bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
1901–1902
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Coming after such a splendidly hit-filled season, the new theatrical year was perceived as a letdown. “Mediocrity has been the rule” was Theatre’s sad conclusion when June came around. To add to its discouraging assessment, the magazine rued that English playwrights had served the New York stage better than native authors had. Certainly offerings by such major American dramatists as Thomas and Fitch were not up to their best of the previous year, and the only novelty that probably could be revived today without too much trepidation was an English play. Yet the season’s longest runs went almost exclusively to American pieces, suggesting American audiences were increasingly comfortable with native efforts. Even so, they must not have been too comfortable, for the number of long runs was down markedly.
1906–1907
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Given the lofty perspective that comes with twenty years’ hindsight, one pioneering American theatrical historian, Arthur Hobson Quinn, saw the 1906-07 season as seminal, ushering in, with a remarkable succession of plays, “the advance guard of the new drama” and offering in a single theatrical year “about as many permanent additions to our dramatic literature as in the five years previous.” Another sixty-odd years on, scholars might question the number of permanent additions with which the season enriched our stage, but most would agree, albeit no doubt with personal qualifications, on its significance as a breakaway year. Appropriately, what many of the more progressive critics saw as its best and most interesting play was entitled The Great Divide. In retrospect several other developments would prove critical to the future of American drama. Some months earlier, in 1905, George Pierce Baker had initiated his playwriting course at Harvard. Out of it would come many of our finest dramatists. The Society of Dramatic Authors was founded in 1906.
1907–1908
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Given the preceding season’s pulsating brilliance, few if any expected the new theatrical year to provide so exciting a sequel. But the new season, although not a total write-off, proved so bleak that even habitual pessimists were left stunned. End-of season assessments agreed on the depth of the disappointment, although they could not agree on or pinpoint an overriding cause.
Erecting Barriers and Narrowing Opportunities (1919-1933)
Authors: Dinnerstein Leonard
Published: November 2023

The aftermath of the first World War left Americans disillusioned with internationalism, fearful of Bolshevik subversion, and frightened that foreigners would corrupt the nation’s values and traditions. A majority seemed tired of almost two decades of domestic reform and longed for what the 1920 Republican presidential nominee, Warren G. Harding, termed “normalcy.” And to most people “normalcy” meant remaking the United States into what it symbolized in the minds of old stock Americans. The Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of one community in Florida captured an extreme expression of this feeling in 1924 when he advocated expelling all Jews and foreigners from St. Petersburg to make the community “a 100% American Gentile City.” More specifically, “Gentile” meant “Protestant.” In rural and urban areas alike Catholics and Jews were regarded as outcasts intent on under¬ mining American values rather than as groups longing to accept them.
Antisemitism and Jewish Anxieties in the South (1865-1980s)
Authors: Dinnerstein Leonard
Published: November 2023

While antisemitism declined throughout the North and West after World War II, manifestations of it increased dramatically in the South after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision to outlaw segregation in public education. Despite the Supreme Court’s decree in Brown v. Board of Education, a majority of southerners refused to comply with the ruling, remained steadfast in their opposition to integration, and attacked those who submitted to the new law of the land. Although most Jews opposed segregation, they were afraid to take a public stand that differed with the dominant regional values and sentiments of their com¬ munities. Such reluctance was based on sound fears since poll data for the 1950s and 1960s showed the South to be the most antisemitic region in the country. How southern Jews accommodated themselves to an evil system and how the larger community of whites and blacks in the South worked out these issues is a topic hardly discussed in American analyses of desegregation.
Defining The Left
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

The French Revolution’s great rhetorical trinity—“liberty, equality, fraternity”—also accompanied these origins. Gendered connotations aside, “fraternity” implied an ideal of social solidarity vital to most left-wing movements, while “equality” resided at the Left’s philosophical core. In demanding the rule of the people, moreover, the Left sought to bring down the power of something else, an ancien régime, a socioeconomic ruling class, or simply a corrupt governing establishment.
Capitalist Stabilities
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

By contrast with 1871–1914, when European peace was broken mainly by colonial violence overseas, 1918–39 was a time of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary strife, civil war, unprecedented economic depression, and renewed social polarization. State terror and acute international tension culminated in the Second World War and the genocidal destruction of peoples.
1956
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

Harry Pollitt’s grotesque peroration typified the eulogies that flooded the Communist world when Stalin died on 5 March 1953. These were not cynically intended. Stalinism’s political psychology in the West subsisted on three decades of isolation and defeat, counterposed to the stirring narrative of the USSR’s heroic success—victory in the civil war, socialism in one country, industrialization and the five-year plan, defeat of fascism— a polarity confused during 1941–47, but now freshly dramatized by the Cold War. Moscow loyalism reflected western Communism’s siege mentality in 1947–53, constantly charged by Soviet demands. But the abjection of so many independent minds, entire movements in fact, before the cult of Stalin’s personality still eludes understanding.
1968
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

