Browse

This book explains the unbending ideal of the nuclear family and how it has seeped so deeply into American society and consciousness without ever becoming the actual norm for most people in the nation. It presents the rich diversity of family lives in American history from the American Revolution to the twenty-first century and at the same time the persistence and normative power of the nuclear family model. American society—one of the major arguments—is “governed through the family,” and to govern, in this sense, is “to structure the possible field of action.” To make this broad examination of the discourse and practice of the family in American life more accessible, this book focuses on the relations of fathers, families, and society. Throughout American history “the father” has been posed as provider and moral leader of his family, American society, and the nation. At the same time power and difference were established around “the father,” and fatherhood meant many different things for different people. To tell this history of fatherhood, families, and American society, the author presents biographical “close-ups” of twelve iconic characters, embedded in contextual “long shots” so that readers can see the enduring power of the family and father ideals along with the complexity and varieties of everyday life in American history. Each protagonist covers a crucial period or event in American history, presents a different family constellation, and makes a different argument with regard to how American society is governed through the family.

When Kate Middleton married Prince William in 2011, watched by hundreds of millions of viewers, the wedding followed a familiar formula: ritual, vows, reception, and a white gown for the bride. Commonly known as a white wedding, the formula is firmly ensconced in popular culture, with movies like Father of the Bride or Bride Wars, shows like Say Yes to the Dress and Bridezillas, and live broadcast royal or reality-TV weddings garnering millions of viewers each year. Despite being condemned by some critics as “cookie-cutter” or conformist, the wedding has in fact progressively allowed for social, cultural, and political challenges to understandings of sex, gender, marriage, and citizenship, thereby providing an ideal site for historical inquiry. This book establishes that the evolution of the American white wedding emerges from our nation's proclivity towards privacy and the individual, as well as the increasingly egalitarian relationships between men and women in the decades following World War II. Blending cultural analysis of film, fiction, advertising, and prescriptive literature with personal views expressed in letters, diaries, essays, and oral histories, the book engages ways in which the modern wedding emblemizes a diverse and consumerist culture and aims to reveal an ongoing debate about the power of peer culture, media, and the marketplace in America. Rather than celebrating wedding traditions as they “used to be” and critiquing contemporary celebrations for their lavish leanings, the book provides a history of the American wedding and its celebrants.

During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda highlighted U.S. racism in order to undermine the credibility of U.S. democracy. In response, incorporating racial and ethnic minorities in order to affirm that America worked to ensure the rights of all and was superior to communist countries became a national imperative. This book explores how Asian Americans figured in this effort to shape the credibility of U.S. democracy, even while the perceived “foreignness” of Asian Americans cast them as likely alien subversives whose activities needed monitoring following the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War. While histories of international politics and U.S. race relations during the Cold War have largely overlooked the significance of Asian Americans, the book challenges the black-white focus of the existing historiography. It highlights how Asian Americans made use of the government's desire to be leader of the “free world” by advocating for civil rights reforms, such as housing integration, increased professional opportunities, and freedom from political persecution. It examines the liberalization of immigration policies, which worked not only to increase the civil rights of Asian Americans but also to improve the nation's ties with Asian countries, providing an opportunity for the U.S. government to broadcast, on a global scale, the freedom and opportunity that American society could offer.

Since the Gilded Age, social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to “pass” as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor. This book examines how intellectuals were shaped by their experiences with the poor, and how despite their sympathy toward working-class people, they unintentionally helped to develop the contemporary concept of a degraded and “other” American underclass. While contributing to our understanding of the history of American social thought, this book offers a new perspective on contemporary debates over how we understand and represent our own society and its class divisions.

As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. This book tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and the world—overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis. The book paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California's penal systems. Each element of prison life—from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence—demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. This book argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. It reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.

Christians today participate as a significant force in politics, asserting their historic role as arbiters of morality and ethics in the process despite being of very different minds about what that means. Evil Deeds in High Places examines Christian responses to the Watergate affair that brought about the debate over impeachment and resignation of Richard M. Nixon. It demonstrates how Christians contributed to the debate over this moral and ethical crisis, and reveals how the Watergate moment became a turning point in twentieth-century American history for Christian engagement with politics. This study uncovers Protestant reactions to Watergate and traces the long-term effects of Protestants’ efforts on the American political landscape. The sampling of periodicals, denominations, and individuals herein presents much diversity in terms of theological and political outlooks, to further highlight the many points of view that a “Christian lens” contributes. Within Protestant Christianity there were significant variations in responses to the proceedings, offering an important step in surfacing the opinions of everyday Americans to Watergate. Moreover, the engagement of Protestants with the political crisis had particularly important ramifications for American politics, which persist to this day. Protestants engaged Watergate in order to solve the moral catastrophe and, as a result, intensified their political activities. In inching into this realm, they became accustomed to having political influence.

