Introduction

Author(s):  
Reginald K. Ellis

The introduction provides an overview of the research and places James Edward Shepard in historical context by analyzing the discourse of race relations in North Carolina. I examine the dialogue of black Durham’s participation in the “race issue” of the early twentieth century and evaluate black higher education throughout the United States during this time period. I discuss the famous Washington versus Du Bois debate. This chapter also presents the main argument of the manuscript--that black college presidents of the early twentieth century were more than academic leaders. They were race leaders, as can be seen in the case of Dr. James Edward Shepard. For these presidents the real debate was not the struggle between liberal arts and vocational education but “what was the most practical way to uplift the Negro Race.”

Author(s):  
Reginald K. Ellis

The purpose of this manuscript is threefold. First, it will serve as a cultural biography of Dr. James Edward Shepard and the National Religious Training Institute and Chautauqua for the Negro Race and later the North Carolina College for Negroes (which became North Carolina Central University). Second, it will argue that black college presidents of the early twentieth century such as Shepard were more than academic leaders; they were race leaders. Shepard’s role at the NRTIC/NCC was to develop a race through this institution. Lastly, this study argues that Shepard, like most black college presidents, did not focus primarily on the difference between liberal arts and vocational education. Rather, he considered the most practical ways to uplift his race. Therefore, this study will be more than a biography of an influential African American, but an analytical study of a black leader during the age of Jim Crow in the South.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.


Author(s):  
David M. Rabban

Most American legal scholars have described their nineteenth-century predecessors as deductive formalists. In my recent book, Law’s History : American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History, I demonstrate instead that the first generation of professional legal scholars in the United States, who wrote during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, viewed law as a historically based inductive science. They constituted a distinctive historical school of American jurisprudence that was superseded by the development of sociological jurisprudence in the early twentieth century. This article focuses on the transatlantic context, involving connections between European and American scholars, in which the historical school of American jurisprudence emerged, flourished, and eventually declined.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.


The first half of the twentieth century was marked by the simultaneous development of logic and mathematics. Logic offered the necessary means to justify the foundations of mathematics and to solve the crisis that arose in mathematics in the early twentieth century. In European science in the late nineteenth century, the ideas of symbolic logic, based on the works of J. Bull, S. Jevons and continued by C. Pierce in the United States and E. Schroeder in Germany were getting popular. The works by G. Frege and B. Russell should be considered more progressive towards the development of mathematical logic. The perspective of mathematical logic in solving the crisis of mathematics in Ukraine was noticed by Professor of Mathematics of Novorossiysk (Odesa) University Ivan Vladislavovich Sleshynsky. Sleshynsky (1854 –1931) is a Doctor of Mathematical Sciences (1893), Professor (1898) of Novorossiysk (Odesa) University. After studying at the University for two years he was a Fellow at the Department of Mathematics of Novorossiysk University, defended his master’s thesis and was sent to a scientific internship in Berlin (1881–1882), where he listened to the lectures by K. Weierstrass, L. Kronecker, E. Kummer, G. Bruns. Under the direction of K. Weierstrass he prepared a doctoral dissertation for defense. He returned to his native university in 1882, and at the same time he was a teacher of mathematics in the seminary (1882–1886), Odesa high schools (1882–1892), and taught mathematics at the Odesa Higher Women’s Courses. Having considerable achievements in the field of mathematics, in particular, Pringsheim’s Theorem (1889) proved by Sleshinsky on the conditions of convergence of continuous fractions, I. Sleshynsky drew attention to a new direction of logical science. The most significant work for the development of national mathematical logic is the translation by I. Sleshynsky from the French language “Algebra of Logic” by L. Couturat (1909). Among the most famous students of I. Sleshynsky, who studied and worked at Novorossiysk University and influenced the development of mathematical logic, one should mention E. Bunitsky and S. Shatunovsky. The second period of scientific work of I. Sleshynsky is connected with Poland. In 1911 he was invited to teach mathematical disciplines at Jagiellonian University and focused on mathematical logic. I. Sleshynsky’s report “On Traditional Logic”, delivered at the meeting of the Philosophical Society in Krakow. He developed the common belief among mathematicians that logic was not necessary for mathematics. His own experience of teaching one of the most difficult topics in higher mathematics – differential calculus, pushed him to explore logic, since the requirement of perfect mathematical proof required this. In one of his further works of this period, he noted the promising development of mathematical logic and its importance for mathematics. He claimed that for the mathematics of future he needed a new logic, which he saw in the “Principles of Mathematics” by A. Whitehead and B. Russell. Works on mathematical logic by I. Sleszynski prompted many of his students in Poland to undertake in-depth studies in this field, including T. Kotarbiński, S. Jaśkowski, V. Boreyko, and S. Zaremba. Thanks to S. Zaremba, I. Sleshynsky managed to complete the long-planned concept, a two-volume work “Theory of Proof” (1925–1929), the basis of which were lectures of Professor. The crisis period in mathematics of the early twentieth century, marked by the search for greater clarity in the very foundations of mathematical reasoning, led to the transition from the study of mathematical objects to the study of structures. The most successful means of doing this were proposed by mathematical logic. Thanks to Professor I. Sleshynsky, who succeeded in making Novorossiysk (Odesa) University a center of popularization of mathematical logic in the beginning of the twentieth century the ideas of mathematical logic in scientific environment became more popular. However, historical events prevented the ideas of mathematical logic in the domestic scientific space from the further development.


