front cover of America the Middlebrow
America the Middlebrow
Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars
Jaime Harker
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Between the two world wars, American publishing entered a "golden age" characterized by an explosion of new publishers, authors, audiences, distribution strategies, and marketing techniques. The period was distinguished by a diverse literary culture, ranging from modern cultural rebels to working-class laborers, political radicals, and progressive housewives. In America the Middlebrow, Jaime Harker focuses on one neglected mode of authorship in the interwar period—women's middlebrow authorship and its intersection with progressive politics.

With the rise of middlebrow institutions and readers came the need for the creation of the new category of authorship. Harker contends that these new writers appropriated and adapted a larger tradition of women's activism and literary activity to their own needs and practices. Like sentimental women writers and readers of the 1850s, these authors saw fiction as a means of reforming and transforming society. Like their Progressive Era forebears, they replaced religious icons with nationalistic images of progress and pragmatic ideology. In the interwar period, this mode of authorship was informed by Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which insisted that art provided vicarious experience that could help create humane, democratic societies.

Drawing on letters from publishers, editors, agents, and authors, America the Middlebrow traces four key moments in this distinctive culture of letters through the careers of Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst. Both an exploration of a virtually invisible culture of letters and a challenge to monolithic paradigms of modernism, the book offers fresh insight into the ongoing tradition of political domestic fiction that flourished between the wars.
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front cover of The Gospel of Progressivism
The Gospel of Progressivism
Moral Reform and Labor War in Colorado, 1900-1930
R. Todd Laugen
University Press of Colorado, 2010
Chronicling the negotiations of Progressive groups and the obstacles that constrained them, The Gospel of Progressivism details the fight against corporate and political corruption in Colorado during the early twentieth century. While the various groups differed in their specific agendas, Protestant reformers, labor organizers, activist women, and mediation experts struggled to defend the public against special-interest groups and their stranglehold on Colorado politics.

Sharing enemies like the party boss and corporate lobbyist who undermined honest and responsive government, Progressive leaders were determined to root out selfish political action with public exposure. Labor unions defied bosses and rallied for government protection of workers. Women's clubs appealed to other women as mothers, calling for social welfare, economic justice, and government responsiveness. Protestant church congregations formed a core of support for moral reform. Labor relations experts struggled to prevent the outbreak of violence through mediation between corporate employers and organized labor. Persevering through World War I, Colorado reformers faced their greatest challenge in the 1920s, when leaders of the Ku Klux Klan drew upon the rhetoric of Protestant Progressives and manipulated reform tools to strengthen their own political machine. Once in power, Klan legislators turned on Progressive leaders in the state government.

A story of promising alliances never fully realized, zealous crusaders who resisted compromise, and reforms with unexpected consequences, The Gospel of Progressivism will appeal to those interested in Progressive Era reform, Colorado history, labor relations, and women's activism.

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front cover of Peaceful Revolution
Peaceful Revolution
Constitutional Change and American Culture from Progressivism to the New Deal
Maxwell Bloomfield
Harvard University Press, 2000

Although Americans claim to revere the Constitution, relatively few understand its workings. Its real importance for the average citizen is as an enduring reminder of the moral vision that shaped the nation's founding. Yet scholars have paid little attention to the broader appeal that constitutional idealism has always made to the American imagination through publications and films. Maxwell Bloomfield draws upon such neglected sources to illustrate the way in which media coverage contributes to major constitutional change.

Successive generations have sought to reaffirm a sense of national identity and purpose by appealing to constitutional norms, defined on an official level by law and government. Public support, however, may depend more on messages delivered by the popular media. Muckraking novels, such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), debated federal economic regulation. Woman suffrage organizations produced films to counteract the harmful gender stereotypes of early comedies. Arguments over the enforcement of black civil rights in the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson took on new meaning when dramatized in popular novels.

From the founding to the present, Americans have been taught that even radical changes may be achieved through orderly constitutional procedures. How both elite and marginalized groups in American society reaffirmed and communicated this faith in the first three decades of the twentieth century is the central theme of this book.

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front cover of Populism to Progressivism In Alabama
Populism to Progressivism In Alabama
Sheldon Hackney
University of Alabama Press, 2010
 

Library of Alabama Classics

Winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association

“In this excellent study of Alabama politics, Hackney deftly analyzes the leadership, following, and essential character of Populism and Progressivism during the period from 1890 to 1910. The work is exceptionally well written; it deals with the personal, social, and political intricacies involved; and it combines traditional and quantitative techniques with a clarity and imagination that should serve as a spur and a model for many future studies.” – Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

“Whatever the ultimate judgment on its conclusions may be, this is an important study and one that should stimulate additional research.
“Hackney has very skillfully integrated his quantitative findings and the results of more traditional research. In this respect the book should for some time be a prime exhibit of the utility of the ‘new political history’ [and] we should receive Hackney’s contribution with both gratitude and admiration.” – Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Sheldon Hackney is a native Alabamian, and -- perhaps aptly -- the son-in-law of courageous Alabama progressives Virginia and Clifford Durr. A student of C. Vann Woodward at Yale, Hackney taught at Princeton University, served as president of Tulane University (1975-80) and the University of Pennsylvania (1981-1993). In 1993 he was appointed by President Clinton as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he served until 1997. After his NEH service he returned to the University of Pennsylvania as Boies Professor of United States History.

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front cover of Progressivism and the Open Door
Progressivism and the Open Door
America and China, 1905–1921
Jerry Israel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971
During the progressive era, most American policymakers agreed that China represented a land of unlimited opportunity for trade, investment and social reform.  Serious divisions existed, however, over policy tactics. One side (mainly manufacturers and academics) advocated a unilateral policy of penetration allied only with Chinese modernizers. The other (primarily financiers and reformists), called for an alliance with other powers, especially Japan, in their dealings with China. In Progressivism and the Open Door, Jerry Israel examines the many factors that led to formal U.S. policy toward China during this era-one that ultimately found a middle ground between the two divisions.
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