bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
1882–1883
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

For dedicated playgoers the new season, like the one just gone by, must have been not uninteresting, even if it was largely undistinguished. The incessant winds of change blew more forcefully and, for careful observers, more noticeably. Several inescapable landmarks signaled evolving tastes and the American theatre’s timely response to this evolution. In October New York’s Casino Theatre opened its doors for the first time.
1887–1888
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Quite probably a majority of playgoers sat through the 1887-88 season reasonably satisfied with what they saw and heard. Gallery gods could still hiss ebony-black, snarling villains and still cheer heroes rescuing heroines from a blaze of illuminated tinsel and stage smoke. At the same time, thanks to new, smaller theatres and to stages brightened by electricity, the exaggerated writing and acting so dear to excitable newsboys and their fellow ragamuffin noisemakers was disappearing rapidly from smarter houses. In those, a better-dressed and bettermannered clientele, who could afford the betterlocated seats, applauded a handful of aging, traditionalist stars returning year after year in their aged, traditional repertory. They also enjoyed surviving stock ensembles (which now made only token bows to the classics) and a rising type of specially cast and mounted production. For the most part the plays both audiences saw were relatively new.
1888–1889
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

If summer dog days cramped theatricals, they could not totally discourage them. Established stars and stock players might desert the sweltering city for cooler haunts at the seashore or in the mountains, but managers continued to keep theatres open and more or less profitable, attempting to lure determined entertainment seekers with promises of icecooled air (barely perceptible), with mountings of plays deemed too uncertain for the height of the season, and with up-and-coming players anxious for a better chance in the limelight. As often as not, this was the time when newer American plays were given an opportunity. Actually, though many contemporary commentators failed to grasp the fact, important young American playwrights were coming increasingly to the fore. By now Steele MacKaye and Bronson Howard were well established, but James A. Herne, Augustus Thomas, William Gillette, Henry C. de Mille, and David Belasco also were carving out enduring niches for themselves. Gillette again had shown his mettle at the close of the previous season. De Mille and Belasco had a new play ready to launch the coming one.
1889–1890
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Odell labeled the new theatrical year “a very brilliant season.” Of course, he was writing about it more than half a century afterwards, and he was writing about the stage of his youth, which almost always seems better when looked back on with age’s tinted memory. Odell was an affectionate chronicler of the era, and he earlier had called the late 1870s Broadway’s palmiest days. Such assessments were tinged with absurdity even in the 1930s and early 1940s, when he made them. Now, another halfcentury later, despite myriad reevaluations of the Victorian period and its arts, they still seem questionable. Unfortunately, the performances and productions have vanished beyond recall, and in any case we would be inclined to judge them, if we could watch them, by standards that were not the standards of their contemporaries.
1891–1892
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

To call the 1891-92 season unimportant would be to condemn it with a gratuitous severity. On its musical stages it saw, first, in Robin Hood the appearance of the earliest American work to enjoy a long, respected afterlife and, almost immediately following, in A Trip to Chinatown the American work that more than any other moved farce-comedy into the realm of modern musical comedy. It also witnessed, if only for a single matinee, the breakaway drama that introduced lbsenite influences into native dramaturgy. For dedicated playgoers it brought forth any number of evenings of more than passing interest. Yet on the whole, it can fairly be termed lackluster. Truly exciting nights seemed fewer and farther between than in many superior seasons, both before and since. Nonetheless, even with these caveats in mind, the season secured itself a minor place in American theatrical history, for it served as a small, rickety bridge between eras, the one ending with the death of Barrett and the retirement of Booth, and the other beginning with the opening of a major new theatre.
1895–1896
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Recovery from the panic of 1893 had been remarkably swift. By late summer of 1895 business was rosy almost everywhere, and theatrical columns, offering their predictions for the new season, were universally optimistic. The Dramatic Mirror echoed a prevailing sentiment when it prophesied that the new theatrical year would be one of the best ever, though it quickly added “from a pecuniary point of view.” One sign of resurgence did not sit well with all crystal-ball readers. Four major theatres announced, virtually in unison, that they intended to raise the top ticket price from $1.50, where it had been since the Civil War, to $2.00. Their reasoning was that higher prices would make theatregoing “higher toned.” Dissenters dismissed such rationalization as self-serving. But their cries were lost in a swelling of production records and the building of new playhouses.
1897–1898
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Theatre business had become spotty the preceding spring and plummeted alarmingly during the summer. Looking for a reason or a scapegoat, pontificators pointed an accusing finger at “the bicycle craze,” which found many potential playgoers pedaling merrily in the balmy weather instead of crowding into cramped, often sizzling theatres. In March of 1898 the Maine was blown up. A month later we were at war with Spain. After a brief spell during which Americans were preoccupied with the new war, box offices again were confronted with the old, accustomed lines. Yet the rage for bicycling persisted, leaving the commentators baffled but happily counting their profits. Another reason-an ineluctable change of tastes-may have accounted for some of the falling off.
1899–1900
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