European radicalism in 1968 was nothing if not internationalist, inspired by nonWestern revolutionary movements or anger at the counterrevolutionary United States. Students passed easily across borders, from one theater of radicalism to another. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation’s International War Crimes Tribunal promoted this process, centering its efforts on the Vietnam War. The world had shrunk, practically through travel and communications and culturally through taste and style.
Feminism
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

In early 1969, women organized a session on women’s liberation during a “revolutionary festival” at Essex University. The occasion was tense. Men, as well as women, were present and responded by dismissing the issues.
New Poltics, New Times
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

On the other hand, socialism’s democratic ideals remained as vital as ever, as did the constitutional, organizational, and cultural frameworks of democracy, for which social democratic and Communist parties had been so indispensable—in times of democracy’s greatest danger no less than in the great constitution-making breakthroughs after the world wars.
Gorbachev, the End of Communism, and the 1989 Revolutions
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

In Eastern Europe, Soviet-style centralism had deadly force. In 1943–47, the region’s CPs had much independence, emerging renewed from the rubble of Liberation and unencumbered by the legacies of Bolshevization. But with the Cold War, Moscow asserted control, terminating the national roads to socialism and imposing repression brutally across the region. The purges destroyed the CPs’ potential creativity by a machinery of arrests, interrogations, surveillance, trials, imprisonment, and judicial killing, hanging a pall of conformity across the political horizon.
Conclusion
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

Clearly an era had ended. The generation whose lifetimes framed the histories presented in this book was passing. Its members were born into a time shaped by the mature socialist parties formed between the 1860s and the First World War.
Mobile, Hard-Working, and Hard-Playing: Rail Travel and the Transformation of American Society, 1870-1900
Authors: Martin Albro
Published: November 2023

Ticket-sellers, conductors, porters, and not a few of the passengers who were waiting for their trains in New York’s new Grand Central Depot that cold morning in January 1877, had plenty to talk about. It hardly seemed possible, but the old man was really dead. For far longer than most of them could remember, Commodore Vanderbilt had been calling the tune in transportation, first on the waters around New York, then on the broad Atlantic, until greater opportunities offered themselves in railroading and, in the last decade of his colorful career, on the national transportation scene. To be sure, not many of them quite yet recognized that passenger traffic had become a national phenomenon, but it had. The Commodore, along with men like J. Edgar Thomson of the Pennsylvania and John W. Garrett of the Baltimore & Ohio, had done much to creat it, for they had done the most to weld together through routes under a single owner’s control following the Civil War.
The Passenger Train Exalted, 1900-1990
Authors: Martin Albro
Published: November 2023

The onslaught of passengers that descended upon American railroads with the return of prosperity in 1898—a tide that would turn only with the coming of the roadable automobile in the 1920s—can not have come as much of a surprise to railroad leaders, especially in the Northeast. Indeed, although national thriftiness and relatively low disposable incomes tended to confine intercity rail travel largely to business and pressing personal needs in the nineteenth century, city fathers everywhere constantly fretted over the tendency of railroad depots, one after the other, to become clogged with growing traffic before they were ten years old.
New Jobs To Do, New People To Do Them
Authors: Martin Albro
Published: November 2023

The late John Barriger, whose startling pronouncement on the pleasures of working for the railroads heads this chapter, was perhaps inordinately fond of the industry in which he made something of a special mark. The dean of American railroad presidents—he claimed to have headed more Class I roads than any other man in history—Barriger spent his long life in or near the seats of power, during the most trying times these great enterprises ever went through, from the era of World War I to their resurgence in World War II, and their postwar public neglect and decline. Yet many men of much humbler station, especially those referred to in the industry as “operating employees” (persons engaged directly in the operation of trains) have shared his love of the calling and said so in their reminiscences. It has been pursued more recently by a few women. “There isn’t anything a man can do that I can’t,” remarked one young lady engineer to the Burlington Northern’s publicist, “except go to the bathroom over the side of the locomotive.”
Lawyers, Bankers, and “Real” Railroad Men
Authors: Martin Albro
Published: November 2023

Americans have no quarrel with the implications of the stern pronouncement that stares down at them from the facade of Washington’s most beautiful building: the United States Supreme Court. The implication is that what is declared to be legal, is just, of course. The lady with scales depicted on the fly-specked wall of the county courthouse is Justice, is she not? The men who sit in final judgment on the decisions of the inferior courts, the laws of the land, and even the sacred Constitution itself, are themselves called “justices,” are they not? Every American believes that what has been duly declared to be legal is just—so long as he agrees with the verdict—and never mind the convoluted reasoning that may lie behind it. Out of this conviction has grown one of America’s most basic institutions and, nowadays, with more and more people looking beyond sweet reasoning with each other for justice, one of the fastest growing professions in the country: the practice of law. Not so gently, magnificently bearded Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes one day reminded an overheated pleader before the Court that it was nota court of “justice,” but of law.
Enterprise Triumphant
Authors: Martin Albro
Published: November 2023

