But how much do you know about the people behind the Internet? Who were the founding fathers and mothers of computer science? Do you know who coined the term ‘computer bug’ or who said “We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives”?

Take our computing quiz, compiled from resources in Who’s Who, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford Reference, and the American National Biography, to see if you’re a computer genius or if you need an upgrade!

Who’s Who, published annually by A & C Black since 1897, and online exclusively by Oxford University Press since 2008, is the leading source of up-to-date information about over 35,000 influential people from all walks of life, worldwide, who have left their mark on British public life. Written by specialist authors, the Oxford DNB biographies will introduce you to the people behind British history’s great events as well as its literature, science, art, music, and ideas. Oxford Reference is the home of Oxford’s quality reference publishing bringing together over 2 million entries, and more than 16,000 illustrations, into a single cross-searchable resource. Discover the lives of more than 18,700 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — who have influenced American history and culture in the acclaimed American National Biography Online.

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The Great Gatsby is one of the best-known American novels, but weirdly, and strangely reflective of Gatsby himself, one of the least understood. The much-awaited Baz Lurhmann version of The Great Gatsby opens in the United States tomorrow, and like Gatsby himself — as a new trailer reminds us — the novel is “guarding secrets.”

In the course of the novel, and no doubt the new film version, we find out what Gatsby is hiding: not only his criminal bootlegging, but also his family name, Gatz, and his poor, ethnic-American roots, which in the end exclude him from the upper-class Anglo-American social circles he hoped to enter. We understand his frustrated American dream, and we understand too why he felt the need to fabricate for himself the pedigree of a patrician family with the Anglo-sounding surname Gatsby.

We’ve all been taught the novel is about the disappearing American dream, but that’s only part of the story, the postwar part. The other part, the “back story” set during World War I, is about the American dream suddenly and dramatically on the rise: how Gatsby, this “Nobody from Nowhere,” as Daisy’s husband Tom calls him, gets to meet Anglo-American princess Daisy on equal terms, so she can fall in love with him. Tom will be “damned” if he sees how Gatsby “got within a mile of [Daisy] unless [he] brought groceries to the back door.”

Of course, what got Gatsby in the front door of her house during the war was his officer status: “he went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor.” The novel makes clear how the war gave Gatsby a new social status when it made him an officer. He crossed the “indiscernible barbed wire” between classes when he put on the “invisible cloak of his uniform.”

What the novel doesn’t answer is how Gatsby, a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy. The novel definitely “guards secrets” on this point. Did Gatsby fool the army the way he fools most of the people in the novel about himself, with his polished manner, his false name, and his invented family background? The novel’s narrator Nick Carraway naturally comes to doubt Gatsby’s account of a military commission that was supposed to have been issued out of a made-up upper-class background.

Then how does Gatsby make officer? The novel gives two hints on the subject, which most critics have ignored and most readers, informed by the criticism, read right past. In fact, as a college professor, I’ve taught many students who think they remember the novel pretty well from high school but have forgotten that Gatsby was even a soldier.

Nick eventually corrects Gatsby’s romantic saga of his promotion in the American Army, from lieutenant to major at the front as a result of his combat heroics, and notes, “He was a captain before he went to the front.” That’s the first hint. The second is that Fitzgerald put Gatsby at Camp Taylor though it was at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama that he met his future wife Zelda — for many critics, the obvious inspiration for Daisy.

Photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald c. 1921, appearing in “The World’s Work” (June 1921 issue)

Take these tiny, seemingly meaningless hints to the library and the archive, and here’s what you discover. The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made — shocking to privileged young men, such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination — was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.

Fitzgerald would have known about this because he was at Camp Taylor in 1917, which is when, in the novel, he has Gatsby pass through. Someone like Gatsby — that is, someone born in America and a high-school graduate in an era when the average white man completed less than seven years of schooling — would have aced the intelligence tests, which, as we know, tested for education and cultural literacy, not native intelligence.

The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there; by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers. A French soldier reported with shock in 1917: “You could not imagine a more extraordinary gathering than this american [sic] army, there is a bit of everything, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Indians, Spanish, also a sizable number of boches [Germans]. Truthfully, almost half of the officers have German origins.”

Why would Fitzgerald have cared about how Gatsby made captain — and more to the point — why would he have been secretive about this information? Here it helps to know that Fitzgerald was frustrated in his own military ambitions and his army record was an embarrassment to him. Though he made it into officer training by taking an entrance exam open to college students, he never got sent to Europe, and captain was precisely the rank he desired and had fantasies about, but never achieved. He stalled at first lieutenant, the rank below. And this was at a charged wartime moment when masculinity was being equated with combat service and army rank. To make matters worse for him, he watched men who he considered his social inferiors make that rank of captain and pass him by.

It is unlikely that Fitzgerald imagined Gatsby making it into officers’ training on the basis of fabrications because fabrications were irrelevant to the army’s personnel processes. One of the reasons the army liked the intelligence tests so much, flawed though they were, was because they got around the problem of relying on soldiers’ possibly false accounts of their own education and skills. As the wartime Committee on Psychology put it in a memorandum, they eliminated “the danger of charletans” (sic).

In short, the particular American mobilization for the World War I, with its new and very particular methods for selecting officers meant that a nobody like Gatsby could be chosen for officer training and specifically promoted to captain while still at camp. The novel reflects this moment — the moment Gatsby wants to recover, in his desperate effort to “repeat the past.” 

It also reflects the backlash of the WASP establishment against upstart “war heroes” like Gatsby after the war. And, unfamiliar with obscure US Army history and taking our current world of meritocratic promotion for granted, that’s all that strikes us about the novel.

Will the new movie reveal Gatsby’s secret? Probably not. But I was happy at least to see that one of the official trailers put emphasis on the mystery of Gatsby’s rise as well as his soldiering in World War I.

Keith Gandal is the author of the 2010 Oxford paperback, The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is currently working on a comic memoir on the subject of researching Fitzgerald and the other Lost Generation writers, titled Moments of Clarity, Years of Delusion: A Scholarly Detective Story.

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Image credit: Images one and three from The Great Gatsby movie copyright Warner Brothers Entertainment. Used for purposes of illustration. Image two from The World’s Work (The World’s Work (June 1921), p. 192) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Just when, where, why, and how should American power be used? Current assumptions about the near omnipresence—though far from omnipotence—of US power, its influence and its reach are now shaky. Yet these same assumptions coexist alongside widely shared views that such power could and should be used. Perspectives on the application of US power are hotly contested—ranging from the advocacy of using force and providing “lethal aid” to revolutionaries in Syria, to the idea of strategic (née preemptive) bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran. Only idealistic aims—e.g. humanitarian intervention and foreign aid—in the use of power are generally acceptable. Indeed, even as the President and Secretary of Defense aver that “all options are being evaluated,” they do not “foresee boots on the ground.” These choices reflect recent developments. Such alternatives simply did not exist for most of US history. Nor, of course, did the nation always hold the power it possesses today.

For the majority of American history weakness, not strength—and certainly not “power” as we understand it now—defined how American policymakers, thinkers, activists, military leaders, and citizens tended to understand their nation’s place in the world. Protecting the state, not using scarce power or resources abroad, and holding European—especially British—encroachment as far off as possible, were the preferred military and diplomatic strategies of US leaders and citizens through the late nineteenth century and, for many, well into the twentieth century.

Three policy pillars in American foreign relations are the foundation for past as well as present considerations of whether and how to deploy US power. The premise for all three was an understanding of weakness, what we might term cautious realism coupled to a vision of isolation, which sought to stay out of power politics, foreign wars, and binding international treaties and regimes.

George Washington in his Farewell Address of 1796 designed this architecture: “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Yet even before that speech, Washington had established the nation’s neutrality as a formal policy tradition with the Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) and the Neutrality Act (1794). These neutrality declarations ran contrary to the alliance with France, which had helped win the Revolutionary War. They officially distanced the US from allies and enemies alike and asserted the guiding principle that America would pursue “a conduct friendly and impartial towards the Belligerent powers.” Washington’s Farewell Address, partly written by Alexander Hamilton along with James Madison and read in Congress almost every year until quite recently, set the explicitly isolationist tone. It aimed to recognize the nation’s limited power in order to nurture the safety and progress of the state (and hence, national power one might say). These, in turn, became the basis for virtually all subsequent invocations of a “tradition” in American foreign relations. Washington built on this notion of the new nation as neutral and impartial when he put forward the classic formulation:

The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible…. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concern…. Therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

These Washingtonian principles did not turn the nation away from the world. Instead, the ideas formed the crux of foreign policy realism and argued for a cautious sense of America’s place in the world and for choosing “war or peace, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.” Washington took into account the inherent fragility of American power and the nation’s precarious place in the world, emphasizing America’s distant geographical position as a key to strategic separation and as a brake on involvement in Europe’s hazardous political system. These views were then established as precedent by John Adams and reaffirmed by Thomas Jefferson, who allayed the fears of many Federalists when he underscored a shared set of Washingtonian-Adamsian foreign policy principles in his own inaugural address in 1801.

Jefferson asserted this ideal as “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” Jefferson held a clear belief grounded on the practicality of a type of isolation: enter no enduring alliances with the Old World and steer clear of Europe’s petty squabbles. Jefferson’s daring and farsighted purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 propelled the great mission of continental expansion and improvement, doubling the nation’s territory. And of course the Purchase limited the amount of North American land that European powers could claim or conquer. When regarded in this light, his unilateralist efforts were consistent with the idea of isolation as a guarantee toward maintaining and protecting national sovereignty—of giving the weak, fledgling nation time to develop and grow while avoiding entanglements such as those that Ben Franklin derisively termed Europe’s “romantick Continental Connections.”

A circumspect view of American power still was evident in 1823, when President James Monroe pronounced his doctrine. An ambitious articulation of American hemispheric power, the Monroe Doctrine evolved as the guiding view for later foreign policy advocates of interventionism as well as isolationism, many of whom agreed that unilateral involvement across the Americas was perfectly legitimate, but that beyond the Western Hemisphere the nation should avoid foreign wars and the corruptions of particularly Old World political intrigues. Monroe centered this argument on what he saw as an obvious fact: “With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected,” and therefore he declared that “we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

Thus, in three bold strokes, Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe laid out the essential isolationist mode of thinking about their young nation’s most advantageous relationship to the world. As we will be discussing at the Oregon State University American Military and Diplomatic History Conference today, 7 May 2013, these arguments became the benchmarks that a broad range of subsequent politicians, thinkers, and citizens later had to confront as they built their own cases for engagement abroad and justified their developing visions of internationalism. One point is clear about interpreting the meaning of their words in their own time. This dedicated triad of America’s founders articulated a commerce-first form of unilateralism and a sense of cautious realism, which at its most fundamental level sought to protect their young, weak nation by favoring isolation from almost all entangling alliances as well as conflicts abroad, particularly those involving Europe.

Americans today debate possible new interventions, withdrawals, disputes over what does and does not constitute a “red line,” and other applications of power abroad in light of enormous geopolitical changes and challenges. Let the debate consider the long history of cautious realism, the recognition of the limits to power, and the concern about the unintended consequences of foreign policy adventurism. The history cannot be blinked away. It is central to American diplomatic and military policy.

Christopher McKnight Nichols is a professor at Oregon State University and a Senior Editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

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Image credit: USA at night. Image by 1xpert, iStockphoto.

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Each year on 8 May, the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies of dozens of nations unite in celebration of World Red Cross/Red Crescent Day. This global event observes the birthday of Henry Dunant, one of the founders of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC), and commemorates the humanitarian principles that this organization represents. This year’s Red Cross Day is a particularly noteworthy occasion for the year 2013 marks the 150^th anniversary of the ICRC’s founding.

This 8 May 2013, the American Red Cross (ARC) will join 186 other national societies in marking this momentous occasion and honoring the ICRC’s sesquicentennial. This probably comes as little surprise: after all, the ARC is an important and influential humanitarian organization, both domestically and globally. And yet, this has not always been the case. It was not until 1881, 18 years after the ICRC’s creation, that US citizens formed their own national Red Cross society. Only in the early 20^th century, moreover, did the ARC come to be recognized as a major international war and disaster relief society. The story of these developments — of the creation of the American Red Cross and its path to becoming the official voluntary aid association of the United States — is an important part of the history of US international engagement, and of its evolution at the turn of the last century.

