The Americanization Syndrome

The Americanization Syndrome PDF Author: Robert A. Carlson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000777340
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The Americanization Syndrome (1987) examines the historical role of education in the process of ‘Americanization’. It argues that beginning with seventeenth century puritan leaders such as John Winthrop and Cotton Maher, the pattern of American education has been not the promotion of a blend of different cultures but the indoctrination of norms of belief of religion, politics and economics and an explicit discouragement of cultural variety. It traces the political role of education at key junctures of American history – after Independence, in the reconstruction of the South after the Civil War, in the establishment of settlement houses and the use of scientific management techniques by employers. The author focuses on the period 1900–1925 when new waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe led to a new drive for orthodoxy.

The Americanization Syndrome

The Americanization Syndrome PDF Author: Robert A. Carlson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000777340
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Americanization Syndrome (1987) examines the historical role of education in the process of ‘Americanization’. It argues that beginning with seventeenth century puritan leaders such as John Winthrop and Cotton Maher, the pattern of American education has been not the promotion of a blend of different cultures but the indoctrination of norms of belief of religion, politics and economics and an explicit discouragement of cultural variety. It traces the political role of education at key junctures of American history – after Independence, in the reconstruction of the South after the Civil War, in the establishment of settlement houses and the use of scientific management techniques by employers. The author focuses on the period 1900–1925 when new waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe led to a new drive for orthodoxy.

Making Americans

Making Americans PDF Author: Desmond S. King
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039629
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
In the nineteenth century, virtually anyone could get into the United States. But by the 1920s, U.S. immigration policy had become a finely filtered regime of selection. Desmond King looks at this dramatic shift, and the debates behind it, for what they reveal about the construction of an American identity. Specifically, the debates in the three decades leading up to 1929 were conceived in terms of desirable versus undesirable immigrants. This not only cemented judgments about specific European groups but reinforced prevailing biases against groups already present in the United States, particularly African Americans, whose inferior status and second-class citizenship--enshrined in Jim Crow laws and embedded in pseudo-scientific arguments about racial classifications--appear to have been consolidated in these decades. Although the values of different groups have always been recognized in the United States, King gives the most thorough account yet of how eugenic arguments were used to establish barriers and to favor an Anglo-Saxon conception of American identity, rejecting claims of other traditions. Thus the immigration controversy emerges here as a significant precursor to recent multicultural debates. Making Americans shows how the choices made about immigration policy in the 1920s played a fundamental role in shaping democracy and ideas about group rights in America.

True Faith and Allegiance

True Faith and Allegiance PDF Author: Noah Pickus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826918
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
True Faith and Allegiance is a provocative account of nationalism and the politics of turning immigrants into citizens and Americans. Noah Pickus offers an alternative to the wild swings between emotionally fraught positions on immigration and citizenship of the past two decades. Drawing on political theory, history, and law, he argues for a renewed civic nationalism that melds principles and peoplehood. This tradition of civic nationalism held sway at America's founding and in the Progressive Era. Pickus explores how, from James Madison to Teddy Roosevelt, its proponents sought to combine reason and reverence and to balance inclusion and exclusion. He takes us through controversies over citizenship for blacks and the rights of aliens at the nation's founding, examines the interplay of ideas and institutions in the Americanization movement in the 1910s and 1920s, and charts how both left and right promoted a policy of neglect toward immigrants and toward citizenship in the second half of the twentieth century. True Faith and Allegiance shows that contemporary debates over a range of immigration and citizenship policies cannot be resolved by appeals to fixed notions of creed or culture, but require a supple civic nationalism that bridges the gap between immigrants' needs and American principles and practices. It is critical reading for scholars, policy makers, and all who care about immigrants and about America.

Making the Bible Modern

Making the Bible Modern PDF Author: Penny Schine Gold
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724983
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The Bible has played a critical role in the story of Judaism, modernity, and identity. Penny Schine Gold examines the arena of children's education and the role of the Bible in the reshaping of Jewish identity, especially in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, when a second generation of Eastern European Jews engaged the task of Americanizing Jewish culture, religion, and institutions. Professional Jewish educators based in the Reform movement undertook a multifaceted agenda for the Bible in America: to modernize it, harmonize it with American values, and move it to the center of the religious school curriculum. Through public schooling, the children of Jewish immigrants brought America home; it was up to the adults to fashion a Judaism that their children could take back out into America. Because of its historic role in the development of Judaism and its cultural significance in American life, Gold finds, the Bible provided Jews with vital links to both the past and the present. The ancient sacred text of the Bible, transformed into highly abridged and amended "Bible tales," was brought into service as a bridge between tradition and modernity.Gold analyzes these American developments with reference to the intellectual history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, innovations in public schooling and social theory, Protestant religious education, and later versions of children's Bibles in the United States and Israel. She shows that these seemingly simple children's books are complex markers of the pressing concerns of Jews in the modern world.

