In this course, we will explore the struggles and triumph "inbetween peoples" after Reconstruction and before WWII.
Typhoid Mary highlights both social failure and medical progress as part of the same tale. Mary Mallon’s story portrays ethnic prejudices taking on a life in the law, but it also discusses the amazing accomplishment of bacteriology.
It was simply too easy: Mary Mallon played into the stereotypes that Americans held for Irish immigrants. The [...]
While reading Typhoid Mary I couldn’t help but ask myself–would a middle or upper class woman have been forced into isolation and stigmatized in such a way as Mary had been? Mary was isolated from everyone and almost treated like she was a disease rather than a person. When Mary was in court, Dr. Fred [...]
Because there is so much material in the first three chapters of Bederman’s “Manliness and Civilization,” I choose to focus on that which was the most compelling to me, Ida B. Wells’ work, in conjunction with Chapter One’s discussion about the Columbian Exposition.
I must say that I was particularly taken aback by the many journalistic [...]
Where to start?! Bederman puts a lot on the table in these first three chapters. Bederman uses Ida B. Wells and G. Stanley Hall to illustrate her assertions about societal discourses of manliness in the first chapter.
I cannot help but feel flattered that this book brings together a few aspects of my American studies career [...]
Just as Roediger and Barrett argued in their article “In-between Peoples: Race, Nationality and “New-Immigrant” Working Class,” concrete definitions of race are not stable in early 20th century America. Similarly, in “Manliness and Civilization,” author Gail Bederman claims that manhood is an equally unstable term in America in the early 20th century. As [...]
Reading Roediger in light of Bederman allowed me to see where Jack Johnson’s story fit into American society as a whole. The Chinese men were among the first to enter into interracial marriages because strict laws prohibited mass immigration of Chinese women. These Chinese men had relationships with African Americans, Poles and other immigrants. [...]
America has long been described as a melting pot of various cultures and ethnicities. An integral part of the American identity is the idea that America is a country of immigrants. As the French writer Crevecoeur once described America, the country he adopted as his homeland, “Here individuals of all nations are melted [...]
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
-Thomas Jefferson
This statement from the Declaration of Independence was intended to be one of the defining characteristics of the United States of America. Or was it? Mr. Jefferson himself was a slave-owner, as were many of his contemporaries. He penned those careful [...]
Roediger and Ngai are investigating the changing nature of the process of racialization, or racial categorization, in American history. They prove that “race” in America during the 19th and 20th centuries was anything but concrete; rather, it was an ever-changing concept, sometimes it was based on (supposedly) scientific explanations, other times based on understandings that [...]
At the turn of the 20th century, “Americans” were in desperate need to categorize people based on race and ethnicity. They wished to protect and maintain the purity of the nation by instituting quotas that would limit the number of immigrants entering the country while also increasing the percentage of natives. Americans and immigrants [...]