This process began in 1859, when a young Swiss citizen named Henry Dunant observed a bloody battle in Solferino, Italy and witnessed the horrors of wartime suffering firsthand. The experience convinced him of the necessity of establishing permanent associations of humanitarian volunteers, ready to provide neutral medical care on the battlefield whenever the need arose. These ideas started coming to fruition when, in February 1863, Dunant met with four fellow Swiss citizens in Geneva to develop an organization dedicated to the relief of wounded soldiers. The result of their meeting would be the formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC’s founding members lobbied for two goals: the creation of Red Cross societies in every nation and the passage of new international laws to protect both wounded soldiers and aid workers. By August 1864, their mission had achieved considerable success. In Geneva, representatives from twelve nations signed a treaty to establish international standards for wartime humanitarianism, the First Geneva Convention. In the ensuing months and years, additional countries would become signatories as well.

Jean Henri Dunant (1828-1910), Swiss author and philanthropist, founder of the Red Cross society. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In 1864, the ICRC’s leaders invited the United States to participate in this fledgling international humanitarian movement. However, the US government demurred. Preoccupied with the nation’s ongoing Civil War, policymakers had their hands full with domestic concerns. Yet even after the Civil War came to an end, US diplomatic officials chose not to follow the growing number of nations that had signed the Geneva Treaty. Citing longstanding precedents in US foreign policy, dating back to the 18^th century, government officials declared it best for the United States to avoid entering any entangling political alliances with Europe.

Not all Americans agreed with this decision. Several former members of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an agency that provided aid to sick and wounded Union soldiers during the US Civil War, lobbied the government to join the International Red Cross Movement. Beginning in the early 1870s, so did an American woman named Clara Barton. Barton had served as a volunteer during the Civil War, helping to deliver medical supplies to Union field hospitals and to identify wounded and dead soldiers. After the Civil War ended, she traveled to Europe to rest and recover. Soon, however, she became involved again in war relief. After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Barton volunteered with the newly formed ICRC to assist its medical aid efforts. It was there that she met Dunant and became inspired by his international humanitarian mission.

Clara Barton, (1821-1912), president of the American Red Cross from 1882 until 1904. Image courtesy of The Library of Congress.

In 1873, Barton returned to the United States and began to lobby against the U.S. government’s policy of non-engagement. For nearly a decade, she led a twin crusade for US ratification of the Geneva Convention and the formation of an American Red Cross society. Eventually, Barton achieved both of her goals. In May 1881, she and fifty-one other US citizens drafted and signed a charter to create the American Association of the Red Cross. The next year, in the spring of 1882, the United States joined a growing body of nations — in Europe and throughout the world — in ratifying the Geneva Convention. US government officials had come to see signing the Geneva Convention as compatible and consistent with US foreign policy goals. As Secretary of State James G. Blaine put it, the American tradition of non-entanglement in foreign political affairs “was not meant to ward off humanity.” Thus, in the early 1880s, the United States became a belated entrant into the world’s foremost international humanitarian movement.

The ARC remained quite limited, in terms of its membership, finances, and power, for several decades to come. It was not until 1900 that the US Congress granted the organization its federal charter. Although President William Howard Taft designated the agency as the “official volunteer aid department of the United States” in 1911, it was only during the First World War — fifty years after the First Geneva Convention — that the ARC began to attain broad popular support and financial stability. It took US entry into the conflict, in April 1917, for the ARC to truly solidify its status as the recognized face of American humanitarian aid.

American Red Cross Parade, Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham View Company., 05/21/1918. Image courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.

Despite this slow progress, the creation of the American Red Cross and the subsequent US ratification of the Geneva Convention in the early 1880s marked a major milestone in the histories of US humanitarianism and international cooperation. On 8 May, as the world unites in celebration of the 150^th anniversary of the ICRC, it is worth taking a moment to remember how the United States and its citizens came to see relieving the suffering of others as a national and an international obligation.

Julia F. Irwin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida. She specializes in the history of U.S. relations with the 20^th century world, with a particular focus on the role of humanitarianism in U.S. foreign affairs. She is the author of Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening. Her current research focuses on the history of U.S. responses to global natural disasters.

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Despite lying at the intersection of both history and international relations — two of the most popular disciplines in the contemporary arts academy — diplomatic history is seen as old-fashioned. New, trendier, and leftier approaches have risen. Consider that of the 45 historians at the University of Wisconsin in 2009, 13 (or 29%) specialized in gender, race, and ethnicity; only 1 (or 2%) studied diplomatic history or US foreign policy. Between 1972-2009, the Journal of American History published 36 articles that expressed some sympathy for American communism and not a single one which was critical.

The bestselling history textbook remains Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980). Zinn was unabashedly liberal-leftist in his approach. His book is currently the 860^th bestselling book in America. Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People, a conservative interpretation, is 19,331^st. This is not to argue over the academic merits of both books but to observe that Zinn’s leftism has necessarily affected how many students and their teachers understand US history. Despite over 40% of Americans describing themselves as conservative, less than 16% of academics identify that way. The American academy, no less American historiography, is a liberal hegemony.

Why this imbalance? After all, diplomatic history has hardly been the preserve of conservative scholars. Perhaps the most important 20^th century work of diplomatic history was William Appleman Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) — the inspiration for a wave of left-leaning revisionist histories of US foreign policy. Christopher McKnight Nichols and David Milne, my two associate editors for the Oxford Encyclopedia, would comfortably locate themselves on the progressive wing of modern politics. Liberal historiography is a very broad church.

One possible answers lies in the necessary focus on the ‘great man’ thesis of history — either implicitly or explicitly — in the work of many diplomatic historians. Men, and it largely is men, have been the key foreign policy makers until comparatively recently. They have lead nations, fought wars, and dictated the terms of peace. All the great commanders-in-chief in US history have been men because all 42 presidents have been men.

As a way around this, university students are increasingly presented with impersonal forces and told these are responsible for injustice or are, conversely, the locomotives of progress. Racism, economic deprivation, and gender inequality color the research agendas of a substantial number of historians. Ameliorate these forces and we can enter the sunny uplands of progress and equality. It is not individuals that move history but forces, pressures, classes, sexes, races, even climate. Nations, led by individual leaders, are made to matter less than the United Nations, led by supposedly progressive impulses.

The diplomatic historian, of course, may be in sympathy with some of this. But he or she must also acknowledge the elite nature of much of what he or she studies: the president and his foreign policy principals, ambassadors and military commanders. And that elite, until the era of Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, was overwhelmingly white and male.

This modern bias against elitism and ‘great men’ and in favor of the explanatory power of impersonal forces is inherent in much contemporary historiography. Diplomatic historians find themselves having to bridge the divide. If only there were more of them — liberal and conservative — doing it.

Timothy J. Lynch is an Associate Professor, Director of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Melbourne. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

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Image credit: A row of international flags. Photo by canbalci, iStockphoto.

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When you hear the name “Henry Ford” do you feel a certain shiver inside? Does a sober look come over your face as you mumble, “Well, he was a terrible anti-Semite”? You aren’t wrong of course, as many books and articles have documented through the years. In fact, that reaction probably places you in the majority. Of course, you know about the Model T and the assembly line too.

But do you also know that 100 years ago he wrote about the ruinous effects of tobacco, and promoted the salubrious effects of a healthy diet and a good deal of exercise on a long and productive life? Furthermore, since he realized that oil wouldn’t last forever, he spent years trying to invent alternative fuels made from vegetable materials. Due to his abhorrence of waste, some 53 industries were created through his attempts to find uses for the byproducts of his factories — just one was the invention of the charcoal briquette from the wood shavings on his shop floor.

The assembly line itself was only one aspect of his most important creation: mass production, which was the foundation of our modern culture of material abundance, that replaced the age old culture of scarcity and want. The Model T, built on the assembly line, was probably the most important and influential piece of technology since the printing press. It was the basis on which mass production was built; the end result of the process was a new type of person, the worker-customer. Ford’s employment policies toward blacks, women and the handicapped, among others, were decades ahead of their time. His work in agriculture on soybeans alone would have made him a significant figure in 20^th century American history.

But then there was the other side. His relentless self-promotion led to self-aggrandizement that was breathtaking in its scope, eventually allowing him to live on a reputation for socially-advanced ideas and achievements long after they began to warp and break down. Uneducated though he was, a rural 19^th century man in background and outlook, he nevertheless came to believe that his preeminent success as a businessman ordained him as a modern sage, a leader who could guide ordinary men to a better life through his ideas. Unfortunately, many of his ideas were regressive and small-minded; sometimes they were far worse.

One of these ideas was anti-Semitism. He spent over six years and millions of dollars promoting vile Judeophobia through a series of articles called The International Jew in his Dearborn Independent periodical, reprinting them in books and publishing the notorious (and discredited) Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which even today have a pernicious anti-Semitic effect in certain parts of the world.

Furthermore, by 1937 a growing meanness in this increasingly isolated man led to an oppressive, militaristic atmosphere in his workplaces. The friend of the workingman had nearly become his enemy. Another demerit in his ledger was his ability to clothe personal greed in a mantle of civic virtue, as he did in the Muscle Shoals affair in the Tennessee Valley in 1923 and the Detroit banking Crisis of 1933.

Soaring heights and abysmal depths in his character produced a wildly mixed record in his public life and subsequent reputation. He remains an ambiguous figure, as much of a puzzle and a mystery today as he was when he lived.

Vincent Curcio is the author of Henry Ford; Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame; Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius; and, with Steven Englund, Charlie’s Prep. He was the General Manager and Producer of Lucille Lortel’s White Barn Theater for 25 years.

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Image credit: (1) Henry Ford, full-length portrait, standing, facing slightly left, leaving the White House after calling on the president. 1927. National Photo Company Collection via Library of Congress. (2) Vincent Curcio author photo by Michael Domenick Tedesco.

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“That was my radio show!” narrator David Goldman exclaimed, looking at copies of classified ads placed in the University of Chicago’s student newspaper during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was an undergraduate student. Goldman, a retired math teacher and one of the founders of the gay liberation movement at the University of Chicago, recently contributed his story to the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) research project Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles: A History of LGBTQ Life at the University of Chicago. During his interview, Goldman spoke at length about coming out in the late 1960s and gay student organizing at the University in the early 1970s. His interview is just the first of many we at CSGS hope to collect from LGBT alumni, faculty, and staff over the next two years.

Chicago Maroon newspaper (ca. 1970), University of Chicago Library.

Building on the success of a previous oral history and exhibition project documenting the experiences of women at the University of Chicago, Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles speaks to a vibrant and growing partnership between the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the University Archives at Special Collections Research Center, one aimed at building archival collections in gender and sexuality studies. With support from CSGS’s undergraduate oral history internship program and archives-based undergraduate seminars (created specifically for the Closeted/Out project), we expect to deposit more than one hundred oral histories to the University Archives by 2015.

While scholars have documented the University of Chicago’s rich and numerous contributions to the academic study of homosexuality, we actually know very little about the experiences of LGBTQ individuals and communities who have passed through the campus gates. Filling that knowledge gap is our team of undergraduate student interns, who bring an important dose of energy, enthusiasm, and insider knowledge about campus life to the Closeted/Out interviews. Molly Liu, a fourth-year Biology major who first trained in oral history methods for an African history course, notes:

The loose, undirected format of oral history means that I get to hear people’s stories without needing to dig for any particular piece of information, and in doing so I’ve felt like I’ve understood these people in some way. Their words about gay identity, the University, and Chicago in particular have given me a lot think about. Plus, it’s very fulfilling on a personal level to talk to LGBTQ alumni who are happy and successful.

Kelsey Ganser, a fourth-year History major who is completing an internship with the project while working on her senior thesis in Russian history, reflected on both the academic and personal value of her work:

Working [on the project] has given me the skills to conduct oral history interviews, which are frequently overlooked in my history courses. As a young queer person, through the project I have been able to connect to my history in a way that was never available to me before. The pleasant and easygoing interviews help me feel how strong and welcoming the gay community is, and the difficult ones help me appreciate how far we have come. I had never met an adult gay person until I came to college, so discovering our history through the life stories of other LGBTQ people has been hugely important for the development of my identity. In this regard, I don’t think I can overstate how much this project has influenced my personal understanding of queer identity and history.

Molly, Kelsey, and our other student interns have also found themselves working on the front lines of gathering new archival donations for Special Collections Research Center. As Cal State scholar David A. Reichard has discussed in the Oral History Review article “Animating Ephemera through Oral History: Interpreting Visual Traces of California Gay College Student Organizing from the 1970s,” oral histories not only help us interpret student ephemera, they also help us collect it. Our interns have returned from their interviews with photos, event flyers, stickers, zines, and promises of future loans and donations to the Closeted/Out project. Their friends and classmates have offered to save materials documenting current feminist and queer organizing on campus. And the courses we offer in conjunction with the Closeted/Out project have also brought new undergraduate users to Special Collections Research Center, where they find archivists and librarians eager to help them explore an activist and social history of LGBT life.

