Associated Products
“Victor Gruen’s Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Postwar Ideal” (Article)Title: “Victor Gruen’s Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Postwar Ideal”
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: This essay focuses on the formation of the architect Victor Gruen’s ideology in interwar Vienna and his early experiences in the United States, where he embraced his identity as a Jewish refugee by managing a theater troupe of exiled Viennese, and where he found jobs and established himself as an architect and designer in part through his contacts in the community of émigré Jews in New York. The communitarian spirit of Gruen’s cabaret performers, combined with the progressive social vision of the Viennese Social Democrats and the entrepreneurialism of immigrant professionals, coalesced in the person of Gruen, who channeled those energies into his vision for the shopping center, a distinctly American manifestation of a central European ideal. It was an architectural form that expressed both the idealism of social democracy and the optimism of postwar America; it was the product of one émigré’s stubborn progressivism and determination to transcend a traumatic past by realizing a positive vision for the future. Yet "the mall" would ultimately succumb to commercial imperatives that compromised this vision, much to the dissatisfaction of its inventor.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/03/23/leobaeck.ybw001.short?rss=1Primary URL Description: The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book is the pre-eminent journal on Central European Jewish history and culture. This well-established publication covers cultural, economic, political, social and religious history, the impact of antisemitism and the Jewish responses to it.
The Year Book is the publication of the Leo Baeck Institute, founded in 1955 for the study of the history and culture of German-speaking Central European Jewry. The journal of record in its field, the Year Book features the world's most prominent experts in the social, cultural, intellectual and political history of Jews in Central Europe after 1789, including the Holocaust.
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 61 (2016): 1-14
Publisher: Oxford University Press
“From the Ringstraße to Madison Avenue: Commercial Market Research and the Viennese Origins of the Mass Culture Debate, 1941–1961,” (Article)Title: “From the Ringstraße to Madison Avenue: Commercial Market Research and the Viennese Origins of the Mass Culture Debate, 1941–1961,”
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: Paul Lazarsfeld's social research organizations, as centres for cosmopolitan refugees who pioneered communications studies, were instrumental in producing some of the most prominent mass-culture critics in the post-war US—both native and emigre—including C. Wright Mills, Leo Lowenthal, Theodor Adorno, and David Riesman. But among Lazarsfeld's fellow Viennese colleagues, perhaps the most prominent in the contemporary popular mind was Ernest Dichter, a psychological consultant to marketers who probed the unconscious of consumer subjects in an effort to reveal their hidden motivations. Dichter was not a critic of mass culture but rather a celebrant who was embraced by the American business class. He entered into the public sphere, however, as the subject of criticism in journalist Vance Packard's exposé The Hidden Persuaders. Lazarsfeld saw no essential contradiction between the critics of mass culture and its industrial purveyors; instead, he saw these forces existing in a dialectical relationship with one another. In this sense, it was no accident that his research institutes nurtured both cultural critics and the agents of industrial mass society.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/666656Primary URL Description: Canadian Review of American Studies publishes essays, review essays and shorter reviews whose purpose is the multi- and inter-disciplinary analysis and understanding of the culture, both past and present, of the United States - and of the relations between the cultures of the U.S. and Canada.
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Canadian Review of American Studies 47 (2017): 261–87
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
"Creating Circumstances: Edward Bernays, Psychoanalysis, and the Making of American Consumer Culture" (Blog Post)Title: "Creating Circumstances: Edward Bernays, Psychoanalysis, and the Making of American Consumer Culture"
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: In 1929, it was socially acceptable for women to smoke at home and in certain public spaces, such as a hotel lobby. Smoking on the streets, however, was another matter altogether. George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, sought to quash this old taboo. He enlisted a public relations consultant, Edward Bernays, who had, in his years as a press agent, perfected the art of “creating circumstances” that would attract favorable coverage—and thus free publicity—in newspapers. For this job, Bernays consulted a psychoanalyst who suggested that smoking cigarettes was a sublimation of oral eroticism—to do it openly would be a dramatic symbol of women’s emancipation. The cigarettes would become, the psychoanalyst said, “torches of freedom.” This led Bernays to stage a parade on Easter Sunday of 10 young debutantes who would, in the interest of the “equality of the sexes,” light their cigarettes and march down New York’s Fifth Avenue—with male escorts—to proclaim their liberation and equality. Bernays exploited his connections with the press to ensure that the parade would be widely photographed and covered in newspapers. In the end, the march caused a national stir, and Bernays had effectively used the press to transform the progressive impulse of feminism into a boost in cigarette sales for his client.
Date: 3/23/2017
Primary URL:
http://blog.historians.org/2017/03/creating-circumstances-edward-bernays-psychoanalysis-and-the-making-of-american-consumer-culture/Primary URL Description: AHA Today publishes posts on a variety of topics relevant to AHA members and the history discipline. Authors may reflect on current historical research or projects, issues of importance to the history profession, and methods for teaching history. Pieces should be substantive in nature, not simply accounts or summaries of the topics being covered; posts should have a main idea and examine the subject from a specific perspective. The AHA is interested in the experiences and work of members and historians at large, and we encourage submissions for AHA Today
Blog Title: AHA Today
Website:
http://blog.historians.org/"When C. Wright Mills Worked for the Culture Industry" (Blog Post)Title: "When C. Wright Mills Worked for the Culture Industry"
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: Known for monumental works in midcentury sociology such as White Collar, The Power Elite, and The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills earned a reputation as an incisive, independent social critic who exposed the biases and banalities of both elite power brokers and ordinary Americans. Yet one of Mills’s assignments early in his career had him conducting a survey in Decatur, Illinois funded by major magazine publisher, Macfadden, which was known for its sensational pulp titles like True Story. Mills had just begun working under Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, where he would eventually join the sociology faculty. Although he worried about how colleagues would perceive his “selling out,” he quickly became engaged in the work when he began part-time in 1944 and then full-time in 1945.
