BiblioVault - Books about Early Twentieth Century

Alaska's Daughter

An Eskimo Memoir of the Early Twentieth Century

Elizabeth Pinson

Utah State University Press, 2004

Elizabeth B. Pinson shares with us her memories of Alaska's emergence into a new and modern era, bearing witness to history in the early twentieth century as she recalls it. She draws us into her world as a young girl of mixed ethnicity, with a mother whose Eskimo family had resided on the Seward Peninsula for generations and a father of German heritage. Growing up in and near the tiny village of Teller on the Bering Strait, Elizabeth at the age of six, despite a harrowing, long midwinter sled ride to rescue her, lost both her legs to frostbite when her grandparents, with whom she was spending the winter in their traditional Eskimo home, died in the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Fitted with artificial legs financed by an eastern benefactor, Elizabeth kept journals of her struggles, triumphs, and adventures, recording her impressions of the changing world around her and experiences with the motley characters she met. These included Roald Amundsen, whose dirigible landed in Teller after crossing the Arctic Circle; the ill-fated 1921 British colonists of Wrangel Island in the Arctic; trading ship captains and crews; prospectors; doomed aviators; and native reindeer herders. Elizabeth moved on to boarding school, marriage, and the state of Washington, where she compiled her records into this memoir and where she lived until her death in 2006.

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Being Modern

The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century

Edited by Robert Bud, Paul Greenhalgh, Frank James, and Morag Shiach

University College London, 2018

In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increased attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern builds on this recent interest to explore engagements with science across culture from the end of the nineteenth century to approximately 1940. Addressing the breadth of cultural forms in Britain and the western world from the architecture of Le Corbusier to working class British science fiction, Being Modern paints a rich picture. Seventeen distinguished contributors from a range of fields, including the history of science and technology, art, architecture, and English culture and literature examine the issues involved. The book will be a valuable resource for further examination of culture as an interconnected web of which science was a critical part.

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Chinese Elites and Political Change

Zheijang Province in the Early Twentieth Century

R. Keith Schoppa

Harvard University Press, 1982

With the Qing Dynasty reform efforts (1901–1911), abolition of the civil service examination (1905), and the end of the monarchy (1912), the first three decades of the twentieth century brought important changes to the elite of Zhejiang Province. This book examines the social backgrounds, public activities, careers, and decision-making of local and provincial elites—that is, nonprofessional men who had taken on public duties when the multiplying problems of government had resulted in a general breakdown of public functions.

While elites in early twentieth-century China have often been caricatured as militarists, corrupt bureaucrats, evil landlords, and ineffectual reformers, they have not been clearly understood or closely analyzed. Since the seventeenth century, elites had been assuming increasing responsibility for funding and managing public projects, and by the twentieth century had expanded their activities still further. In the first three decades of the century, they experienced substantial personal and communitarian development; it was the structures and processes developed by these elites that subsequent regimes—Guomindang, Japanese, or Communist—had to build upon and adapt.

Keith Schoppa divides the counties of Zhejiang Province into four zones according to level of political and economic development and scrupulously analyzes the complex processes of remolding society at the local and provincial levels. By delving beneath the heroic figures and large movements of Chinese political life in this century, he reveals the common factors that make China a part of the worldwide story of reconstruction, reform, and developmental change.

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Communism, Religion, and Revolt in Banten in the Early Twentieth Century

Mis Sea#86

Michael Williams

Ohio University Press, 1990

Twice in this century popular revolts against colonial rule have occured in the Banten district of West Java. These revolts, conducted largely under an Islamic leadership, also proclaimed themselves Communist. Islamic Communism is seemingly a paradox. This is especially the case when one considers that probably no religion has proved more resistant to Communist ideology than Islam.

Michael Williams here details the complicated history of the Bantenese revolts in the twentieth century and probes the ideological riddle of Islamic Communism. Modern history is replete with examples of regions with a long history of organizing themselves politically to resist intrusion on their territory, resources, and people. This book establishes that in Indonesia, the Bantenese were among the most practiced exponents of resistance.

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Drama in English From the Middle Ages to the Early Twentieth Century

Christopher J. Wheatley

Catholic University of America Press, 2016

At a time when good editions of drama in English are prohibitively expensive and online texts are unedited and lack the apparatus necessary for students to understand and contextualize the plays, this anthology affordably illustrates every significant genre of drama in the English language from the late fourteenth century to the early twentieth century, with plays from England, Ireland, and the United States of America. The mystery and morality plays of the Middle Ages, Renaissance comedy, tragedy and meta-theater, Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy, tragedy, and ballad opera, nineteenth-century melodrama, and early twentieth century realism and naturalism are all presented with the introductions glossaries and notes suitable for a college level reader by an editor with a quarter of a century of experience teaching courses on the history of drama in English. The plays both reflect their times and critique them, while remaining stageable today. The Wakefield Master, The York Realist, Marlowe, Jonson, Dryden, Wycherley, Gay, Boucicault, Synge, and Shaw are some of the playwrights in this representative collection of plays that reveal both the popular appeal of the English-language theater and the dazzling dramatic artistry it embodied over a period of six centuries. Further the collection is in "old spelling" and is thus a useful sourcebook for those interested in the history of the English language.