2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-446
Author(s):  
Samuel E. Backer

In the early twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States. Operating before the rise of mechanically reproduced entertainment, its centralized booking offices moved tens of thousands of performers across hundreds of stages to an audience of millions. Designed to gather and analyze data about both audiences and performers, these offices created a complex informational economy that defined the genre—an internal market that sought to transform culture into a commodity. By reconstructing the concrete details of these business practices, it is possible to develop a new understanding of both the success of the vaudeville industry and its influence on the evolution of American mass culture.


Author(s):  
Motoe Sasaki

This chapter shows how the notion of modern science brought to China by American New Women missionaries in the form of medicine and nursing generated concrete responses from their Chinese counterparts. The notion of science as a universally applicable and fundamentally egalitarian element for the development of a modern society and its constituents was increasingly influential in both the United States and China during the early twentieth century. Consequently, American New Women missionaries were able to establish their status as scientific professionals whose expertise could contribute to China's modernization process. At the same time, however, their faith in the new notion of science brought with it the idea of “separate but equal” gender roles, which brought them into conflict with many of their male counterparts from the United States who wanted to compete with other imperial powers to gain influence in China.


Author(s):  
Peter Clayworth

Patrick Hodgens Hickey, a New Zealander, was a labor activist who introduced American ideas of revolutionary industrial unionism and socialist political action to the country of his birth. Hickey grew up in rural New Zealand at a time of industrial peace under a compulsory arbitration system and initially had little interest in unions or socialism. He learned mining skills while working as an itinerant laborer in the United States, becoming part of a transnational network of mine workers. He was radicalized by his experiences of American class conflict and his involvement with the militant Western Federation of Miners. Returning to New Zealand, he became a leader of a workers’ revolt against the compulsory arbitration system in the period from 1907 through to 1914. Hickey was a key organizer of the union peak body that became the New Zealand Federation of Labour, the “Red Feds.” Following the defeats of the Waihi strike of 1912 and the Great Strike of 1913, Hickey suffered blacklisting. He went to Australia in 1915 to escape the blacklist and the threat of wartime conscription. In Australia he worked as a union activist and anticonscription campaigner. Hickey’s life and career illustrate the transnational migration of workers and their ideas in the early twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Reginald K. Ellis

The epilogue reveals the importance of placing African American black college presidents in an historical context. I re-emphasize the role of a black college president as more than an administrator of an institution but a race leader to his community. I also explain the creation of “moderation” in North Carolina and how Shepard help create this approach to the race issue prior to the legal battles surrounding school integration during the 1950s. Finally, I examine how Shepard’s legacy at North Carolina Central University has lasted well into the twenty-first century. This lasting impact is seen in the theory of the “Central Way” of doing things at the school today. This approach is largely based on the foundation of “moral education” that Shepard created in the early to mid-twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Reginald K. Ellis

This chapter examines the creation of the National Religious Training Institute and Chautauqua (NRTIC), while also revealing a shift in Shepard’s approach to racial issues in North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century. I analyze relationships that Shepard built with Benjamin Newton Duke and the Duke family and other philanthropists. Moreover, I discuss Shepard’s position on the Washington/Du Bois debate. Shepard is considered by scholars of NCC as a colleague of Washington while also garnering the respect of Du Bois. I reveal the influence and respect that Shepard had within North Carolina as NRTIC shifted from a private to a public entity and became the first publicly funded black college in the South that focused primarily on liberal arts education.


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