Date: 7/27/2017
Primary URL:
http://blog.utpjournals.com/2017/07/27/when-c-wright-mills-worked-for-the-culture-industry/Primary URL Description: The University of Toronto Press Journals Division is dedicated to innovation in publishing and the sustainability of scholarly journals. The Journals team works hand-in-hand with editors and associations to assist publications in achieving their goals in the most efficient and cost effective manner – resulting in major strides forward in areas such as online peer review systems and online advance publishing.
Blog Title: University of Toronto Press Journals Blog
Website:
http://blog.utpjournals.com/about/“The Industrialist and the Artist: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the New Bauhaus in Chicago, 1937-1946.” (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “The Industrialist and the Artist: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the New Bauhaus in Chicago, 1937-1946.”
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: In 1937, a group of businessmen organized as the Association of Arts and Industries, on the recommendation of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, invited the Hungarian artist and designer László Moholy-Nagy to Chicago to reestablish the Bauhaus school of design, which the Nazis had shut down in 1933. Moholy-Nagy, who was exiled in England at the time, had been a member of the Bauhaus faculty and was a close associate of Gropius, who had turned down the Association’s offer to lead the school. Although the New Bauhaus was forced to close in 1938 after less than a year in operation due to the Association’s withdrawal of financial support, Container Corporation president Walter Paepcke helped Moholy to establish the School of Design in Chicago in 1939, which retained the Bauhaus pedagogy and much of its faculty, including the Hungarian artist György Kepes. Moholy led the design school, which changed its name to the Institute of Design in 1944, until his death in 1946. Drawing on archival resources at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago, this paper looks at Moholy’s immigration to the United States and his close relationship with Paepcke, an arts patron who created jobs for other Bauhaus designers including Herbert Bayer. Moholy and Paepcke attempted to incorporate the socialistic Bauhaus pedagogy with the practical demands of capitalistic American business, and their close personal and professional relationship reveals much about the extent to which such a cultural and economic fusion was possible.
Date: 03/09/2018
Primary URL:
https://ias.ceu.edu/events/2018-03-08/new-perspectives-central-european-and-transatlantic-migration-1800-2000Primary URL Description: Conference webpage
Secondary URL:
https://ias.ceu.edu/Secondary URL Description: Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University
Conference Name: New Perspectives on Central European and Transatlantic Migration, 1800-2000
"The Astonishment of Experience: Psychology as a Citizen Science" (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: "The Astonishment of Experience: Psychology as a Citizen Science"
Author: Alicia Puglionesi
Abstract: Though the origins of scientific psychology in the U.S. are usually traced to the Harvard psychological laboratory established by William James in 1875, experimentation with mental phenomena had a long history as a public practice, a citizen science that pursued what James called “wild facts” embedded in everyday experience. This science, termed “psychical research”, encompassed studies of telepathy, clairvoyance, mediumship, and the emerging notion of a “subliminal” or unconscious self. The Astonishment of Experience shows how field sciences like meteorology and astronomy became models for psychical research, which in turn shaped the professional formation of psychology and its maligned double, parapsychology, in the early twentieth century. Spanning laboratories and asylums, cushioned parlors and remote weather stations, this project presents an expansive vision of how the mind sciences became a site of curiosity, hope, and danger for turn-of-the-century Americans living through unprecedented transformations of subjectivity.
Date Range: 09/15/2017
Location: Stanford University
Primary URL:
https://anthropology.stanford.edu/events/cultures-minds-and-medicines/astonishment-experience-psychology-citizen-sciencePrimary URL Description: Stanford Department of Anthropology web page
“History After the Human” (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “History After the Human”
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Abstract: Over the past few years, the Humanities have been confronting a paradigm shift. After the Cultural and Linguistic turns of the 1970s and 1980s, language, meaning, representation, agency, othering, and knowledge-production redefined the Humanities. Now, in 2016, new media, climate change, environmental catastrophe, terrorism, genetic engineering, population growth, and globalization, destabilize the core of the Humanities. These forces (hyperobjects?) are largerthan-human. They are seismic. They are shifting intellectual terrain. And they require a change of perception, a new vision for a new century. As the macro, the “beyond-the-human,” quake the ballast of the Humanities, animals have emerged from the fault lines and fissures. Though animals were domesticated, commodified, and ultimately silenced between the late-Paleolithic and the Present, their voices have begun to resound across the Humanities as it turns toward the Anthropocene. This paper will explore the ways in which animal voices are reverberating within the historical profession. After tracking animals through the environmental history of the 1990s and 2000s, this paper will look toward the new horizons of “animal history.” Not only will this paper seek to define this emerging field, but it will outline the ways that “animal history” (indeed animals themselves) can creatively uncover a livelier, more truthful, and complex past buried beneath an anthropocentric historical tradition.
Date: 11/11/2017
Primary URL:
http://litsciarts.org/slsa17/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/SLSA-2017-Program-11-9.pdfPrimary URL Description: SLSA 2017 Program
Secondary URL Description: SLSA 2017 Program
Conference Name: 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA)
"The celebrated Grecian dog": Learning from Animals in Peale's Museum (Blog Post)Title: "The celebrated Grecian dog": Learning from Animals in Peale's Museum
Author: Alicia Pugloinesi
Abstract: not available
Date: 2/15/2017
Primary URL:
https://www.mdhumanities.org/2017/02/the-celebrated-grecian-dog-learning-from-animals-in-peales-museum/Website: Maryland Humanities
Lofty Only in Sound: Crossed Wires and Community in 19th Century Dreams (Blog Post)Title: Lofty Only in Sound: Crossed Wires and Community in 19th Century Dreams
Author: Alicia Puglionesi
Abstract: This essay explores a curious case of supposed dream telepathy at the end of the US Civil War, in which old ideas about the prophetic nature of dreaming collided with loss, longing, and new possibilities of communication at a distance.
