Search

The article discusses the relevance of the release of U.S. government documents related to its involvement in the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s to the early 21st century release of information by the journalistic organization WikiLeaks, particularly concerning the concepts of freedom of the press and censorship. The article examines the classified study of the Vietnam War conducted by the U.S. agency the Defense Department commissioned by U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara, the role of U.S. military analyst Daniel Ellsberg in releasing the Pentagon Papers, and the actions of the administration of U.S. president Richard M. Nixon that led to the U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times v. United States. It also discusses former U.S. agency the National Security Administration (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden.

Copyright of Western Historical Quarterly is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During this centennial year of the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS), it is of interest to look back over the history of our Society and, in particular, to the many contributions made by researchers in the area of swine nutrition. A great number of basic and applied research studies involving the nutrition of weanling, growing, and finishing pigs, and gestating and lactating sows have been conducted by swine nutritionists during the past 100 yr. Most of these studies were conducted at universities by animal scientists or by the graduate students under their leadership. Others were conducted by nutritionists in the feed and pharmaceutical industries and government scientists at ARS/USDA research centers. Contributions were also made by animal scientists beyond our borders. Much of the research was published in the Journal of Animal Science during its 66 yr of existence. Before the first issue of the journal was published in 1942, some of the earlier studies were reported in the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Society of Animal Production, the forerunner of ASAS. These research studies have progressively led to a better understanding of the role and utilization of dietary energy, protein, AA, carbohydrates, fats, minerals, and vitamins by pigs and have helped to quantify the nutrient requirements of pigs for various stages of growth, for sows during gestation and lactation, and to a limited extent, for boars. Determining the nutritional value of a wide array of feedstuffs, evaluating feeding strategies, and assessing the value of growth-promoting and carcass-enhancing agents have been important research contributions as well. To identify the particular studies that were among the most instrumental in contributing to our present knowledge of swine nutrition is, to say the least, a daunting assignment. To aid in this task, a survey of swine nutritionists was conducted in which they were asked to identify and rank the 10 most significant findings in swine nutrition during the past 100 yr. The results of that survey are presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the twentieth-century history of Native Americans, based on the papers at the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives of the University of Oklahoma. Native Americans' sources of learning; Effort to protect ceremonial use of peyote; Other issues discussed by Oklahoma's Native Americans with their congressmen.

We are a nation of dog lovers. Never before in our history have we spent more time, money, and emotional energy on a group of animals that are kept solely for companionship. Pet food sales are a multi-billion dollar industry, and pet owners are spending more than 11 billion dollars each year on veterinary care. This devotion is further illustrated by the exponential growth of the pet supply industry, including increasing numbers of pet superstores, play-parks, training centers, and doggie day care centers. During the 1980s, recognition of the human-animal bond led to serious study of the roles that dogs play in our lives. These studies have shown that pets provide significant benefits to our emotional, physical, and social well being. It is ironic then, that at a time when we recognize and appreciate our bonds with animal companions, dark elements of this relationship are equally pervasive. Animal shelters in the United States kill between 3 and 4 million dogs and cats annually. Dog fighting, although outlawed, has reached epidemic proportions in some areas of the country. Episodes of animal cruelty and neglect are reported with alarming frequency in the media; so frequently that discussions of the connection between animal cruelty and human violence have become daily parlance. How then did we come to have such paradoxical perceptions and treatment of our canine companions? This question is explored through an examination of the ancestry of the dog and the prevailing myths and facts about domestication. Historical and present-day perceptions of the wolf and the impact that these attitudes may have upon perceptions of dogs are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles the Norman Bel Geddes Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin as of August 2012. The article states that the papers consist of almost 800 boxes containing the records of U.S. industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes. The article discusses the participation of Bel Geddes in the compilation of his records, the filing system employed by Bel Geddes, and the dominance of Bel Geddes's records of documents from his "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939-1940 World's Fair in New York City. The article discusses opportunities for historical research within the records, access to the collection, and the significance of Bel Geddes to 20th century design concepts.