The seasons from 1899-1900 through 1913-14 witnessed an open, incessant struggle by native playwrights to take over American stages they felt rightly belonged to them. They battled relentlessly against producers who were not unsympathetic to their claims but who regularly, and perhaps understandably, sought safety in proven importations. Their battle was an unwritten drama in itself. Initially, to get a foot in the stage door, they may have seemed to compromise by crafting, more often than not, American vehicles for American stars. But this was still a common practice in many of the world’s theatre capitals. The era of the star vehicle continued, albeit it was soon to come crashing down. Of course, there would be exceptions. Fitch’s The Climbers and several of his other dramas were notable instances. Compromise also took the form of setting a seemingly inordinate number of their plays overseas, especially in England.
1902–1903
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Despite the disappointing season just passed, optimism ran rampant along the Great White Way. No better sign of this existed than the construction busily under way from the bottom to the top of the fast-expanding theatre district. From Fourteenth Street to Columbus Circle no fewer than eight new playhouses were rising. Some would have short, difficult lives, but others-such as the new Lyceum, the Hudson, and the New Amsterdam-would have long, distinguished careers. Producers were eagerly scanning rosters for young players they could proclaim as stars, and they were also avidly searching for star vehicles. The play was still not the thing in this era.
1903–1904
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Optimism continued to help brighten Broadway’s lights. Just after the season got under way, Theatre published its predictions for the ensuing months. One indisputably happy fact was that six theatres that had been rising were ready to open their doors. Their stages, and others, had been promised not only some eagerly awaited London and Continental hits but an “unprecedently large” number of Shakespearean revivals. On the down side, although the article made no judgments, was word that the “list of dramatized novels . . . is longer than ever”; more discouraging, “very few new plays by American authors” were on the slate.
1905–1906
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

The new season brought with it a tremendous smash hit that had no major stars, and its remarkable success may well have alerted both dramatists and producers to the now obvious conclusion that good drama on its own could provide eminently satisfying and profitable theatre.
1909–1910
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

A season of exceptional, sustained interest rarely is followed by an equally exciting season. If 1909-10 was hardly as brilliant as its prececessor, it was by no means a weak one. Its theatrical comings and goings were constantly newsworthy. Among the goingsfor all practical purposes, among the gones-was the all but total disappearance of touring melodrama, along with the conversion to films, or in a few cases to other purposes, of theatres which once had hosted them. Touring melodramas had evolved slowly and naturally from the need to entertain the lower classes; they disappeared quickly but just as naturally when these same playgoers found cheaper and in some ways better diversions. The plays never had added anything to dramatic literature.
1911–1912
Authors: Bordman Gerald
Published: November 2023

Optimism abounded as the new season got under way. Theatre’s lead article in September was a survey of forthcoming months, framed by miniature photographs of thirty starred players, from such oldtimers as Sothern and Drew to such youngsters as Grace George, Alla Nazimova, and Billie Burke. The article branded the new term as “unusually promising” and went on to assert, “The challenge for native plays of superior merit has been answered was performed in virtual darkness until the last moment.
The Depression Era (1933-1939)
Authors: Dinnerstein Leonard
Published: November 2023

Initially, antisemitic displays in the United States did not increase with the onset of the Great Depression. But after 1933, when a Nazi-led government came to power in Germany and Franklin D. Roosevelt inaugurated a New Deal at home, the deepening economic crisis contributed to an explosion of unprecedented antisemitic fervor. Fueled also by the rise of Protestant and Catholic demagogues, deeply entrenched Protestant fundamentalism, and the widespread expression of antisemitic attitudes by respectable social and religious leaders, they illustrated how centuries of denigrating Jews culminated in the most savage accusations, and in some urban areas-especially New York and Boston-violent physical attacks. In the 1930s American antisemitism was “more virulent and more vicious than at any time before or since” as rabid antisemites, almost without exception, envisioned an international Jewish conspiracy aimed at controlling the government of the United States. They believed that unless maximum vigilance was exercised, Christian America would be lost.
Marxism and the Left Laying the Foundations
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