Willa Cather in Context

Willa Cather in Context PDF Author: G. Reynolds
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023037624X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Drawing on a range of material from archives in the USA and from a variety of primary historical sources, this study places Cather's major fiction in its cultural context. Reynolds explores 'progressivism', 'primitivism' and 'Americanization' in such novels as My Antonia and O Pioneers! Willa Cather in Context develops interdisciplinary readings of this important Nebraskan novelist, placing her as a writer actively engaged with many of the key debates of early twentieth-century America, from immigration to evolutionary theory.

Indian Blues

Indian Blues PDF Author: John W. Troutman
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806150025
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, the U.S. government sought to control practices of music on reservations and in Indian boarding schools. At the same time, Native singers, dancers, and musicians created new opportunities through musical performance to resist and manipulate those same policy initiatives. Why did the practice of music generate fear among government officials and opportunity for Native peoples? In this innovative study, John W. Troutman explores the politics of music at the turn of the twentieth century in three spheres: reservations, off-reservation boarding schools, and public venues such as concert halls and Chautauqua circuits. On their reservations, the Lakotas manipulated concepts of U.S. citizenship and patriotism to reinvigorate and adapt social dances, even while the federal government stepped up efforts to suppress them. At Carlisle Indian School, teachers and bandmasters taught music in hopes of imposing their “civilization” agenda, but students made their own meaning of their music. Finally, many former students, armed with saxophones, violins, or operatic vocal training, formed their own “all-Indian” and tribal bands and quartets and traversed the country, engaging the market economy and federal Indian policy initiatives on their own terms. While recent scholarship has offered new insights into the experiences of “show Indians” and evolving powwow traditions, Indian Blues is the first book to explore the polyphony of Native musical practices and their relationship to federal Indian policy in this important period of American Indian history.

Songs of Ourselves

Songs of Ourselves PDF Author: Joan Shelley Rubin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674035127
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Listen to a short interview with Joan Shelley RubinHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane In the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp outings, and civic affairs. As they did so, they invested poems--and the figure of the poet--with the beliefs, values, and emotions that they experienced in those settings. Reciting a poem together with others joined the individual to the community in a special and memorable way. In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Joan Shelley Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words. Emphasizing the cultural circumstances that influenced the production and reception of poets and poetry in this country, Rubin recovers the experiences of ordinary people reading poems in public places. We see the recent immigrant seeking acceptance, the schoolchild eager to be integrated into the class, the mourner sharing grief at a funeral, the grandparent trying to bridge the generation gap--all instances of readers remaking texts to meet social and personal needs. Preserving the moral, romantic, and sentimental legacies of the nineteenth century, the act of reading poems offered cultural continuity, spiritual comfort, and pleasure. Songs of Ourselves is a unique history of literary texts as lived experience. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.

Sweet Greeks

Sweet Greeks PDF Author: Ann Flesor Beck
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052285
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Gus Flesor came to the United States from Greece in 1901. His journey led him to Tuscola, Illinois, where he learned the confectioner's trade and opened a business that still stands on Main Street. Sweet Greeks sets the story of Gus Flesor's life as an immigrant in a small town within the larger history of Greek migration to the Midwest. Ann Flesor Beck's charming personal account recreates the atmosphere of her grandfather's candy kitchen with its odors of chocolate and popcorn and the comings-and-goings of family members. "The Store" represented success while anchoring the business district of Gus's chosen home. It also embodied the Midwest émigré experience of chain migration, immigrant networking, resistance and outright threats by local townspeople, food-related entrepreneurship, and tensions over whether later generations would take over the business. An engaging blend of family memoir and Midwest history, Sweet Greeks tells how Greeks became candy makers to the nation, one shop at a time.

Immigration and Education

Immigration and Education PDF Author: David Wood Stewart
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780669245806
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The level of immigration to the United States has never been higher, with more than a million immigrants, legal and illegal, entering every year. This massive, new immigration, dominated by people from Latin America and Asia, is placing unique demands upon schools, colleges, vocational training centers, and adult education agencies. David Stewart illustrates that the root of these difficulties lies in the absence of coordination between the federal government's immigration policy and related education policies at the federal, state, and local levels.

Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens

Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens PDF Author: Kathleen Kennedy
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253028493
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
A concise and highly readable study of women’s influence on a crucial era in American political and cultural history. Kathleen Kennedy’s unique study explores the arrests, trials, and defenses of women charged under the Wartime Emergency Laws passed soon after the US entered World War I. These women, often members of the political left, whose anti-war or pro-labor activity brought them to the attention of federal officials, made up ten percent of the approximately two thousand Federal Espionage cases. Their trials became important arenas in which women’s relationships and obligations to national security were contested and defined. Anti-radical politics raised questions about the state’s role in defining motherhood and social reproduction. Kennedy shows that state authorities often defined women’s subversion as a violation of their maternal roles. Yet, with the exception of Kate Richards O’Hare, the women charged with sedition did not define their political behavior within the terms set by maternalism. Instead, they used liberal arguments of equality, justice, and democratic citizenship to argue for their right to speak frankly about American policy. Such claims, while often in opposition to strategies outlined by their defense teams, helped form the framework for modern arguments made in defense of civil liberties.