University of Chicago students marching at Chicago Pride (1991), Chicago Maroon collection, University of Chicago Photographic Archive, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

As our students continue to interview, we also begin work on plans for a campus exhibition showcasing our findings, scheduled for the Spring of 2015. Shortly thereafter, the LGBTQ oral history collection will be available to researchers at Special Collections Research Center.

Monica L. Mercado is a Ph.D. Candidate in U.S. History at the University of Chicago and a dissertation fellow at the University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, where she is a coordinator of the Center’s public history initiatives. Before coming to Chicago, Monica worked in exhibitions and programs at the Museum of the City of New York. You can find her musings on women’s and LGBT history, teaching, and Chicago’s unpredictable weather at @monicalmercado.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, or follow the latest OUPblog posts to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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America has a rich and diverse history which shows itself in its music, politics, film, and culture. The power of biography helps to illuminate larger questions of war, peace, and justice and in exploring the lives of the figures that helped shape America’s history we can discover more about our past.

The American National Biography Online (ANB Online) allows you to discover the lives of over 18,700 men and women who have helped to shape American history. This April, 41 new lives have been added to the resource including radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, chess genius Bobby Fischer, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and singer and actress Peggy Lee. We are also delighted to announce a new partnership between the ANB Online and the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution to allow National Portrait Gallery images to be used alongside ANB Online biographies.

Browse through the portraits and discover the famous and, not so famous, lives of some of the key figures who have been added this April.

• James A. VAN ALLEN

   

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  James A. Van Allen, (7 Sept. 1914-9 Aug. 2006), astrophysicist. Courtesy of NASA

• Robert MCNAMARA

   

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  Robert S. McNamara, (9 June 1916-6 July 2009), business executive, president of Ford Motor Company, U.S. secretary of defense, and president of the World Bank. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist.

• Peggy LEE

   

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  Peggy Lee, (26 May 1920-21 Jan. 2002), jazz and pop singer, songwriter, and actress. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Creative Commons License.

• Martha GRIFFITHS

   

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  Martha Griffiths, (29 Jan. 1912-22 Apr. 2003), U.S. congresswoman, lawyer, and women's rights advocate. Courtesy of Library of Congress (LC-U9-23069-20)

• Paulette GODDARD

   

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  Paulette Goddard, (3 June 1910-23 Apr. 1990), actress. Courtesy of Library of Congress (LC-USE6-D-001602)

• John Kenneth GALBRAITH

   

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  John Kenneth Galbraith, (15 Oct. 1908-29 Apr. 2006), economist and author. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USE6-D-000368)

• Orville FREEMAN

   

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  Orville Freeman, (9 May 1918-20 Feb. 2003), governor and secretary of agriculture. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. Boris Chaliapin

• Florence FOSTER JENKINS

   

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  Florence Foster Jenkins, (19 May 1868-26 Nov. 1944), singer. Courtesy of Library of Congress (LC-DIG-ggbain-33928).

• Lucy BURNS

   

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  Lucy Burns, (28 July 1879-22 Dec. 1966), suffragist and vice chairman of the Congressional Union. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-DIG-hec-03870)

Gemma Barratt is an Associate Marketing Manager for Oxford University Press.

The landmark American National Biography (ANB Online) offers portraits of more than 18,700 men & women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped the nation. The wealth of biographies are supplemented with over 900 articles from The Oxford Companion to United States History and over 2,500 illustrations and photographs providing depth and context to the portraits. It is updated twice a year with new biographies, illustrations, and articles. Find out more about the latest update by visiting the Highlights page. American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) sponsors the American National Biography (ANB Online), which is published by Oxford University Press.

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Forty-three years have passed since Senator Gaylord Nelson’s teach-in first made its mark on America. Since then, Earth Day has become as regular a fixture on the US calendar as Labor Day and Halloween, albeit without the shopping and candy. As Adam Rome explains in his new book, The Genius of Earth Day, the original event in 1970 mobilized millions of students, teachers, and housewives and brought together a broad, bi-partisan coalition. It seemed that half the population had become environmental activists, at least for a day.

While Earth Day made waves around the US, a few miles across the Canadian border a different kind of environmental activism was taking shape. Its focus was on stopping a very real and potentially destructive wave, one that would emanate from a giant nuclear bomb that the US military was planning to explode on Amchitka, a small island in the North Pacific. In Vancouver, a group of self-exiled American peace activists and draft evaders had begun to mingle with younger Canadians who were part of the city’s burgeoning counterculture. Together they formed a protest group with the evocative, if somewhat cumbersome name, the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, and they started making plans to sail a protest boat to Amchitka the following year to bear witness to the insane ecological destructiveness of nuclear weapons testing.

One of the DMWC’s founders was Irving Stowe, a 54-year-old American lawyer who had become a full-time activist. As he was leaving one of the group’s meetings, Stowe flashed the two-fingered V-shaped hippie salute and mumbled “peace.” Bill Darnell, a young Canadian social worker, spontaneously replied, “Make it a green peace!” Stowe’s wife, Dorothy, recalled that those final two words “lit up the room,” and the group resolved to name their ship the Greenpeace.

Despite an epic attempt, the Greenpeace, an aging halibut seiner the DMWC hired from a local fisherman in Vancouver, never made it to Amchitka. Nevertheless, the campaign gained considerable coverage in Canada. As a result, Irving and Dorothy Stowe, Bill Darnell, and the other activists felt that the DMWC could become a vehicle for a unique new style of direct action protest against environmental destruction throughout the world, particularly in difficult to reach places such as remote nuclear testing sites. So in early 1972, they changed the DMWC’s name to the Greenpeace Foundation. Within a decade, it would become the most well-known environmental organization in the world, with multiple branches in numerous countries and a global headquarters in Amsterdam.

The older generation of American activists, such as Irving and Dorothy Stowe, imbued Greenpeace with the ideas and tactics of the American peace movement, particularly the style of nonviolent protest that Quakers had adapted from Gandhi’s program of civil disobedience against British rule in India. The Amchitka protest, for example, was directly inspired by similar campaigns that various Quaker organizations had mounted during the 1950s, all of which were based on the Quaker idea of “bearing witness” to the injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the weak.

The younger generation of predominantly Canadian activists was equally important in shaping Greenpeace’s values, tactics, and priorities. Chief among them was a chain-smoking, acid-dropping, I Ching-reading journalist named Bob Hunter. Hunter shared the ecological apocalypticism that characterized much of the environmentalism of the era. He fervently believed that the only way to save the world from destruction was to foment a consciousness revolution that would completely alter the way that humans viewed themselves in relation to other species on the planet. This new consciousness would reflect the holistic worldview of ecology—at least the kind of popular ecology with which Hunter was familiar—and would help humanity reach a stage of sustainable co-existence with the rest of nature.

Hunter felt that the North American counterculture, with its openness to alternative worldviews, its embrace of Native American spirituality and other forms of holistic thought, and its rejection of crass consumption, was already well on the way to achieving the new consciousness. But how could the values held by a relatively small minority reshape the entire world? The media—and particularly television—was the key. Hunter was a devotee of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian communications scholar who developed such enduring concepts and aphorisms as “the global village” and “the medium is the message.” By using the mass media as a vehicle for what Hunter called “mind bombing,” groups like Greenpeace could help fast-track the countercultural consciousness revolution throughout the world. While revolutionaries of the past had required armed struggle as a means of achieving their ends, the modern mass communications system provided a “delivery system” through which the agents of the new consciousness could “bomb” people’s minds, creating new archetypal images and reframing standard narratives of human progress. Television, Hunter argued, could be “targeted with complete accuracy to strike at a point precisely two inches behind the victim’s eyes. No bullet flies so fast, so far, with such unerring accuracy. Not even a hydrogen bomb can affect so many people at once.”

This combination of mind bombing and bearing witness was subsequently employed against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, Soviet and Japanese whaling, and numerous other environmentally destructive activities around the world. Greenpeace’s small cadre of professional environmental activists alerted millions of people to environmental problems that were often remote and hidden from public view. Eventually, they created a powerful international NGO with branches in over 40 countries. Subsequently, Greenpeace diversified its repertoire. Its activities now also include sponsoring scientific studies and environmentally-friendly technology, as well as political lobbying. When combined with the judicious use of mind bombing, Greenpeace’s environmental activism still exerts a degree of political influence, albeit at the cost of a more bloated administrative structure than Irving Stowe or Bob Hunter would have liked.

Earth Day and Greenpeace offered two very different models for raising environmental awareness. Earth Day was based around mass participation and focused on local issues in people’s communities. Its goal was to create an environment conducive to widespread political reform at all levels of government. The Greenpeace model, by contrast, relied on a small cadre of activists to carry out spectacular direct action protests, frequently in remote regions or against difficult targets, in the hope that the striking visual images would embarrass the perpetrators of environmental crimes, as well as generally altering people’s perception of humanity’s relationship to its environment.

Despite its global profile, Greenpeace has never really been a social movement. True, it has a substantial worldwide support base, but it is largely a checkbook membership. For most supporters, participation involves sending money to finance the activities of professionals. Thus the evolution of a more corporate structure, with its attendant hierarchy and managerialism, has in many ways strengthened Greenpeace’s ability to carry out its work. Hunter’s dream of a consciousness revolution has been diluted, but Greenpeace remains a reasonably effective NGO, particularly in Europe and Australasia, where its profile is higher than in the US.

Like Greenpeace, Earth Day is today also a global phenomenon. But is it a successful one? Rome argues that the subsequent professionalization of Earth Day, with its top-down directives, its governmental seals of approval, and emphasis on marketing at the expense of concrete participation, diluted its effectiveness. Unlike Greenpeace, Earth Day started as a broad social movement; it had little to gain from professionalization. Perhaps it’s time take Earth Day away from the politicians and marketers and give it back to teachers, students, and local communities.

Frank Zelko is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and History at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Make it a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism, which has just been published by OUP.

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15 April 2013 marked the fifth Jackie Robinson Day, commemorating the 66th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, an event which broke baseball’s racial barrier. In each game that is now played on 15 April, all players wear Jackie Robinson’s iconic #42 (also the title of a new film on Robinson). Thirty years ago, historian and ardent baseball fan Jules Tygiel proposed the first scholarly study of integration in baseball, shepherded by esteemed Oxford editor, Sheldon Meyer. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy was first published in 1983, and its 25th Anniversary was celebrated with a new edition in 2008. Though Dr. Tygiel passed away in 2008, this extract from his Afterword demonstrates our ongoing captivation with the Jackie Robinson story.

One of the more surprising elements of the recent lionization of Jackie Robinson has been the relative diminution of Branch Rickey in the saga. In the early retellings of the story, Rickey, not Robinson, played the dominant role. The flamboyant and publicity-savvy Dodger president, after all, had set the project in motion, bucking not just history but a hostile group of fellow owners. Rickey had scouted the Negro Leagues and Caribbean baseball, discovered and selected Robinson, and meticulously planned the strategies necessary to make his “great experiment” a success. Rickey had also, in many respects, shaped the prevailing master narrative of the path to integration: his dramatic 1945 meeting with Robinson; the restrictions placed on Robinson’s behavior; the suppression of the 1947 player revolt; and the 1949 liberation of Robinson allowing him to strike back at his tormentors. Although commentators constantly debated and questioned Rickey’s true motivations, in many accounts Robinson appeared as a puppet, with Rickey pulling the strings.

The image of a white, paternalistic Rickey masterminding the integration process and in Lincolnesque fashion emancipating black ballplayers fit well with the postwar liberal ethos. The rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 1950s and 1960s, however, called for a Robinson who was less a martyr to a cause and more an active agent of change. I attempted to present the two more as partners in the endeavor, but as the story unfolded, it was Robinson, the dynamic, compelling man on the field who seized center stage, while Rickey, who left the Dodgers after the 1950 season, faded into the background.

Jackie Robinson swinging a bat in Dodgers uniform, 1954. Photo by Bob Sandberg. Published in LOOK, v. 19, no. 4, 1955 Feb. 22, p. 78.United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division.

Current literature reveals a similar trend. While studies of Robinson proliferate, volumes on Rickey, who even without the Robinson story would still be the most significant baseball executive of the twentieth century, have been rare. Murray Polner’s Branch Rickey: A Biography appeared at about the same time as Baseball’s Great Experiment. Not until 2007, when Lee Lowenfish’s authoritative Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman was published, did another Rickey biography appear. Lowenfish reminds us of the strong religious underpinnings for Rickey’s actions. He criticizes those who question Rickey’s motives as guilty of “erroneous simplification,” arguing that “by ridiculing Rickey’s pontificating style, the impatient ideologues have ignored his moral substance and the genuine paternal relationship he built with Robinson the athlete and family man.” But Lowenfish does not substantially revise the standard long-accepted storyline presented in Baseball’s Great Experiment and other works.

