Browsing by Subject "Progressive Era"

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American wasteland : a social and cultural history of excrement, 1860-1920
(2012-05) Gerling, Daniel Max; Davis, Janet M.; Engelhardt, Elizabeth D.; Hartigan, John; Meikle, Jeffrey L.; Smith, Mark C.
Human excrement is seldom considered to be an integral part of the human condition. Despite the relative silence regarding it, however, excrement has played a significant role in American history. Today the U.S. has more than two million miles of sewer pipes underneath it. Every year Americans flush more than a trillion gallons of water and fertilizer down the toilet, and farmers spend billions of dollars to buy artificial fertilizer. Furthermore, excrement is bound up in many complicated power relationships regarding race, gender, and ethnicity. This dissertation examines the period in American history, from the Civil War through the Progressive Era, when excrement transformed from commodity to waste. More specifically, it examines the cultural and social factors that led to its formulation as waste and the roles it played in the histories of American health, architecture, and imperialism. The first chapter assesses the vast changes to the country’s infrastructure and social fabric beginning in the late nineteenth century. On the subterranean level, much of America’s immense network of sewers was constructed during this era—making it one of the largest public works projects in U.S. history. Above ground, the United States Sanitary Commission, founded at the onset of the Civil War, commenced a widespread creation of sanitary commissions in municipalities, regions, and even internationally, that regulated defecation habits. Chapter Two assesses the social and architectural change that occurred as the toilet moved from the outhouse to inside the house—specifically, how awkwardly newly built homes accommodated this novel room and how the toilet’s move inside actually hastened its removal. The third chapter shifts focus to the way Americans considered their excrement in relation to their body in a time when efficiency a great virtue. Americans feared ailments related to “autointoxication” (constipation) and went to absurd lengths to rid their bodies of excrement. The fourth chapter analyzes the way excrement was racialized and the role it had in the various projects of American imperialism. The colonial subjects and potential American citizens—from Native Americans to Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans—were regularly scrutinized, punished, and re-educated regarding their defecation habits.
John Barrett, Progressive Era Diplomat: A Study of a Commercial Expansionist, 1887-1920, by Salvatore Prisco III
(Business History Review, 1974) Topik, Steven Curtis
"Lizzie Crockett did have illicit intercourse with men other than her husband" : sexuality, race, and criminality in Austin at the turn of the twentieth century
(2000-05) Rosas, Lilia Raquel Dueñas; Peck, Gunther
In this report, I investigate the formation of the stereotypes about sexually ready, available, and promiscuous Black and Mexican women in the history of the U.S. Southwest or Mexican Borderlands. Specifically, I argue that dominant society created sexual stereotypes of women of color sexuality in opposition to sexual stereotypes of white women. I contend that dominant society used these stereotypes to regulate the sexuality of both women of color and white women. Furthermore, I deconstruct the assumption of white society that most women of color were prostitutes regardless of their occupation. Simply put, I ask: how was the sexuality of African American and Mexican women regulated and constructed in contrast to the sexuality of white women in the city of Austin between 1890 to 1914? I propose to illuminate the multiple layers of these stereotypes by analyzing court records and literature on prostitution. I conduct this case study in Austin because of its unique location and history at the crossroads of the South and Southwest and its "multiracial" or "triracial" populations of African Americans, Mexicans and Euro-Americans. Similarly, I focus on the changes in sexual regulation throughout the Progressive Era and use the analytical lenses of "sexuality" and "gender" because I hope to contribute to recent scholarly discussions that have complicated our understanding of sexuality in this period.
Modern displacements : urban injustice affecting working class communities of color in East Austin
(2012-05) Gray, Amanda Elaine; Cordova, Cary, 1970-
In this report I analyze both historical and contemporary urban planning policies enacted by the City of Austin, TX, through which I establish patterns of structural inequality affecting working class communities of color residing in East Austin. I examine early 20th-century urban beautification initiatives, along with the Progressive era segregationist project of the modern city. Austin city planners solidified segregation along racial lines with the 1928 Master Plan, which mandated the systematic displacement and relocation of African American and Mexican American communities to Austin’s Eastside, along with all “objectionable industries.” Today, East Austin working class communities of color continue to experience unequal burdens of environmentally hazardous industry in their neighborhoods. I examine initiatives implemented by the local grassroots environmental justice organization PODER and their fight for the health and safety of East Austin residents of color in combination with their protest against gentrifying urban planning policies and practices. Through an analysis of the PODER Young Scholars for Justice documentary, Gentrification: An Eastside Story, I look at the ways in which gentrification has changed the East Austin urban cultural landscape. This report aims to shed light upon spatial and racial social geographies that have contributed to the nearly century long battle East Austin residents have waged against discriminatory urban planning policies resulting in educational segregation, environmentally racist industrial zoning, and contemporary displacement of working class communities of color for city profit.
The Brothers Johnson : the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, black business, and the Negro image during the Progressive Era
(2014-05-02) Campbell, Yuri Andrew; Walker, Juliet E. K., 1940-; Falola, Toyin; Moore, Leonard; Miller, Karl H; Butler, Johnny S.
This dissertation looks at the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, the first filmmaking concern owned and operated by African Americans with the intention of producing dramas depicting the race in a positive fashion. By undertaking a micro-level inquiry of the LMPC the study provides an unusually detailed assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a Progressive-Era black entrepreneurial endeavor whose national reach had macro-level economic and cultural effect within the African-American commercial realm. On the micro-level, the dissertation adheres to the Cole model of entrepreneurial history by addressing the family, social, and employment backgrounds of the two brothers who owned and operated the film venture, Noble and George Johnson. The dissertation therefore includes notable attentions paid to the business experiences of a third brother, Virgel, and their father, Perry. The family’s deeply rooted ethos of self-reliance through business intertwines with their search for spaces affording the opportunity to deal with wealthy whites and vibrant black communities. The importance of black geographic and economic mobility during for burgeoning establishment of a sense and practice of a black economic and cultural nation is thereby highlighted. The business history inquiry into the organizational and operational specifics of the LMPC provides an informative bedding for the second prong of the study’s thrust, explicating the ways that the businesses of Noble and George Johnson can be seen as modes of a nationally-projected production of the social and cultural knowledge of race. That line of questioning is enhanced by the family’s history with racial ambiguity and the search for access to white wherewithal. On this front those businesses are vetted as chapters in the African-American tradition of modern public storytelling aimed at forwarding the advancement of the race’s bids for full citizenship and material well being by strategically demanding the recognition of black humanity. Theses storytelling businesses were important links in a tradition which had profound effects on African-American life and constituted discursive practices which help us to see the multi-faceted, even contradictory, pull within the experience of blackness in America, a basis of identity seeking likeness and difference, domains of blackness and the freedom to move beyond black