This sense of forward movement was a far cry from the crushing isolation of the 1850s, when Marx began his critique of capitalism. After three years of plotting, barricades, fiery journalism, and unremitting revolutionary excitement during 1848–50, Marx found himself stranded in decidedly unrevolutionary London, surrounded by the disappointments of exile and defeat, suffering the hardships of penury, ill health, and family loss.
The Rise of Labor Movements
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

The 1860s sowed the seeds of organization. Some party foundations coalesced from earlier initiatives, as in Germany, where the SPD’s two tributaries dated from 1863. Others anticipated things to come, as in Britain and the tsarist empire, where stronger foundations came only around 1900. Others still led a marginal or semiclandestine existence before 1914, as in Iberia, the Balkans, and most of eastern Europe. But these were all social democratic parties, distinct from other strands of the Left, like anarchist or syndicalist movements, radical democratic parties, peasant parties, or the populist Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia (see table 4.1). They were parties aligning themselves with the Second International formed in 1889, consciously identifying with the legacy of Karl Marx.
Breaking the Mold of Socialism
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

Russian extremes created chances for the Left that weren’t available elsewhere in Europe. Some wartime circumstances were generic—notably, the labor movement’s incorporation via patriotism, bringing gains for leaders but hardships for the rank and file. But in other ways, Russian circumstances were least like the others, because the thinness of civil society left Russia exceptionally vulnerable to generalized breakdown, which the West’s more developed institutional resources forestalled.
Remolding Militancy
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

I left the international initiatives of European socialism in early 1917, stymied in Stockholm. The northern neutrals vainly confronted the anti Germanism of the British, French, and Belgian socialists, hoping to revive the pre-1914 Second International. The Zimmerwald movement looked for a renewal of revolutionary politics but without breaking irrevocably with the past. Both were focused on Russia, where the Left’s revolutionary prestige had increasingly become the standard.
Stalinism And Western Marxism
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

During 1917–21, the left became permanently split between those who joined the Third International and those who did not. For Communists, Soviet events played an ever more decisive part, proceeding from the power struggle surrounding Lenin’s illness and death in 1923–24. The factional maneuvering—which first isolated Trotsky and then broke the authority of Kamenev and Zinoviev, while relentlessly concentrating power around Stalin—profoundly influenced how Communism elsewhere would be shaped. In particular, Stalin produced the new thesis of “Socialism in One Country,” which claimed, for the first time, that socialism could be built without revolution in the West. This line was taken up by others, hardening into a system within the year.
Fascism and Popular Front
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: November 2023

By 1930 the left’s prospects were bleak. Despite apocalyptic wagers on the world crash, out-and-out revolutionaries remained minorities in their national movements, even, as in the KPD, where they enjoyed mass support. Socialist parties were further from power than ever, while even the scaled-down hopes authorized by the post1918 settlements wore thin.
"The Inherent Property of Liberty"
Authors: Jones Howard
Published: November 2023

The first round of the abolitionists' struggle in the Amistad case took place in the United States Circuit Court meeting in Connecticut. The blacks' attorneys hoped to convince the presiding judges, Associate Justice Smith Thompson from the United States Supreme Court and Andrew T. Judson from the district court, that the circuit court lacked jurisdiction in a case where natural law was the guiding principle and that there was nothing to warrant a grand-jury indictment for either murder or piracy. They first tried to secure a separate writ of habeas corpus for the three girls; this would force the prosecution to bring formal charges against them, or see the court excuse them from appearing as witnesses in the case. Their release would result in a courtroom confrontation between the black captives, who had attracted considerable public favor, and the two Spaniards, who had not. Furthermore, the writ would serve as a license to bring into debate the entire question of human rights and property rights pertaining to slavery. If the abolitionists could show that there was no legal basis for holding the youths, they would expand the argument to include the other blacks. If they could establish that the captives were human beings and not property, no one could have property or salvage claims on them and the blacks could go free. Most important, the abolitionists could exert pressure on the Van Buren administration to change its stand on the issue.
"A National Matter"
Authors: Jones Howard
Published: November 2023

The legal process begun by the abolitionists in Hartford now entered its second phase: the battle in the district court over whether the Amistad blacks were slaves and therefore the property of Ruiz and Monies. If it could be established that the blacks were not property, both Lieutenant Gedney and the United States marshal in Connecticut would have acted illegally and the Spaniards would have no legitimate claims. To undermine the property argument, the abolitionists would have to establish that the captives, by Spanish laws and treaties, were not slaves. They could not argue against human bondage on the basis of its alleged immorality; Judge Thompson had made that clear. They now intended to make the case a national concern and then seek changes through the legal system that would undermine slavery and promote their ideals.
"The Eternal Principles of Justice"
Authors: Jones Howard
Published: November 2023