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The Experience of Modernity

Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century

Janet Ng

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Autobiography of the first half of the twentieth century was used variously by different groups of writers to interrogate, negotiate, and even to program the social and political progress of China. However, despite the popularity and success of this genre, it has also been the most forgotten in literary and historical discussions. Personal stories and individual expressions seem to have had no place in 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s China, smothered instead by the grander rhetoric of nationalism. For this reason, autobiography's popularity during the era is an odd phenomenon and also an important genre for study.
The May Fourth Era (1917-40) began as a movement to make the classical literary language accessible to the common people and became a broader political movement against imperialism. The writing of autobiography was influenced by the idea of literature's social and political mission, yet at the same time autobiography was a uniquely potent venue for individual expression. Janet Ng examines this notion in The Experience of Modernity within the framework of autobiographical writings by Chen Hengzhe, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Xie Bingying, Xiao Hong, Eileen Chang, Yu Dafu, and Shen Congwen.
Janet Ng is Assistant Professor of Asian Literature, the College of Staten.

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High Culture on the Lower Frequencies

African Americans and Opera in the Early Twentieth Century

Lucy Caplan

Harvard University Press

Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration

Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century

Nicholas Patler

University Press of Colorado, 2007

In Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration, Nicholas Patler presents the first in-depth study of the historic protest movement that challenged federal racial segregation and discrimination during the first two years of Woodrow Wilson's presidency. Before the Wilson years, as southern states and localities enshrined Jim Crow--in law and custom--and systematic racial discrimination infiltrated the North, the executive branch of the federal government moved in the opposite direction by opening federal employment to thousands of African Americans, appointing blacks to federal and diplomatic offices throughout the country and the world. Finding support from the federal government, many African Americans, supported Wilson's democratic campaign, dubbed the "New Freedom," with hopes of continuing advancement. But as president, the southern-born Wilson openly supported and directly implemented a Jim Crow policy in the federal departments unleashing a firestorm of protest.

This protest campaign, carried out on a level not seen since the abolitionist movement, galvanized a vast community of men and women. Blacks and whites, professionals and laymen, signed petitions, wrote protest letters, participated in organized mass meetings, lobbied public officials, directly confronted Wilson, made known their plight through publicity campaigns, and, in at least one case, marched to express their opposition. Patler provides a thorough examination of the two national organizations that led these protests efforts - the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and William Monroe Trotter's National Equal Rights League - and deftly contextualizes the movement, while emphasizing the tragic, enduring consequences of the Wilson administration's actions.

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The Mexican Revolution in Chicago

Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War

John H Flores

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Few realize that long before the political activism of the 1960s, there existed a broad social movement in the United States spearheaded by a generation of Mexican immigrants inspired by the revolution in their homeland. Many revolutionaries eschewed U.S. citizenship and have thus far been lost to history, though they have much to teach us about the increasingly international world of today. John H. Flores follows this revolutionary generation of Mexican immigrants and the transnational movements they created in the United States. Through a careful, detailed study of Chicagoland, the area in and around Chicago, Flores examines how competing immigrant organizations raised funds, joined labor unions and churches, engaged the Spanish-language media, and appealed in their own ways to the dignity and unity of other Mexicans. Painting portraits of liberals and radicals, who drew support from the Mexican government, and conservatives, who found a homegrown American ally in the Roman Catholic Church, Flores recovers a complex and little known political world shaped by events south of the U.S border.

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Pioneers Of Change In Ethiopia

The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century

Bahru Zewde

Ohio University Press, 2002

In this exciting new study, Bahru Zewde, one of the foremost historians of modern Ethiopia, has constructed a collective biography of a remarkable group of men and women in a formative period of their country’s history. Ethiopia’s political independence at the end of the nineteenth century put this new African state in a position to determine its own levels of engagement with the West. Ethiopians went to study in universities around the world. They returned with the skills of their education acquired in Europe and America, and at home began to lay the foundations of a new literature and political philosophy. Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia describes the role of these men and women of ideas in the social and political transformation of the young nation and later in the administration of Haile Selassie.

