Late Twentieth-Century Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Sects and Cults: Weston La Bare, Norman Cohn, & E. P. Thompson

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Stephen Kent
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Ghost Dance ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Before the diminished influence of classical psychoanalysis in the late twentieth century, several now-classic studies of sectarian religions contained Freudian psychoanalytic perspectives on religious sects or cults. These studies included Weston La Barre’s analyses of both serpent handlers and the Native American Ghost Dance; Norman Cohn’s panoramic examination of medieval European sectarian apocalyptic movements; and E. P. Thompson’s groundbreaking examination of Methodism within the formation of English working-class consciousness. Regardless of the problems that are endemic to the application of Freudian psychoanalysis to history, the sheer (although sometimes flawed) erudition of these three authors suggests that classical psychoanalysis had an important interpretive role to play in the study of some sectarian and cultic groups.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lou Martin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Income ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Hancock County ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
The Way

This concluding chapter examines how the rural-industrial working-class culture that emerged in Hancock County gradually disappeared in the late twentieth century. The ethic of making do traveled well from the farm to the factory town, but it began its decline in the late 1960s and 1970s as buying power increased and industrial workers focused more on vacations or socializing and less on making do. While many people in Hancock County still tend gardens, work on their houses, hunt, and fish, these activities no longer supplement family income the way they did in the 1950s. Moreover, the localism of their culture may have persisted in some ways to the present, but a localized system of negotiation that local manufacturers helped create disappeared along with many of those companies.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Christopher Martin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
News Media ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
White Male ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The introduction argues that the news media, like in their coverage of Donald Trump supporters, typically consider “the working class” not in its entirety, but just in its stereotypical white male form. This nicely serves the purposes of divisive politicians who seek to exploit this image and divide the broader working class. The introduction contrasts news coverage of transit labor union strikes from the mid- and late-twentieth century to illustrate how America’s working class became invisible. The introduction also describes the author’s working class background and the discovery of a former Cleveland Plain Dealer labor reporter that sparked the idea for this book.

Political culture and the culture of historians: the case of American cities

Urban History ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-109
Author(s):  
Dennis Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Active Process ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Cities ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Culture And Language

It is over thirty years since E.P. Thompson's The Making of the Working Class (1963) pushed culture – seen as an active process of coping with and shaping collective experience – higher up the historians' agenda. The waves made by the late twentieth-century ‘turns’ towards culture and language are still being felt. This highly diverse movement has also been shaped by theorists such as Foucault and Bourdieu, whom Thompson would undoubtedly have regarded as being suspiciously ‘continental’ but whose work has made an exciting contribution to the historian's repertoire.

Engineers and Social Engineering: Professional/Trade Unions and Social Mobility

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-195
Author(s):  
Hannah Forsyth ◽  
Michael P. R. Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Australian Universities

Professions like engineering were a vehicle for social mobility in Australia early in the twentieth century. By the late twentieth century, despite considerable expansions in higher education, it was much harder for young people to enter a trade and then to use their skills and experience to move into professional engineering. The shift in occupation structure in the early twentieth century, when professions - including engineering - grew rapidly, gave new opportunities to working-class tradespeople to move into professional employment. After the 1960s, when educational norms standardised and professional knowledge became more complex, these pathways narrowed. Motor mechanics, for example, were “trade” engineers who were able to move into professional engineering early in the twentieth century in ways that were extensively limited by the end of the century. This article uses engineering as a case study to consider institutional changes, including the growth of middle-class unions and the increased share of education carried by Australian universities, which made access to professional occupations more difficult for working-class tradespeople from the 1960s onwards. This helps us to identify the emergence of a new kind of class solidarity among professionals in the mid-twentieth century, with which they developed strategies to win rights for themselves, but sometimes at the expense of working-class interests.

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