“There will be icicles in hell when Erie common pays a dividend,” Jay Gould is supposed to have said during his stewardship of that unfortunate railroad. Remembering the old quotation, however apochryphal, a financial editor remarked during the wartime summer of 1942 that they must be having a cool time down below, because the Erie Railroad, for the first time in living memory, had just announced a dividend on its common stock. When the Great Depression struck in 1930 the line had fought hard to stay solvent, but eventually the cruelly long Depression was too much for it and it joined a long procession of railroads, many of them better off in 1929 than the Erie, in the bankruptcy courts. Then the war brought prosperity to the Erie. It was a tough old bird, but we finally managed to kill it. In many ways the Erie’s story reflects what was wrong with American transportation policy during its last half-century.
Varieties
Authors: Mendelsohn Ezra
Published: November 2023

In 1907 Israel Zangwill, a Jewish political leader as well as a celebrated writer (the author of the play The Melting Pot) published a remarkable story dealing with Jewish political life in Milovka, a Polish shtetl, shortly before World War I.1 A young man, David Ben Amram (note his new­ style, Hebrew-Zionist name), arrives in this town to organize a Jewish self­ defense force as pogroms sweep over the land. His heroic efforts are ultimately frustrated by the incredible fragmentation of the small but highly politicized Jewish community. Not only have Jews adhered to various legal and illegal Polish and Russian organizations (this part of Poland was under Russian rule), but they are also divided among a large number of specifically Jewish organizations. David, a true believer in the holy principle of Jewish unity, a principle that for all-too-many Jews was honored more in the breach than the observance, encounters in this wretched backwater the following competing Jewish ideologies: integrationism or assimilationism (of which there were two or three distinct types), Orthodoxy (also divided into two types, Hasidic and anti-Hasidic), several varieties of socialist Zionism, Zionist Zionism, cultural Zionism, Mizrachi (Orthodox Zionism), Sejmism, territorialism, socialist territorialism, and Bundism. This awful divisiveness drives the young idealist to despair:
Double Curves and Magic Bats
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

Appetite For Baseball Spurred Boys to Watch and Read About The Game As Well As Play It. Because of The Abundance of town, College, industrial, and Semipro Teams, and Organized Baseball’s Low-Classification Minor-League Professional Clubs That Once Honeycombed The Land, Even Boys in Remote Areas Had Little Difficulty in Finding Some Kind of Ball Games to Watch. But As For Major Leaguers Or High-Minor Leaguers, Youngsters Outside Large Cities Had Little Chance of Seeing Them Except in Spring Exhibition Games Played in Their Own Or A Nearby town By Teams Barnstorming Their Way North From Training Camp, Or By Groups of Professional Players On Post-Season Exhibition tours.
From Sandlot to Municipal Diamond
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

From The Conclusion of The Great War to The Resumption of War in Scarcely More Than Twenty Years, The Dominant Feature of Boys’ Baseball Was Its Further Expropriation By Adults. Whether in The Prosperous Twenties Or The De-Pressed Thirties, The Drift toward Organization and Adult Direction Gathered Force. in The First of These Two Decades The Trend Coincided With Unprecedented Popular Pursuit of Sports By Adults. For The First Time in America, Asserted Social Scientist Jesse F. Steiner, Play “took Its Place Alongside Work and Was Recognized As One of The Major interests of Life” in The Same Vein Professor Preston W.
Husky Muckers intrude
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

By The Tum of The Century Baseball Was A Fixture On American College Campuses. But It Represented Only An Important Branch of The Sapling of intercollegiate Sport. That Sapling, Already Firmly Rooted, Underwent Sturdy Growth in The Decade and A Half Or So Prior to America’s Entrance into The Great War. Assiduously Cultivated By Students, Alumni, and The Public, It Thrived in Soil Watered By enrollments That Climbed From 157,000 in 18go to 6000,00 in 1920. State Universities in Particular Attracted Students.
Wider Horizons Down Home
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