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Pittsburgh Surveyed

Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century

Maurine Greenwald

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996

From 1909-1914 the Pittsburgh Survey brought together statisticans, social workers, engineers, lawyers, physicians, economists, and city planners to study the effects of industrialization on the city of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Surveyed examines the accuracy and the impact of the influential Pittsburgh Survey, emphasizing its role in the social reform movement of the early twentieth century.

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Prairie Grass Roots

An Iowa Small Town in the Early Twentieth Century

Thomas J. Morain

University of Iowa Press, 1998

Prairie Grass Roots describes how broad social changes taking place in the early twentieth century influenced one particular town, Jefferson, Iowa. Examing the three turbulent decades between the turn of the century and the New Deal, Morain looks at the impact of social change on community social structure, gender roles, the influence of the automobile,electricty,World War I, and the farm depression. A final chapter analyzes the state of the small town at the beginning of the 1930's.

Combining archival research, oral histories and local newspaper accounts, Morain revisitis Jefferson's residents perceptions of their times.

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Rehearsing Revolutions

The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century

Mary McAvoy

University of Iowa Press, 2019

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2019

George Freedley Memorial Award Finalist, 2020

Between the world wars, several labor colleges sprouted up across the U.S. These schools, funded by unions, sought to provide members with adult education while also indoctrinating them into the cause. As Mary McAvoy reveals, a big part of that learning experience centered on the schools’ drama programs. For the first time, Rehearsing Revolutions shows how these left-leaning drama programs prepared American workers for the “on-the-ground” activism emerging across the country. In fact, McAvoy argues, these amateur stages served as training grounds for radical social activism in early twentieth-century America.

Using a wealth of previously unpublished material such as director’s reports, course materials, playscripts, and reviews, McAvoy traces the programs’ evolution from experimental teaching tool to radically politicized training that inspired overt—even militant—labor activism by the late 1930s. All the while, she keeps an eye on larger trends in public life, connecting interwar labor drama to post-war arts-based activism in response to McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights movement. Ultimately, McAvoy asks: What did labor drama do for the workers’ colleges and why did they pursue it? She finds her answer through several different case studies in places like the Portland Labor College and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

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Reproducing the French Race

Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century

Elisa Camiscioli

Duke University Press, 2009

In Reproducing the French Race, Elisa Camiscioli argues that immigration was a defining feature of early-twentieth-century France, and she examines the political, cultural, and social issues implicated in public debates about immigration and national identity at the time. Camiscioli demonstrates that mass immigration provided politicians, jurists, industrialists, racial theorists, feminists, and others with ample opportunity to explore questions of French racial belonging, France’s relationship to the colonial empire and the rest of Europe, and the connections between race and national anxieties regarding depopulation and degeneration. She also shows that discussions of the nation and its citizenry consistently returned to the body: its color and gender, its expenditure of labor power, its reproductive capacity, and its experience of desire. Of paramount importance was the question of which kinds of bodies could assimilate into the “French race.”

By focusing on telling aspects of the immigration debate, Camiscioli reveals how racial hierarchies were constructed, how gender figured in their creation, and how only white Europeans were cast as assimilable. Delving into pronatalist politics, she describes how potential immigrants were ranked according to their imagined capacity to adapt to the workplace and family life in France. She traces the links between racialized categories and concerns about industrial skills and output, and she examines medico-hygienic texts on interracial sex, connecting those to the crusade against prostitution and the related campaign to abolish “white slavery,” the alleged entrapment of (white) women for sale into prostitution abroad. Camiscioli also explores the debate surrounding the 1927 law that first made it possible for French women who married foreigners to keep their French nationality. She concludes by linking the Third Republic’s impulse to create racial hierarchies to the emergence of the Vichy regime.

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To Become an American

Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century

Leslie A. Hahner

Michigan State University Press, 2017

Pledging allegiance, singing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” wearing a flag pin—these are all markers of modern patriotism, emblems that announce the devotion of American citizens. Most of these nationalistic performances were formulized during the early twentieth century and driven to new heights by the panic surrounding national identity during World War I. In To Become an American Leslie A. Hahner argues that, in part, the Americanization movement engendered the transformation of patriotism during this period. Americanization was a massive campaign designed to fashion immigrants into perfect Americans—those who were loyal in word, deed, and heart. The larger outcome of this widespread movement was a dramatic shift in the nation’s understanding of Americanism. Employing a rhetorical lens to analyze the visual and aesthetic practices of Americanization, Hahner contends that Americanization not only tutored students in the practices of citizenship but also created a normative visual metric that modified how Americans would come to understand, interpret, and judge their own patriotism and that of others.

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