“The salt water washes away all impropriety”: mass culture and the middle-class body on the beach in turn-of-the- century Atlantic City

2013 ◽  
pp. 106-120
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Salt Water ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Atlantic City

Requiem for a Hospital

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-289
Author(s):  
Mark F. Ditmar
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic Ocean ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Atlantic City ◽  
Pediatric Hospital ◽  
Layer Cake ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
New Facility

The splendor falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. —from The Splendor Falls by Alfred, Lord Tennyson This is the story of the closure of a hospital and with it a part of American pediatric history. Children's Seashore House of Atlantic City is the nation's fourth oldest pediatric hospital. After 118 years, it will close in the summer of 1990 and move to a new facility in Philadelphia. The simple brick, layer-cake structure looks very tired now, its iconic soul having been steadily removed for incorporation into the new hospital. The cornerstone animals, lions and bighorn, have been chiseled free and now guard a new outpost. So too have the plaques from the turn of the century, optimistically commemorating the establishment of endowed beds, wards, and cottages "for perpetual use" with their benefactors of simplicity and gentleness by name, such as the "Endowed Bed of St James Sunday School, 1889" and "Endowed by the Everyday Kindness Society, 1912." On this day, the workers hammer to remove the final link—an enormous marble tablet from 1919 eulogizing Dr William Bennett, the principal driving force of Children's Seashore House and also the founder of St Christopher's Hospital in Philadelphia. A mere 50 yards away, the Atlantic Ocean beats inexorably as it did at the founding in 1872, 2 years after the first planks were laid for the famous boardwalk.

Antediluvian pictorial fun: E.T. Reed and the prehistoric peeps

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Horrall
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Local History ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Racial Threat ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Conservative View ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

This chapter is centred on the ‘prehistoric peeps’ cartoons that E.T. Reed began publishing in Punch magazine in 1893. These immensely influential images, which appeared for years and were reproduced throughout the English-speaking world, marked the point at which the cave man character entered popular culture. Reed’s scruffy human cave men were not related to gorillas or missing links and so they posed no existential racial threat. They inhabited a completely fanciful world that is also easily recognisable as an archaic version of late-Victorian Britain. Reed poked gentle fun at contemporary institutions, ideas and events. It was a conservative view of the ancient past that endorsed late-Victorian ideas about gender, class and national identity. Reed’s images were especially popular in the colonies, where they were used to promote a British identity and erase indigenous peoples from local history. Reed’s impact on contemporaries is explored, especially American cartoonists whose imitative images finally popularised cave men in that country. Reed’s cartoons were also recreated on stage by professional and amateur performers in Britain and throughout the empire. Writers explored prehistory in literature. By the turn of the century, Reed’s unthreatening, middle class vision of prehistory predominated.

scholarly journals Sinking in Quicksand: The Demise of Victorian High Culture in America 1870-1915

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitra Sharafi
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Ethnic Origin ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Level Of Education ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Ideal

Today, the term Victorian implies snobbishness and rigidity. Our world, the result in part of a rebellion against Victorian formality and social hierarchy, celebrates the classless, the democratic, and the popular. It professes faith in the artistic judgment of all members of society regardless of ethnic origin, level of education or wealth. From the Victorian point of view, however, twentieth-century mass culture is accessible to all by appealing to the lowest common denominator; it is inclusive at the cost of a loss of education, refinement, and profundity. Turn-of-the-century America is the ideal subject for a study of the interaction between Victorian high culture and modern mass culture; the period from 1870 to 1915 was one of drastic cultural metamorphosis. Social change threatened the foundations of high culture and eventually killed it, but not without the unintentional help of the Victorians' own self-alienating behaviour.

“The Workingman's Bible”: Robert Blatchford's Merrie England, Radical Literacy, and the Making of Debsian Socialism, 1895–1900

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason D. Martinek
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social System ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Moral Indignation ◽  
Missionary Zeal ◽  
The People ◽  
Adequate Food

Turn-of-the-century socialists radicalized literacy. Unlike middle-class reformers, whose desire for mass literacy arose from the need for a hardworking, compliant workforce, socialists used it to undermine capitalism. Through their printed culture of dissent, they not only sought to transform individual lives, but an entire social system. They took up the task of using literacy to convert workers with a missionary zeal. Moral indignation fueled their crusade. In a nation of such wealth, they asked, why was it that so many industrious people did not have enough to provide themselves and their families with adequate food, clothing, and shelter? Their answer was that America's political and economic institutions had been corrupted by the nation's monied power. In their minds, only an enlightened, educated working-class could challenge the prerogatives of capital and make these institutions fully socially accountable to the people.

scholarly journals POPULAR MAGAZINES, NEW LIBERAL DISCOURSE AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, 1890s–1914

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Matthew Schneirov
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Corporate Capitalism ◽  
Popular Magazines ◽  
Mass Circulation

The study of the mass circulation “popular magazine” during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era was revived during the 1990s as part of the emerging fields of gender studies, consumer studies, and the study of the new middle class. Richard Ohmann's seminal work viewed these magazines through the lens of the political economy and class relations of an emerging corporate capitalist society and explored the relationship between mass culture and the political economy of capitalism. This paper reexamines the connection between a national mass culture, the new middle class, and an emerging corporate capitalist society through the lens of post-structuralist discourse theory. Corporate capitalism is conceptualized as in part a discourse, the new liberalism, which incorporated or rearticulated populist and socialist discourses and in doing so temporarily won the consent of the capitalist class, middle classes, and segments of the working class. Through the pages of popular magazines readers were offered pieces of a new discourse that embraced corporations rather than the “free market,” women's entry into public life, and new constructions of the self. During the muckraking era, elements of socialism and populism were integrated into mainstream American culture. Overall, the essay argues that a discourse perspective on popular magazines can open up new perspectives on corporate capitalism and the new liberalism. While corporate capitalism marked the decline of the producer–republican tradition, it also marked the emergence of an American social democratic tradition, a mixture of capitalist and socialist social formations.