Date: 04/05/2017
Primary URL:
https://publicdomainreview.org/2017/04/05/lofty-only-in-sound-crossed-wires-and-community-in-19th-century-dreams/Blog Title: The Public Domain Review
Nose-Counters versus Depth-Probers: European Émigrés and the Contentious Science of Market Research in Postwar America (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Nose-Counters versus Depth-Probers: European Émigrés and the Contentious Science of Market Research in Postwar America
Author: Joe Malherek
Abstract: This paper looks at a 1950s conflict between market researchers Alfred Politz and Ernest Dichter as more than a methodological squabble in the behavioral sciences: it was a paradigmatic conflict over the possibility of subjective choice as a fundamental principle of democracy. Dichter professed to use the psychoanalytic method to expose the “true” basis of consumers’ motivations, but his fellow market researchers distrusted the scientific rigor of his method, and contemporary writers attacked his brand motivational research as a threat to the autonomy of American consumers who had become vulnerable to manipulation by a mysterious group of “depth probers.” For Politz, what people believed on a conscious level, or even what they desired on an unconscious level, was not getting to the truth in market research; for him, what was true was how consumers would behave in a marketplace situation. The truth could be arrived at through the scientific design of the survey, calibrated to judge the likelihood of behaviors and actions, not the depth of attitudes. Although it occurred within the provincial world of consumer market research, this conflict had profound implications for the concept of the individual as an autonomous agent in a commercial-democratic society.
Date: 05/26/2017
Primary URL Description:
http://www.ebhsoc.org/conference/public/conferences/2/schedConfs/6/program-en_US.pdfConference Name: 41st Annual Economic and Business History Society Conference
Narrating Animal History from the Crags: A Turn-of-the-Century Tale about Mountain Sheep, Resistance, and a Nation (Article)Title: Narrating Animal History from the Crags: A Turn-of-the-Century Tale about Mountain Sheep, Resistance, and a Nation
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Abstract: It took years, at the dawn of the twentieth century, for the National Zoo to capture Rocky Mountain sheep. The split hooves and remarkable eyesight of bighorns made these animals virtually impossible to catch alive. This is a story about a national government chasing sheep for the purpose of zoological display. This is also a story about the construction of knowledge, the ironies of conservation, and the building of the American West. More important, this is a story about storytelling. The following tale will call attention to the opportunities that zoological parks, animal history, and narrative history offer the historian.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S002187581600133XFormat: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of American Studies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
“Critical Theory as Displaced Knowledge: Émigré Intellectuals from Central Europe and Their American Sponsors, 1933–45” (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “Critical Theory as Displaced Knowledge: Émigré Intellectuals from Central Europe and Their American Sponsors, 1933–45”
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: This paper examines the humanistic values and personal motives that drove officers of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars in assisting exiles from National Socialism. Officers’ values determined the scholarship of beneficiaries, among whom were Max Horkheimer and his Institute of Social Research, and Paul Lazarsfeld and his Bureau of Applied Social Research.
Date: 10/18/2018
Primary URL:
https://www.ghi-dc.org/fileadmin/user_upload/GHI_Washington/Events___Conferences/2018/Bucerius_YSF/2018_YSF_Program_web.pdfPrimary URL Description: Bucerius Young Scholar Forum Program
Conference Name: 2018 Bocerius Young Scholars Forum at German Historical Institute West
“Shopping Malls and Social Democracy: Victor Gruen’s Postwar Campaign for Conscientious Consumption in American Suburbia,”in Consumer Engineering, 1920s–1970s: Marketing between Expert Planning and Consumer Responsiveness (Book Section)Title: “Shopping Malls and Social Democracy: Victor Gruen’s Postwar Campaign for Conscientious Consumption in American Suburbia,”in Consumer Engineering, 1920s–1970s: Marketing between Expert Planning and Consumer Responsiveness
Author: Joseph Malherek
Editor: Jan Logemann
Editor: Gary Cross
Editor: Ingo Köhler
Abstract: In the middle of the twentieth century, a new class of marketing expert emerged beyond the familiar ad men of Madison Avenue. Working as commercial designers, consumer psychologists, sales managers, and market researchers, these professionals were self-defined “consumer engineers,” and their rise heralded a new era of marketing. To what extent did these efforts to engineer consumers shape consumption practices? And to what extent was the phenomenon itself a product of broader social and cultural forces? This collection considers consumer engineering in the context of the longer history of transatlantic marketing. Contributors offer case studies on the roles of individual consumer engineers on both sides of the Atlantic, the impact of such marketing practices on European economies during World War II and after, and the conflicted relationship between consumer activists and the ideas of consumer engineering. By connecting consumer engineering to a web of social processes in the twentieth century, this volume contributes to a reassessment of consumer history more broadly.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030145637Primary URL Description: Publisher website
Access Model: hardcover & ebook editions available
Publisher: Palgreve Macmillan
ISBN: 978-3-030-1456
The Industrialist and the Artist: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the New Bauhaus in Chicago, 1918–46" (Article)Title: The Industrialist and the Artist: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the New Bauhaus in Chicago, 1918–46"
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: In 1937, a group of businessmen organized as the Association of Arts and Industries, on the recommendation of German Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, invited the Hungarian artist and designer László Moholy-Nagy to Chicago to reestablish the Bauhaus school of design, which the Nazis had shut down in 1933. Moholy-Nagy, who was exiled in England at the time, had been a prominent member of the Bauhaus faculty. Although the New Bauhaus was forced to close in 1938 after less than a year in operation owing to the association's withdrawal of financial support, Container Corporation president Walter Paepcke helped Moholy establish the School of Design in Chicago in 1939, which retained the Bauhaus pedagogy and several members of its faculty. Moholy led the design school, which changed its name to the Institute of Design in 1944, until his death in 1946. Drawing on archival resources at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago, this essay looks at Moholy's immigration to the United States and his close relationship with Paepcke, an arts patron who created jobs for other Bauhaus designers including Herbert Bayer. Moholy and Paepcke attempted to incorporate the socialistic Bauhaus pedagogy with the practical demands of capitalistic American business. Their close personal and professional relationship reveals the limits and possibilities of such a cultural and economic fusion.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jaustamerhist.2.1.0051#metadata_info_tab_contentsPrimary URL Description: Article, p 51-76, on jstor.org
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Austrian-American History, Vol 2, No 1
Publisher: Penn State University Press
“Cell Culture and Science Culture” (Blog Post)Title: “Cell Culture and Science Culture”
Author: Alicia Puglionei
Abstract: This blogpost discusses the role of Georgeanna Seeger and her role in the complex history and cultural outcomes of in vitro fertilization.
