BiblioVault - Books about 1919

Becoming African Americans

Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919–1939

Clare Corbould

Harvard University Press, 2009

In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked “African American” in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity.

Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. In plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and the visual arts, they aimed to give stature and solidity to the American black community through a new awareness of the African past and the international black world. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.

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Bookwomen

Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–1939

Jacalyn Eddy

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

The most comprehensive account of the women who, as librarians, editors, and founders of the Horn Book, shaped the modern children's book industry between 1919 and 1939. The lives of Anne Carroll Moore, Alice Jordan, Louise Seaman Bechtel, May Massee, Bertha Mahony Miller, and Elinor Whitney Field open up for readers the world of female professionalization. What emerges is a vivid illustration of some of the cultural debates of the time, including concerns about "good reading" for children and about women's negotiations between domesticity and participation in the paid labor force and the costs and payoffs of professional life.

Published in collaboration among the University of Wisconsin Press, the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America (a joint program of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society), and the University of Wisconsin–Madison General Library System Office of Scholarly Communication.

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Soldiers Back Home

The American Legion in Illinois, 1919-1939

Thomas B. Littlewood

Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

This first political and social history of the American Legion in Illinois from its formation in 1919 to the onset of World War II focuses on the organization’s influence on the two political parties and on public opinion at the state and local levels. Gauging the singular influence of the organization in a particularly turbulent time in Illinois and American history, Thomas B. Littlewood argues that the local orientation of individual posts was probably more important to most Legionnaires than the activities of the organization’s national leaders. At the same time, he shows how the conflicts within the Legion mirrored those in the larger society.

Soldiers Back Home: The American Legion in Illinois, 1919–1939 traces the origins of the organization nationally and in Illinois, showing it to be the biggest and most politically committed of the several organizations of World War I veterans. First and foremost a fraternal association of men whose military service set them apart, it was also a social mechanism through which veterans contained and redirected their anger and alienation. Littlewood details how the organization developed quickly into a vigorous pressure group working to influence public policy on behalf of veterans and their families. Concentrating at first on the welfare of children who had lost their fathers in the war, the Legion later became involved in a variety of community service activities and served as a political training ground.

World War I was the first conflict to be fought by a largely conscripted army. When the soldiers returned from the war, labor unions were pressing hard to organize American workers in rapidly growing concentrations of industry. Business enjoyed generally high esteem, but the ensuing social and economic turbulence led to a shattering of civil order in some parts of Illinois. Prohibition, bootleggers, and organized crime gave way to the crumbling of the economy and the lean, hard years of the Depression. While these events were unfolding in Illinois, rural citizens resisted the rebalancing of power caused by massive migrations of citizens from farm to city by refusing to reapportion legislative districts.

Organized thematically, Soldiers Back Home traces the Legion’s impact on politics, community life, labor relations, race relations, and the struggle for veterans’ benefits in Illinois. Littlewood maintains that the Legion experienced significant divisions along regional lines, especially over the issues of the Ku Klux Klan and labor. Likewise, brutal sectional tensions grew between rural and urban populations. Littlewood looks at the role of the veteran in American politics and society, discussing the careers of famed Illinois leaders such as Scott Lucas, William Dawson, and Everett Dirksen and their involvement with the Legion. He also addresses issues of diversity and division within the organization.

Resisting the polemics of some contemporary interpretations of the American Legion and avoiding the tone of the sanitized official histories of the organization, Soldiers Back Home is a major contribution to the history of the interwar years—in Illinois and nationally—that will interest general readers and historians alike. The volume is augmented by thirteen illustrations.

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Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939

Allison Schachter

Northwestern University Press, 2022

Finalist, 2023 National Jewish Book Award Winners in Women’s Studies

In Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939, Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging.

Born in the former Russian and Austro‑Hungarian Empires and writing from their homes in New York, Poland, and Mandatory Palestine, the authors central to this book—Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel—seized on the freedoms of social revolution to reimagine Jewish culture beyond the traditionally male world of Jewish letters. The societies they lived in devalued women’s labor and denied them support for their work. In response, their writing challenged the social hierarchies that excluded them as women and as Jews. As she reads these women, Schachter upends the idea that literary modernity was a conversation among men about women, with a few women writers listening in. Women writers revolutionized the very terms of Jewish fiction at a pivotal moment in Jewish history, transcending the boundaries of Jewish minority identities. Schachter tells their story and in so doing calls for a new way of thinking about Jewish cultural modernity.

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