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland had gained a reputation for protecting national supremacy while also safeguarding the rights of states, individuals, and property. These stances were not always compatible and necessitated compromise decisions. But a compromise in the Amistad case could only leave the captives as casualties and the abolitionists' objectives unfulfilled. The abolitionists feared that the justices would opt to protect national supremacy and decide against the blacks. The easiest way out of the morass, a way that would affirm the administration's position without challenging the states' rights position, would be to award the blacks to the Spanish minister. If unity depended upon keeping arguments over slavery to a minimum, the Court would surely prefer that course.
The Passenger Train Creates Modern America
Authors: Martin Albro
Published: November 2023

The depopulation of the countryside by the industrial revolution, which so troubled the English, did not take place in the United States, although the character of the population changed dramatically. A growing tendency for farm boys (and more and more girls) to forsake the land for the rising urban centers was apparent by the turn of the century, and it alarmed a few old-timers like James J. Hill, who saw in it a fatuous belief on the part of young people that they could “live without working.” But most Americans were proud of the transformation of villages into towns and towns into ambitious cities—a trend that would last as long as the railroad train was the chief mode of intercity transportation. Most people saw in such trends nothing less than the march of progress across what had been, within the memory of many still living in 1920, an empty, inviting landscape. The passenger train, which so many historians have seen as “knitting together” localities into a national whole, did no such thing. It rather created those local and regional centers, in the process of creating a highly vertebrate nation that by the early twentieth century had achieved an efficiency and trustworthiness of travel, transport, and communication that would not survive the emergence of the automobile and its suburbs. Reflecting upon the fact that it was the railroads that created the heavy industry that made universal ownership of cars possible, we can see how the passenger train contained the seeds of its own destruction. In its day, however, which lasted almost a century, the train was as totally in command of national mobility as the car has been since.
From Entrepreneurs to Managers: The Founding Years
Authors: Martin Albro
Published: November 2023

A railroad is an expensive, complex machine, spread out over vaster distances than one mind can comprehend at a single moment, programmed to do many things in many different places, at the direction of many different people. It either works right, or it hardly works at all, and when it does not it can be disastrous for both human life and property. That railroad leaders worked out the knotty problems of human relations which this proposition implies, however slowly and painfully, and not without some grand failures, is one of the most significant contributions of the railroad to the evolution of American social institutions.
It’s All Politics!
Authors: Martin Albro
Published: November 2023

The old century went out with a bang, after all. It really ended in 1897, when the inauguration of William McKinley as president of the United States—after an unpleasant dalliance with the Democrats under Grover Cleveland—resumed the nearly unbroken tradition of Republican presidents that had begun with Abraham Lincoln. A fast-growing America, welcoming each year thousands of sturdy, intelligent, industrious immigrants to her shores, went back to work with gusto, and soon a wave of prosperity and self-renewing optimism swept through the land. William Jennings Bryan spoke Populist cant out of one side of his mouth as he rode the campaign trail in 1896, but a majority preferred the philosophy of McKinley’s front-porch campaign, which emphasized more for everybody. The Republican view of human nature won the day. The middle class, which included the skilled workers and affluent farmers (in both cases they were the ones who voted) wanted their youthful industries and expanding farm frontiers protected by the tariff and they wanted “good hard mun,” as one Swede put it, in the form of the honest gold dollar.
Geography
Authors: Mendelsohn Ezra
Published: November 2023

Having named the main varieties of modern Jewish politics, my next task is to give them a local habitation, that is, to make the connection between politics and geography. Jewish politics was international in character. How was it influenced by the very different surroundings in which it operated? Which environments, both general and Jewish, were most supportive of which sorts of Jewish politics? Where were the ideal environments, the core areas of the major Jewish political camps located? How did the character of a given Jewish political orientation differ from one country to another? Where, for example, is one most likely to find a strong Jewish integrationist movement? What was the core area ofJewish nationalism, of Orthodoxy, of the Jewish left? Why was Polish Zionism so different from American Zionism?
Dynamics
Authors: Mendelsohn Ezra
Published: November 2023

One way to study the balance of power among the various schools of Jewish politics is to employ the case study method. I propose in this chapter to consider the dynamics of Jewish politics in the two largest and most important Jewish communities in what was once called the “free world,” those in Poland and the United States.
Conclusions: Then and Now
Authors: Mendelsohn Ezra
Published: November 2023