Date: 11/15/2018
Primary URL:
https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/cell-culture-and-science-culture/Primary URL Description: Lady Science blogpost on the New Inquiry website
Blog Title: Lady Science
Website: The New Inquiry
“The Perfect Medium” (Article)Title: “The Perfect Medium”
Author: Alicia Puglionesi
Abstract: This essay explores the practices of antebellum Spiritualist mediums who channeled dead political figures to deliver abolitionist messages. It uses primary sources and historical scholarship to explore the ethics of "speaking for" the dead, and the gendered nature of political speech that made female mediums ideal for such performances.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/perfect-mediumPrimary URL Description: article url
Access Model: open access
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: The Point
Publisher: The Point Magazine
Phonographs, flying machines and the animality of modernity (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Phonographs, flying machines and the animality of modernity
Abstract: To gain support for the public zoo movement, between 1890 and 1910, zoo boosters praised zoological parks as institutions that would "advance knowledge" by supporting both scientific research and education. Zoos around the world, therefore, staged countless experiments. In this talk, Dr. Vandersommer's wil tell the story of these experiments, conducted in the National Zoological Park around the turn of the 20th century. The first deals with primatology. The second, aeronautics. Though from a contemporary perspective both experiments appear to be failures, they will point us toward the wild natures and unpredictable animalities hidden beneath the anthropocentrism of modern science.
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Date: 11/13/2018
Location: Ball State University, Department of History
Primary URL:
https://www.bsu.edu/Primary URL Description: Ball State University home page
Secondary URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANayBDIEKzkSecondary URL Description: Ball State University YouTube channel, Phonographs,flying-machines and the animality of modernity
“Fish and the Problem of (Historical) Scales”, (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “Fish and the Problem of (Historical) Scales”,
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Abstract: Scale (which encompasses time, space, and causation) has become the most relevant topic in 21st century historiography. And while most historians think intensely about scale (namely, how to deal with it themselves), they have only recently (with a few exceptions, of course) started to both historicize and theorize the very term that divides the profession, its subfields, and its methodologies. Many historians—while confronting the Anthropocene—are calling for “global” histories, “deeper” histories, and “bigger” histories (to use the adjectives that are being employed in new course titles, including my own). But many others are rightfully skeptical, for how much nuance is lost (how much violence is done) as we amalgamate the particularities of the human experience into sweeping narratives that can account for global phenomena like Climate Change.
I would like to suggest that animals may provide one solution to the problem of Scale. Seeing animals as subjects in the past, and looking for their lives, biographies, cultures, and particularities can help us tie together the “scale gaps” that divide historiography. Furthermore, seeing animals can help us enact a more ecological vision.
In particular, this paper will think about historical scales by following fish through the Great Lakes. It will reinvigorate ecological niche theory for the purpose of placing fish and humans into history, or more precisely, into different, yet overlapping, histories, calibrated to different scalar visions. This paper will suggest that niche models may be useful in 1.) finding “agencies” in, around, and between animal collectivities without anthropomorphizing or essentializing any single individual, 2.) conceptualizing various scales together, and 3.) fusing animal history with historical ecology in a manner that foregrounds both human and nonhuman subjects at the same time.
Date: 11/16/2018
Primary URL:
http://litsciarts.org/slsa18/Primary URL Description: Website for 2018 Conference for Literature, Science and the Arts
Conference Name: Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) 2018
“The Sectionalism of the National Zoo: Animals, Language, Politics" (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “The Sectionalism of the National Zoo: Animals, Language, Politics"
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Abstract: Shortly after the Civil War ended, the zoo movement, alongside other urban cultural movements, swept the United States, both in the North and the South. The history of American zoos, of course, have much to say about the history of conservation, animal history, historical ecology, the history of science and medicine, and evolutionary history as they, in turn, inform histories of nation-building, urbanization, and empire. Zoos, though, can also tell (bio)political stories. While zoogoers themselves rarely encountered politics along zoo footpaths, in the halls of Congress the ties that bound the National Zoo and its animals to politics proved more visible, especially when the topic of the zoo exploded into years of intense sectional debate in the House of Representatives. The National Zoological Park, as the only zoo in American history whose governance fell under the purview of the federal legislature, offers a unique window into a semiology that fused animals to debates about government that divided a nation through and after the Civil War. Animals were used by Congressmen to conjure sectional ideologies that could not be wielded as aggressively in an era of reconciliation. Using methods derived from animal studies, this essay will call attention to the sectionalism of the National Zoo.
