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Inventing America: A History of the United States
by Pauline Maier Merritt Roe Smith Alexander Keyssar Daniel J. KevlesW. W. Norton presents Inventing America, a balanced new survey of American history by four outstanding historians. The text uses the theme of innovation—the impulse in American history to "make it new"—to integrate the political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the American story. From the creation of a new nation and the invention of the corporation in the eighteenth century, through the vast changes wrought by early industry and the rise of cities in the nineteenth century, to the culture of jazz and the new nation-state of the twentieth century, the text draws together the many ways in which innovation—and its limits—have marked American history.
Inventing America's First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West (Catholic Practice in North America)
by Luke RitterWhy have Americans expressed concern about immigration at some times but not at others? In pursuit of an answer, this book examines America’s first nativist movement, which responded to the rapid influx of 4.2 million immigrants between 1840 and 1860 and culminated in the dramatic rise of the National American Party. As previous studies have focused on the coasts, historians have not yet completely explained why westerners joined the ranks of the National American, or “Know Nothing,” Party or why the nation’s bloodiest anti-immigrant riots erupted in western cities—namely Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. In focusing on the antebellum West, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis illuminates the cultural, economic, and political issues that originally motivated American nativism and explains how it ultimately shaped the political relationship between church and state.In six detailed chapters, Ritter explains how unprecedented immigration from Europe and rapid westward expansion reignited fears of Catholicism as a corrosive force. He presents new research on the inner sanctums of the secretive Order of Know-Nothings and provides original data on immigration, crime, and poverty in the urban West. Ritter argues that the country’s first bout of political nativism actually renewed Americans’ commitment to church-state separation. Native-born Americans compelled Catholics and immigrants, who might have otherwise shared an affinity for monarchism, to accept American-style democracy. Catholics and immigrants forced Americans to adopt a more inclusive definition of religious freedom. This study offers valuable insight into the history of nativism in U.S. politics and sheds light on present-day concerns about immigration, particularly the role of anti-Islamic appeals in recent elections.
Inventing Australia: Images And Identity, 1688-1980 (Australian Experience Ser. #No. 3)
by Richard White'White sets himself a most ambitious task, and he goes remarkably far to achieving his goals. Very few books tell so much about Australia, with elegance and concision, as does his' - Professor Michael Roe'Stimulating and informative. an antidote to the cultural cringe' - Canberra Times'To be Australian': what can that mean? Inventing Australia sets out to find the answers by tracing the images we have used to describe our land and our people - the convict hell, the workingman's paradise, the Bush legend, the 'typical' Australian from the shearer to the Bondi lifesaver, the land of opportunity, the small rich industrial country, the multicultural society.The book argues that these images, rather than describing an especially Australian reality, grow out of assumptions about nature, race, class, democracy, sex and empire, and are 'invented' to serve the interests of particular groups.There have been many books about Australia's national identity; this is the first to place the discussion within an historical context to explain how Australians' views of themselves change and why these views change in the way they do.
Inventing Baby Food
by Amy BentleyFood consumption is a significant and complex social activity--and what a society chooses to feed its children reveals much about its tastes and ideas regarding health. In this groundbreaking historical work, Amy Bentley explores how the invention of commercial baby food shaped American notions of infancy and influenced the evolution of parental and pediatric care. Until the late nineteenth century, infants were almost exclusively fed breast milk. But over the course of a few short decades, Americans began feeding their babies formula and solid foods, frequently as early as a few weeks after birth. By the 1950s, commercial baby food had become emblematic of all things modern in postwar America. Little jars of baby food were thought to resolve a multitude of problems in the domestic sphere: they reduced parental anxieties about nutrition and health; they made caretakers feel empowered; and they offered women entering the workforce an irresistible convenience. But these baby food products laden with sugar, salt, and starch also became a gateway to the industrialized diet that blossomed during this period. Today, baby food continues to be shaped by medical, commercial, and parenting trends. Baby food producers now contend with health and nutrition problems as well as the rise of alternative food movements. All of this matters because, as the author suggests, it's during infancy that American palates become acclimated to tastes and textures, including those of highly processed, minimally nutritious, and calorie-dense industrial food products.