In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. This book unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the US military in Asia, it reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and US servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children. The book moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of US multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, it acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.

Racial history has always been the thorn in America's side, with a swath of injustices—slavery, lynching, segregation, and many other ills—perpetrated against black people. This very history is complicated by, and also dependent on, what constitutes a white person in this country. Many of the European immigrant groups now considered white have also had to struggle with their own racial consciousness. This book explores how Italian immigrants, a once undesirable and “swarthy” race, assimilated into dominant white culture through the influential national and radical Italian language press in New York City. Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, this book investigates how this immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity from 1886 through 1920. Their frequent coverage of racially charged events of the time, as well as other topics such as capitalism and religion, reveals how these papers constructed a racial identity as Italian, American, and white. The book illustrates how the immigrant press was a site where socially constructed categories of race, color, civilization, and identity were reworked, created, contested, and negotiated. It also uncovers how Italian immigrants filtered societal pressures and redefined the parameters of whiteness, constructing their own identity.

In 1938, Hedda Hopper (a 52-year-old struggling actress) rose to fame and influence writing an incendiary gossip column, “Hedda Hopper's Hollywood,” that appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers throughout Hollywood's golden age. Often eviscerating moviemakers and stars, her column earned her a nasty reputation in the film industry while winning a legion of some 32 million fans, whose avid support established her as the voice of small-town America. Yet Hopper sought not only to build her career as a gossip columnist but also to push her agenda of staunch moral and political conservatism, using her column to argue against U.S. entry into World War II, uphold traditional views of sex and marriage, defend racist roles for African Americans, and enthusiastically support the Hollywood blacklist. While usually dismissed as an eccentric crank, this book argues that Hopper has had a profound and lasting influence on popular and political culture and should be viewed as a pivotal popularizer of conservatism. The first book to explore Hopper's gossip career and the public's response to her column and her politics, the book illustrates how the conservative gossip maven contributed mightily to the public understanding of film, while providing a platform for women to voice political views within a traditionally masculine public realm. It builds the case that, as practiced by Hopper and her readers, Hollywood gossip shaped key developments in American movies and movie culture, newspaper journalism and conservative politics, along with the culture of gossip itself, all of which continue to play out today.

This book examines the development of elementary and secondary students’ constitutional rights between 1964 and 1984 and its relationship to efforts to secure racial justice at school during the desegregation era. The first three chapters cover case studies that provide the local context for students’ rights litigation that originated in Mississippi; Denver, Colorado; and Columbus, Ohio. Each case study focuses on a particular area of students’ rights, such as free speech, equal protection, and due process, and provides an examination of how student protestrelated to civil rights and Chicano Movement activism contributed to litigation. The final two chapters provide a national view of the effects that these cases had on students’ rights law more generally, including the rights related to bilingual education, equal educational opportunities, and access to education for students with disabilities. The book also explores students’ rights in relation to school discipline, including the areas of corporal punishment, privacy, and suspensions and expulsions. The book argues that, as the courts developed the principles that determine when and why students gain rights protections, they did so in ways that undermined the initial goals of the black and Chicano student activists who set these lawsuits into motion.This book therefore offers a critical approach to these developments in American constitutional law and concludes by pointing to the ways in which the law contributes to persistent racial inequities in education.

African Americans played pivotal roles in the adoptions of Korean black children in the first two decades following the Korean War. Beginning with the efforts of black soldiers who devised short-term and long-term strategies to aid Korean children displaced or orphaned by the war, African Americans developed a race-conscious approach to their rescue of Korean black children. However, the families that adopted and the families that attempted to adopt Korean black children faced challenges because racial inequality influenced both US and transnational adoption policies. The child welfare professionals, nonprofessionals, and adoptive families that endeavored to transform adoption policies and practices to increase African Americans’ adoptions had inconsistent results. Some were able to transform standards that had upheld rigid ideas about adoptive couples’ performance of the gender roles associated with the nuclear family. Some demonstrated the benefits of interracial families and interracial communities for mixed-race Korean children. Both Cold War anxieties and civil rights ideals made many of these changes possible. Paradoxically, the rhetoric and ideals of Cold War civil rights also facilitated the expansion of transracial and transnational adoptions involving white couples and nonwhite children in the United States and abroad.