Date: 4/13/2019
Primary URL:
https://aseh.net/conference-workshops/columbus-ohio/2019-aseh-conference-programPrimary URL Description: website for 2019 Annual Conference of the American Society for Environmental History
Conference Name: American Society for Environmental History-Annual Conference 2019
"Failed Zoo Experiments: Primatology, Aeronautics, and the Animality of 'Modern' Science" (Book Section)Title: "Failed Zoo Experiments: Primatology, Aeronautics, and the Animality of 'Modern' Science"
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Editor: Tracy McDonald
Editor: Daniel Vandersommers
Abstract: Zoo Studies considers the modern zoo from a range of approaches and disciplines, united in a desire to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. The volume begins with an account of the first modern mental hospital, La Salpêtrière, established in 1656, and the first panoptical zoo, the menagerie at Versailles, created in 1662 by the same royal architect; the final chapter presents a choreographic performance that imagines the Toronto Zoo as a place where the human body can be inspired by animal bodies. From beginning to end, through interdisciplinary collaboration, this volume decentres the human subject and offers alternative ways of thinking about zoos and their inhabitants. This collection immerses readers in the lives of animals and their experiences of captivity and asks us to reflect on our own assumptions about both humans and animals.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://www.mqup.ca/zoo-studies-products-9780773556911.phpPrimary URL Description: McGilll-Queen's University Press website
Publisher: McGill-Queens University Press
Book Title: Zoo Studies: A New Humanities
ISBN: 0773558152 978
Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (Book)Title: Zoo Studies: A New Humanities
Editor: Tracy McDonald
Editor: Daniel Vandersommers
Abstract: "Do both the zoo and the mental hospital induce psychosis, as humans are treated as animals and animals are treated as humans? How have we looked at animals in the past, and how do we look at them today? How have zoos presented themselves, and their purpose, over time? In response to the emergence of environmental and animal studies, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, theorists, literature scholars, and historians around the world have begun to explore the significance of zoological parks, past and present. Zoo Studies considers the modern zoo from a range of approaches and disciplines, united in a desire to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. The volume begins with an account of the first modern mental hospital, La Salpe^trie`re, established in 1656, and the first panoptical zoo, the menagerie at Versailles, created in 1662 by the same royal architect; the final chapter presents a choreographic performance that imagines the Toronto Zoo as a place where the human body can be inspired by animal bodies. From beginning to end, through interdisciplinary collaboration, this volume decentres the human subject and offers alternative ways of thinking about zoos and their inhabitants. This collection immerses readers in the lives of animals and their experiences of captivity and asks us to reflect on our own assumptions about both humans and animals. An original and groundbreaking work, Zoo Studies will change the way readers see nonhuman animals and themselves."--
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/zoo-studies-a-new-humanities/oclc/1085545251&referer=brief_resultsPublisher: McGill Queen's University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 0773558152 978
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Prizes
ALA Choice Outstanding Academic Title (OAT)
Date: 12/1/2020
Organization: American Library Association
Abstract: Selected by ALA Choice as an "Outstanding Academic Title
The Civil War and the Zoo, Entangled: Animals and Political Laughter (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Civil War and the Zoo, Entangled: Animals and Political Laughter
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Abstract: Shortly after the Civil War ended, the zoo movement, alongside other urban cultural movements, swept the United States, both in the North and the South. The history of American zoos, of course, have much to say about the history of conservation, animal history, historical ecology, the history of science and medicine, and evolutionary history as they, in turn, inform histories of nation-building, urbanization, and empire. Zoos, though, can also tell (bio) political stories. While zoogoers themselves rarely encountered politics along zoo footpaths, in the halls of Congress the ties that bound the National Zoo and its animals to politics proved more visible, especially when the topic of the zoo exploded into years of intense sectional debate in the House of Representatives. The National Zoological Park, as the only zoo in American history whose governance fell under the purview of the federal legislature, offers a unique window into a semiology that fused animals to debates about government that divided a nation through and after the Civil War. Animals were used by Congressmen to conjure sectional ideologies that could not be wielded as aggressively in an era of reconciliation. Using methods derived from animal studies, this essay will call attention to the sectionalism of the National Zoo.
Date: 11/7/2019
Primary URL:
https://easychair.org/smart-program/SLSA2019/2019-11-07.htmlPrimary URL Description: Conference Website
Conference Name: 33rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
Displaced Knowledge and Its Sponsors: How American Foundations and Aid Organizations Shaped Émigré Social Research, 1933–45 (Article)Title: Displaced Knowledge and Its Sponsors: How American Foundations and Aid Organizations Shaped Émigré Social Research, 1933–45
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: The global refugee crisis precipitated by Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 was viewed by university presidents, foundation administrators, and idealistic liberal internationalists in the United States as a serious humanitarian disaster in need of immediate attention. It was also, in their view, a historic opportunity to salvage the great minds of Central Europe being forced into exile. This essay focuses on the work of one of the most important American agencies aiding the refugee scholars, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which did more than any other philanthropy to support the intellectual émigrés, placing hundreds of them at universities and other academic institutions, often working in concert with the Emergency Committee.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.ghi-dc.org/fileadmin/publications/Bulletin_Supplement/Supplement_15/Supp-15_113.pdfPrimary URL Description: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute
Publisher: German Historical Institute
Walter Kotschnig and the German Refugee Scholar Crisis, 1933–36 (Blog Post)Title: Walter Kotschnig and the German Refugee Scholar Crisis, 1933–36
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: At a critical historical juncture following Hitler’s rise to power, an Austrian political scientist helped to coordinate a profoundly consequential intellectual migration to the United States. Walter Maria Kotschnig (1901–1985) was well-positioned to respond to the crisis of refugee scholars caused by the Nazi Reich’s law to “restore” the professional civil service, which went into effect in April of 1933 and led to the immediate dismissal of more than a thousand academics in Germany. In his official capacities at the International Student Service and at the High Commission for Refugees (Jewish and Other) Coming from Germany, Kotschnig became an important negotiator between the various ad hoc committees that formed to find positions for the hundreds of displaced German scholars, many of whom would come to the U.S. to re-establish their careers. When the German crisis became a continental crisis with the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, many of the procedures and relationships that Kotschnig had worked to establish through the committees became the framework for the relocation of émigré scholars whose careers were terminated by the Nazi regime on the basis of their political identity as socialists, communists, or liberals, or because of their “racial” identity as “non-Aryans” or Jews.