During the more than fifty years since the beginning of World War II the Jewish world and Jewish politics have undergone a sea change. Two dramatic and unexpected events, one horrific, the other miraculous (at least in the eyes of many Jews) have much to do with this change. I refer, of course, to the Holocaust and to the establishment of the Jewish state. The Nazis and their local allies destroyed forever the Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation that had inhabited Poland, Romania, parts of Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states. As a result several pieces fell out of the Jewish political puzzle. Those political movements based exclusively or largely on this nation were doomed. As I have already pointed out, Yiddish-oriented Diaspora nationalism, championed by the Bund, the Folkists, and the Zionists of Eastern Europe, was already a doctrine in decline before the war. It could not survive the war, and is today only a memory. The Bund itself—of all the major East European Jewish political parties the one most closely linked to doikeyt (hereness), to the Yiddish-speaking East European “masses,”—was shattered forever.
The Armed Forces Draft Baseball
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

America entered the war in April, 1917, woefully unprepared to engage in such a formidable undertaking. The Army was pitifully small. The previous year it had been increased, but only to less than a quarter million. Conscription seemed essential, for entrance into the war necessitated mobilization of a vast force of millions. A draft was undertaken with some trepidation, however, in view of memory of the Civil War draft riots. But this time conscription, conducted on a much fairer basis, proceeded without any serious opposition. Even so, poor physical condition caused rejection of about 35 percent of those registered.*
The Armed Forces After World War I
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

The signing of the armistice left about 1,800,000 men longing to return home. Manifestly, they could not all be transported back to the States at once, so to keep the troops occupied while they awaited passage home, General Pershing resorted to an intensive program of military instruction, drill, and busywork. As a result the men became bored, disgruntled and embittered to the point that in some parts of France mutiny broke out. to ease the situation, Pershing substituted a program of athletics and amusements, a change of policy that had a palliative impact. As Stars and Stripes stated in June of 1919, after the armistice baseball and other sports “proved a boon to the Yanks,”; diverting the soldiers’ minds at a time when “the call of home was strong”
Women touch All the Bases
Authors: Mills Dorothy Seymour , Seymour Harold
Published: November 2023

in the pre-World War I years of the twentieth century women’s passivity continued to fade. Changes in women’s status made slow headway in the face of tenacious prejudices and practices, but old attitudes steadily lost force and credence. The plainest sign of women’s growing self-determination was the enlarging scale on which they participated in the burgeoning, swirling economic life outside the home. From about 20 percent of the work force in 1900, by 1910 the percentage of women working had risen above 25. After 1910 women also became increasingly prominent in white collar jobs. A 1913 report revealed widening opportunities for them in schools, businesses, hospitals, publishing firms, libraries, department stores, and government service.
Politics and the Social Milieu
Authors: Stampp Kenneth M
Published: November 2023

Early in 1857, amid the optimistic forecasts of northern conservatives, Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, the militant antislavery editor of the Republican Washington National Era, voiced a sharp dissent. After the recent exciting campaign he thought it natural that people should long for a respite from political agitation. But he cautioned them not to expect the present calm to be more than a lull in a political storm whose end was not in sight. “The well-organized Slave Interest has elected its President,” he warned, and Buchanan, a veteran politician, could not be expected to “falsify the record of his life.
The President, the Chief Justice, and a Slave Named Scott
Authors: Stampp Kenneth M
Published: November 2023

Unfortunately, Buchanan’s White House entourage and official advisers included no diarists to record, day by day, his domestic life, personal relationships, and shifting moods, or to discuss and interpret the formal business transacted at Cabinet meetings, his conferences with individual department heads, and the complex manner in which policies evolved during his presidential years. The voluminous correspondence of the President and some of those close to him, notably Black and Cobb, the facts and rumors served up by friendly and unfriendly reporters, and the recollections, more or less reliable, of his associates tell us much about life behind the White House doors.
Politics as Tragedy: Buchanan’s Decision
Authors: Stampp Kenneth M
Published: November 2023

In the late autumn of 1857, news of the new crisis in Kansas filled the columns of the press, troubled state and national politicians, and seemed to arouse strong feelings among much of the electorate. Kansas deserved the public attention it received, for the manner in which Congress and the administration dealt with the Lecompton issue ultimately would affect the lives of everyone. Yet, at that time, many regarded this political controversy as less important than various con current events that touched their lives more immediately and directly.
“There Is Meat Ye Know Not Of” Feeding a Family
Authors: Ross Ellen
Published: November 2023