Inventing Benjy: William Faulkner’s Most Splendid Creative Leap
by Frédérique SpillInventing Benjy: William Faulkner’s Most Splendid Creative Leap is a groundbreaking work at the intersection of Faulkner studies and disability studies. Originally published in 2009 by Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle as L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de Faulkner, this translation brings the book to English-language readers for the first time. Author Frédérique Spill begins with a sustained look at the monologue of Benjy Compson, the initial first-person narrator in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Spill questions the reasons for this narrative choice, bringing readers to consider Benjy’s monologue, which is told by a narrator who is deaf and cognitively disabled, as an impossible discourse. This paradoxical discourse, which relies mostly on senses and sensory perception, sets the foundation of a sophisticated poetics of idiocy. Using this form of writing, Faulkner shaped perspective from a disabled character, revealing a certain depth to characters that were previously only portrayed on a shallow level. This style encompasses some of the most striking forms and figures of his leap into modern(ist) writing. In that respect, Inventing Benjy thoroughly examines Benjy’s discourse as an experimental workshop in which objects and words are exclusively modelled by the senses. This study regards Faulkner’s decision to place a disabled character at the center of perception as the inaugural and emblematic gesture of his writing. Closely examining excerpts from Faulkner’s novels and a few short stories, Spill emphasizes how the corporal, temporal, sensorial, and narrative figures of "idiocy" are reflected throughout Faulkner’s work. These writing choices underlie some of his most compelling inventions and certainly contribute to his unmistakable writing style. In the process, Faulkner’s writing takes on a phenomenological dimension, simultaneously dismantling and reinventing the intertwined dynamics of perception and language.
Inventing Berlin: Architecture, Politics and Cultural Memory in the New/Old German Capital Post-1989 (The Urban Book Series)
by Mary Dellenbaugh-LosseThis book comprehensively examines post-1989 changes to the symbolic landscape of Berlin – specifically, street names, architecture, urban planning and monuments – and links these changes to concepts of contested cultural memory and national identity in Berlin and Germany in the post-Wall period. The core of the book is made up of an analysis of built space changes in the eastern half of the city before and after the Berlin Wall, flanked by an introduction to the theoretical underpinnings of the topic and a wider interpretation of the events in Berlin in relation to other geographic and historical contexts. It furthermore offers an explanatory model for the phenomenon of the "symbolic foreigner" whereby former citizens of the GDR feel disenfranchised and excluded from today's German society. This book is a valuable resource for researchers, students, and also appeals to a wider, non-academic audience with an interest in both cultural memory and Berlin.
Inventing Disaster: The Culture Of Calamity From The Jamestown Colony To The Johnstown Flood
by Cynthia A. KiernerWhen hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other disasters strike, we count our losses, search for causes, commiserate with victims, and initiate relief efforts. Amply illustrated and expansively researched, Inventing Disaster explains the origins and development of this predictable, even ritualized, culture of calamity over three centuries, exploring its roots in the revolutions in science, information, and emotion that were part of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and America. Beginning with the collapse of the early seventeenth-century Jamestown colony, ending with the deadly Johnstown flood of 1889, and highlighting fires, epidemics, earthquakes, and exploding steamboats along the way, Cynthia A. Kierner tells horrific stories of culturally significant calamities and their victims and charts efforts to explain, prevent, and relieve disaster-related losses. Although how we interpret and respond to disasters has changed in some ways since the nineteenth century, Kierner demonstrates that, for better or worse, the intellectual, economic, and political environments of earlier eras forged our own twenty-first-century approach to disaster, shaping the stories we tell, the precautions we ponder, and the remedies we prescribe for disaster-ravaged communities.
Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills: Pharmaceutical Companies and the Medicalisation of Normal Life
by Jörg BlechThis is a highly accessible and reassuring account of how the pharmaceutical industry is redefining health, making it a state that is almost impossible to achieve. Many normal life processes – states as natural as birth, ageing, sexuality, unhappiness and death – are systematically being reinterpreted as pathological so creating new markets for their treatments. In this enlightening book, Jörg Blech reveals:how the invention of diseases by pharmaceutical companies is turning us all into patients, and how we can protect ourselves against this how the medical profession has been bullied and co-opted into endorsing profitable cures for people who aren't illfears about how pharmaceutical companies create markets by playing on the general public's concern with their health.A self-help book in the truest sense, Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills reassures us about our own health. It is essential reading for doctors, nurses and patients alike.
Inventing 'Easter Island'
by Beverley HaunEaster Island, or Rapa Nui as it is known to its inhabitants, is located in the Pacific Ocean, 3600 kilometres west of South America. Annexed by Chile in 1888, the island has been a source of fascination for the world beyond the island since the first visit by Europeans in 1722 due to its intriguing statues and complex history. Inventing 'Easter Island' examines narrative strategies and visual conventions in the discursive construction of 'Easter Island' as distinct from the native conception of 'Rapa Nui.' It looks at the geographic imaginary that pervaded the eighteenth century, a period of overwhelming imperial expansion. Beverley Haun begins with a discussion of forces that shaped the European version of island culture and goes on to consider the representation of that culture in the form of explorer texts and illustrations, as well as more recent texts and images in comic books and kitsch from off the island. Throughout, 'Easter Island' is used as a case study of the impact of imperialism on the view of a culture from outside. The study hinges on three key points - an inquiry into the formation of 'Easter Island' as a subject; an examination of how the constructed space and culture have been shaped, reshaped, and represented in discursive spaces; and a discussion of cultural memory and how the constraints of foreign texts and images have shaped thought and action about 'Easter Island.'Richly illustrated and unique in its findings, Inventing 'Easter Island' will appeal to cultural theorists, anthropologists, educators, and anyone interested in the history of the South Pacific.