Date: 12/16/2019
Primary URL: /https://botstiberbiaas.org/Walter-Kotschnig-and-the-Scholar-Crisis/
Website: Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies Blog
The Frankfurt School’s Other: Socialist Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1956 (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Frankfurt School’s Other: Socialist Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1956
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: Abstract: What are the essential formal qualities of socialism, and how may those forms be translated by migrants in new national-social contexts in which alternative economic values prevail? My study considers the intersecting careers of a cohort of entrepreneurial socialists who formed their beliefs and practiced their professions in the new republics of post-Habsburg Central Europe: the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, the architect Victor Gruen, and the artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy. Having come of age during the period of interwar socialist experimentation in Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin, they arrived in the U.S. as refugees from Nazism during the New Deal era of the 1930s, a time of extraordinary openness to social-democratic thinking. While the critical theorists of Max Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research—Lazarsfeld’s fellow exiles at Columbia University—have become known to intellectual historians as the chief antagonists of twentieth-century consumer capitalism, the émigrés I consider in this project became the unlikely avatars of European-style social democracy in the “free enterprise” culture of American business. They interpreted the research methods, pedagogical techniques, and urban values they had acquired in a social-democratic cultural context for the American system. Their socialistic Weltanschauung was fundamental, I argue, to some of their most important works in the U.S., including the suburban shopping center, the “focus” group, and a new Bauhaus school of design in Chicago.
Date: 10/30/2019
Primary URL:
https://events.ceu.edu/2019-10-30/frankfurt-schools-other-socialist-emigres-who-made-capitalist-culture-america-1918-1956Primary URL Description: Website page for presentation at CEU (Central European University)
Conference Name: Institute for Advanced Study
The Frankfurt School’s Other: Socialist Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1956 (Staff/Faculty/Fellow Position)Name: The Frankfurt School’s Other: Socialist Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1956
Abstract: What is the essential ideological form of socialism, and can that form be carried, translated, and incorporated into different cultures through the work of intellectuals, individually and collectively? My study considers the intersecting careers of a cohort of socialists—Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, Viennese architect Victor Gruen, and Hungarian artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy—who formed their beliefs and practiced their professions in the new republics of post-Habsburg Central Europe, and, as refugees from Nazism in the United States, translated an ethos of socialism within the foreign cultural context of American capitalism. While the critical theorists of Max Horkheimer’s Institut für Sozialforschung— associates of Lazarsfeld who were also exiled at Columbia University in the 1930s and 1940s—have become known as the chief intellectual antagonists of twentieth-century consumer capitalism, the émigrés I consider in this project became the unlikely avatars of European social democracy in the “free-enterprise” culture of American business.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://ias.ceu.edu/people/joseph-malherekPrimary URL Description: Botsiber Fellowship page for Joseph Malherek, Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University, Budapest, 2019-20.
Dynamics of emigration, Epistemic repercussions: Émigré scholars and the production of historical knowledge in the age of extremes (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: Dynamics of emigration, Epistemic repercussions: Émigré scholars and the production of historical knowledge in the age of extremes
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: This paper considers the ways in which concerned Americans such as Stephen Duggan, working through universities and organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, assisted émigrés and reconstituted intellectual communities. The German Max Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research and the Austrian Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, e.g., were both based at Columbia University, and both received support from American refugee assistance groups and influential faculty members like Robert Lynd. Like Lazarsfeld’s Bureau, Horkheimer’s Institute served as a refuge for many displaced scholars. But it brought with it a unique style of scholarship, Critical Theory, so peculiar that its American sponsors were not sure how to classify it: its scholars were not quite sociologists, economists, historians, psychologists, philosophers, or political scientists; rather, their method of scholarly inquiry was a hybrid of these disciplines. This unique combination of social research was ideal for the critical analysis of fascism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism, as represented in comprehensive studies such as Studien über Autorität und Familie. The Institute itself sponsored a methodologically-related study in the American context, The Unemployed Man and His Family, by Lazarsfeld. The Institute’s journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, continued to be published in German, providing a crucial resource for exiled German-speaking scholars not only in the U.S. but around the world. These research institutes were composed of exiled scholars who worked together and exchanged members, but they pursued distinct kinds of research that responded differently to the American context: the Critical Theory of the Horkheimer group attacked capitalist society, while the Lazarsfeld group embraced it. Their relationship with their American sponsors, I suggest, fundamentally affected the nature of their work.