As Soon As Conditions Permitted, town Teams Began to Arrange More Regular Playing Schedules and to Sharpen Competition By Holding tournatments and Organizing Leagues. Even Before The Civil War California Teams Dramatized Their Natural Rivalry By Holding A tournament. in Western New York Several town Teams, At Auburn’s instigation, Staged A tournament in 1866 Among The Buffalo Niagaras, Albany Knickerbockers, and Two Rochester Teams. According to Researcher Joseph M. Overfield, “Chicanery”; On The Part of The Two Rochester Clubs Resulted in Victory For The Niagaras, Who Also Won The Following Year. By 1877 Teams in New York Had Convened to Set Up A State Championship, Deciding That For A Ten-Dollar Fee Participating Teams Would Play Four Games With Each Other. That Same Year Iowa town Teams Held A Convention At Cedar Rapids to Form A State League and Play For A Championship.
Time off to Play Ball
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

in the nineteenth century baseball playing sprang up and thrived in the very institution where those in command once forbade play: the workplace. How could such a thing happen? Why would the institution that most completely separated play from work change from forbidding play to becoming one of its most prominent sponsors? The answer lies in changing views of life, work, and leisure that developed during and after the technological revolution. Before that sweeping change, work included and spawned leisure and entertainment, and life was organized around alternating rhythms of work and play, with the two often combined, as in early barn-raising celebrations and cornhusking bees. When industrialism urbanized life, work and leisure at first separated. Communities formed as appendages to factories, and there life revolved around machines and the business offices they depended upon. Recreation then arose in and clustered about these business and industrial plants.
Goldilocks is Benched
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

The impression of the twenties as a decade of substantial female liberation derives in part from the fact that the shower of publicity on the decade’s sports titans descended on female champions as well as on male, for instance Glenna Collett (golf), Helen Wills (tennis), and Gertrude Ederle (swimming). Sports clothing for women became more practical and fashionable, and so many popular magazines published articles on “women as athletes”; that in 1922 the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature added the term as a new category.
The Beginnings of Black Baseball
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

King Solomon himself would have been baffled by the question of whether indians or blacks have suffered the worst of any group in American history. Far from the least of the blacks’ suffering arose from the maltreatment by Organized Baseball of black baseball players and leagues, recorded in accounts by Robert Peterson in his pioneer study, Only the Ball Was White, and in other praiseworthy books by John Holway, William Rogosin, Janet Bruce, and Rob Ruck. Some writers and former black professional players have understandably, and doubtless correctly, been at pains to prove that during Organized Base-ball’s decades of segregation many blacks were sufficiently qualified to merit admission.
If He Had A White Face
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

While black ball players in the South were passing under the yoke of segregation, in the North, where the lot of Afro-Americans was only marginally better, some black professionals were gaining admission to Organized Baseball. During the period 1883-1898, fifty-five of them, according to an indispensible register laboriously compiled by Merl F. Kleinknecht and colleagues, gained entrance to some twenty of Organized Baseball’s leagues. Limited and short-lived though this essay at integration proved, it is nevertheless memorable not only on its own account but because failure to continue and nourish the experiment provides an uncomfortable reminder that discrimination exacts a price not only of the victims but of the society that practices it.
Two Strikes Called Before You Bat
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s in art, music, and literature brought pulsating black cultural life to the attention of many Americans. to some whites this cultural outpouring revealed that blacks had particular talents; but to most it merely established a new black stereotype--the exotic African, the uninhibited, emotional, irrepressive, immoral, alarmingly phallic stranger. Nativism became a major force, and the Ku Klux Klan revived. One Klavern even tried to get the owner of the Cincinnati Reds to declare Sunday, July 20, 1924, Klan Day at the park and permit the Klan, 40,000 strong in the county and 100,000 in the area, to publicly present flowers to the managers and players of the two teams.
Dog Days
Authors: Stampp Kenneth M
Published: November 2023

“Today is the fourth of July!” wrote a patriotic Texas editor, the anniversary of the day, eighty-one years ago, that brought “to each lover of liberty the hope for the world’s redemption.” Although it was a day of feasting and celebration throughout the land, a Virginia editor urged his readers to spend it soberly “as the Great National Sabbath,” consecrated to the memory of the Revolutionary fathers. “Let us, in grateful remembrance,” he advised, “cherish the emotions which this day awakens.” The spirit of the day seemed to inspire most Northerners and Southerners, momentarily transcending their differences, to acknowledge their common heritage, history, and nationality, and to share feelings of pride in all they had achieved.
Flush Times and an Autumn Panic
Authors: Stampp Kenneth M
Published: November 2023

On the first day of autumn Robert C. Winthrop, descendant of John Winthrop, conservative Whig politician, and gentleman scholar, sat at his desk in his comfortable Boston home and considered the state of the Union. For almost a month, no doubt, he had been reading daily accounts in the local press of a series of economic calamities that had startled the country and produced a condition of near business paralysis: a sharp decline of prices on the New York Stock Exchange, merchants in distress, banks in dire peril, railroads facing bankruptcy, land values collapsing, factories reducing their operations or shutting down, the ranks of the unemployed steadily growing.
Northern Politics: The Parties in Equipoise
Authors: Stampp Kenneth M
Published: November 2023