Der forverts, or the Jewish Daily Forward, was one of the most significant and influential alternative newspapers in U.S. media history. Through an examination of archival materials, I demonstrate that the commodification of the Forward's content led to the production of its readership as a commodity audience. Key leaders at the newspaper aimed to rationalize the contradictions between maintaining a socialist newspaper central to an oppositional political movement and the need for advertising revenue. This entailed reimagining the audience as ethnic consumers rather than working-class socialists. This history highlights long-standing contradictions that the alternative media must reconcile between serving counterhegemonic interests and institutional demands within a capitalist political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the history and available resources about nonprofit organizations in the U.S. Scope of the services provided by nonprofit organizations; Sources for the history of nonprofit organizations and of the nonprofit sector in general; Background on nonprofit social service organizations during the first four-fifths of the nineteenth century; Nonprofit activity of charity organization societies.

This paper, a historical analysis of the relation between social work and psychoanalysis in the United States, explores the reasons why social work became preoccupied with psychoanalysis at the expense of social reform and discusses the consequences of this for social work. The author suggests that the scientific and political climate of the 1920s stifled social reform and urges a more balanced historical view to avoid such a bias in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Americans in the early nineteenth century, friendship and faith both carried emotional power. It is no surprise, then, that friendships among like-minded believers intertwined with religious experience. This essay explores the spiritual dimensions of friendship during the early republic by considering one social network that had its hub in the household of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake. Bryant and Drake, who lived in Weybridge, Vermont, ran a tailor shop and were fixtures of their Congregationalist community. They formed an unconventional union; their relationship was devoted and passionate, and friends and relatives acknowledged its romantic nature. But in many ways, their household resembled others in early republican New England. Like other families, they fostered piety in their home, which became a spiritual and social gathering point for neighbors as well as far-flung friends who migrated about the region. Bryant, Drake, and their friends sustained emotional and religious connections through prayer, ritual, spiritual conversation, and correspondence and shared reading and benevolent activity. Their intimate connections suggest how friends forged spiritual communities that existed outside the bounds of formal churches and cohered in the face of dislocation. The emotional experience of friendship lent itself to the emotional experience of religion by heightening a sense of obligation and selflessness and focusing attention on matters of the soul. The intersecting experiences of friendship and religion speak to how spiritual networks helped people navigate a rapidly changing and often incomprehensible world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper derives the value and risk of aggregate human capital in a stochastic equilibrium model with Duffie-Epstein preferences. A three-factor asset-pricing model is derived, where the factors are the market, the capital share, and investment in human capital. When the model is calibrated to match the historical ratio of wages to consumption in the United States, the weight of human capital in aggregate wealth is estimated to be about 93%, well above most previous estimates, and human capital's riskiness is lower than that of the market portfolio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the history of a portable shock-producing electrotherapeutic device known as the medical battery (1870-1920), which provided both direct and alternating current and was thought to cure a wide variety of ailments. The product occupied a unique space at the nexus of medicine, consumerism and quackery: it was simultaneously considered a legitimate device by medical professionals who practiced electrotherapeutics, yet identical versions were sold directly to consumers, often via newspaper advertisements and with cure-all marketing language. Indeed, as I show in this paper, the line between what was considered a medical device and a consumer product was often blurred. Even though medical textbooks and journals never mentioned (much less promoted) the home use of electricity, every reputable electrotherapy instrument manufacturer sold a "family battery" for patients to use on themselves at home. While a handful of physicians spoke out against the use of electricity by the laity--as they felt it undermined the image of electrotherapy as a skilled medical procedure--existing evidence suggests that many physicians were likely recommending the home use of medical electricity to their patients. Taken together, this paper shows how the professional ideals of electrotherapeutics were not always aligned with physicians' actual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of administrative records--data collected by governmental agencies or commercial businesses in the course of administering a program or service--for household enumeration may be one way to significantly reduce Decennial Census costs, particularly in nonresponse follow-up (NRFU). Administrative records suffer the complications of big data in that they are collected for purposes not related to Census enumeration, yet