Date Range: 09/19/19-9/21/2019
Location: Bochum, Germany
Primary URL:
http://historiografija.hr/?p=16381Primary URL Description: Workshop page on the Institute for Social Movements website
Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (Book)Title: Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science
Author: Alicia Puglionesi
Abstract: Modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences, this book brings to life the seances, deathbed communions, flashes of clairvoyance, and telepathic experiments that captivated the American public from the 1860s well into the twentieth century. The book contextualizes psychical research, an unorthodox "science of the soul," within a long history of citizen science in the United States. Rather than a superstitious impediment to the progress of laboratory psychology, psychical research belongs to a continuous tradition of knowledge production by ordinary people in everyday settings. The book reveals how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. They formed a far-flung network devoted to gathering evidence and making the study of experience an "in vivo" field science. And they persisted despite growing marginalization in the 1920s and 30s, as psychology asserted its professional and laboratory-based status. Each chapter delves into the vigorous experimental culture of amateur psychical researchers, challenging readers to discern whether this was a pseudo-science, a failed science, or a phantom science-one impossible yet persistent, the faint rapping of a curiosity that refuses to be extinguished"--
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/common-phantoms-an-american-history-of-psychic-science/oclc/1127063475&referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: WorldCat, comprehensive global catalog of library colletions
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781503608375
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science, an interview with Alicia Puglionesi (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science, an interview with Alicia Puglionesi
Writer: Alicia Puglionesi
Director: Claire Clark
Producer: Marshall Poe
Abstract: Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (Stanford UP, 2020) brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences.
Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, Alicia Puglionesi recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study their experiences on their own terms. Academic psychology would ultimately disown this effort as both a scientific failure and a remnant of magical thinking, but its challenge to the limits of science, the mind, and the soul still reverberates today.
Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.
Date: 12/18/2020
Primary URL:
https://newbooksnetwork.com/common-phantomsPrimary URL Description: url for interview on the New Books Network website
Access Model: open
Format: Digital File
I Predict That You Will Listen To A Public Radio Show About Psychics (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: I Predict That You Will Listen To A Public Radio Show About Psychics
Director: Chion Wolf
Producer: Chion Wolf
Abstract: From ancient Egypt to Greek mythology, through Abrahamic religions, in ancient African and Native American spiritual traditions, in medieval Europe, and 16th century France (remember that Nostradamus guy?), humans have reliably attempted to predict the future, read minds, and communicate with the dead.
And at this moment in our history, with a pandemic, protests, an upcoming election, climate change... On top of the innate chaos of being a human being, it would surely be more psychologically manageable if we could somehow see into the future.
This hour, you'll listen in on my first reading ever with a psychic medium - someone who claims to be able to predict the future, and communicate with the dead. We'll hear what this work is like for her. You'll also meet a researcher who looks back at some of the ways psychics and mediums have been tested and understood - or not - in American history.
Guests:
Karen Hollis is a Rocky Hill-based psychic medium who has worked with over 7,000 clients, as well as the police. She’s appeared on the Discovery Channel and the Travel Channel, and she's worked with the Ghosts of New England Research Society, or G.O.N.E.R.S.
Alicia Puglionesi is the author of the forthcoming book, Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science, exploring questions of faith and doubt, orthodoxy and marginality that underpin the field of parapsychology
Date: 7/24/2020
Primary URL:
https://www.wnpr.org/post/i-predict-you-will-listen-public-radio-show-about-psychicsPrimary URL Description: URL for interview with Alicia Puglionesi on her book, Common Phantoms, with Audacious host Chion Wolf of Connecticut Public Radio (WNPR)
Access Model: open
Format: Digital File
Common Phantoms w/ Alicia Puglionesi (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Common Phantoms w/ Alicia Puglionesi
Director: David Parsons
Producer: Peter Sabatino
Abstract: Alicia Puglionesi is a writer and historian whose book Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science tells the story of how researchers in the late 19th and early 20th century attempted to engage the outer limits of human consciousness, and how their efforts were written out of “legitimate” academic discourse. In this conversation, she explains how this lost history of psychic experimentation resonates in 21st century politics and culture.
Date: 2/16/2021
Primary URL:
https://www.nostalgiatrap.com/episodes/2021/2/16/episode-253-common-phantoms-w-alicia-puglionesiPrimary URL Description: URL for interview on Nostalgia Trap podcast which features weekly conversations about history and politics with some of the left's most incisive thinkers, writer, and extremely online personalities, exploring how individual lives intersect with the big events and debates of our era.
Access Model: open
Format: Digital File
When Scientists Dabbled In Clairvoyance (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: When Scientists Dabbled In Clairvoyance
Director: Krys Boyd
Producer: Krys Boyd
Abstract: In the late 19th century, many Americans were obsessed with séances, clairvoyance and other so-called “psychic sciences.” Alicia Puglionesi holds a Ph.D. in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology from Johns Hopkins University, and she joins host Krys Boyd to discuss a field of study that tried to make a science of the unexplained. Her book is “Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science.”
Date: 01/25/2021
Primary URL:
https://think.kera.org/2021/01/25/when-scientists-dabbled-in-clairvoyance/Primary URL Description: hink is a national call-in radio program, hosted by acclaimed journalist Krys Boyd and produced by KERA — North Texas’ PBS and NPR member station. Each week, listeners across the country tune in to the program to hear thought-provoking, in-depth conversations with newsmakers from across the globe. Since launching in November 2006, Think and Krys Boyd have earned more than a dozen local, regional and national awards, including the 2013 Regional Edward R. Murrow award for breaking news coverage.
