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American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports

Miriam Reumann

When Alfred Kinsey's massive studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared in 1948 and 1953 respectively, their detailed data spurred an unprecedented ... More

When Alfred Kinsey's massive studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared in 1948 and 1953 respectively, their detailed data spurred an unprecedented public discussion of the nation's sexual practices and ideologies. As they debated what behaviors were normal or average, abnormal or deviant, Cold War Americans also celebrated and scrutinized the state of their nation, relating apparent changes in sexuality to shifts in its political structure, economy, and people. This book employs the studies and the myriad responses they evoked to examine national debates about sexuality, gender, and Americanness after World War II. Focusing on the mutual construction of postwar ideas about national identity and sexual life, it explores the many uses to which these sex surveys were put at a time of extreme anxiety about sexual behavior and its effects on the nation. Looking at real and perceived changes in masculinity, female sexuality, marriage, and homosexuality, the author develops the notion of “American sexual character,” sexual patterns and attitudes that were understood to be uniquely American and to reflect contemporary transformations in politics, social life, gender roles, and culture. She considers how apparent shifts in sexual behavior shaped the nation's workplaces, homes, and families, and how these might be linked to racial and class differences.Less

Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment

Michael Brian Schiffer

Most of us have heard that Benjamin Franklin conducted some kind of electrical experiment with a kite. What few of us realize is that he played a major role in laying the foundations of modern ... More

Most of us have heard that Benjamin Franklin conducted some kind of electrical experiment with a kite. What few of us realize is that he played a major role in laying the foundations of modern electrical science and technology. This book, rich with historical details and anecdotes, brings to life Franklin, the large international network of scientists and inventors in which he played a key role, and their inventions. We learn what these early electrical devices—from lights and motors to musical and medical instruments—looked like, how they worked, and what their utilitarian and symbolic meanings were for those who invented and used them. Against the panorama of life in the eighteenth century, the book tells the story of the very beginnings of our modern electrical world. The earliest electrical technologies were conceived in the laboratory apparatus of physicists; because of their surprising and diverse effects, however, these technologies rapidly made their way into many other communities and activities. The author conducts us from community to community, showing how these technologies worked as they were put to use in public lectures, revolutionary experiments in chemistry and biology, and medical therapy. This story brings to light the arcane and long-forgotten inventions that made way for many modern technologies—including lightning rods (Franklin's invention), cardiac stimulation, xerography, and the internal combustion engine—and conveys the complex relationships among science, technology, and culture.Less

Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650-1800

Ruth Bloch

Stephen Miller (ed.)

This book brings together chapters on the origins of Anglo-American conceptions of gender and morality. It illuminates the overarching theme of this work by addressing a basic historical question: ... More

This book brings together chapters on the origins of Anglo-American conceptions of gender and morality. It illuminates the overarching theme of this work by addressing a basic historical question: Why did the attitudes toward gender and family relations that we now consider traditional values emerge when they did? The book looks deeply into eighteenth-century culture to answer this question, highlighting long-term developments in religion, intellectual history, law, and literature, showing that the eighteenth century was a time of profound transformation for women's roles as wives and mothers, for ideas about sexuality, and for notions of female moral authority. It engages topics from British moral philosophy to colonial laws regarding courtship, and from the popularity of the sentimental novel to the psychology of religious revivalism. These chapters bring a revisionist challenge to both women's studies and cultural studies as they ask us to reconsider the origins of the system of gender relations that has dominated American culture for two hundred years.Less

Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920

David Igler

Few industrial enterprises left a more enduring imprint on the American West than Miller and Lux, a vast meatpacking conglomerate started by two San Francisco butchers in 1858. This book examines how ... More

Few industrial enterprises left a more enduring imprint on the American West than Miller and Lux, a vast meatpacking conglomerate started by two San Francisco butchers in 1858. This book examines how Henry Miller and Charles Lux, two German immigrants, consolidated the West's most extensive land and water rights, swayed legislatures and courts, monopolized western beef markets, and imposed their corporate will on California's natural environment. It uses one case study to illuminate the industrial development and environmental transformation of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. The author examines the broader impact that industrialism—as exemplified by Miller and Lux—had on landscapes and waterscapes, and on human as well as plant and animal life in the West. He also provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller and Lux, from the dispossession of California rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force. The book also covers such topics as land acquisition and reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. Above all, it highlights essential issues that resonate for us today: who holds the right and who has the power to engineer the landscape for market production?Less

Lewis & Clark: Legacies, Memories, and New Perspectives

Kris Fresonke and Irene Bloemraad (eds)

Two centuries after their expedition awoke the nation both to the promise and to the disquiet of the vast territory out west, Lewis and Clark still stir the imagination, and their adventure remains ... More

Two centuries after their expedition awoke the nation both to the promise and to the disquiet of the vast territory out west, Lewis and Clark still stir the imagination, and their adventure remains one of the most celebrated and studied chapters in American history. This volume explores the legacy of Lewis and Clark's momentous journey and, on the occasion of its bicentennial, considers the impact of their westward expedition on American culture. Approaching their subject from many different perspectives—literature, history, women's studies, law, medicine, and environmental history, among others—the book charts shifting attitudes about the explorers and their journals, creating a compelling, finely detailed picture of the “interdisciplinary intrigue” that has always surrounded Lewis and Clark's accomplishment. This book offers insights into ongoing debates over the relationships between settler culture and aboriginal peoples, law and land tenure, manifest destiny and westward expansion, as well as over the character of Sacagawea, the expedition's vision of nature, and the interpretation and preservation of the Lewis and Clark Trail.Less

Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America

Stephen Rice

This book offers a new understanding of class formation in America during the several decades before the Civil War. This was the period in the nation's early industrial development when travel by ... More

This book offers a new understanding of class formation in America during the several decades before the Civil War. This was the period in the nation's early industrial development when travel by steamboat became commonplace, when the railroad altered concepts of space and time, and when Americans experienced the beginnings of factory production. These disorienting changes raised a host of questions about what machinery would accomplish. Would it promote equality or widen the distance between rich and poor? Among the most contentious questions were those focusing on the social consequences of mechanization: while machine enthusiasts touted the extent to which machines would free workers from toil, others pointed out that people needed to tend machines, and that work was fundamentally degrading and exploitative. This book shows how members of a new middle class laid claim to their social authority and minimized the potential for class conflict by playing out class relations on less contested social and technical terrains. As they did so, they defined relations between shopowners—and the overseers, foremen, or managers they employed—and wage workers as analogous to relations between head and hand, between mind and body, and between human and machine. The book presents fascinating discussions of the mechanics' institute movement, the manual labor school movement, popular physiology reformers, and efforts to solve the seemingly intractable problem of steam boiler explosions.Less

Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands

Verónica Castillo-Muñoz

This book documents the story of working-class communities and how they constituted the racially and ethnically diverse landscape of Baja California. Packed with new and transformative stories, the ... More

This book documents the story of working-class communities and how they constituted the racially and ethnically diverse landscape of Baja California. Packed with new and transformative stories, the book examines the interplay of land reform and migratory labor on the peninsula from 1850 to 1954, as governments, foreign investors, and local communities shaped a vibrant and dynamic borderland alongside the booming cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, and Santa Rosalia. Migration and intermarriage between Mexican women and men from Asia, Europe, and the United States transformed Baja California into a multicultural society. Mixed-race families extended across national borders, forging new local communities, labor relations, and border politics.Less

The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900

Philip Ethington

This book challenges the assumptions of several decades of urban history that treat American urban politics as the expression of social-group community experience. Instead, it maintains that ... More

This book challenges the assumptions of several decades of urban history that treat American urban politics as the expression of social-group community experience. Instead, it maintains that social-group identities of race, class, ethnicity, and gender were politically constructed in the public sphere in the process of political mobilization and journalistic discourse. The book looks specifically at the political construction of urban life in San Francisco from 1850–1900.Less

Public Lands and Political Meaning: Ranchers, the Government, and the Property between Them

Karen Merrill

The history of the American West is a history of struggles over land, and none has inspired so much passion and misunderstanding as the conflict between ranchers and the federal government over ... More

The history of the American West is a history of struggles over land, and none has inspired so much passion and misunderstanding as the conflict between ranchers and the federal government over public grazing lands. Drawing upon neglected sources from organized ranchers, this is the first book to provide an historically based explanation for why the relationship between ranchers and the federal government became so embattled long before modern environmentalists became involved in the issue. Reconstructing the increasingly contested interpretations of the meaning of public land administration, this book traces the history of the political dynamics between ranchers and federal land agencies, giving us a new look at the relations of power that made the modern West. Although a majority of organized ranchers supported government control of the range at the turn of the century, by midcentury these same organizations often used a virulently antifederal discourse that fueled many a political fight in Washington and that still runs deep in American politics today. In analyzing this shift, the book shows how profoundly people's ideas about property wove their way into the political language of the debates surrounding public range policy. It demonstrates that different ideas about property played a crucial role in perpetuating antagonism on both sides of the fence. In addition to illuminating the origins of the “sagebrush rebellions” in the American West, this book also persuasively argues that political historians must pay more attention to public land management issues as a way of understanding tensions in American state-building.Less

Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948-1974

Theodore Hamm

This book uses the 1960 execution of Caryl Chessman as a lens for examining how politics and debates about criminal justice became a volatile mix that ignited postwar California. The effects of those ... More

This book uses the 1960 execution of Caryl Chessman as a lens for examining how politics and debates about criminal justice became a volatile mix that ignited postwar California. The effects of those years continue to be felt as the state's three-strikes law and expanding prison-construction program spark heated arguments over rehabilitation and punishment. Known as the Red Light Bandit, Chessman allegedly stalked lovers' lanes in Los Angeles. Eventually convicted of rape and kidnapping, he was sentenced to death in 1948. In prison he gained significant notoriety as a writer, beginning with his autobiographical Cell 2455 Death Row (1954). In the following years Chessman presented himself not only as an innocent man but also as one rehabilitated from his prior life of crime. He acquired an enthusiastic audience among leading criminologists, liberal intellectuals, and ordinary citizens, many of whom engaged in protests to halt Chessman's execution. The book analyzes how Chessman convinced thousands of Californians to support him, and why Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who opposed the death penalty, allowed the execution to go forward. It also demonstrates the intrinsic limits of the popular commitment to the rehabilitative ideal. This book places the Chessman case in a broad cultural and historical context, relating it to histories of prison reform, the anti-death penalty movement, the popularization of psychology, and the successive rise and decline of the New Left and the more enduring rise of the New Right.Less