Rural Ambivalence Toward Mass Society: Evidence from the U.S. Parcel Post Debates, 1900–1913

Rural History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Kielbowicz
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Consumer Choice ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Cost

For rural Americans, the debate over establishing a parcel post evoked all the hopes and anxieties associated with the expansion of mass society at the turn of the century. Parcel post, today an accepted and seemingly inconsequential government service, was originally seen as a linchpin in the emerging industry of mass culture. The media of mass communication advertised products and ran stories acclimating readers to a consumer society, thereby encouraging demand for mass-produced goods that were distributed, finally, by parcel post. Opponents of parcel post foresaw a decline of small towns, a centralization of production and distribution, a disruption of the ‘natural’ relations among labor, retailers, and consumers, and the aggrandizement of urban culture. At the other extreme, proponents claimed that parcel post would increase consumer choice, reduce the cost of living, and bridge the widening chasm between urban and rural life. Thus, the simple act of carrying a parcel from Chicago to a farmer's lane became freighted with a panoply of issues agitating the nation.

Some General Characteristics of Nonpartisan Elections

1952 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 766-776 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles R. Adrian
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Corporate Structure ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Nonpartisan Elections

Out of the middle-class businessman's “Efficiency and Economy Movement” that reached full strength in the second decade of the twentieth century came a series of innovations designed to place government “on a business basis” and to weaken the power of the political parties. The movement was inspired both by the example of the success of the corporate structure in trade and industry and by revulsion against the low standards of morality to be found in many sectors of political party activity around the turn of the century. The contemporary brand of politician had recently been exposed by the “muck-rakers” and the prestige of the parties had reached a very low level.Of the numerous ideas and mechanisms adopted as a result of the reform movement, one of the most unusual was that of election without party designation. Early in the twentieth century, under the theory that judges are neutral referees, not political officers, and that political activities should therefore be discouraged in the choosing of them, many communities initiated “nonpartisan” elections (the term that is usually applied) in the balloting for judicial posts.

scholarly journals LA CULTURA DE MASAS Y LOS MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN. SU INCIDENCIA EN LA SOCIEDAD

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Elba Orfelia Domaccin Aros
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
The Media ◽  
Medios De Comunicacion

La cultura de masas consigue fabricar a gran escala, con técnicas y procedimientos  industriales,  ideas,  sueños  e  ilusiones,  estilos  personales  y hasta una vida privada en gran parte producto de una técnica, subordinada a una rentabilidad y a la tensión permanente entre la creatividad y la estandarización,  apta  para  poder  ser  asimilada  por  el  ciudadano  de  clase media. En la actualidad, los medios de comunicación constituyen una herramienta persuasiva que nos permiten mantenernos en continua comunicación con los distintos sucesos sociales, políticos y económicos tanto a escala nacional como internacional. PALABRAS CLAVE: cultura de masas; medios de comunicación; creatividad; estandarización. ABSTRACT Mass culture manages to manufacture on a large scale, with industrial techniques and procedures, ideas, dreams and illusions, personal styles and even a private life largely the product of a technique, subordinated to a profitability and the permanent tension between creativity and Standardization, capable of being assimilated by the middle-class citizen. At present, the media is a persuasive tool that allows us to keep in constant communication with the different social, political and economic events, both nationally and internationally. KEYWORDS: mass culture; media; creativity; standardization.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy M. Wingfield
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Political Transition ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Processes

Austria-Hungary’s defeat in the war was a juncture in long-term historical processes rather than a decisive break with the past in matters of morality. Bureaucratic transition did not necessarily parallel political transition, so there was no dramatic change in the regulation of prostitution in the states of the defunct Monarchy. Most legislation changed regulation only piecemeal in the first months and years after the war, incorporating various forms of control, which reflected attitudes about sexuality, particularly, women’s. Public attention to prostitution continued—anxiety about venereal disease and public hygiene, trafficking, public morals—yet with a modern inflection. Middle class, often female, reformers had more political power in the interwar “democracies” and accomplished change they could only dream about at the turn of the century. Finally, the scientific turn in understanding race and nation infected professional thinking about both the regulation of commercial sex and the women who engaged in it.

Haunted Happiness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Physical Exercise ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Specific Class ◽  
City Center ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
The City

turn-of-the-century Cairo, practices of living at a distance from the city center and physical exercise were also praised as fostering rationality and producing positive emotions. While contemporaries in the Egyptian capital could draw on the same examples as their counterparts in Berlin, Arabic-language authors did not exclusively refer to “European” ideals. They also discussed specific “Egyptian” antecedents, including physical exercise among the ancient Egyptians. With the spread of suburbs and spaces for physical exercise, these arguments about emotional betterment left material traces in turn-of-the-century Cairo. Looking at these dynamics, the chapter demonstrates that practices of emotional reform in Cairo were bound to a specific class formation. The attempt at creating “rational” and emotionally controlled subjects was tied to the rising influence of the city’s Arabic-speaking, male middle class, which presented itself as the vanguard of the national movement.

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