Inventing Equal Opportunity
by Frank DobbinEqual opportunity in the workplace is thought to be the direct legacy of the civil rights and feminist movements and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, as Frank Dobbin demonstrates, corporate personnel experts--not Congress or the courts--were the ones who determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination. Dobbin shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel. He traces how the first measures were adopted by military contractors worried that the Kennedy administration would cancel their contracts if they didn't take "affirmative action" to end discrimination. These measures built on existing personnel programs, many designed to prevent bias against unionists. Dobbin follows the changes in the law as personnel experts invented one wave after another of equal opportunity programs. He examines how corporate personnel formalized hiring and promotion practices in the 1970s to eradicate bias by managers; how in the 1980s they answered Ronald Reagan's threat to end affirmative action by recasting their efforts as diversity-management programs; and how the growing presence of women in the newly named human resources profession has contributed to a focus on sexual harassment and work/life issues. Inventing Equal Opportunity reveals how the personnel profession devised--and ultimately transformed--our understanding of discrimination.
Inventing Equality: Reconstructing the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War
by Michael BellesilesThe evolution of the battle for true equality in America seen through the men, ideas, and politics behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed at the end of the Civil War. On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of a crowd in Rochester, New York, and asked, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” The audience had invited him to speak on the day celebrating freedom, and had expected him to offer a hopeful message about America; instead, he’d offered back to them their own hypocrisy. How could the Constitution defend both freedom and slavery? How could it celebrate liberty with one hand while withdrawing it with another? Theirs was a country which promoted and even celebrated inequality. From the very beginning, American history can be seen as a battle to reconcile the large gap between America’s stated ideals and the reality of its republic. Its struggle is not one of steady progress toward greater freedom and equality, but rather for every step forward there is a step taken in a different direction. In Inventing Equality, Michael Bellesiles traces the evolution of the battle for true equality—the stories of those fighting forward, to expand the working definition of what it means to be an American citizen—from the Revolution through the late nineteenth century. He identifies the systemic flaws in the Constitution, and explores through the role of the Supreme Court and three Constitutional amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—the ways in which equality and inequality waxed and waned over the decades.
Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe's Early Modern World (Material Texts)
by Benjamin SchmidtAs early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. The shapes and meanings of the extraordinary global images that emerged from this process form the subject of this highly original and richly textured study of cultural geography. Inventing Exoticism draws on a vast range of sources from history, literature, science, and art to describe the energetic and sustained international engagements that gave birth to our modern conceptions of exoticism and globalism.Illustrated with more than two hundred images of engravings, paintings, ceramics, and more, Inventing Exoticism shows, in vivid example and persuasive detail, how Europeans came to see and understand the world at an especially critical juncture of imperial imagination. At the turn to the eighteenth century, European markets were flooded by books and artifacts that described or otherwise evoked non-European realms: histories and ethnographies of overseas kingdoms, travel narratives and decorative maps, lavishly produced tomes illustrating foreign flora and fauna, and numerous decorative objects in the styles of distant cultures. Inventing Exoticism meticulously analyzes these, while further identifying the particular role of the Dutch—"Carryers of the World," as Defoe famously called them—in the business of exotica. The form of early modern exoticism that sold so well, as this book shows, originated not with expansion-minded imperialists of London and Paris, but in the canny ateliers of Holland. By scrutinizing these materials from the perspectives of both producers and consumers—and paying close attention to processes of cultural mediation—Inventing Exoticism interrogates traditional postcolonial theories of knowledge and power. It proposes a wholly revisionist understanding of geography in a pivotal age of expansion and offers a crucial historical perspective on our own global culture as it engages in a media-saturated world.