Several historians, however, have contributed a handful of additional insights into Rickey’s thinking that alter my original portrayal. John Thorn discovered a cache of photographs of Robinson taken by a Look photographer in 1945. This led John and me to revisit several documents in the Arthur Mann Papers and to conclude that Rickey’s original idea was not to announce the signing of just Robinson in October 1945 but several Negro League players at once. Political pressures forced Rickey to abandon this strategy and focused attention on Robinson alone as the standard-bearer of the campaign. Neil Lanctot has also shattered the longstanding myth that the United States League (USL), a new Negro League that took the field in 1945, was created largely as a smokescreen for Rickey’s integration initiative. Rickey, he shows, played a minimal role in the conception or operations of the USL. In a review of Baseball’s Great Experiment, Ron Story suggested that my analysis of Rickey’s actions had underplayed his lifelong pursuit of cheap labor, as embodied in his creation of the farm system, in analyzing his decision to sign black players. Following this lead, I addressed this aspect of Rickey’s career in a chapter in Past Time: Baseball As History, published in 2000.

If Rickey, however, has inspired relatively little new research, Robinson remains a popular subject. Thanks to several biographical studies, most notably, Arnold Rampersad’s magisterial Jackie Robinson: A Life, we have a more fully developed portrait of Robinson’s upbringing and his often controversial postbaseball experiences as businessman, civil rights leader, and political activist. Family memoirs by his wife, Rachel, and daughter, Sharon, have, along with Rampersad’s book, also offered a deeper perspective into Robinson’s personal life. In the quest for fresh things to say about Robinson’s baseball career, historians and journalists have begun to deconstruct it in minute detail. Thus we now have books focusing on Robinson’s first spring training in Florida in 1946 and his 1947 rookie season. Can studies of his 1949 Most Valuable Player year or his personal role in the 1951 heartbreak (both of which could actually be wonderful reads) be far behind?

Jules Tygiel, a native of Brooklyn, was Professor of History at San Francisco State University and founder of the Pacific Ghost League. He is the author of Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy and The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks, and Scandal During the Roaring Twenties. In this gripping account of one of the most important steps in the history of American desegregation, Jules Tygiel tells the story of Jackie Robinson’s crossing of baseball’s color line. Examining the social and historical context of Robinson’s introduction into white organized baseball, both on and off the field, Tygiel also tells the often neglected stories of other African-American players–such as Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron–who helped transform our national pastime into an integrated game.

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In March 1978, Ada Smith, a fifty-six-year old woman from Memphis, sat down at her typewriter and wrote an angry letter to Tennessee’s Republican Senator Howard Baker. She explained that until recently, she had always been proud of her country, and “its superiority in the world.” But now her pride had turned to fear: “After coming through that great fiasco Vietnam, which cost us billions in dollars and much more in American blood, we are now faced with another act of stupidity, which, in the years to come, could be even more costly. Why should we Americans give up our sons, husbands, and brothers, to fight for land that does not even belong to us, and then sit quietly by, and let you, whom we chose to represent us, give away something as important as the Panama Canal?”

Jimmy Carter and General Omar Torrijos shake hands after signing the Panama Canal Treaty, 7 September 1977. National Archives and Records Administration.

For a brief moment in the late 1970s, thousands of Americans became fixated on a place that most of them had never seen: the Panama Canal. In 1903, the ratification of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla treaty (which took place one hundred and ten years ago last month) had given the United States exclusive jurisdiction over the yet-to-be-constructed Canal and the ten mile wide zone that surrounded it. In the years that followed, the Canal quickly emerged as a potent symbol of American military, economic, and political ascendancy on the world stage. It enabled the traversal of two oceans with one navy, opened trade routes to the global South and East, and constituted a feat of modern engineering. By the 1970s, however, U.S. policymakers had grown convinced that the 1903 treaty was an outdated imperial relic that no longer served the national interest. When he was elected president in 1976, Jimmy Carter placed the negotiation of a new Panama Canal Treaty at the center of a post-Vietnam U.S. foreign policy that would rely less on military force and more on consent, with the aim of restoring the nation’s damaged moral authority in the wake of military defeat. In April 1978, the Carter Administration appeared to get what it wanted: the Senate ratified a new treaty that ensured the gradual assumption by Panama of the management, operation, and control of the Canal.

The famous Culebra Cut of the Panama Canal, 1907.

It is not surprising that Carter’s victory incensed some politicians, who saw no need to “give away” what they believed to be a vital possession. But how do we explain the angry response of citizens like Ada Smith, who lived thousands of miles from the Canal and had no direct familial or economic ties to it? Why did she become so distressed when she thought about the replacement of one treaty with another? More broadly, how do particular places outside of the United States—whether nations, territories, cities, or built environments–become sites of emotional and psychological investment for Americans? As a cultural historian who has studied the increasingly polarized politics of the 1970s, I have long understood why some issues that surfaced during that era—like abortion, women’s rights, and gay liberation—struck such a deep chord that they compelled once apolitical people to engage in New Right grassroots organizing for the first time in their lives. But I was intrigued when I discovered that an ostensibly rarified foreign policy issue could have a similarly galvanizing effect. Yet it had: treaty opponents engaged in letter-writing campaigns, held political rallies, and raised money to buy radio time to air their opposition. And after the new treaty was ratified, conservative voters threatened moderate Republicans who had supported the treaty with political extinction. The threat was not hollow. In the elections of 1978 and 1980, eighteen pro-treaty senators (along with President Carter) went down in defeat. As New Right operative Richard Viguerie explained it, the canal fight had created a “voting map”; conservative voters could go to the polls, look for a pro-treaty candidate’s name on the ballot, and vote against him.

USS Missouri (BB-63) in the Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal, 13 October 1945, while en route from the Pacific to New York City to take part in Navy Day celebrations. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.

The many letters, pamphlets, and position papers written by its opponents reveal that the treaty served as a proxy for a larger debate about the nation’s global position in the wake of Vietnam. While figures like Carter saw in the treaty a chance for the United States to replace the overt domination associated with empire with a more benign managerial role in its dealings with weaker states, critics perceived the treaties as symptomatic of the paralysis, confusion, and weakness that they believed had gripped policymakers after the failed intervention in Southeast Asia. In other words, they saw in the treaties a larger post-Vietnam pattern of defeatism and surrender, what one anti-treaty critic described as “the cowardly retreat of a tired, toothless paper tiger.” For the many men and women who were carving out a political space for themselves within the burgeoning New Right, this perception of weakness in the foreign policy realm was not unrelated to domestic fights over abortion, feminism, and homosexuality. Indeed, this weakness was seen as an extension of the moral decline they perceived in the realms of heterosexual marriage, gender relations, and the family. Treaty critics routinely portrayed Carter as effeminized and weak and contrasted him to Teddy Roosevelt, the president who had taken control of the Canal in 1903 and who in their view embodied the manliness and fortitude that had now gone missing from U.S. foreign policy.

One hundred and ten years after the signing of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty and thirty five years after the bitter fight over the treaty that replaced it, the struggle over the Canal reminds us that while scholars may draw tidy lines of demarcation between the “foreign” and the “domestic,” citizens themselves inhabit a political universe that is considerably messier, one in which the seemingly distinct worlds of policy-making and private life intersect. Thus when Americans become ideologically invested in a particular place beyond the boundaries of the nation (as they did in the Canal both in the early twentieth century and in the late 1970s), the answer to the question of “why” will almost certainly reside closer to home.

Natasha Zaretsky is an Associate Professor of History at Southern Illinois University. She is the author of “Restraint or Retreat? The Debate over the Panama Canal Treaties and U.S. Nationalism after Vietnam” in Diplomatic History, which is available to read for free for a limited time. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980, which was published by The University of North Carolina Press in 2007. Her writings have also appeared in The New Republic (on-line edition), Diplomatic History, Race, Nation, and Empire in American History (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), and The World the Sixties Made (Temple University Press, 2003). Along with Mark Lawrence, she is the co-editor of the fourth edition of Major Problems in American History Since 1945 (forthcoming from Cengage-Wadsworth) and is currently working on a cultural history of the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. In 2009, she was named a Top Young Historian by the History News Network.

As the principal journal devoted to the history of US diplomacy, foreign relations, and security issues, Diplomatic History examines issues from the colonial period to the present in a global and comparative context. The journal offers a variety of perspectives on the economic, strategic, cultural, racial, and ideological aspects of the United States in the world.

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On the seventeenth of April 1907, 11,747 immigrants arrived in the Ellis Island landing station in New York, marking a record high in terms of the number of people processed on a single day at the station, where 17 million newcomers landed between 1892 and 1954. This arrival was part of a broader landmark immigration wave. In 1907, the United States received 1,285,349 immigrants, and this annual entry remained largest in the nation’s history until 1990.

For the majority of immigrants, Ellis Island was a gateway to a new American life. The station also represented a bitter reality that the door to America was firmly closed to many. By 1907, the federal government had developed a series of laws to regulate the quality of newcomers who would join American society. Immigrants of undesirable character such as prostitutes, criminals, paupers, persons “likely to become a public charge,” people with physical and mental defects, and people with contagious diseases were not permitted to land. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and subsequent legislation, had also suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers. As the nation’s major point of entry, Ellis Island played a central role in the implementation of federal immigration law. Upon the arrival of immigrants, federal inspectors interrogated them, examined their medical conditions, and ordered the return of those deemed excludable to their countries of origin. Those who seemed to require additional inspection were detained.

While Ellis Island is now widely recognized as a historical icon of the American immigration experience, some important questions remain to be addressed. Where did federal immigration regulation law come from? How was immigration to the United States regulated prior to Ellis Island? What was the relationship between earlier practices of immigration control and federal regulatory policy that developed from the late nineteenth century onward?

Some of the roots of federal immigration control can be traced back to passenger laws in Atlantic seaboard states. Since the 18th century, coastal states adopted policies for preventing the landing of destitute Europeans. Upon the arrival of a steamship, state or local officials examined the condition of passengers, and sent back to the other side of the Atlantic those who were likely to become public charges in America unless the shipmaster provided a certain amount of bond money for their landing.

PERSPECTIVE VIEW (NORTHWEST) OF MAIN GATE – Castle Clinton, Battery Park, New York. Historic American Buildings Survey Collection. Library of Congress.

Among coastal states, New York and Massachusetts pursued this kind of exclusion policy successfully. In 1855, New York established an immigration depot at Castle Garden, an old fort in lower Manhattan. At this state-level predecessor for Ellis Island, the New York Commissioners of Emigration inspected arriving passengers. If paupers or criminals were found, the officials wrote, “they are detained” and “measures may be taken to cause their return to the port of embarkation.” In addition to admission regulation, Massachusetts developed policies for deporting foreign paupers already in the state in response to the influx of the famine-stricken Irish in the mid-19th century.

State-level immigration control was developed into national policy in the early 1880s. When the US Supreme Court struck down state passenger law in 1876 for infringing upon Congress’s authority over foreign commerce, immigration officials in New York and Massachusetts organized an interstate campaign to establish national immigration legislation. The result of the campaign was the Immigration Act of 1882. Enacted three months after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the act was modeled on preexisting immigration policies in New York and Massachusetts and prohibited the landing of criminals, paupers, and lunatics with a deportation provision for criminals. This act, together with the Chinese Exclusion Act, laid the foundations of federal immigration control.

The introduction of the federal Immigration Act of 1882 didn’t signify the end of states’ involvement in immigration control. Since the federal government had neither the administrative capacity nor the experience in passenger regulation to enforce the law, the 1882 act left the implementation of its provisions, such as inspecting passengers’ conditions and excluding undesirable foreigners, to state officials. Thus, federal immigration control started as a state-federal joint endeavor.

State officials’ participation in federal policy continued even after 1891, when the nationalization of immigration regulation was technically completed. In March 1891, Congress passed a new immigration act that replaced state enforcers with federal employees. The passage of the act was followed by the construction of the federally operated Ellis Island landing station. Yet again, without trained staff of its own, the federal government ended up hiring state workers at Castle Garden for the administration of Ellis Island. Similarly, in Massachusetts, state officials were employed as US officers to implement the 1891 act.

U.S. inspectors examining eyes of immigrants, Ellis Island, New York Harbor. Miscellaneous Items in High Demand. Library of Congress.

State officials’ enduring involvement not only helped consolidate federal control in its formative period but also shaped the way federal law was implemented. One of the characteristics of federal control that developed in the following decades was immigration officers’ virtually unqualified power over exclusion and deportation decisions. The vague construction of the “likely to become a public charge” clause allowed officials to apply exclusion to a wide range of people. Deportations could be processed based on unlawful arrest and informal evidence. In short, federal immigration control was loose at best and to a great extent subject to the discretion of immigration officials.