By mid-November, affairs in Kansas had become so critical that the highly political national press was devoting an increasing amount of attention to territorial news and less space to news of the economic recession. In contrast, before the renewal of the Kansas controversy, a series of important autumn gubernatorial and legislative campaigns in the northern states had met with considerable public apathy. George Templeton Strong, who had filled his diary with political commentary the previous year, ignored the New York campaign until a terse entry on November 2: “State election comes off tomorrow. Nobody cares.
Politics as Farce: The Lecompton Constitution
Authors: Stampp Kenneth M
Published: November 2023

On the seventh of September delegates to the Kansas constitutional convention, elected by the small proslavery minority the previous June, were to meet at Lecompton, the drab little territorial capital overlooking the Kansas River. That was just two weeks after the shocking failure of the Ohio Life and Trust, when the financial panic filled the columns of the press and was foremost in the public mind. Yet, even then a conservative Philadelphia editor believed that the panic was a more transitory event than those he feared would soon occur in Kansas.
Introduction:Rip Van Winkle’s America
Authors: Wood Gordon S
Published: November 2023

During the second decade of the nineteenth century, writer Washington Irving developed an acute sense that his native land was no longer the same place it had been just a generation earlier. Irving had conservative and nostalgic sensibilities, and he sought to express some of his amazement at the transformation that had taken place in America by writing his story “Rip Van Winkle. “ Irving had his character Rip awaken from a sleep that had begun before the Revolution and had lasted twenty years. When Rip entered his old village, he immediately felt lost. The buildings, the faces, the names were all strange and incomprehensible. “The very village was altered—it was larger and more populous, ” and idleness, except among the aged, was no longer tolerated. “The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility “—a terrifying situation for Rip, who had had “an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour. ” Even the language was strange— “rights of citizens—elections—members of Congress—liberty . . . and other words which were a perfect babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle. ” When people asked him “on which side he voted ” and “whether he was Federal or a Democrat, ” Rip could only stare “in vacant stupidity. “
The Jeffersonian West
Authors: Wood Gordon S
Published: November 2023

Alexander Hamilton always faced east, toward Europe. By contrast, Thomas Jefferson faced west, toward the trans-Appalachian territory and even the lands beyond the Mississippi. Although Jefferson himself never traveled beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, he was obsessed with the West. He always had, as he said in 1781, “a peculiar confidence in the men from the Western side of the mountains. “1 Only by moving westward, Jefferson believed, could Americans maintain their republican society of independent yeoman farmers and avoid the miseries of the concentrated urban working classes of Europe. Indeed, an expansive West was capable of redeeming the nation if its Eastern sections should ever become corrupt. “By enlarging the empire of liberty, ” said Jefferson, “we multiply its auxiliaries, and provide new sources of renovation, should its principles at any time degenerate in those portions of our country which gave them birth. “ Jefferson was the most expansion-minded president in American history, a firm believer in what might be called demographic imperialism. As early as 1786 he thought the United States might become “the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled, ” creating what he referred to more than once as an “empire of liberty. ” “Empire ” for him did not mean the coercive domination of alien peoples; instead, it meant a nation of citizens spread over vast tracts of land. Yet the British Empire had given enough ambiguity to the term to lend some irony to Jefferson’s use of it.
Law and an Independent Judiciary
Authors: Wood Gordon S
Published: November 2023

In 1801 the Republicans had taken control of two-thirds of the federal government—the presidency and the Congress—but the judiciary remained in the hands of the Federalists. The Federalist grip on the judiciary more than rankled Jefferson and his Republican colleagues; it enraged them. Most extreme Republicans never liked the judiciary anyway. It was the least popular part of both the state and federal constitutions and the institution relied upon by those who most scorned and feared the people. Most judges were appointed, not elected by the people, and often, as in the case of the federal judges, with tenure during good behavior. With its robes, court ceremonies, and elevated benches, the judiciary seemed to be the branch of government that was essentially unrepublican. Consequently, some of the most rabid Republicans would have liked to do away with the judiciary altogether.
Love and Toil
Authors: Ross Ellen
Published: November 2023

The history of the British working classes has until recently been written with a focus on the workplace or on such male organizations as clubs, unions, or national political parties. This study of mothers in London before the First World War stresses the distinctiveness of their experiences from those of other classes, and of the post World War I period, and demonstrates the ways in which mothers and their domestic choices were essential to the survival and cultural perpetuation of the working classes.
“A Gamble You Have to Take”:Marriage
Authors: Ross Ellen
Published: November 2023