contain a wealth of information relevant to Census enumeration. This paper describes a modeling approach to determine which administrative data are sufficiently reliable to proxy for a field response in a way that reduces costs and balances quality. Specifically, the approach is to (1) develop and assess models to determine characteristics of good-quality administrative records via a retrospective study of linked field and administrative data; and (2) choose a quality threshold, in a statistically defensible way, at which administrative records take the place of field responses. This paper presents empirical results illustrating the cost-quality trade-off of this approach applied to Census enumeration. We assess three classification techniques to further detail the cost-quality trade-off and allow flexibility in balancing predictive power and implementation complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis of this paper is that because the significance of Western medicine lies in its ability to enhance the health of persons within a society, the practice of medicine is foremost an ethic and only thereafter a science. In support of the priority of an ethical perspective in medical practice, the paper explores the socio-cultural nature of knowledge, upon which science itself is constructed. Next, it draws from Levinas' philosophy, which illumines the problem of ontological and epistemological priority. Specifically, it examines Levinas' rendering of the human face and of language, as they found the case for the priority of justice, or ethics. Finally, the paper offers the practice of narrative discourse as one solution that elevates the status of ethics within the institution of medicine and that has the potential to counteract the tendency in medical practice to employ a universalizing methodology based in science's power to control the human Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the failure of negotiations between the United States and Vietnam after the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. Normalization of relations; Issue of reconstruction assistance from the US and the return of missing bodies from Vietnam; Political pressure on the Ford administration to deny Vietnam the right to enter the international arena.

Examines the history of the African American Church based on the book "The History of Negro Church," by Carter G. Woodson. Features of the book; Analysis of the religious history of the U.S.; Problem regarding the location of manuscript and archival sources for the history of African American churches.

The article discusses U.S. unemployment policy during the Interwar Period of the early 1920s, including the role that the U.S. government played in offering services to the unemployed and the paternalist aspects of the policy. The role that U.S. Secretary of Commerce and future President Herbert Hoover played in developing U.S. welfare policy for the unemployed is discussed. The former U.S. colonel Arthur Woods' involvement in the 1921 President’s Conference on Unemployment is also discussed.

Is there a relationship between family income inequality and income mobility across generations in the United States? As family income inequality rose in the United States, parental resources available for improving children's health, education, and care diverged. The amount and rate of divergence also varied across US states. Researchers and policy analysts have expressed concern that relatively high inequality might be accompanied by relatively low mobility, tightening the connection between individuals' incomes during childhood and adulthood. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and various government sources, this paper exploits state and cohort variation to estimate the relationship between inequality and mobility. Results provide very little support for the hypothesis that inequality shapes mobility in the United States. The inequality children experienced during youth had no robust association with their economic mobility as adults. Formal analysis reveals that offsetting effects could underlie this result. In theory, mobility-enhancing forces may counterbalance mobility-reducing effects. In practice, the results suggest that in the US context, the intergenerational transmission of income may not be very responsive to changes in inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper concerns what I call “the moment of recovery,” the time when, in the 1950s, American cancer campaigns abandoned an earlier tendency to downplay post-operative recovery in their public education programs. This change was signalled by the emergence of new patients groups such as Reach to Recovery (founded 1953), and by a new interest in cancer rehabilitation among physicians, nurses, and manufacturers and sellers of equipment and clothing for patients. My focus is on breast cancer and the nurse-patient-industrial complex that drove the new interest in rehabilitation and recovery, but I also argue that the “moment of recovery” in breast cancer was part of a larger “moment” in cancer more generally. Finally, I seek to distinguish the “moment of recovery” of the 1950s from the discourses around the survivor that have emerged since the 1970s and 1980s, what might be called the “moment of survivorship.