Browsing by Subject "Progressive Era"
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Item American wasteland : a social and cultural history of excrement, 1860-1920(2012-05) Gerling, Daniel Max; Davis, Janet M.; Engelhardt, Elizabeth D.; Hartigan, John; Meikle, Jeffrey L.; Smith, Mark C.Human excrement is seldom considered to be an integral part of the human condition. Despite the relative silence regarding it, however, excrement has played a significant role in American history. Today the U.S. has more than two million miles of sewer pipes underneath it. Every year Americans flush more than a trillion gallons of water and fertilizer down the toilet, and farmers spend billions of dollars to buy artificial fertilizer. Furthermore, excrement is bound up in many complicated power relationships regarding race, gender, and ethnicity. This dissertation examines the period in American history, from the Civil War through the Progressive Era, when excrement transformed from commodity to waste. More specifically, it examines the cultural and social factors that led to its formulation as waste and the roles it played in the histories of American health, architecture, and imperialism. The first chapter assesses the vast changes to the country’s infrastructure and social fabric beginning in the late nineteenth century. On the subterranean level, much of America’s immense network of sewers was constructed during this era—making it one of the largest public works projects in U.S. history. Above ground, the United States Sanitary Commission, founded at the onset of the Civil War, commenced a widespread creation of sanitary commissions in municipalities, regions, and even internationally, that regulated defecation habits. Chapter Two assesses the social and architectural change that occurred as the toilet moved from the outhouse to inside the house—specifically, how awkwardly newly built homes accommodated this novel room and how the toilet’s move inside actually hastened its removal. The third chapter shifts focus to the way Americans considered their excrement in relation to their body in a time when efficiency a great virtue. Americans feared ailments related to “autointoxication” (constipation) and went to absurd lengths to rid their bodies of excrement. The fourth chapter analyzes the way excrement was racialized and the role it had in the various projects of American imperialism. The colonial subjects and potential American citizens—from Native Americans to Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans—were regularly scrutinized, punished, and re-educated regarding their defecation habits.Item Modern displacements : urban injustice affecting working class communities of color in East Austin(2012-05) Gray, Amanda Elaine; Cordova, Cary, 1970-In this report I analyze both historical and contemporary urban planning policies enacted by the City of Austin, TX, through which I establish patterns of structural inequality affecting working class communities of color residing in East Austin. I examine early 20th-century urban beautification initiatives, along with the Progressive era segregationist project of the modern city. Austin city planners solidified segregation along racial lines with the 1928 Master Plan, which mandated the systematic displacement and relocation of African American and Mexican American communities to Austin’s Eastside, along with all “objectionable industries.” Today, East Austin working class communities of color continue to experience unequal burdens of environmentally hazardous industry in their neighborhoods. I examine initiatives implemented by the local grassroots environmental justice organization PODER and their fight for the health and safety of East Austin residents of color in combination with their protest against gentrifying urban planning policies and practices. Through an analysis of the PODER Young Scholars for Justice documentary, Gentrification: An Eastside Story, I look at the ways in which gentrification has changed the East Austin urban cultural landscape. This report aims to shed light upon spatial and racial social geographies that have contributed to the nearly century long battle East Austin residents have waged against discriminatory urban planning policies resulting in educational segregation, environmentally racist industrial zoning, and contemporary displacement of working class communities of color for city profit.Item Thinking American, Working American, Playing American Folk Dance in Chicago, 1890-1940(2014-07-23) Herzogenrath, JessicaExamination of folk dance in the Chicago area from 1890 to 1940 reveals the centrality of the body to ideas about education in the early twentieth century. The dissertation illuminates the circulation of folk dance practices in higher education and settlement houses in Progressive Era Chicago in conjunction with the influences of gender, ethnicity, and race. Folk dance satisfied both white, native-born, middle-class American nostalgia for an imagined rural past and immigrant desire to retain ties to homelands. Women social workers and teachers promoted folk dance as a healthful exercise and an avenue of insight into other cultures while also presenting it as an embodiment of American values. Extension of the study into the interwar period (1920-1940) permits analysis of both the persistence of progressive ideologies concerning the body as practiced through folk dance and the central role of women in physical education. Over six chapters the dissertation address three primary points. First, it argues for the consideration of folk dance as an integral part of the physical education of children and young women as well as its function as an element of defining American-ness in both higher education and social settlements. Second, the dissertation demonstrates the prevalence of women as innovators in education, specifically through physical education curricula in colleges and universities. It also shows the connections between higher education and social settlements as two sites for learning that incorporated similar ideas about folk dance. Third, the dissertation assesses how Chicago, as a progressive center, facilitated the circulation of a set of folk dance practices grounded in Old World nostalgia and reframed it as part of the way to learn how to achieve a proper American body through similar curricula, instructors, and performances. Sources examined include records from colleges and universities such as course catalogs, programs, yearbooks, and campus newspapers; materials from social settlements, for example histories, programs, activity announcements, workers? reports, and scrapbooks; personal papers of settlement workers and folk dance instructors; and folk dance manuals.