In the chronically hungry London population, providing meals was, more than any other kind of maternal activity, the source of the enormous positive charge that the word muvver and its cognates (mammy, mam, mum) carried in cockney dialect. Much of the “awesome responsibility” of motherhood in the years before World War I was played out around a woman’s shopping for and preparing food on sums of money over which she had little control.1 Meals signified maternal servic the safety and comfort it brought-and also, if the food was served and eaten properly, respectability for everyone at the table. Food was obviously also a matter of life or death, for starvation deaths continued to be a regular occurrence even in the kinder years after I 870.
“What Is Fated Must Be” Having Babies
Authors: Ross Ellen
Published: November 2023

Music-hall jocularity about being “in a family way,” the sing-song of children’s street chants, and even women’s matter-of-fact stories of the material strains of pregnancy represent the dominant “mustn’t grumble” version of continual maternity. In the 1910s and 1920s, though, birth control and maternal health advocates began to ask women new questions about gynecological health, about sex, and about “wanting” babies. When they did, they heard a less-told story of childbearing-of fear, pain, and resentment.
“The Value of Babies”Transforming Motherhood, 1900-1918
Authors: Ross Ellen
Published: November 2023

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, London working-class mothers were the objects of an unprecedented attempt by a cluster of governmental bodies and private associations to transform the way in which they cared for their infants and children. Collectively, these efforts comprise what contemporaries called the Infant Welfare movement. Some of these programs offered mothers help, some threats. Some began with sympathy and admiration for London’s “working women”; others accused them of ignorant, even vicious, child care practices. But they all added up to a reconfiguration of their motherhood. Women of the middle classes had much earlier embraced child nurturing as a private identity and a public duty. The Infant Welfare reformers sought to generate this consciousness in the majority of British women who were poor and who regarded material survival and daily household management as more central charges than the motherly supervision of their children’s development. Although much maternal passion and interest went into keeping the children fed and well, and mothers’ relationships with their children could be intimate and satisfying, women’s principal identity during this period remained that of managers of their households rather than nurturers of their children. The “maternalist” Infant Welfare reformers, on the other hand, thought that mothering as child nurture should require new kinds of work, some of it defined by doctors, and should occupy a more central position in an adult woman’s identity.
From the Turkish Wars to the Revolutions of 1848: An Early History
Authors: Deak Istvan
Published: November 2023

The European standing armies originated from such motley forces as feudal levies, mercenary companies, town and peasant militias, and princely body guards, none of which was permanent in character. The levies and militias went home, the mercenaries turned into bandits, the standing armies of the Renaissance princes had to be disbanded because of lack of money as well as the unwillingness of noble estates to tolerate their presence. The Habsburg possessions were no exception to this rule; they even provided a perfect example of reckless princely ambition, estate hostility, and desperate shortage of funds. The sixteenth-century Habsburgs were obliged to dissipate their energies in fighting simultaneously against the Ottomans, the French, the German Protestant princes, the unruly nobles in their own domains, and often their own troops.
Pensioners, Widows, and Orphans
Authors: Deak Istvan
Published: November 2023

If life in active service was not easy, life in retirement could be even harder, although it is true that the officers’ pension system improved considerably between the 1850s and 1914.
The Gunfighter: The Reality Behind the Myth
Authors: Brown Richard Maxwell
Published: November 2023

President Eisenhower is no isolated example, for Americans have always been fascinated by fiction and film purveying the image of Western gunfighters like Wild Bill Hickok. (In an aside to his audience in the 1953 speech, Ike chided those who might have been unfamiliar with Wild Bill: “If you don ‘t know about him, read your Westerns more.”)1 Yet historians and critics have tended to denigrate the significance of Western gunfighters, con tending that there were relatively few of them and that they were unimportant in real historical terms. This chapter departs from the common wisdom of scholars and holds instead that there were a great many gunfighters-not just a few famous ones like Hickok-and that the noted (as well as other) gunfighters were important in objective terms, not merely for their powerful impact on the American imagination.
The Persistence of No Duty to Retreat: Crime, Law, and Society in America from the 1850s to the Present
Authors: Brown Richard Maxwell
Published: November 2023