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To what degree have generational differences contributed to partisan changes in the American electorate, and what role did they play in the emergence of the gender gap in party identification? This paper sheds light on parallel and contradicting partisan trends among subgroups of the American electorate that affected the partisan gender gap over the past decades. By unpacking the gap by region, race, and generations, the analysis reveals that the effect of generational replacement on the gender gap varied in terms of size and direction between different subgroups. While in the South newer generations of white women diverged from the New Deal generation, consequently having a greater effect on the gender gap, in the rest of the country shifts among white men affected the gap to a greater extent than shifts among white women. Among African Americans, a decline in Democratic support was shown among newer generations of men, but less so among women. The findings highlight the importance of such political and historical contexts, and raise questions about the future of the partisan gender gap as the New Deal generation is replaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergency medicine evolved into a medical specialty in the 1960s under the leadership of physicians in small communities across the country. This paper uses three case studies to investigate the political, societal, and local factors that propelled emergency medicine along this path. The case studies—Alexandria Hospital, Hartford Hospital, and Yale-New Haven Hospital—demonstrate that the changes in emergency medicine began at small community hospitals and later spread to urban teaching hospitals. These changes were primarily a response to public demand. The government, the American public, and the medical community brought emergency medical care to the forefront of national attention in the sixties. Simultaneously, patients' relationships with their general practitioners dissolved. As patients started to use the emergency room for non-urgent health problems, emergency visits increased astronomically. In response to rising patient loads and mounting criticism, hospital administrators devised strategies to improve emergency care. Drawing on hospital archives, oral histories, and statistical data, I will argue that small community hospitals' hiring of full-time emergency physicians sparked the development of a new specialty. Urban teaching hospitals, which established triage systems and ambulatory care facilities, resisted the idea of emergency medicine and ultimately delayed its development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the early twentieth century, death rates from typhoid in European cities reached an all time low. By contrast, death rates in America were six times as high, and the American public health community began a crusade against the disease in 1912. In the 1920s, hopes for greater control of the disease focused not just on sewers and drinking water supplies, but on the newly established scientific means of immunization, the supervision of food-related pathways of infection, and the management of healthy carriers. The management of carriers, which lay at the core of any typhoid control program, proved an intractable problem, and typhoid remained a public health concern. America and England both struggled with control of the disease during the interwar period. Coming from different starting points, however, their approaches to the problem differed. This paper compares and contrasts these different public health strategies, considers the variable quality of support provided by bacteriological laboratories, and demonstrates that “accidental” typhoid outbreaks continued to happen up to the outbreak of World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the origins of the practice of dissection in American medical education in order to both understand the function of dissection in medical education and challenge conventional wisdom about that function. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American medical schools increasingly made human dissection a crucial part of their curricula, privileging use of the human cadaver over any other anatomical model. In this paper, I break apart the claims that American physicians made at that time regarding the unique pedagogic usefulness of the cadaver, and I juxtapose those claims against the realities of the dissection process. In doing so, I show how the realities of dissection differed sharply from the depictions given by physicians. In the conclusion, I argue that the cadaver still remained epistemologically and ontologically useful to the medical profession, although not necessarily for the reasons physicians explicitly stated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the tumultuous relationship between the World Bank and the U.S. government during the seventies. Drawing on previously untapped documents from the bank archives, it details the rise of U.S. opposition to the bank in the seventies and describes the resistance by the bank’s president, former U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara, to American efforts to influence the organization during the time. A study of the bank’s relationship with Chile in the early seventies demonstrates how the organization’s behavior was guided as much by internal factors—in this case a desire to maintain its creditworthiness—as it was the result of pressure from the U.S. government. Nevertheless, the article concludes that U.S. support remained critical to the bank and, as such, the organization’s autonomy was significantly bounded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1966, morticians provided 50 percent of ambulance services in the United States; today advanced care by trained medical professionals en route to the hospital is considered a basic standard of care. The creation of emergency medical services (EMS) provides an important case study for how physicians acting as “experts” helped to shape the creation of federal policy in the post-World War II years. This paper challenges a narrative of the development of EMS that has emphasized technology, individual agency, and the role of fortuitous chance as the prime movers of EMS development. Instead it argues that a