Wedlock “happened” to most people in London’s industrial districts, but these marriages seem decidedly embattled: cemented together by powerful forms of material interdependence but pulled apart by gender divisions and hostilities. Family life provided the settings for some of the sweetest moments in the hard lives of London workers, and cockney humor softened marriage’s harsh edges. But sexual antagonism was an openly acknowledged party to the contract. Husbands’ authority in their households was a wobbly fixture, one that was always on the verge of breaking down. Wives could easily be found who were neither ladylike nor deferential, and their husbands had to struggle, often violently, to maintain their authority over them.
“I’ll Bring ‘Em Up in My Way” Child Rearing
Authors: Ross Ellen
Published: November 2023

For aristocratic English women early in the nineteenth century, motherhood had meant mostly the painful act of giving birth to heirs to their husbands’ estates. Later, childbirth anesthesia obliterated the pain (or its memory), while many aristocratic and upper-class women were coming to view motherhood in a new way, as a tender and enriching emotional experience. For working-class women of our period, the transmission of blood and property were not central issues, and the pain of childbirth was seldom openly voiced. Motherhood mainly meant labor, not only in giving birth, but also in sustaining the child’s life. Some London mothers were nurturing, some affectionate, and some playful, but these were only incidental qualities of good mothers. A good mother was mainly a good worker.
Marriage, Family, Sexual Ethics, and Crime
Authors: Deak Istvan
Published: November 2023

The ideals of medieval chivalry demanded that the knight be chaste or, if married, that he spend long spells away from hearth and home in pursuit of some noble goal. Nineteenth-century officers liked to subscribe to these ideals and often compared the corps to the ancient fighting orders, but like most knights of old, they had little desire to live according to these precepts. Yet dire necessity and army policy held down the number of marriages and caused thousands of officers who did attain marriage to live a nomadic existence, not unlike that endured by the medieval knight.
Epilogue
Authors: Deak Istvan
Published: November 2023

The revolutions which swept east central Europe in the fall of 1918 aimed variously at the achievement of national independence, independence combined with social equality, or unification with co-nationals in a neighboring country. The revolutionary leaders professed Wilsonian democracy and national self-determination on one hand, Leninist proletarian internationalism on the other.
The marshall plan and return to private life
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

The European Crisis

The Truman Doctrine did not give the administration the power to cope with what Acheson now realized was a great European crisis —a crisis of economy, society, polity, and confidence. Everyone had misjudged the difficulties of reestablishing productive capitalist economies. Postwar planners knew helping Europe would be necessary, but Americans thus far had failed to meet the gaping deficits now exposed. The bleak winter of 1946 –47, succeeding a drought and followed by another, threatened to overwhelm people doing battle with the decay around them. Wrecked merchant ships barricaded harbors, and broken bridges and railroads impeded the simplest commercial traffic. Ragged men and women picked at debris looking for their next meal. Britain was bankrupt. Winston Churchill described the continent as “a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.”
Acheson, the presiden , and the state department
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Introduction It had not been so long since all the employees of the state department could pose together on the front steps in annual pictures. By January 1949, however, five times as many people worked in its new building at Foggy Bottom as in the old State-War-Navy headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. The department employed a little over 600 people in the early 1920s, nearly 1,000 by the eve of World War II, and almost 6,000 by 1948. In 1947, it had approximately 12,000 Americans working abroad; in 1950, the figure was nearly 16,000. From 1938 to 1948, the staff of the office of the secretary of state rose from 21 to 186 and workers in the geographic and political offices from 112 to 318. The United States was served by 737 career diplomats in 1936, 1,217 in 1950. Around the world in 1951, the department ran 59 embassies, 14 legations, and 196 consular offices, and people on the State payroll helped run the occupation regimes in Germany and Japan. Department appropriations rose from $2.6 to $33.7 million from 1938 to 1948, money that paid for a rising tide of communications —by 1950, 25,000 incoming and outgoing telegrams and 250,000 memos and other official messages.
Looking for chances in china, 1949
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Introduction: Acheson’s Effort and Failure in Asia Dean Acheson inherited a thick Asian diplomatic record that added up to something like a strategy. General Douglas MacArthur, following Washington’s instructions, was reforming the Japanese state, George Marshall had vainly attempted mediating the Chinese civil war, and the army was overseeing the creation of a state in South Korea. Washington had supervised the advent of Philippine independence. After first accepting continuation of Dutch imperialism in Indonesia, it moved to end it. It had urged Britain to resolve the festering dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. And it was beginning to give Paris unwelcome advice about reestablishing order in Indochina.
Neither wood nor ivory: checkm ated in china, 1949 – 1950
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Acheson once remarked that chess masters played with “wood or ivory” pieces, but “in the game we play, they are alive, people move on their own; it’s the human character.” The Chinese proved the truth of this by moving around the board without regard for his wishes. Mao Zedong’s imminent victory in the summer of 1949 put the issue of diplomatic recognition in the foreground, but Acheson had become wary following attacks on the White Paper and some turbulence within the administration itself. Truman’s hatred of the Chinese communists tended to cancel out his contempt for Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists. Acheson sought purchase while being crisscrossed by divergent presidential, military, and state department views. His objectives, however, remained constant. He hoped Washington could adjust to the new Chinese realities, untie its strategy from the long romance with Chiang, and encourage Chinese independence of Moscow. Hoping to focus on Europe, in a surge of confidence near the end of the year he staged a showdown with the Pentagon for Truman’s loyalty. The “win” he gained would quickly vanish.
Real diplomacy, in europe, 1949 – 1950
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Behind the writing of NSC-68 was the deflation of the bullishness created by the 1949 Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in Paris. Reasons for the deflation ranged from the atomic test in the USSR to the first explosions of McCarthyism in the United States. American plans for Europe again seemed stalled. European economies still dragged, hurting the U.S. economy, too, as well as its foreign policy. Acheson wondered about the allies’ willingness to fight and accept West Germany in their camp. Most U.S. officials—most of the time—viewed Moscow’s strength as rising rather than receding. When the UN failed to surrender Chiang Kai-shek’s Security Council seat to the Chinese communist regime, the Soviets walked out of the council in protest. This move, along with Moscow’s nuclear breakthrough, rattled nerves throughout the west.
Evil days
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