Precedents for this aspect of federal control are found in the practices of state officials prior to 1882. The New York Commissioners of Emigration, for example, routinely detained and returned destitute immigrants at their discretion without giving ship masters the option to provide bonds. In antebellum Massachusetts, Irish paupers were deported often illegally without required court warrants by state officials who were desperate to remove “an ignorant and vicious Irish Catholic population” or “leeches upon our tax payers.” These state-level approaches to undesirable foreigners were integrated into national policy through the 1882 act’s state-federal joint administration and state officials’ continuous presence after the passage of the 1891 act.

It is beyond dispute that racism against Asians and Mexicans immensely influenced the development of modern American immigration policy. Yet American immigration restriction also stemmed from earlier practices and mindsets against destitute Europeans established in northeastern seaboard states long before Ellis Island. Border control, then, is a tradition deeply rooted in the American immigration experience.

Hidetaka Hirota is Postdoctoral Fellow of History at Boston College. He is the author of “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy” in the Journal of American History (March 2013), which won the 2012 Organization of American Historians Louis Pelzer Memorial Award.

The Journal of American History is the leading scholarly publication and the journal of record in the field of American history. Published quarterly in March, June, September, and December, the Journal continues its nine-decade-long career presenting original articles on American history. Each volume of the Journal features a variety of pieces that deal with every aspect of American history, including state-of-the-field essays, broadly inclusive book reviews, and reviews of films, museum exhibitions, and Web sites.

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Mashapaug Pond, Yoyatche Mehquantash – Always Remember by Loren Spears.  Used with permission of the photographer.

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards

Continuing our celebration of the release of 40.1, today we’re excited to share a conversation between managing editor Troy Reeves and contributors Anne Valk and Holly Ewald. Valk and Ewald are the authors of, “Bringing a Hidden Pond to Public Attention: Increasing Impact through Digital Tools,” which describes the origins and methods of the Mashapaug Project, a collaborative community arts and oral history project on a pond in Providence, Rhode Island. Through the course of their conversation with Troy, Valk, and Ewald demonstrate how we may push the definition and impact of oral history work.

Those interested in public art and public humanities should also be sure to give this a listen!

[See post to listen to audio]

Or download it directly.

Anne Valk is Associate Director of Programs at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University. Her book Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South (Palgrave Press, 2010), written with Leslie Brown, won the Oral History Association Book Award in 2011. Holly Ewald is an artist who works within the context of public spaces, and with the people who inhabit and treasure those places. As founder of Urban Pond Procession, she encourages other artists to use the historical and environmental challenges of Mashapaug Pond to engage the public in creative responses to this neglected site. Through Our Eyes, An Indigenous View of Mashapug Pond (2012), a book she co-edited with Dawn Dove, was the culmination of a project with an intergenerational Indigenous group at the Tomaquag Museum in Rhode Island.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview and like them on Facebook to preview the latest from the Review, learn about other oral history projects, connect with oral history centers across the world, and discover topics that you may have thought were even remotely connected to the study of oral history. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts on the OUPblog for addendum to past articles, interviews with scholars in oral history and related fields, and fieldnotes on conferences, workshops, etc.

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One of the first things I did after being appointed general editor of the American National Biography was to assign myself an entry to write. I wanted to put myself in the shoes of my contributors and experience first-hand the challenge of the short biographical form.

I settled on Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003), a feminist literary scholar who also wrote mystery novels under the pen name of Amanda Cross. Her writings on biography and women’s literature have been important to my own intellectual journey as a feminist scholar and I have even toyed with the idea of using her best known book, Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), as the model for a book on feminist biography I hope to write someday. I also love her mystery novels, which bear a strong debt to Dorothy Sayers, whose books had also been a formative influence on me when I was growing up. One of the most important prerequisites for writing good biography, I have learned, is the spark between biographer and subject, and it seemed like Heilbrun and I would make a good match.

Carolyn Heilbrun – the most brilliant. Legenda, 1947. Image courtesy of Susan Ware. Do not reproduce without permission.

Additionally, I had a more personal connection to the subject: Heilbrun had been a classmate of my mother’s at Wellesley College in the 1940s. My mother loved to tell the story of letting “Cacky” (her nickname) Gold into their dorm by a basement window after she had stayed out past curfew with the Harvard student, James Heilbrun, whom she married in February of her sophomore year. I suspect that Carolyn had not officially told college officials about her marriage, because her new husband was about to be shipped off to the Pacific. So in the meantime she managed to steal time with him in Cambridge with the help of her dorm mates who covered for her. By her senior year, he was back from the war and they lived off campus while she finished her degree. Carolyn Gold Heilbrun graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1947, as did my mother, Charlotte McConnell.

A photo of six Freshman from the Class of 1947 at Wellesley, including Susan Ware’s mother, Charlotte McConnell, second from left. Legenda, 1947. Image courtesy of Susan Ware. Do not reproduce without permission.

I always chuckled over this story, because by the time I was a student at Wellesley in the late 1960s, living in the same Severance Hall dorm, it wasn’t so much a question of letting students in through basement windows after hours but trying to sneak in male visitors for the night. I seriously doubt that my mother and her friends would have conspired with Carolyn so readily if she had been sneaking off to see her boyfriend, but the sanction of marriage made it okay.

Tower Court complex – Wellesley College. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Fast forward about forty years to 1987, when I published a biography of New Deal politician (and Wellesley graduate) Molly Dewson, a work very much informed by the feminist scholarship of which Heilbrun was now a leading proponent from her tenured position in the English Department at Columbia. Seeking to make a connection between her and my mother, I sent her an inscribed copy of my book. I never heard a word in return.

Some years later my mother and I were both reading Heilbrun’s Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. One night I got an excited phone call. “Look at page 212,” my mother exclaimed. “She mentions your book!” Sure enough, Heilbrun used the story of Molly Dewson and her partner Polly Porter as an example of how women’s relationships could be just as strong and long-lived as heterosexual marriages. Unfortunately she slightly garbled the title of my book, calling it My Partner and I rather than Partner and I, but I think Heilbrun’s rendition is actually better.

A lot of the background research and preparation for a biographical entry never makes it into the formal essay. It also takes a lot more time to craft a biographical essay than, say, this blog post. Every detail has to be nailed down. Hard choices have to be made about which episodes and events to include versus which to leave out. Should I include quotations to give the flavor of her writing? How much space should I devote to her personal life, when she always claimed that the essence of her life was her work?  So many choices, so few words.

In practically the same amount of space as this blog post, we ask our contributors to craft an interpretation of an entire life, chock full of dates and details accompanied by the larger context in which the subject operated. The experience of writing a biographical essay, and then writing about the process, confirms how challenging – and rewarding — the invitation to contribute an essay to the ANB can be. I plan to draw on this insight in my interactions with contributors in the years to come.

Susan Ware is the General Editor of the American National Biography and celebrated her first year anniversary of working on the ANB this April. She is an accomplished historian, editor, and the author of seven books, including biographies of Billie Jean King, Amelia Earhart, Molly Dewson, and Mary Margaret McBride. She served as the editor of several documentary collections and of the most recent volume of Notable American Women, published in 2004, which contains biographies of 483 women from over 50 fields. Educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University, Dr. Ware taught at New York University and Harvard. Susan’s article on Carolyn Gold Heilbrun will be added to the ANB Online in October 2013.

The landmark American National Biography offers portraits of more than 18,700 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped the nation. First published in 24 volumes in 1999, the ANB received instant acclaim as the new authority in American biographies, and continues to serve readers in thousands of school, public, and academic libraries around the world. Its online counterpart, ANB Online, is a regularly updated resource currently offering portraits of over 18,700 biographies, including the 17,435 of the print edition. ACLS sponsors the ANB, which is published by Oxford University Press.

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The history of American witchcraft is indelibly associated with Salem, Massachusetts, where in 1692 nineteen people were executed as witches after the accusations of two young girls sparked a wave of fear. The village of Salem, the centre of the events of 1692, is now the town of Danvers, with the focus of today’s witchcraft industry centred on Salem city. But there are numerous other Salems in America, born of the country’s religious heritage – Salem in Hebraic means “peace”. But forget colonial Salem for a moment, as on two occasions in America’s more recent past Salem was the scene of trials related to witchcraft.

Salem 1878. In May 1878 the Supreme Judicial Court at Salem, Massachusetts, considered:

That the said Daniel H. Spofford of Newburyport is a mesmerist, and practices the art of mesmerism, and that by his power and influence he is capable of injuring the persons and property and social relations of others, and does by said means so injure them. That the said Daniel H. Spofford has at divers times and places since the year 1875 wrongfully, maliciously and with the intent to injure the plaintiff, caused the plaintiff by means of his said power and art great suffering of body, severe spinal pains and neuralgia, and temporary suspension of mind.

The charge reads remarkably like the indictments for witchcraft two centuries earlier, and the trial’s location further underscored the association in the minds of commentators.

Profoundly influenced by both mesmerism and spiritualism in her early adult life, the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), conceived a source of spiritual harm that came to be known as “malicious animal magnetism” or “MAM”. This was the malign use of willpower, the projection of harmful thoughts to cause physical damage. MAM become something of a preoccupation amongst early members of the movement.

In 1870 Daniel Spofford and his wife had entered into an agreement with Eddy that she would teach them the healing art for the sum of $100 cash and ten per cent of the commercial income from their future Christian Science healing practice. The Spoffords fell out with Eddy over other matters and declined to pay the tithe. So in 1878 Eddy launched a lawsuit against them. It was one of several legal actions that the litigious Eddy instigated against former followers at the time.

Things got worse for Spofford when, as this case was pending, Lucretia Brown, a 48-year-old spinster who lived with her mother and sister in one of the oldest houses in Ipswich, lodged a suit against Spofford that Lucretia had suffered a spinal injury as a child, but while an invalid she was able to run a crocheting agency, employing local women working for pin money. An erstwhile Congregationalist, she was converted to Christian Science in 1876 after successful treatment by a female Christian Science healer from the town of Lynn named Dr Dorcas Rawson, herself a former Methodist. Lucretia was rejuvenated and was able to walk for miles for the first time since childhood, but she had a relapse following several visits by Spofford. She consulted Dorcas again who diagnosed that Spofford had been using mesmerism against her. And so Lucretia decided to take legal action, with some subsequently suggesting that Eddy put her up to it. The case was dismissed.

“The Long Lost Friend” was one of the most widely consulted books on how to deal with witches and witchcraft in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

Salem 1893. The town of Salem, Columbiana County, Ohio, was a thriving settlement founded by the Quakers. Its inhabitants numbered over 6,000 by the end of the nineteenth century, at which time it was described by one observer as displaying “order, prosperity, thrift, and comfort”. But in 1893 the peace after which the town was named was shattered by a virulent witchcraft dispute.

A few miles south of Salem, at a place known as McCracken Corner, lived a farmer named Jacob Culp. Born in Germany around 1839, he and his family emigrated to America when he was a boy. By 1860 the young man had taken up farming and married Hannah Loop, a Pennsylvanian woman fifteen years his senior, becoming step father to two children from her previous marriage. Culp worked hard and became one of the most prosperous members of the community. Sometime during the 1870s Hannah’s mother Mary Loop and her disabled brother Ephraim moved in to the Culp’s home for a few years. When Mary died, some neighbours, including a couple of the Loop sisters, cast accusing glances at Jacob. When Hannah also died sometime around 1887 and Jacob married Hattie, a woman twenty-five years younger, rumour had it he had bumped Hannah off too by his witchcraft.

The principal rumour-monger was Culp’s sister-in-law, Sadie Loop. Sadie was a key member of Hart Methodist Church, having served it as a Sunday School teacher and sexton. In November 1892, following further family misfortunes and illnesses, which no doctor could help, Sadie decided to call upon a herb doctress named Louise Burns. She told Sadie that she had a very bad brother-in-law, and when she was asked which one, Burns replied “the one that came across the ocean.” This could only be Jacob.

Sadie told a farmer and church Class Leader named Homer B. Shelton of her suspicions. He subsequently made a formal complaint about Sadie:

The undersigned a member of the Methodist Episcopal church, complains to you that Sadie Loop, a member of the same church, has been guilty of immoral conduct, and she is hereby charged therewith as follows: Charge, falsehood.

Specification 1. The said Sadie Loop on or about the 27^th day of April, 1893, did utter and publish, contrary to the word of God and the discipline, the following false and evil matter of and concerning Jacob Culp, to wit that he, meaning the said Jacob Culp was a wizard and practiced witchcraft.