key factor in EMS development was the National Academy of Science-National Research Council's Committee on Emergency Medical Services. Using the examples of paramedic training and ambulance design, this paper argues that members of the committee utilized complex mix of local experimentation and professional networking to suggest directions for the federal government's efforts to create national standards and guidelines for EMS. The NAS-NRC Committee retained a prominent role in EMS development until the passage of the Emergency Medical Services Systems Act of 1973, when federal interest in EMS largely shifted from prehospital transport to an emphasis on in hospital care and regional trauma systems planning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the history of operating room nurses in the light of the history of nursing and the history of surgery at a time of change in both domains. Geographically, its focus is on the United States as a national context where the specialization in this field occurred early on. The examination of instructional literature, e.g., textbooks, provides insight into the normative universe of the American operating rooms at the time. It shows how nurses played an integral, yet often overlooked part in the development of modern surgical practices. At the same time, operating room nurses were confined to a very gender-specific sphere of activities - they were basically responsible for cleanliness and maintaining order - and they were strictly subordinated to the operating surgeon's authority. Operating room nursing thus offered a new field of professional activity for women while simultaneously reproducing and cementing contemporary gender roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Instead of viewing racial eugenics, modernist religion and prescriptions for social engineering as discourses tangential to the evolution constructs propounded by top scientists in the build‐up to the Scopes trial, this article considers how the American Association for the Advancement of Science's committee on evolution intertwined all of these threads by the early nineteen‐twenties. Committee members aimed their evolution models at broad public audiences even as they tried to fulfill the American Civil Liberties Union's request to provide a scientifically‐sound view of evolution to help combat Protestant fundamentalism in the build‐up to the trial. Racialist eugenics was essential to their multi‐layered evolution constructs, as were key religious ideas particular to Protestant modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines latrines as the measure of American soldiers and the politics of disgust in occupied Europe and Asia. It reflects on the proposal of Andrew Rotter on diplomatic historians attending more closely to the senses in studying transnational encounters. It proposes that students of U.S. foreign relations take occupation soldiers and soldiering more seriously on the inquiry of cultural politics and practices of postwar reconstruction. It notes the neglect of war's after-armies, a term coined by John Hersey, by Military historians more concerned with combat than postwar peace-building operations. It mentions the jurisdictional boundaries of discrete urban or national zones ensconced by most diplomatic and cultural historians despite the transnational turn.

Comments on an article by Laura Kalman about the constitutional revolution in 1937 in the U.S. Kalman lays out the internalist and externalist arguments thoroughly and fairly; shows her impressive command of the literature and of the fields of both history and law; advances cogently her own point of view; and ends with a plea for civility that I heartily endorse. She notes, quite rightly, that a controversy about how to interpret the constitutional history of the 1930s has heated up. Dwelling on the emergence of that dispute, though, may inadvertently leave the impression that only in recent years has there been a challenge to what is now characterized as the orthodox view.

This essay concerns a woman by the name of Adele Gordon. Adele Gordon was a nurse who, during the 1930s, operated a commercially-sponsored birth control clinic in the city of Milwaukee and who, in 1935; was arrested and tried for precisely these activities. However, while her story is the guiding theme of this narrative, her life (as well as the lessons to be learned from the history of medicine) invites us to consider the larger world in which her work took place, in particular the early days of the birth control clinic movement. Indeed, what this essay asks us to imagine is the presence of what I call the Irregular birth control clinic movement, a movement of clinics which continued to embody the supposedly lost radicalism of Margaret Sanger in the teens. And this Irregular clinic movement, in turn, invites us to re-think the efforts of the American Birth Control League in its quest for professionalization and the backing of the American Medical Association. Hence Nurse Gordon's story is an important one in part, because she is an intriguing individual who embodied an uncommon sense of modesty and determination, dignity and pride. But also because Nurse Gordon offers us a new way to tell the story of twentieth-century birth control, encouraging us to appreciate the breadth of the birth control clinic movement, the malleability of the birth control institution, and the American Birth Control League's efforts to contain them both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talks about teaching the History 443 course at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Information on the student presentations of their class syllabus; Description of the components of the students' final papers; Project which sent the students into the schools of West Philadelphia.

