Introduction

Author(s):  
Roger Davidson

The introductory chapter fulfils three objectives. First, it locates this study within the existing, somewhat disparate, historiography relating to sexuality and sexual practices in twentieth-century Scotland and summarises the aims of the book. Secondly, it explores the strengths and weaknesses of Scottish High Court and Crown Office records as a source for the social historian. In particular, it examines the importance of precognitions − witness statements, including testimony from medicsl experts and the police compiled by the Procurator Fiscal prior to any prosecution. Thirdly, it provides an overview of the structure and contents of the study.

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-301
Author(s):  
Ryan Patrick Murphy

This essay offers a genealogy of lifestyle, a category widely used in the 1960s to mark dissident kinship networks and sexual practices: single parenting, bisexuality, gender nonconformity, polyamory, cohabitation, and communal living, among many others. I argue that the concept of lifestyle emerged in a desire among white mid-twentieth-century suburbanites for the social and sexual worlds that preceded rapid suburbanization, those most visible in the immigrant industrial metropolis at its peak in the decades immediately before the United States drastically restricted immigration in 1924. Even at the apex of suburbanization in the 1960s, many people refused to comply with the demand for suburban domesticity, staying in the city, joining countercultural groups, or adopting what came to be called alternative lifestyles. But in that act of dissent, urban planners, real estate developers, and marketing experts saw an opportunity and began to sell urban lifestyle landscapes that they claimed would reproduce the sexual heterogeneity of the early twentieth-century industrial metropolis. By the 1980s, as ever more people lived outside the nuclear family, a growing lifestyle market drove up prices in central cities that amplified the class and race exclusions that the social movements of the 1960s contested. This article is therefore both a critical and a recuperative reading of lifestyle, one that uses the category to show how dissident sexualities can be both the harbinger of the niche-marketed gentrified city and an incitement to new ways of living and loving that advance the pursuit of economic justice.


Author(s):  
Susan Scott Parrish

This introductory chapter discusses the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. It argues that although historians have uncovered the details of what caused the flood to unfold the way it did, less work has been done to explain how, what was arguably the most publicly consuming environmental catastrophe of the twentieth century in the United States, assumed public meaning. The chapter then sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore how this disaster took on form and meaning as it was nationally and internationally represented across multiple media platforms, both while the flood moved inexorably southward and, subsequently, over the next two decades. The book begins by looking at the social and environmental causes of the disaster, and by briefly describing the sociological certitudes of the 1920s into which it broke. It then investigates how this disaster went public, and made publics, as it was mediated through newspapers, radio, blues songs, and theater benefits. Finally, it looks at how the flood comprises an important chapter in the history of literary modernism.


Author(s):  
J. Pierre Loebel ◽  
Julian Savulescu

This introductory chapter discusses the lack of a unifying theory in psychiatry. No generally accepted theory of mental illness exists, in part because there is little agreement on what the concepts ‘mental’ and ‘illness’ entail. Lacking such a theory, the profession has experienced internal divisiveness, uncertainty among applicants for training, and attacks from outside. Since the decline of nineteenth- and twentieth-century paradigms such as psychoanalysis and behaviourism, psychiatrists have been in search of one that acknowledges what is universally recognized, that is, that human beings function in a nexus comprising the psyche, the soma, and the social surround, and that each domain requires consideration when drawing up a psychiatric formulation and treatment plan. Thus, the biopsychosocial (BPS) paradigm proposed by George L. Engel in 1977 was adopted without much enquiry into details. This book presents a nascent, stronger version of the concept based on a growing body of genetic, epigenetic, and other evidence that encompasses a central, overlapping component to the Venn diagram description of the BPS conceptualization.


Author(s):  
LaShawn Harris

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the less-familiar aspects of informal black women's work during the first three decades of the twentieth century—the labor patterns and economic activities of those that were part of the city's profitable yet illegal sexual economy, gambling enterprise, and supernatural consulting business. In doing so the chapter also tackles the problems of documenting informal labor and maps out a multidisciplinary approach for piecing together the oft-neglected lives of informal black female laborers. Finally, the chapter sets the scope of this study within New York City and describes the city's informal labor sector in order to set the social and economic backdrop within which these workers operate.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Ronald Torrance

There are few resources amongst contemporary Chinese literary criticism that manage to weave such insightful literary readings and incisive historical research as Kristin Stapleton’s Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family. The book accomplishes three feats, as set out by Stapleton in her introductory chapter, simultaneously incorporating a history of twentieth-century Chengdu (and its relevance to the developments in China during this period, more broadly) alongside the author’s biography of Ba Jin’s formative years in the city and the historiographical context of his novel Family. Such an undertaking by a less skilled author would have, perhaps, produced a work which simplifies the rich historical underpinnings of Ba Jin’s Family to supplementary readings of the novel, coupled with incidental evidence of the political and social machinations of the city in which its author grew up. Not so under Stapleton’s careful guidance. By reading the social and economic development of early twentieth-century Chengdu as much as its fictional counterpart in Ba Jin’s Turbulent Stream trilogy, Stapleton provides a perceptive reading of Family which invites the reader to consider how fiction can enrich and enliven our understanding of history.


Author(s):  
Trais Pearson

This introductory chapter briefly discusses the major themes of this book. It argues that the investigation of unnatural death was an early—and unlikely—site of direct interaction between the state and its subjects. Furthermore, the chapter illustrates how the emergence of a necropolitical regime at the turn of the twentieth century offered a troubling rebuke to the master narrative of modern Thai historiography: namely, the doctrine of Siamese/Thai exceptionalism. Thailand's status as the only nation-state in Southeast Asia to avoid direct control by European imperial power marks it as a singular state with an exceptional past. And it is within this context that the chapter addresses certain morbid subjects—alluding not merely to death but also to the social, cultural, and political lives of the dead.


Author(s):  
Sean P. Holmes

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which to explore the efforts of American actors to define what it meant to earn a living on the stage at a historical moment when the cultural landscape of the United States was undergoing seismic changes. In so doing, it sheds light on a number of larger issues: the nature of cultural production in the early twentieth century; languages of class and their role in the construction of cultural hierarchy; and the special problems that unionization posed for workers in the commercial entertainment industry. The book focuses on that section of the American acting community that earned its living in the so-called legitimate theater, a cultural category that by the early twentieth century had come to be defined, at least in a metropolitan context, less by a particular set of performance traditions than by the social identity of its audience. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.


2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saty Satya-Murti ◽  
Jennifer Gutierrez

The Los Angeles Plaza Community Center (PCC), an early twentieth-century Los Angeles community center and clinic, published El Mexicano, a quarterly newsletter, from 1913 to 1925. The newsletter’s reports reveal how the PCC combined walk-in medical visits with broader efforts to address the overall wellness of its attendees. Available records, some with occasional clinical details, reveal the general spectrum of illnesses treated over a twelve-year span. Placed in today’s context, the medical care given at this center was simple and minimal. The social support it provided, however, was multifaceted. The center’s caring extended beyond providing medical attention to helping with education, nutrition, employment, transportation, and moral support. Thus, the social determinants of health (SDH), a prominent concern of present-day public health, was a concept already realized and practiced by these early twentieth-century Los Angeles Plaza community leaders. Such practices, although not yet nominally identified as SDH, had their beginnings in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social activism movement aiming to mitigate the social ills and inequities of emerging industrial nations. The PCC was one of the pioneers in this effort. Its concerns and successes in this area were sophisticated enough to be comparable to our current intentions and aspirations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.


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