H.B. Shelton

A church trial was held in the classroom of Salem Methodist Church. The presiding Judge, Rev. Smith, concluded after hearing all the evidence that he had no alternative but to expel Sadie Loop from the membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Hart Church never recovered from these traumatic events. Today it is marked only by a small graveyard along Route 45 a few miles south of Salem.

These nineteenth-century Salem witch trials are a reminder that, two hundred years after the last legal executions for witchcraft in the USA, accusations of witchcraft and malign occult influence could still shake communities to their core, revealing that fear of witchery was as much a part of modern American life as it was in the colonial days.

Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire and has written extensively on the subject of magic. His new book America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem is the first full history of witchcraft in modern America.

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Image credit: From John George Hohman’s The Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts & Remedies (Harrisburg, 1856). Image provided by Dr Owen Davies. Do not reproduce without permission.

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At the turn of the 20^th century, the baseball team in Brooklyn was known as the Superbas and they played ball at Washington Park, between First and Third streets along Third Avenue near the Gowanus Canal. While the park was convenient for its patrons, located in a densely developed part of the borough and connected to trolley lines on 3^rd and 5^th avenues, fans and players frequently complained about the awful odors emanating from the canal and nearby industrial works.

By the end of the aughts, Charles Ebbets, team owner and president, had grown unsatisfied with these rented grounds, even after spending significant money to upgrade and enlarge the seating area in 1907. In addition to the odors and the limited capacity of its wooden grandstand (undoubtedly a fire trap), the owner was unhappy with those who watched the games for free from the roofs of nearby tenements and the adjacent American Can Factory. At the same time, the advent of reinforced concrete was ushering in a building boom in baseball; several of Brooklyn’s rivals had already built or were in the process of erecting larger, “fireproof” ballparks.

After touring some of these newly built parks, including Shibe Park in Philadelphia and Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Ebbets hired the architect Clarence Randall Van Buskirk to design the franchise a modern ballpark with more seats and fan comforts commensurate with these facilities. Van Buskirk worked on plans in secrecy for over a year, while Ebbets, through a dummy company began buying up properties on a large block bound by Bedford Avenue and Montgomery just east of Prospect Park. The subterfuge was intended to prevent landowners to squeeze him on the lots that would comprise the ballpark assemblage.

Ebbets Field, New York City, on opening day, 1913. Via WikiCommons

In 1913, the team moved to Ebbets Field at 55 Sullivan Place, in what is now considered the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Like the new ballparks of its rivals, Ebbets Field was a two-tier concrete pavilion concentrating seating around home plate, which was strategically placed near the block’s narrower southwest corner. With its gracefully arched brick window bays, pilasters, Corinthian columns and roof ornament, Ebbets Field was one of the more elegant of the ballparks constructed during this era. Its entry rotunda at the corner of Sullivan Place and Cedar Place (now McKeever Place), featured marble wall treatments, gilded ticket cages, and a marble mosaic floor inlaid with a stitched baseball pattern at its center, while a 12-arm “bat-and-ball” chandelier hung from the stuccoed ceiling above. But like its counterparts in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit, Ebbets Field was less an architectural gem and more of a utilitarian structure that could be incrementally expanded as the team’s market grew (unlike CitiField or the new Yankee Stadium, which were designed and built in its more or less final form). Starting with an initial capacity of 18,000, additions to the stadium over the years — enlarging bleachers and extending the upper deck around the lower seating bowl — brought the park’s capacity to 34,000 by 1937 and filled out its footprint with all but its left field bleachers, covered in two decks.

When Ebbets Field was completed in 1913, its market was relatively local, with most fans traveling to the park by trolley, subway or elevated train, or on foot. Indeed when unveiling the plans for the park, Dodger management boasted that the field was in proximity to 15 points of transit that connected to 38 different transit lines. Aside from cementing the franchise’s nickname as the “Trolley Dodgers,” or later, just Dodgers (officially becoming the teams name in 1932 after 18 years as the Robins), its location was also well connected to growth markets in southern and eastern Brooklyn, areas that were still developing during the 1910s. But by the 1950s, the park’s location had become a liability, ill-suited to the growing metropolitan scale of its fan base, who were now spreading out across Long Island and throughout the region. The stadium offered only 750 parking spaces and no nearby highway access. Even if Robert Moses had accommodated then Dodger owner Walter O’Malley’s 1955 request to move the Dodgers to the more centrally located site at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, where the Brooklyn Nets now play basketball, Ebbets Field would have still met the same fate, demolished in the 1960 to facilitate the construction of an apartment complex.

The demise of Ebbets Field was not terribly different than other beloved parks of its day. Beginning in the 1950s, major league teams demanded new, larger stadiums on sites accessible to suburban fan bases within their own or new cities. In 1957, when the Dodgers left Brooklyn along with the Giants who left Manhattan for San Francisco, other teams were doing the same (the Boston Braves, St. Louis Browns and Philadelphia Athletics and Washington Senators all relocated during the 1950s). During the following decade, most of the teams that did not relocate, received new, taxpayer-financed stadiums on spacious sites well connected to regional highways, much like what the Dodgers replacement, the New York Mets received when Shea Stadium was completed in Queens in 1964.

These trends resulted in the eventual demolition of all but two ballparks from the early 20^th century era, Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway Park in Boston (the last to be taken down was Tiger Stadium in 2009 on Detroit’s Westside, a loss still mourned by many Tiger fans). Yet a generation and a half later, most of the mid-century parks have been demolished as well (Dodger Stadium in L.A. is one of the few survivors). Again threatening relocation, teams have demanded and received (mostly) downtown sites for the construction of nostalgically inspired, amenity-laden palaces mostly paid for with public money, and an ever larger share of the profits they generate. We preserve ballparks in memory more than in actual conservation of bricks and masonry.

Few current Brooklynites ever saw the Brooklyn Dodgers play, and likewise, there are only a few Dodger fans who possess memories of the team’s 1940s-50s golden era and its stellar roster of players, including future hall of famers Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Roy Campenella. As the Dodgers begin their 51^st season at Dodger Stadium (and their 55^th in L.A.), they have played there for six more seasons (and counting) than their 45-year run at Ebbets Field. While memories of the Dodgers grow more distant from the collective consciousness of Brooklyn’s 2.6 million residents, the team’s legacy is still very much with us. The design of the Met’s new home, CitiField in Queens, was inspired by Ebbets Field and includes an updated version of the park’s famed rotunda. And bringing the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn has been justified in part as returning a major league team to the borough which lost the Dodgers.

As part of the Atlantic Yards project, city and state leaders gave the Nets a home at Flatbush and Atlantic avenues, the location denied the Dodgers, and conflated bygone allegiances, rivalries, and civic identities. Playing now in an arena named for a global bank amid a constellation of well gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods, the Nets betray the “old school” image they attempt cultivate through their branding strategy and marketing campaigns. Tying the Nets identity specifically to Brooklyn rather than “New York” — a regional catch all that encompasses over 20 million people — captures both the nostalgia for the Dodgers and Brooklyn’s relatively recent ascension as hippest place in the universe. Time will tell if it was a wise long term strategy. Surely public money spent to lure the Nets in and subsidize Atlantic Yards could have been better spent.

Looking southwest across Bedford Avenue at Ebbets Field Apartments on a mostly sunny afternoon. Photo by Jim Henderson, public domain via WikiCommons

By contrast, the 1,300-unit housing complex, the Ebbets Field Apartments, which replaced the beloved home of the Dodgers, was a more modest and far better public investment. The immense rental complex, whose 26-story towers dwarf the more modestly scaled development east of Prospect Park, is architecturally uninspiring and a mere footnote in the history of the borough. Yet it serves a vital function, being built as part of New York State’s Mitchell Lama program, which sought to increase the supply of affordable housing for New York’s rapidly diminishing middle class of the 1960s and 1970s (the complex’s owner opted out of Mitchell Lama in 1987). Similarly, the site of the Polo Grounds, the Giants home until they left for San Francisco was rebuilt in the mid-1960s as public housing. While these developments do little to excite our collective memory or sense of community, they continue to serve as the homes of thousands of New Yorkers and perhaps will continue to do so long after the Mets, Nets, and the region’s other sports franchises again demand new facilities.

Daniel Campo is assistant professor at the School of Architecture & Planning at Morgan State University. He is the author of the forthcoming The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned (Fordham University Press, August 2013).

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First observed nationally in 1997, Tartan Day celebrates the legacy and contributions of Scottish Americans. The annual festivities are held on April 6th, the anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath, the 1320 Scottish Declaration of Independence.

As George Bush’s 2008 presidential proclamation stated, Tartan Day seeks to “celebrate the spirit and character of Scottish Americans and recognize their many contributions to our culture and our way of life.”

Though Census data does not go back as far as the 14th century Declaration of Arbroath, Social Explorer’s data resources offer a glimpse into the birth and development of the Scottish community in America. Back in 1790, the very first Census tracked the nationality of the foreign born population.

While the English and Welsh made up over four fifths of the population (81.4 percent), followed by the Germans (6.5 percent), the Scottish were the next most populous group (5.9 percent), followed by the Dutch (3.0 percent). (Calculations based on all available county data from the 1790 Census.)

Though small in number compared to other groups, they settled in particular communities of the early colonies, which you can explore in the following map.

Scottish Americans: Census 1790

Click the map to explore.

This detailed map of American Community Survey data shows where Americans with Scottish ancestry live today.

Scottish Ancestry: American Community Survey 2006-10

Click the map to explore.

The Scottish continue to immigrate to the US, and this detailed map data shows where residents originally born in Scotland live today.

Foreign-Born Scottish Residents: American Community Survey 2006-10

Click the map to explore.

Check out Social Explorer’s map and report tools for more Tartan Day data.

Sydney Beveridge is the Media and Content Editor for Social Explorer, where she works on the blog, curriculum materials, how-to-videos, social media outreach, presentations and strategic planning. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Social Explorer is an online research tool designed to provide quick and easy access to current and historical census data and demographic information. The easy-to-use web interface lets users create maps and reports to better illustrate, analyze and understand demography and social change. From research libraries to classrooms to the front page of the New York Times, Social Explorer is helping people engage with society and science.

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On 1 April 1913, Henry Ford symbolically pressed a lever that catapulted factory workers into the modern era. That lever was the assembly line, which was started at his Highland Park factory on that date. From then on the organized chaos and time-wasting labor of the typical factory floor were transformed into a process that was much quicker and economical, and far less strenuous. It allowed production to explode exponentially, which was good for everyone, for in the process employees made far more money, and that money was enough to buy the sophisticated standardized product they were producing: the Model T. So Ford got happier workers, and a brand new market among them. His practices spread quickly throughout industry and throughout the world.

The Ford Motor Company assembly line (1928)

The assembly line was a technical marvel that allowed the complete system of mass production to evolve. The revolutionary $5 a day wage he announced in January 1914 sustained it. But from the beginning, there was a great deal of controversy over these things.

Ford’s competitors thought he had lost his mind, especially when they heard that part of that $5 wage was to be a share in profits. To them he was a flaming radical, infringing on a sacred right of capitalism, the right of its owners to keep the profit it earned. Ford however was influenced by the Emersonian notion of just compensation: if you didn’t offer that, you got something else instead, something not at all good. Later he was to say he believed workers had a right to a share in profits, and that owners had an obligation to provide it. This was a truly radical statement.

But in truth Ford had to do something like this to meet overwhelming demand. His plant was in turmoil as new assembly lines were set up every day, amid clangorous noise and a constant need to go faster and faster. Turnover among the workers was nearly complete, as many of them felt no incentive to bear these new working conditions.

Work was now democratized, broken down to tiny units of standardized effort that anyone could do with a few minutes of training, even if they didn’t speak English. But it was also mind-deadening and infinitely repetitive. Furthermore, craft and skill were taken from the workers lives. Henceforward, those qualities were to be found only in planners and engineers. The only thing that mattered for laborers was that they showed up and did their jobs. In 1936, when Charlie Chaplin’s satire on factory work, Modern Times, was shown in Pittsburgh, nobody laughed because it was too close to the truth. So the $5 day was Ford’s necessary solution to this situation. People were willing to put up with almost anything to get it.

There was another problem with mass production. This one was for Ford himself, and it was both intractable and unexpected. He always said he was in the business of making men in his factories, but the kind of men he made were modern urban factory workers, many drawn from the rural America in which Ford himself was raised. He expected that they would share the same old fashioned homespun American values that he espoused, but now they were living in urban society with time and money of their own to spend on their leisure. They wanted to participate in the good citified life they saw all around them. So jazz and the Charleston replaced fiddlers and barn dances, and speakeasies and film palaces became the places where the sheiks and shebas of the modern urban workplace congregated after hours, drinking and smoking and raising hell. Ford was horrified, especially when he realized that this situation was irreversible, and a surprising consequence of his life’s work. More and more, he pulled back from the sort of men he was making in his factories.

