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August 8, 2012

Beth Tompkins Bates: The High Road to Economic Prosperity

To address the human element of production, Ford introduced his Five Dollar Day, Ford Profit-Sharing Plan. When the plan was unveiled in 1914, the world was stunned. Qualified Ford workers would receive five dollars a day, more than double the average wage in the auto industry at that time. When compared to lower prevailing wages in other industries such as steel, meatpacking, or coal mining, the Ford proposal was even more astounding. Simultaneously, FMC reduced the workday from nine hours to eight. Continue Reading Beth Tompkins Bates: The High Road to Economic Prosperity

Categories African American History/American History/American Studies/Author blog entry/Economics/Guest Bloggers/History
August 6, 2012

Deirdre M. Moloney: State and local immigration policies affect U.S. foreign affairs

But there is another historically significant dimension to the decision that has received less media attention: ceding to states greater authority to regulate immigration would have represented a significant devolution in federal power. Continue Reading Deirdre M. Moloney: State and local immigration policies affect U.S. foreign affairs

Categories American History/American Studies/Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/History/Latino Studies/Law / Legal History/Politics
August 3, 2012

Free Book Friday: Colors of Confinement

For this month’s Free Book Friday, we’re giving away a copy of Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II, which features very rare color photographs of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. Continue Reading Free Book Friday: Colors of Confinement

Categories American History/American Studies/Asian Studies/History/Photography
August 1, 2012

Barbara Sicherman: It Happened in the Archives

Well-Read Lives evolved from my interest in women’s history and biography that my father did not live to witness. He would surely have had his doubts about the gender angle. But I like to think that my admiration for his literary interests informed my choice of subject, if not my approach to it. Continue Reading Barbara Sicherman: It Happened in the Archives

Categories American Studies/Author blog entry/Gender Studies/Guest Bloggers/History/Women's Studies
July 31, 2012

Michael H. Hunt: Ryan Crocker and the Imperial Reckoning

One reason for the U.S. failure in the Middle East seems obvious. The Bush administration embraced empire long after empire’s expiration date had passed. The American project faced potent opposition in Iraq and Afghanistan that could be contained only by making deals with shrewd collaborators with their own interests to serve. The international hostility to the Iraq invasion was intense, and even in the United States the Iraq adventure fell into disfavor. Continue Reading Michael H. Hunt: Ryan Crocker and the Imperial Reckoning

Categories American History/American Studies/Author blog entry/Columnists/Current Events/Guest Bloggers/History/Michael H. Hunt/Politics
July 30, 2012

Miles Orvell: From Mayberry to Dogville: The Small Town as Microcosm

Mayberry, Lake Wobegon, Hadleyburg, Dogville—these are extreme representations of the small town and they are in direct conflict with one another. Taken together, they reveal the contradictions of the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Continue Reading Miles Orvell: From Mayberry to Dogville: The Small Town as Microcosm

Categories American Studies/Author blog entry/Fiction/Film/Guest Bloggers/Literature/Media Studies
July 25, 2012

Excerpt: Bonds of Alliance, by Brett Rushforth

Between about 1660 and 1760, French colonists and their Native allies enslaved thousands of Indians, keeping them in the towns and villages of New France or shipping them to the French Caribbean. Over time, a vast network of slave raiders, traders, and owners emerged, ensnaring both colonists and Indians in the violence that generated slaves and kept them under French control. Continue Reading Excerpt: Bonds of Alliance, by Brett Rushforth

Categories American History/American Studies/History/Latin American/Caribbean Hist./Native Amer./Indigenous Studies
July 23, 2012

Interview: Christopher C. Sellers on the origins of American environmentalism

During the post-WWII period in the United States, a new generation of pollutants proved especially mobile and persistent. Overriding a widespread segregation of neighborhoods by class as well as race, these pollutants proved capable of pervading entire suburban metropolises. Americans, especially around our largest cities, were forced to confront just how shared the burden of pollution had become. Continue Reading Interview: Christopher C. Sellers on the origins of American environmentalism

Categories American History/American Studies/Environmental Studies/History/Interviews
July 19, 2012

Video: Jesus Christ at Comic-Con

In The Color of Christ, Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey discuss America’s perceptions of the race of Jesus Christ. To observe some popular opinions, an interviewer and a camera went to Comic-Con, where they asked attendees about their views of Jesus. From questions about who would win in a fight, Jesus or the Joker? to popular perceptions of Jesus’ race, see the colorful answers from the even more colorful Comic-Con goers. Continue Reading Video: Jesus Christ at Comic-Con

