“Havens of mercy”: health, medical research, and the governance of the movement of dogs in twentieth-century America

This article argues that the movement of dogs from pounds to medical laboratories played a critically important role in debates over the use of animals in science and medicine in the United States in the twentieth century, not least by drawing the scientific community into every greater engagement with bureaucratic political governance. If we are to understand the unique characteristics of the American federal legislation that emerges in the 1960s, we need to understand the long and protracted debate over the use of pound animals at the local municipal and state level between antivivisectionists, humane activists, and scientific and medical researchers. We argue that the Laboratory Animal Care Act of 1966 reflects the slow evolution of a strategy that proved most successful in local conflicts, and which would characterize a “new humanitarianism”: not the regulation of experimental practices but of the care and transportation of the animals being provided to the laboratory. Our analysis is consistent with, and draws upon, scholarship which has established the productive power of public agencies and civil society on the periphery of the American state.

“Companions”

The documentary Crip Camp presents a 1970s summer camp for disabled youth as a place of friendship and political dialogues that spawned the American disability rights movement. The film also represented Camp Jened as a haven of racial harmony and inclusion. Jened was not the only American micro-community of disability solidarity and political possibilities that also involved questions of racial politics. Scholars have criticized disability activists and disability studies scholars for neglecting problems of racial oppression. This historical study examines three examples of empowering disability subcultures in twentieth century America: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Warm Springs rehabilitation resort from the mid-1920s through the mid-1940s, the Rolling Quads at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s, and Camp Interdependence in California in the 1980s. The article interrogates the racial politics of these egalitarian communities.

Introduction

This introduction historicizes cinema’s relationship to policing and particularizes that relationship beyond familiar questions of regulation and censorship, while also revisiting those very questions in the context of a broader study of police power. How did the institution of law enforcement interact with the studio system? How was classical Hollywood shaped by—and how, in turn, did it shape—specific police activities? To what extent and in what ways did cinema serve the emergent public relations needs of police agencies, and vice versa? Police departments were not passive beneficiaries of Hollywood’s fiscal and ideological investments but active and self-interested contributors to various cinematic projects, many of which they themselves initiated. The relative fragility of police legitimacy—its disputability, particularly in the face of obvious abuses of power—necessitated this constant advocacy in twentieth-century America, as did Hollywood’s generic, formula-driven, reiterative commercial character.

Teachers and Sowers

This chapter begins by considering the relation between the models of the teacher and the sower, which might seem very similar to each other. In Plato’s Phaedrus, the thought leader sows ideas by teaching; and teachers leave behind students capable of teaching others, so extending the original teacher’s legacy. The models are nonetheless distinct, even if they often converge: the teacher model focuses on the relationship between the leader and their immediate followers, stressing the need for rational communication; the sower looks beyond the relationship between the leader and their immediate followers towards subsequent generations, and to the perpetuation of ideas. Most of the chapter is then taken up with two case studies that show the two models working hand in hand: Florence Nightingale, who revolutionized nursing, and Margaret Mead, the US anthropologist, who helped transform attitudes to the family and sex in twentieth-century America.

American family slideshows : 1952 - 1967

Vernacular photography has been a popular topic of research within the platforms of the history of photography and sociological studies and, in its print form, has increasingly seen its value rise in the marketplace. However, the family slideshow has been largely excluded from these various sites of attention. This thesis explores the family slideshow as a cultural product of mid-twentieth-century America. The slideshow is analysed in terms of how it was presented to and consumed by families in the 1950s and 1960s. The main section of this thesis provides an analysis of a case study carried out regarding the slideshow. The case study collected oral histories from four individuals on their experiences with producing and viewing slideshows in the mid-twentieth century. The analysis provides qualitative research on the consumption, production and viewing of the slideshow as a popular medium for family snapshots.