Today the progeny of the proletariat whom Ford helped into the middle class with his system are told education and skill are the keys to a better life in modern society. The problem is that that there is an ever widening economic gulf between those who have acquired education and skills and those who have not, which many fear could sooner or later undermine the cohesion of the social fabric. Ford’s solution to the problem of dealing with those who were left behind was to provide a system that could bring them up to speed with everyone else. It was a businessman’s solution to business problems, and not eleemosynary, but it served the times well. But who is providing a modern solution for the millions and tens of millions who have never gotten ahead, or feel themselves slipping further and further behind those who have the resources to get ahead? Telling them to go out and get what they do not have and cannot get is no solution. Henry Ford brought the uneducated, unskilled common man new levels of material prosperity with mass production. Would that someone of equal genius and equal concern might come along now with a similarly effective idea for the problems of the common man of today.

Vincent Curcio is the author of Henry Ford; Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame; Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius; and, with Steven Englund, Charlie’s Prep. He was the General Manager and Producer of Lucille Lortel’s White Barn Theater for 25 years.

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Image credit: Literary Digest 1928-01-07 Henry Ford Interview / Photographer unknown via Wikimedia Commons

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As North Americans, should we have confidence that the products we purchase are safe? Should we trust that manufacturers and advertisers keep consumer welfare in mind during the marketing process — from product conception to point of purchase? Of course we should. One would hope that corporations would have a sense of moral responsibility to act in the best interest of their customers. If companies don’t recognize their moral obligations, legal entities exist to protect us…right?

Unfortunately this isn’t always the case, and historically speaking, corporate North America has a long history of knowingly producing dangerous products, making misleading, fraudulent claims, and harming the consumer. In some cases, these very products are still on store shelves. Take Lysol, for example. Today, millions trust it to clean their sinks and countertops without incident. But in the 1920s and 1930s — and until the 1960s — women across Canada and the United States suffered burns and scarring because they chose to trust the makers of Lysol. Lehn & Fink, interwar manufacturer of Lysol, said that their product could be used as a contraceptive vaginal douche. In other words, Lysol was advertised as a form of birth control (which was illegal in North America in the 1920s and 1930s), consumers believed them, some were seriously injured, and many became pregnant.

In researching how Lysol could possibly have got away with such irresponsible behavior for so long, two issues came to light. First, the company devised an advertising campaign that communicated to consumers that their product could be used to avoid unwanted pregnancies without actually saying it was a birth control product. The term “feminine hygiene” was a euphemism for birth control that illegal birth control manufacturers like Lysol coined in the 1920s. Unfortunately, it caught on, which is unsurprising since the ads using the phrase also included rhetoric surrounding aging caused by worry over using an ineffective feminine hygiene product (read worry over unwanted pregnancy) and invoked imagery of marital strife because women didn’t use feminine hygiene (meaning women failed to obtain birth control and were choosing abstinence, causing marital problems).

The second major issue was that legal authorities were powerless because of the euphemism the company used. Without actually saying it was intended for use as birth control, Lysol could, and did, deny that they were advertising the product as birth control, despite the fact that everyone knew they were lying. What’s more, neither Canada nor the US had any consumer protection laws to prevent this kind of dangerous false advertising. They had laws pertaining to unfair competition between firms and misbranding, but nothing that protected the consumer.

While Lysol is only advertised as a household cleaning product these days, there are companies that still try to take advantage of consumers and evade the legal ramifications. In 2012, for instance, the American Federal Trade Commission prosecuted huge corporations such as athletic wear and shoe producer Reebok for claiming one of their shoes would strengthen lower body muscles. Likewise, Nivea was prosecuted for falsely claiming one of their creams could reduce users’ body size.

Of course, these examples are not as extreme as Lysol’s interwar advertising and authorities today, armed with useful laws, stepped in to protect consumers. The trouble is, these products were advertised and made their way into the hands of consumers as Lysol and its birth control method once did. In Canada and the US, laws are in place to protect us, but the responsive nature of the legal system means that companies can go about telling us and selling us what they want until they get caught. But at least they can get caught.

So, should we have faith in the consumer market that has really come to define North American society? Well, we certainly shouldn’t be afraid of it, but both historical and contemporary examples suggest we should be vigilant. Perhaps the safest way to approach the market is with some consumer confidence, accompanied by a healthy dose of skepticism.

Kristin Hall is a graduate student in the history department at the University of Waterloo. She is the author of “Selling Sexual Certainty? Advertising Lysol as a Contraceptive in the United States and Canada, 1919-1939″ in the most recent issue of in Enterprise & Society, which is available to read for free for a limited time.

Enterprise & Society offers a forum for research on the historical relations between businesses and their larger political, cultural, institutional, social, and economic contexts. The journal aims to be truly international in scope. Studies focused on individual firms and industries and grounded in a broad historical framework are welcome, as are innovative applications of economic or management theories to business and its context.

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Image credit: Woman checking food labelling in supermarket. monkeybusinessimages via iStockphoto.

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To celebrate the imminent release of Oral History Review (OHR)’s latest issue, 40.1, on oral history in the digital age, we’re delighted to share a chat between managing editor Troy Reeves and contributor Lindsey Barnes. Barnes and her colleague Kim Guise are co-authors of “World War Words: The Creation of a World War II–Specific Vocabulary for the Oral History Collection at The National WWII Museum,” a case study of developing controlled vocabulary for the oral history collections at the National WWII Museum. It — and the rest of issue 40.1 — will be available at OHR Oxford University Press page soon. Keep an eye on our twitter (@oralhistreview) and Facebook page to see when articles go live.

In addition to the article, Troy and Lindsay discuss the creation of http://ww2online.org and Lindsay reveals how those outside the field see oral history. The words “problem child” are used and no one is surprised. Enjoy!

[Troy: When Lindsay refers to problem child, she means oral history cataloging and metadata, not me.]

[See post to listen to audio]

Or download the podcast directly.

Lindsey Barnes is the Senior Archivist/Digital Projects Manager at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. She is currently working to provide online access to the museum’s many collections including oral histories, photographs and artifacts.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview and like them on Facebook to preview the latest from the Review, learn about other oral history projects, connect with oral history centers across the world, and discover topics that you may have thought were even remotely connected to the study of oral history. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts on the OUPblog for addendum to past articles, interviews with scholars in oral history and related fields, and fieldnotes on conferences, workshops, etc.

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We are in the midst of a great Dwight Eisenhower revival. Our 34th president, whose tenure once appeared to be little more than a sleepy interlude between the New Deal era and the tumultuous 1960s, is very much in vogue again. The past year has seen the publication of three major new biographies. On 7-8 March, Ike’s presidential legacy and its implications for our own time will be the focus of a conference at Hunter College in New York City.

The renewed interest in Eisenhower owes much to our dissatisfaction with our current politics, especially the partisan polarization that yields stalemate in national politics and prevents action on issues ranging from the long-term deficit and immigration reform to climate change and investments in education. In foreign policy, we recoil from a decade of costly and frustrating military interventions. We see political leaders seeking to break any policy impasse through public rhetoric that has little demonstrable impact on public opinion.

Against this backdrop of frustration, Eisenhower’s record in office looks impressive. Even as conservatives called on Ike to dismantle the New Deal, his administration backed the expansion of Social Security coverage. And while conservatives also demanded that the United States “roll back” communism in Eastern Europe, Eisenhower avoided reckless confrontations with Moscow and Beijing. He brought the Korean War, by then deeply unpopular at home, to a close within months of taking office. Also, despite his pending reelection contest in 1956, he insisted that Israel, Great Britain, and France withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez Canal.

Of special note, Eisenhower recorded several important legislative achievements, notwithstanding the fact that the Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress only during his first two years in office.  He pushed successfully for the federal interstate highway program that remade America’s built landscape, the first civil rights bill to win congressional approval since Reconstruction, and enhanced science education. It isn’t surprising, then, that pundits and politicians alike get a bit wistful when they consider what Ike did under the umbrella of bipartisanship.

In contrast to the highly visible public leadership favored by presidents in our own time, Eisenhower preferred a low-key style. He realized that sometimes he could be most effective behind the scenes, what political scientist Fred Greenstein aptly terms the “hidden-hand presidency.” One result was that Eisenhower could appear to be reluctant to act, as during the Little Rock school desegregation crisis. But we have seen today that when a president associates himself very visibly with an issue, his support can be toxic, driving away some of those who otherwise share his position.

President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles in 1956. US National Archives and Records Administration.

So there is much to like now about Dwight Eisenhower as a president. That said, we also need to recognize that his record owed a great deal to the circumstances in which he held office. Many of the things he accomplished simply are not possible today.

Let’s start with Ike’s ability to make deals across party lines. Mid-century American politics has been described as a four-party democracy: moderate and liberal Republican internationalists; Republican conservatives; conservative Southern Democrats; and liberal big-city Democrats. From these components, a president and legislative leaders such as Lyndon Johnson could mix and match. The parties overlapped ideologically at the margins, and some lawmakers stood closer to the center of opinion in the other party than in their own. Contrast this with the situation now, where the most conservative Democrat consistently casts more liberal votes than the most liberal Republican.

In fact, if a Dwight Eisenhower had tried to run for president as a Republican in 2012, he would not have secured the nomination.  The party has veered too far to the right, and a nominating system that gives so much weight to ideological activists would be especially inhospitable to someone with as many centrist positions as Ike held.

Eisenhower also held office at the peak of America’s relative advantage in the global economy. Europe and Asia had yet to recover from the war’s devastation and American industries enjoyed an enormous competitive edge. So dominant was the American economy in the postwar period that Eisenhower could expand Social Security, establish an interstate highway system that would be largely self-funded through new dedicated revenues, sustain a large peacetime military, and balance the budget. Certainly, he had to make some difficult choices, but they pale next to the trade-offs policy makers face today.

Yes, there is still a lot to like about Ike. His record commands respect. But perhaps the most important thing we can learn is that a president has to work with the material at hand, and some of the ingredients Eisenhower used won’t be found in the political cupboard any more.

Andrew Polsky is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the journal Polity, his most recent book is Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War. Read Andrew Polsky’s previous blog posts.

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Why was the KKK so popular in North Carolina?

Two factors were important. First, the state’s klan leadership — and in particular its top officer, “Grand Dragon” Bob Jones — had the ingenuity and capacity to mount massive rallies every night in the state. Hundreds — and sometimes thousands — of spectators would come out, buy refreshments and souvenirs, listen to live music from the KKK’s house band Skeeter Bob and the Country Pals, hear a full slate of klan orators, and watch the climactic burning of a 60 or 70 foot high cross. This skewed county fair atmosphere was compelling theater, and a highly effective recruiting tool.

The United Klans of America printed 2000 of these flyers for each rally. Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

The second factor related to the flipside of North Carolina’s pronounced moderation with civil rights. In places like Mississippi or Alabama, committed segregationists could count on militant support from a full spectrum of state and local officials — from governors on down to school boards — and the KKK therefore had a narrow appeal, primarily among those who believed that violence was the only answer to civil rights challenges. In North Carolina, where political officials were clear that they didn’t agree with civil rights reforms but would abide by federal law, the klan became the primary conduit for those who sought to defiantly maintain segregation. This meant that, while the group certainly attracted its share of violent members, it also appealed to those who sought out a civic outlet that insulated them from changes to the racial order.

What led to the KKK’s abrupt and rapid decline in the late 1960s?

While the declining fortunes of Jim Crow-style segregation made the klan’s efforts seem increasingly futile and anachronistic, the fall of the civil rights-era KKK was predominantly a policing story. In North Carolina, state officials had always spoken out against the klan but hadn’t ever engaged in actions that would proactively hinder the group’s efforts to organize and terrorize its enemies. When a congressional committee held hearings on the KKK in late 1965, the state’s status as “Klansville U.S.A.” was splashed across the national headlines. This led to an about-face in North Carolina’s policing efforts. The Governor appointed an “anti-klan” committee to strategize about how to solve its KKK problem, and soon after state police began arresting klansmen on violations large and small, court injunctions prevented the klan from holding rallies in many communities, judges began sentencing klansmen for infractions that would have been ignored earlier in the decade, and both the state police and FBI began more aggressively deploying informants to create infighting within klan units that sapped the group of its resource base. While the press emphasized how disgruntled KKK members were abandoning a laughably crude and irrelevant organization, in truth the Carolina Klan was a sophisticated outfit whose momentum was halted only by an equally dedicated and coordinated anti-klan policing campaign.

What does the KKK’s history tell us about the civil rights movement?

