Networks of Culture,Networks of Meaning

This chapter focuses on the relationship between culture and networks. Sense-making is a collective activity and, therefore, subject to network processes. This chapter builds on work that approaches this relationship using formal methods with an interest in how meaning is structured. It describes two approaches to analyzing meaning from a structural position: text networks that model the relationships between texts based on overlapping content and subject-action-object networks that model the content of a text corpus by digging deeper into the grammatical relationships between words. These approaches are illustrated with analyses of the classic US Works Progress Administration interviews with formerly enslaved Americans from the 1930s.

The U.S. Unemployment Rate

Creating a scientific survey of unemployment in the 1930s and 1940s was an advance for people’s understanding of unemployment and for rational government policy. Many government officials, including Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and agencies including the Census Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), deserve credit for the achievement. However, today’s BLS unemployment rate omits too many people, and the low count weakens support for job-creation programs. This chapter offers a short history and a critique. It explains and evaluates the official rate, discusses hidden unemployment, including discouraged workers and other labor-force dropouts, evaluates alternative unemployment rates, including the BLS’s U-6 and the National Jobs for All Coalition’s rate, and examines the idea of full employment.

Collecting Haudenosaunee Art from the Modern Era

My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the twentieth century. For decades Native visual and material culture was viewed under the guise of ‘crafts.’ I look back to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan on Haudenosaunee material culture. His writings helped establish a specific notion of Haudenosaunee material culture within the scholarly field of anthropology in the nineteenth century. At that point two-dimensional arts did not play a substantial role in Haudenosaunee visual culture, even though both Tuscarora and Seneca artists had produced drawings and paintings then. I investigate the turn toward collecting two-dimensional Haudenosaunee representational art, where before there was only craft. I locate this turn at the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s. It was at this point that Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker recruited Native crafts people and painters working in two-dimensional art forms to participate in a Works Progress Administration-sponsored project known as the Seneca Arts Program. Thereafter, museum collectors began purchasing and displaying paintings by the artists: Jesse Cornplanter, Sanford Plummer, and Ernest Smith. I argue that their representation in museum collections opened the door for the contemporary Haudenosaunee to follow.

“My Daddy…He Was a Good Man”: Gendered Genealogies and Memories of Enslaved Fatherhood in America’s Antebellum South

While the last few years have witnessed an upsurge of studies into enslaved motherhood in the antebellum American South, the role of the enslaved father remains largely trapped within a paradigm of enforced absenteeism from an unstable and insecure familial unit. The origins of this lie in the racist assumptions of the infamous “Moynihan Report” of 1965, read backwards into slavery itself. Consequently, the historiographical trajectory of work on enslaved men has drawn out the performative aspects of their masculinity in almost every area of their lives except that of fatherhood. This has produced an image of individualistic masculinity, separate from the familial role that many enslaved men managed to sustain and, as a result, productive of a disjointed and gendered genealogy of slavery and its legacy. This paper assesses the extent to which this fractured genealogy actually represents the former slaves’ worldview. By examining a selection of interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s (the WPA Narratives), this paper explores formers slaves’ memories of their enslaved fathers and the significance of the voluntary paternal presence in their life stories. It concludes that the role of the black father was of greater significance than so far recognised by the genealogical narratives that emerged from the slave communities of the Antebellum South.

Grant Park Music Festival and Music in Chicago's “Front Yard”

Chicago's Grant Park Music Festival, a free classical music series, provides a case study for exploring how music festivals contribute to the musical life of cities. Each summer, the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra and Choir perform dozens of free performances at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park and in residential neighborhoods. In 1935, James C. Petrillo, head of the Chicago local of the American Federation of Musicians, initiated the festival, then called Grant Park Concerts, to employ musicians during the Great Depression with funds from the federal Works Progress Administration. Changes in the city's cultural policies, its demographics, financial support, and expectations for how the festival serves the community have impacted how it programs its season and seeks audiences. Based on archival research, this article focuses on how the festival as a civic institution creates a listening public invested in particular narratives of Chicago as a dynamic city through programming music in public spaces. Looking at Grant Park Music Festival from contemporary and historical angles provides insight into how changes in aesthetic and social values, funding for the arts, and urban planning shape the way a festival engages with the city.

Liberdade entre fronteiras: libertos no Território Indígena e no Sul dos Estados Unidos

Resumo: Este artigo examina como os ex-escravos dos indígenas Choctaw e no Território Indígena, em geral debateram e imaginaram a liberdade. Analisam-se as narrativas de escravizados coletadas pela Administração para o Progresso do Trabalho (Works Progress Administration - WPA). Essas pessoas frequentemente descreveram os proprietários e capatazes, bem como o anúncio da emancipação em linguagem muito semelhante à encontrada em narrativas de libertos dos estados confederados. Tais relatos se diferenciavam de modo marcante, no entanto, em relação ao acesso à terra quando do término da Guerra Civil e do início do processo conhecido como Reconstrução (1863-1877), quando o governo federal tentou fazer dos estados confederados uma sociedade baseada em cidadania. Durante a Reconstrução, os ex-escravos dos povos nativos do Território Indígena adquiriram o direito à terra, diferentemente do que ocorreu nos estados do Sul.

The WPA and the Opening of the American Arts

This chapter focuses on the infusion of state subsidies during the New Deal, which accelerated the pace of artistic legitimation and widened its path. Federal and state governments paid for the production and display of an enormous amount and variety of culture. This diversified the content and personnel in American creative fields and accelerated the transformation of many forms of vernacular culture into art. It was this world, rich with variety, in which an artistically voracious group of Americans was born and enculturated. The chapter then looks at the establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). While the purpose of the WPA was to provide an income for starving artists, its unintended consequence was a radical opening of access to the arts and heretofore “illegitimate” culture. Under the WPA, the four programs referred to as “Federal Project Number One” provided subsidies for the production of visual art, music, theater, and literature.

41NA197, the Sam Stripling Site, on Bayou Loco in Nacogdoches County, Texas

The Sam Stripling site (41NA197) is an ancestral Caddo settlement on a series of alluvial knolls in the floodplain on the east side of Bayou Loco in the Angelina River basin in the East Texas Pineywoods. The site was first located by Robert L. Turner, Sr. and Jr. in 1938, and in 1939 they told Gus Arnold of the University of Texas about the site when Arnold was conducting a Works Progress Administration (WPA)-sponsored archaeological survey of East Texas. Arnold collected a large sample of ceramic vessel sherds from the site (ET-601) during his 1939 survey work, and these collections are held by the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin; the Turner’s had also amassed a substantial collection during their work; and in 1996 Tom Middlebrook returned to the site and officially recorded it, noting a well-preserved midden deposit in one part of the site, while also inventorying the Turner’s collection. In this article, I discuss the specific character of the ancestral Caddo ceramic assemblage from the Sam Stripling site recovered during Arnold’s work. Analyses by Middlebrook of the other known collections from the site are in progress.