toxicity of lead to be a consideration? Despite some opponents' recourse to a rhetoric of toxicity and public health, all sides agreed that the best paints contained a significant quantity of lead, and that government should stay out of setting industry standards. This accord all but assured that Americans would apply tons of lead paint on the walls of their homes.

Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


Author(s):  
K.S. Joseph ◽  
Lily Lee ◽  
Laura Arbour ◽  
Nathalie Auger ◽  
Elizabeth K. Darling ◽  
...  

AbstractThe archaic definition and registration processes for stillbirth currently prevalent in Canada impede both clinical care and public health. The situation is fraught because of definitional problems related to the inclusion of induced abortions at ≥20 weeks’ gestation as stillbirths: widespread uptake of prenatal diagnosis and induced abortion for serious congenital anomalies has resulted in an artefactual temporal increase in stillbirth rates in Canada and placed the country in an unfavourable position in international (stillbirth) rankings. Other problems with the Canadian stillbirth definition and registration processes extend to the inclusion of fetal reductions (for multi-fetal pregnancy) as stillbirths, and the use of inconsistent viability criteria for reporting stillbirth. This paper reviews the history of stillbirth registration in Canada, provides a rationale for updating the definition of fetal death and recommends a new definition and improved processes for fetal death registration. The recommendations proposed are intended to serve as a starting point for reformulating issues related to stillbirth, with the hope that building a consensus regarding a definition and registration procedures will facilitate clinical care and public health.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Mary Augusta Brazelton

This introductory chapter provides a background of how mass immunization programs made vaccination a cornerstone of Chinese public health and China a site of consummate biopower, or power over life. Over the twentieth century, through processes of increasing force, vaccines became medical technologies of governance that bound together the individual and the collective, authorities and citizens, and experts and the uneducated. These programs did not just transform public health in China—they helped shape the history of global health. The material and administrative systems of mass immunization on which these health campaigns relied had a longer history than the People's Republic of China itself. The Chinese Communist Party championed as its own invention and dramatically expanded immunization systems that largely predated 1949 and had originated with public health programs developed in southwestern China during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945. The nationwide implementation of these systems in the 1950s relied on transformations in research, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and concepts of disease that had begun in the first decades of the twentieth century. These processes spanned multiple regime changes, decades of war, and diverse forms of foreign intervention. Most important, they brought with them new ideas about what it meant to be a citizen of China.


2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW HILTON

This article traces the history of women's participation in consumer politics and the gendering of the consumer in twentieth-century Britain. It does so by focusing on two important moments in the official discussion of the consumer interest: the Consumers' Council of the First World War and the Molony Committee on Consumer Protection, 1959–1962. It argues that notions of consumer-citizenship have been varied and forever in flux and that the involvement of women in consumer issues within the state apparatus has always been at once both disputed and encouraged. Within this complex history, however, a number of discernible trends are apparent. In the first half of the twentieth century, consumer issues were articulated by women's organizations on the political left and the consumer was considered largely a working-class housewife within official consumer politics. By mid-century, an increasingly dominant view of the consumer was that of the middle-class housewife, and a host of socially conservative women's groups came to speak for the consumer. By the 1950s, while the definition of the consumer remained contested, it had increasingly become a gender-neutral category, as business groups defined consumer interests in government committees and an emerging affluent consumer movement inscribed consumerism with the values of a male professional class.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-15
Author(s):  
A.A. Shorokhov ◽  

The article combines two significant historical and literary phenomena. The first is a group of Russian poets and prose writers of the early twentieth century, known under the general name “new peasant poets”. The second is a group of Russian writers of the late twentieth century, whose work has received a steady definition of “village prose”. V.M. Shukshin’s works are also referred to this cultural phenomenon. The article attempts to get away from simplifying definitions of “urban romance”, “village prose”, and to establish the civilizational continuity of Shukshin’s work with “new peasant poets” of the early twentieth century. The author also tries to consider the phenomenon of the group of “new peasant poets” from the cultural, philosophical and historical-biographical points of view – In the unity of their work, fate and dramatic changes in the history of Russia. The article uses theoretical works on Russian and world literature and history by M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Kozhinova, I.R. Shafarevich, G.I. Shmeleva, P.F. Alyoshkina, S.Yu. and S.S. Kunyaevs, recent publications on Shukshin’s works by V.I. Belov, A.D. Zabolotsky, and A.N. Varlamov.


