Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Van Horn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
New England ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Object Use ◽  
Material Artifacts ◽  
Polite Culture ◽  
Sensus Communis

Elite colonists in the port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston sought to construct a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. They turned to material artifacts as a means of building networks between people. Through purchase of common goods and similar modes of object use, colonial consumers formulated communities of taste that drew individuals together. Colonists relied upon the power of assemblage to transform their individual identities and to create a sensus communis. The portraits painted by Joseph Blackburn in Bermuda and New England illuminate the regional divergences in transatlantic polite culture and point to the local bonds forged through artifacts and objects’ power to assemble the social.

James Bryant Conant and the Meritocratic University

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton Keller ◽  
Phyllis Keller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Professional Education ◽  
William James ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
American University ◽  
Economic Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Law

The Harvard that James Bryant Conant inherited when he became president in 1933 was the creation of his Boston Brahmin predecessors Charles W. Eliot (1867–1908) and Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1908–33). Under Eliot, Harvard became a university, and not just a college with some ancillary professional education. As he said of the various fields of higher education in his inaugural: “We shall have them all, and at their best.” The Law and Medical schools became world-class. Major scholars began to be more than an occasional fluke in the faculty lineup. And Eliot was the first American university president to become a significant public figure. No less revolutionary was what he did with undergraduate education. His elective system replaced the former tightly regulated curriculum, a laissez-faire approach to education in full accord with the prevailing beliefs of the Gilded Age. It was also a brilliant piece of educational politics. At one stroke it freed students and teachers from the tyranny of each other’s presence. It lulled the undergraduates into thinking that they were free to choose their curriculum when in fact most of them rushed, lemminglike, into a few massively popular courses taught by faculty crowd pleasers dubbed “bow-wows.” This freed research-minded professors to pursue their work relatively unencumbered by undergraduate obligations. At the same time the social character of Harvard College became increasingly “Brahmin,” in the sense of domination by Boston’s social and economic elite rather than by Unitarian or Congregational ministers. Much of Eliot’s Harvard was seriously intellectual; more of it was socially snobbish. Its faculty consisted of a few major figures such as the Law School’s Christopher Columbus Langdell and Philosophy’s William James and Josiah Royce, and a majority who were gentlemen first, teachers second, scholars (perhaps) third. Its student body, over whelmingly from New England and New York, stretched from earnest Jewish commuters (whom Eliot welcomed) to good-family swells who dwelt on Harvard’s “gold coast” of posh dormitories. But the latter set the social tone of undergraduate life.

Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia. By Stephen F. Cohen. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. 320p. $21.95.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 494-495
Author(s):  
Mark R. Beissinger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Political Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Causal Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific

Both of these books seek to explain the failure or shortcom- ings of Russia's postcommunist democratic experiment. Both are critical of much of the transition literature within political science, and both identify certain features that make the prescriptions of that literature problematic within the Rus- sian and Soviet contexts. But they anchor their criticisms in contrasting explanations of the current travails. One is rooted in the importation of inappropriate models of economic and social development under Western prodding; the other points to the weakness of Russia's nascent civil society and the opportunities lost by political leaders to strengthen it. They provide opposing views not only of the causal processes underlying failed or incomplete democratization within Rus- sia but also to some extent of the purposes of the social scientific enterprise itself.

The Social Sources of Mormonism

1968 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario S. De Pillis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Northern Half ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mormon History

Since the very beginnings of Mormon history, non-Mormon historians (and “anti-Mormon” polemicists) have traced the sources of the religion in one way or another to some conception of New England. The conceptions have been as varied as the writers themselves: New England has been the land of both enthusiasm and rational religion; of educated, enlightened Yankees and of credulous, antiintellectual Yankees; of a culture east of the Hudson and of a culture extending across the northern half of the United States; a region of people with great civic and religious virtue but also a people noted for deception, cunning, and hypocrisy. The problem of the New England Mind has never been settled, but all writers have assumed that at one time or another western New York, the supposed birthplace of Mormonism, was a “frontier” of New England.

scholarly journals Sex, Gender, Sexuality: Subalternity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Soheila Faghfori ◽  
Zeinab Chatrzarnegari ◽  
Esmaeil Zohdi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Sexual Dimorphism ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
The Social ◽  
Marxist Tradition

In contrast with what is widely emphasized and academically discussed, subalternity emerges in a broad spectrum. The current research discusses sex, gender and sexuality as fertile grounds of subalternity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. Although the Classical Marxist tradition submits “class” as the only narrative of oppression and inequality, Gramsci’s Marxism can account for a wider range of narratives, namely, sex, age, race, gender and sexual orientation, and, subsequently, replaces “the proletariat” with “the subalterns.” Gramsci divided superstructure in two parts (civil society and political society) and traced the footsteps of oppression and subordination through everyday lives by concepts such as “hegemony,” “civil society,” and “common sense.” As well as Gramsci, Judith Butler draws attention to the legislation of norms in the social domain. Heterosexuality, sexual dimorphism and masculine/feminine dichotomy are norms which are legislated and hegemonic through the institutions of civil society and shape people’s common sense about sex, gender and sexuality. “Normalization” and “recognition,” to employ Butler’s words, occur based on the norms and turn the outsiders into the subalterns. In this regard, this study discusses intersex Cal/lie and homosexual Sourmelina as subalterns challenging the normative sex, gender and sexuality. The Stephanides family, New York Public Library, Orthodox religion, Sophie Sassoon’s beauty parlor and Ed’s barbershop are all civil society institutions that play a significant role in dissemination of heteronormativity, sexual dimorphism and masculine/feminine dichotomy and ,thereby, subalternity of Cal/lie and Sourmalina.

From Nation to Linguistic Community

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce D. Goodfriend
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Linguistic Community ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
Cultural Orientations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Polite Culture ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter examines the adaptive strategies employed by ordinary Dutch New Yorkers to dispute the elite's cultural authority. English polite culture emerged in early eighteenth-century New York City and was embraced by high-ranking Dutch and French families. This fostered the impression that the values of the elite were unanimously endorsed by those lower down on the social scale. While the ambitious were apt to emulate models of gentility in hopes of inching their way across the cultural threshold, others, particularly non-English artisans and laborers, rejected the gentry's cultural directives. This chapter considers how New Yorkers of differing cultural orientations clashed over the issue of language used in worship. It shows that the city's ordinary Dutch acted to safeguard their native tongue by invigorating Dutch print culture and defending Dutch-language worship in the Dutch Reformed Church.

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