The 1950s strife over communism and anti-communism exposed Americans as their own worst enemy. “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” Walt Kelly famously had Pogo say. Dean Acheson’s rash defense of Alger Hiss put him in that number, too. The frenzy over communists “boring from within” coincided with a hard renewal of Soviet espionage, as station chiefs of the KGB (Moscow’s secret police) in March 1950 moved toward winning over ordinary U.S. citizens. As Chinese armies poured over their American foes in Korea, the McCarthyite attack on the administration became pitiless. The biggest prize the “primitives’” wanted to bag was Acheson himself, plus anyone working for him having anything to do with Asia. Acheson himself survived and achieved most of his goals, but he paid a price in somewhat reduced effectiveness and a far higher one in personal abuse. Fighting back, he leaned precariously into the hostile winds, not “broken under fire,” said one observer, but “bent considerably.” He surrendered one significant hostage, John Stewart Service, and came to realize his defense of Hiss had redoubled the troubles of worthier men. His own travail led to more caustic views of his congressional foes, their media allies, and with redeeming qualifications, of the people and democracy, too.
In the cockpit
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

In daylight savings season, the wristwatch on a person in Korea will read thirteen hours later than the watch on a man or woman in Washington, D.C. The war that began in Korea at 4 a.m. on Sunday, 25 June 1950, started at 3 p.m. on Saturday the 24th in the U.S. capital, where the thermometer approached 96 degrees. President Harry Truman was flying at that moment for his first weekend in Independence in six months after making a stop to dedicate Baltimore’s new Friendship Airport. Army chief of staff, General Joseph Lawton (“Lightning Joe”) Collins, was relaxing at his beach house on the Chesapeake. Both Secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter and Warren Austin, ambassador to the United Nations, were vacationing in New England. Louis Johnson of the defense department and General Omar Bradley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, had landed a few hours earlier from a tour of Asia, carrying General Douglas MacArthur’s message on the need to keep Formosa out of communist hands. Dean Acheson, whom one historian would dub “The Commissar of the Cold War” for his leadership in the crisis about to occur, had left D.C.’s heat for the weekend at Harewood Farm in Maryland. There it was as quiet “as that haven could then be” when McCarthyite “crank mail” had led to around-the-clock shifts of guards pacing around his place.
Prodding evolution with action: german rearmament
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Some of the loudest repercussions of the war in Korea came in Europe, where shrapnel punched holes in the still rickety walls of the western alliance. Before Korea, the U.S. government was unsure how best to defend western Europe and had only fitfully tried to overcome the fear and complacency blocking effective action by its allies. Americans thought the demonstration of Soviet willingness to use outright military aggression would activate the fear enough to eliminate the complacency. By now, virtually all U.S. leaders thought a large and long-term U.S. role in European defense was inescapable. But—again fitfully, and gradually —they also began to believe a West German renewal could lessen the American burden. In the middle of 1950, however, they did not yet see how to make this goal acceptable to both the Germans and their neighbors. Except for a few flinty military planners, Europeans shivered at the memory of jackbooted Soldaten in their midst.
Captives of war
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Shooting MacArthur through the Heart Besides a titanic contest between general and president, the MacArthur imbroglio was the last chapter of six years of tension between general and secretary of state. As Acheson said afterward: “It always seemed that whenever General MacArthur made a statement that embarrassed anybody I was the fellow who had to reply to it,” a history begun in 1945 when he chided MacArthur for thinking he made his own Japanese policy. In a sign of how distant MacArthur was from what was going on back home, he had reacted to the news of Louis Johnson’s firing in September 1950 by predicting that Acheson would topple next. When MacArthur himself fell, Acheson spoke discreetly for the record but described him in a letter as a victim of a “disastrous manic depressive tendency.” In 1970, he switched to Truman-speak and called him a “jackass.
Jousting with mosadeq, waiting for nasser
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Jousting with Mosadeq Muhammad Mosadeq led the endeavor to free Iran of outsiders’ domination. Often ailing and given to fainting and weeping spells, he habitually lay in hotel or hospital beds, robed and beslippered, talking to diplomats or reporters. Such eccentric conduct was misleading, for this Persian was a man of parts. Not London’s hated lunatic, he was a formidable leader feared by Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi. Born in 1882 in a landholding family, he studied in France, took a doctorate in law in Switzerland, and returned to Iran imbued with both rationalist and nationalist values. Serving as both a finance and foreign minister and helping establish the National Front in 1949 was part of his hope to bring Iran into a modern age, but these did not stop the Shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, from briefly throwing him in prison. First as legislator and then as prime minister, he pursued an ambitious agenda to improve ordinary Iranians’ lives and develop democratic and constitutional institutions at the Shah’s expense. He hated British imperialism, and Britons in turn despised him. But Americans often took pleasure in his company. George McGhee talked to him twenty odd times and thought him “a delightful fellow,” spending half their time “laughing at his jokes.” But he also thought Mosadeq was unrealistic about how far the United States would go to retain Iranian oil for the west.
Conclusion: power for a purpose
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