On December 22, 1984, on a Manhattan subway train, a slight electronics specialist bearing some resemblance to Woody Allen shot four young blacks in what was a no-duty-to-retreat confron station. The event was front-page news in the next day ‘s Sunday New York Times and soon became not just a New York but a national media sensation. The massive show of support for Bern hard H. Goetz, the young white man who fired the shots and whom the media soon labeled the “subway vigilante,” was the most significant aspect of the episode, which attracted strong public interest for three months, a relatively long period in a media-sated nation. The case generated heavy newspaper reporting, national newsmagazine cover stories, featured attention by the major television networks, a congressional hearing, and statements by the president, the governor of New York, and the mayor of New York City. More than ten months later, the occasional stories about the aftermath of the Goetz episode were relegated to the inside pages, and the public had largely forgotten the whole thing. Yet the case was one of those news events From the Industrial Society of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century to the Information Society of our own time, the factor of values has been crucial in regard to American violence and crime.
Introduction “the shiniest fish th at ever came out of the sea”
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, leaders of the victors had little sense of where they now stood. At first, it was unclear if new quarrels among the allies were transitory or the first round of a new conflict. It became clear soon enough. With the United States armed with nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union about to develop its own, with European empires crumbling and sharp disputes erupting in Iran, Greece, and Germany, tensions between east and west worsened. By 1950, armies again fired on one another, in Asia, thousands of miles from Washington and Moscow. The cold war was well under way, to last nearly a half century.
The inner and outer acheson
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Acheson’s most conspicuous personal qualities—intellectual brilliance, moral courage, and elegant style—usually served him well as secretary of state, but not always, for these properties are not the norm in any society, let alone a popular democracy, where they are as likely to be resented as much as admired. By 1949, Acheson had buffed these qualities to such a high gleam, they bordered on the prodigious, and they often stirred indignation. The fact is, his personality was so glaring, it is nearly impossible to imagine his being appointed to high office in our own times. In his time, he had offended, or overpowered, enough people to guarantee at least some tension in his confirmation hearings.
Other early encounters with asia and the middle east
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

During the Truman administration, a great deal of drama occurred in China and Korea, both of which officials first approached with little understanding. With the exception of Japan, this was even more the case elsewhere in Asia and certainly so in the Middle East, where American diplomacy before 1945 was close to virginal. Lack of experience in these areas reflected limited prewar conceptions of America’s international interests, views challenged by World War II and its aftermath. Equally important in causing Americans to approach much of Asia and all the Middle East with uncertainty was Britain’s traditionally leading role in these areas. But as London’s postwar decline became evident, Washington moved into its place, if at first with little grace.
Words: nsc-68 , public opinion, and total diplomacy
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Usually when the two men disagreed on policy, Dean Acheson either quietly submitted to President Truman’s wishes or worked hard to change his mind through persuasion and conversation, sometimes extended over many months. There were exceptions, however. At times, especially with respect to China, Truman took preemptive actions that did not necessarily reverse Acheson’s goals but sharply restricted his ability to reach them. As we will see later, the president also worked behind Acheson’s back in an ill-fated effort to overthrow the government of Guatemala.
Testing ground—korea
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

“Never has fate been secreted in so unlikely a receptacle as Korea appeared to be in 1943 in Cairo, or in 1945 at the Japanese surrender,” Dean Acheson said in 1954. Viewing even that as “an understatement,” he expressed wonder “that so much of the fate of the rest of the world was going to arise out of this place.”1 At the end of the war against Japan, U.S. and Soviet armies moved into Korea, the former below and the latter above the 38th parallel, an abstract line that would critically intersect with Acheson’s career. The first Korean War, which began with North Korean tanks rolling over the parallel, caused basic changes in U.S. cold war policies. In the second Korean War, U.S. forces threw back the invaders and headed north, above the 38th parallel. The third, which started with Chinese forces smashing the U.S. army and marines above the parallel, plunged the administration into crisis, stirred noxious new effusions of McCarthyism, and put Acheson’s leadership powers to the test. For a year, he labored to prevent the crisis from derailing larger strategic goals. He also seized the occasion to establish new situations of strength by arming NATO and converting NSC-68’s prescriptions to realities. Setbacks lay ahead, but, within the administration, no one seriously contested his foreign policy supremacy after June 1950.
Acceler action from a running start
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Pedal to the Metal Everything changed after Korea. This is a hoary interpretive truism. The most prominent example usually given is Washington’s hip-deep, first immersion in the Big Muddy of Indochina. The U.S. government brought a new urgency to the cold war. It was stimulated to rearm Germany. It supplanted economic with military aid, launched a large buildup of nuclear and conventional forces, enrolled Turkey and Greece in NATO, intensified economic warfare against its foes, shelved hopes for normal relations with China, and scurried to complete a peace treaty with Japan. Soon it made defense commitments to South Korea, Formosa, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. It pressed cold war views on hemispheric governments and moved toward a military alliance with Pakistan. It became “increasingly necessary,” wrote the state department’s Jack McFall, to “pursue the cold war on all fronts.
Razor edge sensibilities: anzus and india
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Accommodating Kangaroos and Kiwi The drive to make peace with Japan reflected the sole Asian priority Acheson took on willingly and with conviction. He was also an early proponent of a significant American role in South Korea, of course, but with no premonitions of how events there would dominate U.S. foreign policy. His preference would have been to pursue a fundamentally passive approach to China and Formosa. The fateful plunge into Indochina, as we have just seen, resulted partly from the growing Asian crisis but stemmed mainly from views of France’s role in Europe, not Southeast Asia, and secondarily from his concern for the future economic development of Japan. With issues related to foreign aid dominating, the United States tried to accommodate Indonesian ruler Sukarno’s nationalism while keeping him out of the communist camp, but Acheson mostly oversaw rather than conducted that diplomacy.
Falling between two stools: the middle east, north africa, and africa
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

