Introduction

Author(s):  
David J. Bettez

When the United States joined the Great War—World War I—in April 1917, the Commonwealth of Kentucky remained both progressive and regressive. On the one hand, Progressives led by Governor Augustus Owsley Stanley and others had passed laws regulating child labor, workers’ compensation, and other socially beneficial measures. On the other hand, just ten years before war broke out in Europe, the state legislature had passed the Day Law, officially establishing segregation in schools. Kentucky state historian Jim Klotter has aptly termed this time in Kentucky’s history a “Portrait in Paradox.”...

2021 ◽  
pp. 260-294
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo

Chapter 7 follows nonblack minorities through their training and service in the United States. America’s World War II military, from its top leaders to its enlisted personnel, simultaneously built and blurred a white-nonwhite divide alongside its black-white one. On the one hand, the blurring stemmed from a host of factors, including the day-to-day intermingling of troops, the activism of nonblack minorities, and, paradoxically, the unifying power of the black-white divide among nonblacks. On the other hand, this blurring had its limits. White-nonwhite lines cropped up in some of the same places black-white ones did and in some different ones, too, especially those related to national security and Japanese Americans. In the end, these lines remained in place throughout the war years, despite continuous blurring. They did so in part because of these racialized national security concerns and because of the power of civilian racist practices and investments.


Author(s):  
Aaron Shaheen

The chapter first shows how the spiritualized version of prosthetics originated in the Civil War, which rendered approximately 60,000 veterans limbless. Prominent physicians such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and S. Weir Mitchell postulated that artificial limbs gave both physical and emotional solace to shattered soldiers, especially among those who suffered phantom limb syndrome. The devices’ “spiritual” potential proved limited, if not illusory; in fact, they were often so fragile, cumbersome, and painful that amputees simply preferred to go without them. Upon entering World War I, the United States created a rehabilitation and vocational program that aided injured veterans to reenter the workforce. Reflecting the way in which “personality” had come to replace a more traditional notion of spirit, orthopedists such as Joel Goldthwait and David Silver, both employed at Walter Reed Hospital, designed artificial limbs for both physical and psychological compatibility.


Author(s):  
David J. Bettez

This chapter covers the commonwealth’s response to World War I and efforts to support the war after the United States entered it in April 1917. It describes support from newspaper editors Henry Watterson and Desha Breckinridge. It also discusses attitudes toward the state’s extensive German American population, including an effort to ban the teaching of the German language in schools and the repression of people deemed disloyal or insufficiently supportive of the war. Kentuckians also rallied to the war effort in a positive way, supporting Liberty Bond and Red Cross campaigns. They joined support organizations such as the Four Minute Men and the American Protective League.


1975 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Zaehner

As everyone knows, since the end of the Second World War there has been a sensational revival of interest in the non-Christian religions particularly in the United States and in this country. The revival has taken two forms, the one popular, the other academic. The first of these has turned almost exclusively to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism and can be seen as an energetic reaction against the dogmatic and until very recently rigid structure of institutionalised Christianity and a search for a lived experience of the freedom of the spirit which is held to be the true content of mysticism, obscured in Christianity by the basic dogma of a transcendent God, the ‘wholly Other’ of Rudolf Otto and his numerous followers, but wholly untrammelled by any such concept in the higher reaches of Vedanta and Buddhism, particularly in its Zen manifestation. On the academic side the picture is less clear. There is, of course, the claim that the study of religion, like any other academic study, must be subjected to and controlled by the same principles of ‘scientific’ objectivity to which the other ‘arts’ subjects have been subjected, to their own undoing. But even here there would seem to be a bias in favour of the religions of India and the Far East as against Islam, largely, one supposes, in response to popular demand.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-19
Author(s):  
Philippe Descola

Claude Levi-Strauss mentioned several times in his work that the notion of transformation is the keystone of the structural analysis he pratices. By his own admission, this notion stems from his reading of D’Arcy Thomson’s book On Growth and Form during World War II in the United States. But Levi-Strauss makes use of two very different meanings of transformation, relating to two distinct morpho-genetic traditions. On the one hand, he is inspired by Goethe’s Morphology. All forms can be seen as transformation of a Urform, an original form, from which they grow out like a tree. But on the other hand, D’Arcy Thomson’s emphasis lies on the geometric simplicity of a transformation grid that allows the transition from one biological form to the other without considering any original from which other forms would be derivable. Levi-Strauss’ epistemological choice to study myths and masks can be better understood when his concept of transformation is clearly defined in relation to Goethe and D’Arcy Thomson. Thus, the originality of his own interpretation will become clear


Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura

This chapter focuses on the men with whom Kurihara clashed at Manzanar. These include Tokie Nishimura Slocum, Togo Tanaka, and Karl Yoneda. Like Kurihara, Slocum was a veteran of World War I and a member of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. As war between Japan and the United States grew imminent, Slocum gained the reputation of being an informer for the FBI and Naval Intelligence. As such, he was thoroughly despised by most Nikkei at Manzanar. Similarly, because of his role as a WRA documentary historian, Togo Tanaka was targeted by Nikkei dissidents as an informer and included him on their death list. On the other hand, Karl Yoneda refused to speak out against DeWitt's removal orders. Yoneda and other Nikkei Communists felt that they had no choice but to “accept the racist U.S. dictum” of incarceration “over Hitler's ovens and Japan's military rapists of Nanking.”


Author(s):  
Frank C. Zagare

This chapter focuses on the outbreak of World War I, which remains one of the most perplexing events of international history. It should be no surprise that rationalist interpretations of the July Crisis are a diverse lot, ranging from the sinister to the benign. This chapter constructs a theoretically rigorous rationalist explanation of World War I, the 1914 European war that involved Austria–Hungary, Germany, Russia, and France. On the one hand, this chapter confirms the view that one does not have to take a particularly dark view of German intentions to explain the onset of war in 1914; on the other hand, it also calls into question the “accidental war” thesis. A number of related questions about the Great War are addressed in the context of a generic game-theoretic escalation model with incomplete information.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth D. Esch

AS THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY’S PLACE in multiple national economies deepened in the decades after World War I so, too, did analysis and assessment of the political and cultural implications of Ford’s various presences. No one offered greater insight into the promise and peril represented by Ford than Antonio Gramsci, despite the stark limits imposed on him by incarceration and the multiple deprivations that attended it. In “Americanism and Fordism” Gramsci described the process through which the United States had relatively easily “made the whole life of the nation revolve around production” through a combination of “force … and persuasion.”...


Author(s):  
Sabine N. Meyer

This chapter examines the consequences of World War I for Minnesota's temperance movement during the period 1916–1919. The specter and, consequently, the reality of military involvement enhanced the tolerance of many Americans toward restrictive liquor laws they would otherwise not have accepted. The chapter considers how the struggle for prohibition became entangled with the United States's looming military efforts in the Great War and how the war provided an opportunity for temperance reformers to fight for the preservation of military discipline in army camps throughout the United States. Reformers insisted that military efficiency could be achieved only through young soldiers' abstinence and purity, an argument that convinced Congress to pass the Hobson-Sheppard bill, the Selective Service Act, and the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act in 1917. In addition, Progressive reformers waged a social purification campaign. In September 1918, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, which would function as the enforcement act of the Eighteenth Amendment. The period also saw the demise of German Americans' opposition to Minnesota's temperance movement.


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