Fifty years ago, while Dr. King was delivering his famous “I Have  a Dream” speech on the Mall in Washington, DC, the KKK was barnstorming around North Carolina, holding its first rallies and attracting two or three thousand spectators each night to protest the rising civil rights tide. When King came to Raleigh, the state’s capital, three years later, a thousand robed klansmen gathered to protest his speech. Talking to reporters afterward, he asked how the state that prided itself as the most liberal in the South could also have the largest KKK. We know that the Civil Rights Movement story remains important, and this is a key component of it — part of the mosaic that continues to shape race relations in the United States today.

What was it like talking to these former KKK members as you researched your book?

These conversations ran the gamut, from unreconstructed defenses of the klan’s mission, to strong rejections of the KKK’s principles, to nostalgic reminiscences about the camaraderie and “good fun” that members enjoyed. Two interviews in particular stand out. The first was with Robert Shelton, who as the United Klans of America’s “Imperial Wizard” was the most influential KKK leader of the era. Shelton had been put out of the KKK business by a landmark Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuit in the 1980s, and by the early 2000’s had adopted a Burger King near his Alabama home as a sort of ad hoc headquarters for him and “his boys.” He agreed to meet me there, and arrived in a big powder-blue Lincoln Town Car with a defiant “Never” license plate displayed in front. He bragged about working out a deal with the manager for cheap coffee in return for keeping the restaurant full. The disjuncture between his persona and the setting, I think, says a lot about the klan’s declining fortunes since the 1960s.

Another interesting interview was with George Dorsett, the Carolina Klan’s most popular and fiery speaker in the 1960s. Late in his life, both his charisma and his stridency remained evident as he regaled me with Biblical justifications for racial separation. He also told me about his work as an FBI informant throughout much of his klan tenure. I had previously seen documentation of his recruitment by the Bureau, and also had learned about his partnership-of-sorts with his local handling agent. But what struck me was his retrospective view that the FBI was working for him, which isn’t entirely inaccurate if you consider how he was able to protect his role as the KKK’s most successful fundraiser while on the Bureau’s payroll.

What is the KKK’s legacy today?

In my view, the KKK continues to embody two opposing realities. The first relates to the tragic continuities associated with klan activity in the South. My colleague Rory McVeigh and I have found that communities where the KKK was active fifty years ago continue to this day to have significantly higher rates of violent crime than places where the klan never established a foothold. That sustained culture of violence is one aspect of the legacy of organized and sanctioned vigilantism. But the KKK’s trajectory also epitomizes the great changes that have occurred in the South and our nation since the 1960s. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate in more than three decades to win North Carolina. From Klansville, U.S.A. to the state that cemented the election of our first African-American president, all in less than fifty years — a remarkable transformation indeed!

David Cunningham is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology and the Social Justice & Social Policy Program at Brandeis University. Over the past decade, he has worked with the Greensboro (N.C.) Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as the Mississippi Truth Project, and served as a consulting expert in several court cases. The author of Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan, his current research focuses on the causes, consequences, and legacy of racial violence.

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When politicians attempt to capture a unifying moment, they often choose the music of Aaron Copland. Why? Classical music in 1940s America had a ubiquitous cultural presence at time when national identity consolidated. Drawing on music history, aesthetics, reception history, and cultural history, Sounds of War recreates the remarkable sonic landscape of the World War II era. We present a brief excerpt of the forthcoming book below.

Music also played its role. Whether as an instrument of blatant propaganda or as a means of entertainment, recuperation, and uplift, music pervaded homes and concert halls, army camps and government buildings, hospitals and factories. A medium both permeable and malleable, music was appropriated for numerous war-related tasks. Indeed, even more than movies, posters, books, and newspapers, music sounded everywhere in this war, not only in its live manifestations but also through recording and radio. So far as the U.S. is concerned, even today, musicians such as Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrew Sisters populate the sonic imaginary of wartime. Whether performed by “all-girl” groups such as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm or by military bands conducted by Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, swing and boogie-woogie entertained civilians at home and G.I.s stationed abroad. Numerous films created to boost both civilian and military morale—from Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and Stage Door Canteen (1943) to Anchors Aweigh (1945)—featured star-studded numbers presenting country sounds, barbershop quartets, swing, sentimental ballads, and hot jazz, among others. Likewise, nostalgic songs such as “I’ll Be Seeing You” (1938) and belligerent tunes as “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” (1942) had their place on popular radio programs, USO shows and V-Discs.

Star Spangled Rhythm, for example, brings together all the popular styles well known for this period, and indeed often regarded as iconic for it. However, it does so in what might sometimes seem surprising ways, if with obvious programmatic intent. The big production number “Swing Shift,” set in an aircraft factory, combines jazzy swing with traditional barn dances, musical and dance styles that might otherwise have been hailed as incompatible. Another number merges the style and performance of the African American Golden Gate Quartet with the more sentimental duet “Hit the Road to Dreamland” (marked as “white” by both its performance style and its crooning arrangement) performed by Mary Martin and Dick Powell. Hot jazz is represented, inevitably, by a Harlem street scene featuring the star African American dancer Katherine Dunham. And equally inevitably, the film ends with a patriotic number, “Old Glory,” where Bing Crosby, at the head of a crowd before a stage-set Mount Rushmore, sings in praise of the U.S. flag, engages with a Doubting Thomas, and leads representatives of the states (including a gospel group for Georgia) into a choral hymn of patriotic solidarity.

Yet that final number has still more surprises to offer given its obvious, and no doubt deliberate, echoes of another well-known patriotic piece, John La Touche and Earl Robinson’s Ballad for Americans (1939). Here we move from “popular music” in the direction of a repertory that was, and is, often labeled “classical.” I use that term with all due caution—and mostly for the lack of anything better—without asserting value judgments on its superiority over other musical forms and acts, nor limiting my inquiry to elitist “highbrow” domains: indeed, one of my points is that wartime classical music is not at all highbrow—just as popular music is not lowbrow—but does its cultural work in differently configured social spheres. However, for all the scholarly emphasis on popular culture in the wartime period, what in fact distinguished musical life in the U.S. during World War II from other times of war was the significant role assigned to classical music: in 1940s America it had a cultural relevance and ubiquity that is hard to imagine today.

The out-and-out involvement of the entire nation into the war meant that all music was to serve in its needs, and that also included types of music that had already gained a significantly broader presence in U.S. culture during the 1930s. This new prominence was achieved in New Deal America—and we shall see how New Deal institutions transferred to wartime ones—especially through music appreciation courses in schools and colleges, nationwide radio broadcasts of major orchestras and the Metropolitan Opera House, and gramophone catalogues that offered a repertoire of classics for the middlebrow household. Through these educational and marketing initiatives, classical music from symphonies to Schubert songs carried added value as cultural capital moving beyond popular musical entertainment. Also at stake, however, was the U.S.’s role not just as a military power, but also as a force for civilization. In composer Henry Cowell’s words, musicians of all stripes were “shaping music for total war.” Indeed, no other period in U.S. history mobilized and instrumentalized culture in general, and music in particular, so totally, so consciously, and so unequivocally as World War II.

Musicians—whether a singing cowboy such as Gene Autry or an opera singer such as John Carter from the Met—saw themselves as cultural combatants. Aaron Copland, for example, was just one of many classical composers deeply involved in the war effort. Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, and Colin McPhee all participated in the propaganda missions of the Offi ce of War Information (OWI). Earlier, in summer 1942, Blitzstein had become attached to the Eighth Army Air Force in London where he was commissioned to compose his Airborne Symphony. Samuel Barber also served in the Army Air Force (but stationed in the U.S.), writing both his Second Symphony and his Capricorn Concerto, “a rather tooting piece, with fl ute, oboe and trumpet chirping away” and thus fi t for the times, as he assured Copland.5 Civilian commissions for new music focused on patriotic and “martial” subjects, most famously the series of fanfares that Eugene Goossens, the chief conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, requested from American composers and from European musicians in exile: Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man is a still much performed result. Similarly, the League of Composers (financed by the Treasury Department) commissioned seventeen works on patriotic themes, including Bohuslav Martinů’s Memorial to Lidice and William Grant Still’s In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy. Classical music was heard on the radio and in film scores, whether Yehudi Menuhin playing Schubert’s Ave Maria in Stage Door Canteen or Victor Young infusing the entire score for Frenchman’s Creek (1944) with Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune. Concert music was performed in the Armed Forces, for example by the Camp Lee Symphony Orchestra or the U.S. Navy Band String Quartet; and it even played a role in the work of the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA), whose director, General “Wild Bill” Donovan, was known not only to support experiments in using music as cipher code, but also to involve himself in music-related propaganda efforts.

Annegret Fauser is Professor of Music and Adjunct Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is author of Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II and Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair and co-editor of Music, Theater and Cultural Transfer: Paris 1813-1914.

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Dr Carter Woodson, an advocate for black history studies, initially created “Negro History Week” between the birthdays of two great men who strived to influence the lives of African Americans: Fredrick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. This celebration was then expanded to the month of February and became Black History Month. Find out more about important African American lives with our quiz.

Rev. Ralph David Abernathy speaks at Nat’l. Press Club luncheon. Photo by Warren K. Leffler. 1968. Library of Congress.

The landmark American National Biography offers portraits of more than 18,700 men & women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped the nation. The American National Biography is the first biographical resource of this scope to be published in more than sixty years.

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When I was approached by the good folks at Oxford University Press to write some entries on jazz artists, I noticed that while the biggest names (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, etc.) were already covered, many other artists were also deserving of entries. There were several qualities that I looked for in musicians before suggesting that they be written about. Each musician had to have a distinctive sound (always a prerequisite before any artist is considered a significant jazz musician), a strong body of work, and recordings that sound enjoyable today. It did not matter if the musician’s prime was in the 1920s or today. If their recordings still sounded good, they were eligible to be given prestigious entries in the African American National Biography.

Some of the entries included in the February update to the Oxford African American Studies Center are veteran singers Ernestine Anderson, Ernie Andrews, and Jon Hendricks; trumpet legends Harry “Sweets” Edison, Kenny Dorham, and Art Farmer; and a few giants of today, including pianist Kenny Barron, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and clarinetist Don Byron.

In each case, in addition to including the musicians’ basic biographical information, key associations, and recordings, I have included a few sentences that place each artist in their historic perspective, talking about how they fit into their era, describing their style, and discussing their accomplishments. Some musicians had only a brief but important prime period, but there is a surprising number of artists whose careers lasted over 50 years. In the case of Benny Carter, the alto saxophonist/arranger was in his musical prime for a remarkable 70 years, still sounding great when he retired after his 90th birthday.

Jazz, whether from 90 years ago or today, has always overflowed with exciting talents. While jazz history books often simplify events, making it seem as if there were only a handful of giants, the number of jazz greats is actually in the hundreds. There was more to the 1920s than Louis Armstrong, more to the swing era than Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, and more to the classic bebop era than Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. For example, while Duke Ellington is justly celebrated, during the 49 years that he led his orchestra, he often had as many as ten major soloists in his band at one time, all of whom had colorful and interesting lives.

Because jazz has had such a rich history, it is easy for reference books and encyclopedias to overlook the very viable scene of today. The music did not stop with the death of John Coltrane in 1967 or the end of the fusion years in the late 1970s. Because the evolution of jazz was so rapid between 1920 and 1980, continuing in almost a straight line as the music became freer and more advanced, it is easy (but inaccurate) to say that the music has not continued evolving. What has happened during the past 35 years is that instead of developing in one basic way, the music evolved in a number of directions. The music world became smaller and many artists utilized aspects of World and folk music to create new types of “fusions.” Some musicians explored earlier styles in creative ways, ranging from 1920s jazz to hard bop. The avant-garde or free jazz scene introduced many new musicians, often on small label releases. And some of the most adventurous players combined elements of past styles — such as utilizing plunger mutes on horns or engaging in collective improvisations — to create something altogether new.

While many veteran listeners might call one period or another jazz’s “golden age,” the truth is that the music has been in its prime since around 1920 (when records became more widely available) and is still in its golden age today. While jazz deserves a much larger audience, there is no shortage of creative young musicians of all styles and approaches on the scene today. The future of jazz is quite bright and the African American National Biography’s many entries on jazz greats reflect that optimism.

Scott Yanow is the author of eleven books on jazz, including The Great Jazz Guitarists, The Jazz Singers, Trumpet Kings, Jazz On Record 1917-76, and Jazz On Film.

The Oxford African American Studies Center combines the authority of carefully edited reference works with sophisticated technology to create the most comprehensive collection of scholarship available online to focus on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture. It provides students, scholars and librarians with more than 10,000 articles by top scholars in the field.

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Image Credit: Kenny Barron 2001, Munich/Germany. Photo by Sven.petersen, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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