Deals with rural insurgency in Pennsylvania in 1787. Overview of the scarcity of money and credit in the state; Details on several provisions of its constitution.

The article discusses American newspaper advertisements within woman's pages developed for women consumers from 1895 through 1935. An overview of the U.S. newspaper publishers' efforts to gain access to women's private spaces in American homes, including their efforts to gain access to the American family, is provided.

Despite the declining use of bloodletting, American physicians vigorously debated its therapeutic value throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century. This debate was a terrain upon which physicians expressed deeply held ideas about professional identity and clinical epistemology. Many bloodletting proponents saw its continued defence as a way of affirming the superiority of mainstream physicians over irregular practitioners as well as the epistemological priority of clinical experience over laboratory knowledge; others sought to reconcile the practice of bloodletting with the latest physiological and bacteriological discoveries. This paper contributes to historians' ongoing reassessment of what it meant for medicine to become 'scientific' at the turn of the twentieth century. 'Scientific medicine' encompassed not only the search for new remedies and research practices, but also the attempt to put older therapies like bloodletting on a sound footing for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on leadership transitions at the U.S. Children's Bureau as a window for viewing the organization's life course in a gendered policy and cultural context. For social work students and practitioners of today, this article recaptures part of the profession's story, the narrative that provides a shared language, a sense of order, coherence, and continuity. The article takes a revisionist view of the Children's Bureau through gendered lenses, and it also seeks to clarify a misreading of gender as a category to explain the bureau's loss of status in 1969. Differences between the Children's Bureau and the Social Security Board suggest structural factors that help account for the demise of the Children's Bureau. The Social Security Board enjoyed much administrative autonomy because of its technical mystery. Few outsiders understood the actuarial bases for its tax rate and wage base increases, its obscure formulas for transforming earnings into benefits, or the accuracy of its long-term trust fund balance projections.

Surveillance systems in public health practice have increased in number and sophistication with advances in data collection, analysis, and communication. When the Communicable Disease Center (now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) was founded some 70 years ago, surveillance referred to the close observation of individuals with suspected smallpox, plague, or cholera. Alexander Langmuir, head of the Epidemiology Branch, redefined surveillance as the epidemiology-based critical factor in infectious disease control. I joined Langmuir as assistant chief in 1955 and was appointed chief of the Surveillance Section in 1961. In this paper, I describe Langmuir's redefinition of surveillance. Langmuir asserted that its proper use in public health meant the systematic reporting of infectious diseases, the analysis and epidemiologic interpretation of data, and both prompt and widespread dissemination of results. I outline the Communicable Disease Center's first surveillance systems for malaria, poliomyelitis, and influenza. I also discuss the role of surveillance in the global smallpox eradication program, emphasizing that the establishment of systematic reporting systems and prompt action based on results were critical factors of the program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, African Americans made huge contributions to the field of social welfare and the social work profession, yet little has been written about them in the professional literature. This article explores the contributions of pioneering social worker Ophelia Settle Egypt. A thorough assessment of her pioneering role would reveal her unique work as an educator, researcher, and grassroots social worker, but the focus here is on her innovative commitment to the Planned Parenthood movement. Egypt's work around population control in her Southeast Washington, DC, neighborhood with low-income African American families in the early 1950s became a labor of love in her community that can help inform current practice approaches in urban environments with African American populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that a color-blind psychologisation of black interiority constituted one way in which activists imagined African Americans as both fully human and deserving of equal citizenship during the long civil rights era. Between 1954 and 1964, the Wiltwyck School for Boys, a reform school with a predominantly black student body in Esopus, New York, expanded their therapeutic services into Manhattan, creating one of the US's first psychiatric aftercare programmes. Singer Harry Bela-fonte and boxing champion Floyd Patterson, two black culture heroes linked to the civil rights movement, lent their support as the Wiltwyck Board of Directors sought the funds needed to build a halfway home named in Patterson's