Author(s):  
Annette Rodríguez

This chapter explores the development of pedagogical choices and historical practice via familial and professional mentorship. Rodríguez argues for the critical role of mentorship for the development of women in the historical profession. Naming her work “a history of the gaps,” she discusses widening the definition of historical actors as well as subjects of historical analysis. As an example, the chapter points to the continuum of women acting against racist violence, documenting, analyzing, and historicizing racist violence—against previously masculinist narratives. Demonstrating a “history of the gaps,” Rodríguez’s chapter concludes with the testimonies of Mexican and Mexican American women whose X marks confirmed anti-Mexican murders at the turn of the twentieth century.


2020 ◽  
pp. 171-200
Author(s):  
Robert Colls

Chapter 6 brings the history of modern sport and the modern school together. In the Uppingham School Archives there’s a photograph of the school cricket team gathered round its ambitious and reforming headmaster Rev. Edward Thring. At this moment (1858) Thring was involved in painful disputes with these boys, trivial struggles that confirmed in his mind if not theirs the need to build a network of powerful schools committed to reforming the character of elite young men. He and his brother headmasters spent their lives reinventing these so called ‘public’ schools as new moral worlds. Chapter 6 looks also at the Girls Public Day School Company (1872) and its work towards the proper education of middle-class young women. Sport and gender was vital to both campaigns although how vital rather depended on the extent to which girls won a new independent voice and the boys retained their old one. Public schools were seen by their inventors as new moral worlds but they could be new immoral worlds as well. Or, to put it another way, the schools were reconfigured as closed institutions deliberately designed to influence the character and behaviour of the young. By the beginning of the twentieth century the leading public schools were seen as uniquely successful enterprises, obsessed with the athletic body, significant and forceful in the definition of what a ‘school’ should be, stately and beautiful, and surrounded almost by definition by playing fields. A new set of national icons had been created.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 489-514
Author(s):  
Lukas Engelmann

Abstract The arrival of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900 has become a pivotal case study in the history of American public health. The presence of plague remained contested for months as the evidence provided by the federal bacteriologist Joseph Kinyoun of the Marine Hospital Service was rejected, his laboratory methods disputed and his person ridiculed. Before the disease diagnosis became widely accepted, Kinyoun had been subjected to public caricature; his expensive and disruptive pragmatics for containing the epidemic were ridiculed as a plague of ‘Kinyounism’. Not only does this history offer insight into the difficult and contradictory ways in which bacteriology became an established science, it also provides an early twentieth-century example of ‘politicised science’. This paper revisits the controversy around Kinyoun and his bacteriological practice through the lens of caricature to sharpen the historical understanding of the shifting and shifty relationships between science, medicine, public health and politics.


2007 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-268
Author(s):  
KAREN McNEILL

Architect Julia Morgan (1872-1957) cultivated a professional style that enabled her to exert authority in a male-dominated profession. This article focuses on three aspects of that style: her costume, her relationship to the media, and her downtown San Francisco offi ce. Rather than a shy woman who sought anonymity, Morgan was a savvy professional with a strong gender consciousness who actively sought success and shaped her own destiny. Her story provides insight into the history of women in the professions and the gendered landscape of the Progressive Era city. Since Julia Morgan left behind few words regarding her social views, professional intentions, or architectural philosophy, this article is also an interdisciplinary exercise that investigates the intersection of biography, material culture, gender, and the built environment.


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