Categories American History/American Studies/Christian Studies/History/Religion/Video
July 18, 2012

Excerpt: Transpacific Field of Dreams, by Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu

The current scholarly consensus holds that no single individual created baseball; rather, it evolved incrementally from various forms of bat-and-ball folk games, including British rounders. This cultural form of transatlantic hybrid pedigree grew into a modern team sport in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York in the early nineteenth century, with each of these burgeoning northeastern American cities developing its distinctive formats of the game. Continue Reading Excerpt: Transpacific Field of Dreams, by Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu

Categories American History/American Studies/Asian Studies/Excerpts/History/Sports
July 9, 2012

Excerpt: Creating Consumers, by Carolyn M. Goldstein

Like Marye Dahnke, dozens of home economists carved out spaces for themselves in the consumer products industries in the early 1920s. While home economists in business struggled to win legitimacy within the American Home Economics Association (AHEA), they also faced challenges convincing corporate executives and managers that their expertise was necessary to effective consumer-oriented production and marketing. Continue Reading Excerpt: Creating Consumers, by Carolyn M. Goldstein

Categories American Studies/Cooking / Food/Excerpts/Gender Studies/Labor Studies/Women's Studies
June 28, 2012

Video: Manisha Sinha on the Origins of Abolitionism

When we think of the Abolition movement, a common history textbook answer is that the Abolition movement began when William Lloyd Garrison started publishing his Liberator in 1831, but the roots of American abolitionism are fairly long. Continue Reading Video: Manisha Sinha on the Origins of Abolitionism

Categories African American History/African American Studies/American History/American Studies/History
June 11, 2012

Altina L. Waller: The Hatfield-McCoy Feud

What is missing here is any social and economic context. True, the Civil War is the film’s encompassing social explanation, but it leaves me wondering why the set of social and economic circumstances that confronted folks in post war Appalachia is completely ignored. In the Tug Valley, as in all Appalachia and even the entire South, economic decline was a serious threat to almost everyone. Continue Reading Altina L. Waller: The Hatfield-McCoy Feud

Categories American History/American Studies/Appalachian Studies/Author blog entry/Film/Guest Bloggers/History/Southern Studies
June 1, 2012

Interview: Heather Andrea Williams on the search for family lost in slavery

I think the quilt on the cover really captures some of the pain of separation as well as the hope that some enslaved people held on to. There is a little girl’s dress, but no little girl, and the handwriting is traced from a letter sent by an enslaved woman to the family of her former owner asking what had ever become of her little girl. Vilet Lester, the child’s mother, was literate enough to write this letter seeking information about her daughter. She was hopeful that her current owner would be able to purchase the child and restore Lester’s family. One of the sad things about doing this work is that I do not know if Vilet Lester ever received an answer to her letter or whether she ever saw her daughter again. Continue Reading Interview: Heather Andrea Williams on the search for family lost in slavery

Categories African American History/African American Studies/American History/American Studies/History/Interviews
May 2, 2012

Excerpt: Making Marriage Work, by Kristin Celello

By 1930 divorce had indeed become a reality of everyday American life. At the same time, however, many Americans were deeply anxious about what the escalating divorce rate meant for the family, women, and the very future of the nation. Such fears were fanned by an emergent group of experts who spent the first several decades of the twentieth century identifying a “crisis” in American marriage. Continue Reading Excerpt: Making Marriage Work, by Kristin Celello

Categories American Studies/Excerpts/Sociology
April 27, 2012

90th Anniversary sale now includes biography and American studies books

Our 90th anniversary sale continues with new books added in biography and American studies. Save 50% and get free shipping on orders over $75. Sale continues on select books in Civil War, literature and literary studies, African American history, women’s studies, religious studies, and art, architecture, and craft. Continue Reading 90th Anniversary sale now includes biography and American studies books

Categories African American History/African American Studies/American Studies/Biography / Autobiography/Civil War/Literature/Religion/Sale/Women's Studies
April 19, 2012

Karen L. Cox: Black Domestic in a Can: A South Carolina Ad Agency “Helps” Glory Foods

Who is the company trying to reach with these commercials except, perhaps, all those white women who read ‘The Help’ and are looking to recapture some of that for themselves? It’s certainly an interesting marketing ploy. Perhaps that is the point. Continue Reading Karen L. Cox: Black Domestic in a Can: A South Carolina Ad Agency “Helps” Glory Foods

Categories African American Studies/American Studies/Author blog entry/Columnists/Cooking / Food/Guest Bloggers/Karen L. Cox/Media Studies/Southern Studies