honor. The public support of these black celebrity-activists helped create the impression that the mental health of black children was a matter of civil rights import, underscoring the black psyche as both the very source of equality between the races and as a site where racial progress could be measured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the role of political ideology in shaping black voters' evaluations of political candidates' race and skin tone. Our findings challenge simplistic notions of black preference for descriptive representation. Instead, we argue that race matters to how black Americans evaluate candidates for political office, but that it does so in combination with both candidates' skin tone and voters' ideology. Specifically, our data from a set of randomized experiments show that black conservative Democrats, relative to their more liberal copartisans, express a stronger preference for black candidates relative to white counterparts and prefer darker-skinned candidates relative to lighterskinned ones. In exploring this result, we argue that conservative black Democrats, who are liberal economically but more socially conservative, use skin tone as a heuristic to help determine which candidate is most likely to match their party-atypical but race-typical political preferences. Thus, despite being less likely to support affirmative action policies, black conservatives are actually more prone to using race and skin tone heuristics in their evaluations of candidates for political office. These findings are substantively significant. As black voters have become much more ideologically diverse, their preferences with respect to candidate race and skin tone may have greater electoral consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of the American Civil War on medical modernisation is increasingly being recognised, yet the ways in which the Civil War challenged and changed doctors' understanding of their professional role during the war remains underappreciated. By juxtaposing Union doctors' personal and professional responses to the Civil War with the wider public reaction to Union medical care, this paper explores the tensions that arose between the public and the professional perceptions of medicine as these developed on the battlefields of the nation's internecine conflict. It argues that the intersection between the positive and negative narratives of Union medical provision, specifically surgery, established an important discursive space within which Union doctors could negotiate their public and professional status. It finds that the negative narrative, far from a hindrance, was instrumental to the process of medical modernisation by enabling Union physicians to define, defend and develop a more modern medical role. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By the 1950s, American medical authorities declared obesity to be the nation's leading health care problem prompting a society, already familiar with the rigours of weight control, to extend the bounds of their diet consciousness. This manifested in a ‘self-help movement for fatties’ which witnessed the proliferation of weight loss groups with names such as, Take Off Pounds Sensibly and Fatties Anonymous, and introduced an eclectic blend of mutual aid inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous and psychoanalytic psychiatry. This paper explores the emergence of these mutual aid groups in response to the growing concern about obesity and argues that the rise of weight loss groups was the result of many separate but interacting variables in the context of the post-war United States. The history of the self-help weight loss movement can offer new perspectives on the politics of current obesity management policies, as well as insight into mid-twentieth-century popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) was the vision of Alexander Langmuir, who developed a program with a vital mission to address an unmet need in the United States. The Communicable Disease Center, now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; Atlanta, Georgia), and the EIS steadily expanded from focusing on infectious disease to address chronic diseases, health statistics, occupational and environmental health and safety, injury prevention and control, and reproductive health. Langmuir recognized the need for epidemiologists to collaborate with others, initially from the laboratory and later including veterinarians, demographers, statisticians, nutritionists, behavioral and social scientists, industrial hygienists, and sanitarians. These partnerships stimulated the further evolution of the EIS Program to include sophisticated statistical analysis, economics, and the tools of the behavioral and social sciences. A mixture of analytical rigor and practical application characterizes the practice of epidemiology at CDC and in the EIS. Thus, the “significant” in the title of this paper refers to the analytical rigor of the public health approach and the validity of the results, while the “consequential” reflects the practical application of the results, trying to make a difference in health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As early as the 1950s, the profession of psychiatry in the United States began to experience a series of subtle adjustments. By the mid-1960s, the American