A “Spacious Environment” Modern American strategy emerged with the dawn of the cold war more than a half century ago. It involved both new instruments and new uses of power. Power allows one nation to get another to do its wishes, whether enemy or ally. It comes from many sources—geography and natural resources, an ingenious and relatively large population, allies among other states, and large and effective military forces. Using this power to achieve one’s purposes is what strategy is about. After 1945, Americans’ objective was to found and uphold a world order compatible with their own values and institutions.
Stratagems
Authors: Slaughter Thomas P
Published: November 2023

Rumors Concerning The Mutilation of Edward Gorsuch’s body may, as was suggested in chapter 4, have been the product of fertile Southern imaginations. No witness, no participant-white or black-provided such gruesome details as those uttered in anti-abolitionist circles. Among the first-hand accounts we have only the cryptic observation of William Parker that “the women finished him off.” The coroner’s report mentions only one bullet wound, a single “incision” on the head, and a “fracture of the left humerus” produced by a blunt instrument. Not even the most virulently racist Democratic newspapers in the North carried the story of com cutters hacking the corpse to a pulp.1 There is no way to tell for certain whether Northern sensibilities led newspaper editors to suppress accounts of the riot’s true brutality or whether Southerners simply assumed a savagery that reveals more about the psychology of slave owners, and the politics of interracial violence, than it does about the Christiana rioters. On balance, though, it appears more likely that the mutilation was a figment of white people’s fears or an attempt to use the riot for political ends. The story represented the most shocking form of role reversal imaginable to a Southern white man: members of the weaker gender of a subservient race mutilating the body of a male exemplar of the master class. In light of the sexual abuse that female slaves sometimes suffered at the hands of white men, the alleged genital mutilation manifests a symbolic retribution that is appropriate to this historical setting. Still, the symbolic significance of the act could reflect either the plausibility of the story or help to explain the nature of the guilt among white men that would lead to such a horrible fantasy.
The Trial
Authors: Slaughter Thomas P
Published: November 2023

Charging The Christiana Prisoners with treason was a political act of real significance for American jurisprudence, but the long-term consequences for constitutional law were of secondary concern to most people at the time. In the heat of the moment, it was difficult for anyone to see beyond the exigencies of interregional strife, to get past conflicting senses of what justice, honor, and law demanded as retribution for the death of Edward Gorsuch. To those Americans who valued the Compromise measures, Castner Hanway and his “accomplices” had gone beyond the bounds of normal crime. What they did was more than a riot and worse than a murder, so their act needed another name. “Treason” carried such a burden in the popular mind. Perhaps this was partly because of its association with England’s famous state trials and the penalty of drawing and quartering during the not-so-distant past of Anglo-American law. The name Benedict Arnold remained synonymous with “traitor,” and school children still read the story of Major John Andre’s execution for treason during the Revolution. Americans also collectively remembered their political trials of the Whiskey rebels, John Fries, and Aaron Burr in the first quarter-century after the War for Independence. For these reasons, among others, treason had a symbolic significance as “the king of crimes,” which transcended judicial definitions of its meaning.