Inventing Fear of Crime
by Murray LeeOver the past four decades the fear of crime has become an increasingly significant concern for criminologists, victimologists, policy makers, politicians, police, the media and the general public. For many practitioners reducing fear of crime has become almost as important an issue as reducing crime itself. The identification of fear of crime as a serious policy problem has given rise to a massive amount of research activity, political discussion and intellectual debate. Despite this activity, actually reducing levels of fear of crime has proved difficult. Even in recent years when many western nations have experienced reductions in the levels of reported crime, fear of crime has often proven intractable. The result has been the development of what amounts to a fear of crime industry. Previous studies have identified conceptual challenges, theoretical cul-de-sacs and methodological problems with the use of the concept fear of crime. Yet it has endured as both an organizing principal for a body of research and a term to describe a social malady. This provocative, wide ranging book asks how and why fear of crime retains this cultural, political and social scientific currency despite concerted criticism of its utility? It subjects the concept to rigorous critical scrutiny taking examples from the UK, North America and Australia. Part One of Inventing Fear of Crime traces the historical emergence of the fear of crime concept, while Part Two addresses the issue of fear of crime and political rationality, and analyses fear of crime as a tactic or technique of government. This book will be essential reading on one of the key issues in government and politics in contemporary society.
Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon
by Jessica M. ParrEvangelicals and scholars of religious history have long recognized George Whitefield (1714-1770) as a founding father of American evangelicalism. But Jessica M. Parr argues he was much more than that. He was an enormously influential figure in Anglo-American religious culture, and his expansive missionary career can be understood in multiple ways. Whitefield began as an Anglican clergyman. Many in the Church of England perceived him as a radical. In the American South, Whitefield struggled to reconcile his disdain for the planter class with his belief that slavery was an economic necessity. Whitefield was drawn to an idealized Puritan past that was all but gone by the time of his first visit to New England in 1740.Parr draws from Whitefield's writing and sermons and from newspapers, pamphlets, and other sources to understand Whitefield's career and times. She offers new insights into revivalism, print culture, transatlantic cultural influences, and the relationship between religious thought and slavery. Whitefield became a religious icon shaped in the complexities of revivalism, the contest over religious toleration, and the conflicting role of Christianity for enslaved people. Proslavery Christians used Christianity as a form of social control for slaves, whereas evangelical Christianity's emphasis on "freedom in the eyes of God" suggested a path to political freedom. Parr reveals how Whitefield's death marked the start of a complex legacy that in many ways rendered him more powerful and influential after his death than during his long career.
Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage
by Elaine ShowalterSure to take its place alongside the literary landmarks of modern feminism, Elaine Showalter's brilliant, provocative work chronicles the roles of feminist intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the present. With sources as diverse as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Scream 2, Inventing Herself is an expansive and timely exploration of women who possess a boundless determination to alter the world by boldly experiencing love, achievement, and fame on a grand scale. These women tried to work, travel, think, love, and even die in ways that were ahead of their time. In doing so, they forged an epic history that each generation of adventurous women has rediscovered. Focusing on paradigmatic figures ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller to Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag, preeminent scholar Elaine Showalter uncovers common themes and patterns of these women's lives across the centuries and discovers the feminist intellectual tradition they embodied. The author brilliantly illuminates the contributions of Eleanor Marx, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, and many more. Showalter, a highly regarded critic known for her provocative and strongly held opinions, has here established a compelling new Who's Who of women's thought. Certain to spark controversy, the omission of such feminist perennials as Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Virginia Woolf will surprise and shock the conventional wisdom. This is not a history of perfect women, but rather of real women, whose mistakes and even tragedies are instructive and inspiring for women today who are still trying to invent themselves.
Inventing Indigenous Knowledge: Archaeology, Rural Development and the Raised Field Rehabilitation Project in Bolivia (Indigenous Peoples and Politics)
by Lynn SwartleyThis volume provides a multi-sited and multivocalic investigation of the dynamic social, political and economic processes in the creation and implementation of an agricultural development project. The raised field rehabilitation project attempted to introduce a pre-Columbian agricultural method into the contemporary Lake Titicaca Basin.
Inventing New Beginnings
by Asher D. BiemannBiemann (modern Jewish thought and intellectual history, U. of Virginia) explores the multiple connotations of "renaissance" in relation to the Jewish Renaissance that suffused much of German- speaking Jewry between 1890 and the rise of Nazism in the late 1930s, partly as a backlash to the earlier assimilationist Jewish Enlightenment. Drawing on the thinking of Franz Rosensweig in the New Learning, Mircea Eliade, Hegel, Buber, and other philosophers on the meaning of time and beginnings, he argues that this movement was less a return to traditional Judaism than a renewal of self-awareness and questioning in the encounter with modernity. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)
Inventing The Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality
by Luana RossIn this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native American women to demonstrate how race/ethnicity, gender, and class contribute to the criminalizing of various behaviors and subsequent incarceration rates. Drawing on the Native women's own words, she reveals the violence in their lives prior to incarceration, their respective responses to it, and how those responses affect their eventual criminalization and imprisonment. Comparisons with the experiences of white women in the same prison underline the significant role of race in determining women's experiences within the criminal justice system.
Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present
by Johanna DruckerThe first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies.Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history. Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography. This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been “invented” as an object of scholarship.
Inventing the Christmas Tree
by Benjamin A. Smith Bernd BrunnerA colorfully decorated Christmas tree, lit with twinkling lights, provokes awe and delight. We understand the lighted tree as a central symbol of the Christmas season, but what are the roots of the tradition? Who first thought to bedeck a tree, to bring it inside? How and where did the local activity grow into a widespread tradition, and how has the Christmas tree traveled across time and continents? Bernd Brunner's brief history--enriched by a selection of delightful and unusual historical illustrations--spans many centuries and cultures to illuminate the mysteries of the Christmas tree and its enduring hold on the human imagination. Tracing various European traditions from the Middle Ages forward, Brunner finds that only in the nineteenth century did Christmas trees become common in European family homes. In North America, the imported custom soon fascinated, though some found the tree not quite compatible with a Puritan mindset. Brunner explores how the Christmas tree entered mainstream American culture and how in recent times it has become globally popular. He introduces Jacqueline Kennedy's Nutcracker Tree in the White House, trees used to celebrate the New Year in Turkey, and the world's most expensive Christmas tree, erected in Abu Dhabi. The author also considers the place of the artificial tree and the ecological dimensions of the Christmas tree trade. A book rich with anecdote and insight, Inventing the Christmas Tree will enchant a wide audience.
Inventing the Criminal
by Richard F. WetzellRecent years have witnessed a resurgence of biological research into the causes of crime, but the origins of this kind of research date back to the late nineteenth century. Here, Richard Wetzell presents the first history of German criminology from Imperial Germany through the Weimar Republic to the end of the Third Reich, a period that provided a unique test case for the perils associated with biological explanations of crime.Drawing on a wealth of primary sources from criminological, legal, and psychiatric literature, Wetzell shows that German biomedical research on crime predominated over sociological research and thus contributed to the rise of the eugenics movement and the eventual targeting of criminals for eugenic measures by the Nazi regime. However, he also demonstrates that the development of German criminology was characterized by a constant tension between the criminologists' hereditarian biases and an increasing methodological sophistication that prevented many of them from endorsing the crude genetic determinism and racism that characterized so much of Hitler's regime. As a result, proposals for the sterilization of criminals remained highly controversial during the Nazi years, suggesting that Nazi biological politics left more room for contention than has often been assumed.
Inventing the Egghead
by Aaron LeckliderThroughout the twentieth century, pop songs, magazine articles, plays, posters, and novels in the United States represented intelligence alternately as empowering or threatening. In Inventing the Egghead, cultural historian Aaron Lecklider offers a sharp, entertaining narrative of these sources to reveal how Americans who were not part of the traditional intellectual class negotiated the complicated politics of intelligence within an accelerating mass culture.Central to the book is the concept of brainpower--a term used by Lecklider to capture the ways in which journalists, writers, artists, and others invoked intelligence to embolden the majority of Americans who did not have access to institutions of higher learning. Expressions of brainpower, Lecklider argues, challenged the deeply embedded assumptions in society that intellectual capacity was the province of an educated elite, and that the working class was unreservedly anti-intellectual. Amid changes in work, leisure, and domestic life, brainpower became a means for social transformation in the modern United States. The concept thus provides an exciting vantage point from which to make fresh assessments of ongoing debates over intelligence and access to quality education.Expressions of brainpower in the twentieth century engendered an uncomfortable paradox: they diminished the value of intellectuals (the hapless egghead, for example) while establishing claims to intellectual authority among ordinary women and men, including labor activists, women workers, and African Americans. Reading across historical, literary, and visual media, Lecklider mines popular culture as an arena where the brainpower of ordinary people was commonly invoked and frequently contested.
Inventing the Future
by Alex Williams Nick SrnicekA major new manifesto for a high-tech future free from workNeoliberalism isn't working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifest0 for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitaiist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.
Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy
by Katherine Benton-CohenIn 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission’s legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later. Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission’s recommendations—including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy—were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics. The Dillingham Commission—which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States—reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America’s immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement.
Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary
by Lynne A. HaneyThis ambitious, fluid, and engaging book explains the political and social transformation of the Hungarian state from 1948 to the present. Haney reconceptualizes how we might understand the momentous changes of 1989, resisting the usual categories of the socialist past and the capitalist present.