Psychiatric Association was gripped and bound by the larger social, economic and political trends of the era. Widespread political activist movements focused on the Vietnam War, civil rights for blacks, and the elevation of feminism. Amid this contentious, transitional climate, factions in the field of mental health deliberated over best practices as well as broader questions of modernisation, scientific legitimacy and human rights. The Radical Caucus of the American Psychiatric Association was one such faction. It included black and women's wings and challenged other members of the APA to embrace the transformative zeitgeist of the 1960s, as well as connect these tenets to the practice of psychiatry. This paper offers a snapshot of an important period in the history of American psychiatry, politics, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research conducted at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford under the direction of founding superintendent Katharine Bement Davis produced some of the most influential data on prostitution in the Progressive Era. While Davis and Bedford have figured prominently in histories of the women's prison reform movement, historical studies of the social response to prostitution in the Progressive Era, and feminist biographical accounts of women in early twentieth century reform crusades, the relationship between penal reform and the changing social organization of labor has been overlooked. This paper undertakes a critical reexamination of the Bedford data, demonstrating that while Davis advocated a social scientific approach to reform, she systematically displaced the significance of structural factors at two crucial levels: her studies of inmates and her own philosophy and practice of reform. Studies of inmates discounted the role of economic factors for women's entry into prostitution in favor of explanations that emphasized familial and personal weakness. The institutionalization, training, and parole of inmates functioned not simply to place inmates in domestic service but to effectively disqualify them from other sources of respectable employment. Viewed through the lens of a social organization of labor perspective, a previously neglected dimension of the logic and practice of reform is illuminated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recently developed hierarchical age-period-cohort (HAPC) models, inferential questions arise: How can one assess or judge the significance of estimates of individual cohort and period effects in such models? And how does one assess the overall statistical significance of the cohort and/or the period effects? Beyond statistical significance is the question of substantive significance. This paper addresses these questions. In the context of empirical applications of linear and generalized linear mixed-model specifications of HAPC models using data on verbal test scores and voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections, respectively, we describe a two-step approach and a set of guidelines for assessing statistical significance. The guidelines include assessments of patterns of effects and statistical tests both for the effects of individual cohorts and time periods as well as for entire sets of cohorts and periods. The empirical applications show strong evidence that trends in verbal test scores are primarily cohort driven, while voter turnout is primarily a period phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) was a key figure in the U.S. black power movement in the late sixties and early seventies whose globe-trotting freelance diplomacy on behalf of the Black Panther Party (BPP) led him from Soledad prison to the streets of Oakland, California and from there to Havana, Algiers, Pyongyang, Beijing, Hanoi, Brazzaville, and Paris. Cleaver’s party-building efforts with the BPP illustrated the powerful appeal of an anticolonial analysis that looked beyond the East–West dynamics of the Cold War to position people of color as part of a global North–South struggle over decolonization. Cleaver’s journey also illustrated the continuing and ultimately tragic relevance of the Cold War to the evolution of the African American freedom struggle. In establishing the International Section of the BPP, Cleaver found himself dependent on the whims of his new allies and highly sensitive to changes in the Cold War environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in locational attainments in the transition to adulthood, using longitudinal data about neighborhoods of youth in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. It examines place stratification and life course models of locational attainment during the 1990s, a period during which neighborhood poverty rates were declining for many groups. The analysis reveals durable inequalities in neighborhood poverty from adolescence to young adulthood, particularly for blacks and Hispanic origin subgroups. Family socioeconomic status and emerging educational attainments are associated with decreases in neighborhood poverty, with blacks receiving a stronger return from educational attainments than whites. Despite the benefits of education, racial and ethnic minorities remain more likely to live in considerably more disadvantaged neighborhoods in young adulthood than whites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]