Sources of Discontent At first, the United States in the early cold war period preferred avoiding any major Middle Eastern involvement, but as time passed, Washington decided it wanted the area on its side in the contest against the Soviet Union. Americans, therefore, would have to do what they could to resolve area disputes between Arabs and Israelis, between the British and Egyptians, and between the British again and Iranians.
Apples of discord: germany and the soviet union, 1952
Authors: Beisner Robert L
Published: November 2023

A “Spoiling Operation”

Many early cold war events might have happened differently, and leaders might have made different decisions. What if FDR had not died in 1945? What if U.S. armies in 1950 had called a halt at the 38th parallel in Korea? And what would have happened if the western powers had given a true test to the Soviet diplomatic proposals on Germany in March 1952 instead of deflecting them? Did they abort a chance to remove Germany as the center of east-west conflict? Did their aversion to a hazardous negotiation consign East Germans to forty more years of repression? Might a different course have enhanced U.S. security? Would the next decades have produced a more prosperous and democratic Europe? Even if we could know what Josef Stalin’s intentions were, we could not definitively answer these questions, but available evidence strongly indicates that a comprehensive negotiation on Germany in 1952 would have ended in failure. Stalin was not serious, as soon became clear. And in 1955 Moscow itself, though technically holding its offer open, categorically repudiated the very idea of German reunification proposed in 1952.
Growth Liberalism Comes a Cropper, 1968
Authors: Collins Robert M
Published: November 2023

The ideology driving the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies was an amalgam of growth economics and government activism at home and abroad. Growth liberalism sought to update the nation’s still potent reform tradition for the era of affluence, influence, and optimism well captured in Henry Luce’s prescient conceit, the “American Century.” But, by the late 1960s, growth liberalism’s combination of growth-inducing tax cuts, an escalating war in Vietnam, and increased social spending at home had overstrained economic institutions and capabilities. The economic crisis that resulted in 1968 provided irrefutable proof of that strain and figured prominently in the decisions to cap U.S. escalation in Vietnam and rein in the Great Society initiatives at the top of LBJs presidential agenda. Those decisions—and the problems that elicited them—left growth liberalism in disarray and the American Century in retreat.
Richard Nixon’s Whig Growthmanship
Authors: Collins Robert M
Published: November 2023

The eclipse of growth liberalism signaled the end of both the distinctive era of the 1960s and America’s postwar boom. The economic stagnation, stubborn inflation, and widespread pessimism that marked the 1970s contrasted sharply with the prosperity and confidence of the earlier postwar years. The loss of optimism was manifested in a growing distrust of established institutions and a widespread loss of faith in the curative powers of economic growth.1 The uncertainty and ambivalence about growth that had earlier appeared as an undercurrent took on a new scope and stridency in the 1970s, causing many to doubt whether future growth was either possible or desirable.
The Retreat from Growth in the 1970s
Authors: Collins Robert M
Published: November 2023

In politics as in everyday life, timing is all-important. In launching a moral crusade based on economic growth and competition in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon ran afoul of some of the most powerful trends of the day: His efforts coincided with the most vigorous challenge to growth of the entire postwar period. As we have seen, growth had never been an exclusive goal and had never been wholly immune from criticism.

Critics of growth prospered even in the heyday of growthmanship. When John Kenneth Galbraith in the late 1950s described how “the paramount position of production” was upsetting the desired balance of the U.S. economy as between public and private goods and services, his book The Affluent Society rose to second place on the New York Times best-seller list and his name became a byword among the cosmopolitans who shared his disdain for what he memorably labeled “the conventional wisdom.” Nevertheless, Galbraith had claimed (in his inimitable self-effacing way) that his was a singular, prophetic voice, and had maintained that in bravely attacking “the cult of production” he was challenging “a phenomenon … still of heroic proportions.”1 But by the end of Nixon’s first term, growth liberalism was in tatters and its Whiggish epigone was in the process of self-destruction.