Access Model: open
Format: Radio
Format: Digital File
"Pajamas from Spirit Land': Searching for William James" (Article)Title: "Pajamas from Spirit Land': Searching for William James"
Author: Alicia Puglionesi
Abstract: After the passing of William James — philosopher, early psychologist, and investigator of psychic phenomena — mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor. Channelling these fragmentary voices, Alicia Puglionesi considers the relationship between communication, reputation, and survival after death.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/pajamas-from-spirit-landPrimary URL Description: The Public Domain Review is an online journal dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Public Domain Review
Publisher: The Public Domain Review
"The Sectionalism of the National Zoo: Animals, Language, Politics, Laughter" (Book Section)Title: "The Sectionalism of the National Zoo: Animals, Language, Politics, Laughter"
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Editor: Earl J. Hess
Abstract: Animal Histories of the Civil War Era introduces the concept of animal history to Civil War studies. Until now, the field of animal history has paid little attention to the Civil War, and Civil War scholars have paid almost no attention to animals. This volume serves as an intersection of these two critical fields of scholarly inquiry. In thirteen essays, ten by Civil War historians and three by animal history scholars, the contributors illuminate an important but largely ignored aspect of the war-its animal participants. The topics covered are wide-ranging. One essay examines camels in the American South and Southwest before the war, highlighting the involvement of camels in illegal efforts to import slaves into the United States. Essays on horses during the war explore the process of procuring equines for military service, the training of horses for use by artillery units, and the impact of horse supply problems on hopes for Confederate military success. Two essays cover wildlife in the Civil War, focusing on bees. An essay on hogs in the Confederacy and another on the culture of meat-eating examine animals as food during the war. Two essays on dogs in the South during and after the war illustrate how pets and farm animals influenced slavery and the prosecution of the Confederate war effort. An essay on regimental animal mascots during the war analyzes how veterans incorporated them into their post-war lives. Another essay explores the effort to create a national zoo in the 1880s, a task that underscored the persistence of sectional division after Reconstruction. The final essay likewise examines sectional division and the resonance of enslavement as seen in the career of an ex-slave and his unusual show horse. Through the process of broadly writing animals into Civil War history, the contributors demonstrate the many ways in which animals of all kinds played roles in the sectional history of America during the middle and late nineteenth century. Most of the essay
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/animal-histories-of-the-civil-war-era/oclc/1281650317&referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: WorldCat, comprehensive global catalog of library collections
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Book Title: Animal Histories of the Civil War Era
ISBN: 9780807176917
Echoes Down the Years: Technologies of Mediumship and Immortality (Book Section)Title: Echoes Down the Years: Technologies of Mediumship and Immortality
Author: Alicia Puglionesi
Editor: Shannon Wong Lerner
Editor: Jaimie Baron
Editor: Jennifer Fleeger
Abstract: This chapter examines the history of human-machine assemblages used to speak for the dead, comparing the practices of the nineteenth-century American Spiritualist movement with those of present-day transhumanist mind-uploading. In both cases, forms of mediated communication give the dead a continuing voice in society through a participatory performance involving the medium—a person whose consciousness is suspended in a state of trance, or a set of algorithms—the deceased, and an audience. Mediumship becomes a theater in which audiences both desire and interrogate the capabilities of necro-communication technology. The chapter attends to these technologies’ implied models of selfhood, which disaggregate mental content—software—from the vehicle of its expression—hardware—in the tradition of Cartesian dualism. The chapter argues that the technologies in question inevitably structure, in concerning ways, political notions of possessive individualism, which become commoditized in the shift from human-performed mediumship to selfhood instantiated in proprietary software products.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://academic.oup.com/book/41115/chapter-abstract/350420178?redirectedFrom=fulltextPrimary URL Description: Oxford University Press webpage for the chapter, "Echoes down the years: technologies of mediumship and immortality," which appears in the book, Media Ventriloquism: How Audiovisual Technologies Transform the Voice-Body Relationship.
Secondary URL:
https://academic.oup.com/book/41115Secondary URL Description: Oxford University Press webpage for book, Media Ventriloquism: How Audiovisual Technologies Transform the Voice-Body Relationship
Access Model: subscription
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: Media Ventriloquism: How Audiovisual Technologies Transform the Voice-Body Relationship
ISBN: 9780197563625
Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968 (Book)Title: Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: The Hungarian artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and his fellow Viennese Victor Gruen—an architect and urban planner—made careers in different fields. Yet they shared common socialist politics, Jewish backgrounds, and experience as refugees from the Nazis. This book tells the story of their intellectual migration from Central Europe to the United States, beginning with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and moving through the heady years of newly independent social-democratic republics before the descent into fascism. It follows their experience of exile and adaptation in a new country, and culminates with a surprising outcome of socialist thinking: the opening of the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned suburban shopping center in the United States. Although the American culture they encountered ostensibly celebrated entrepreneurial individualism and capitalistic “free enterprise,” Moholy-Nagy, Lazarsfeld, and Gruen arrived at a time of the progressive economic reforms of the New Deal and an extraordinary open-mindedness about social democracy. This period of unprecedented economic experimentation nurtured a business climate that, for the most part, did not stifle the émigrés’ socialist idealism but rather channeled it as the source of creative solutions to the practical problems of industrial design, urban planning, and consumer behavior.
Based on a vast array of original sources, Malherek interweaves the biographies of these three remarkable personalities and those of their wives, colleagues, and friends with whom they collaborated on innovative projects that would shape the material environment and consumer culture of their adopted home. The result is a narrative of immigration and adaptation that challenges the crude binary of capitalism and socialism with a story of creative economic hybridization.
Year: 2022
Primary URL Description:
https://ceupress.com/book/free-market-socialistsAccess Model: open
Publisher: CEU Central European University
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-963-386-44
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive Year (Book)Title: Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive Year
Title: Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive Year
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Abstract: Founded amid the urban commotion of Washington, DC, before the dawn of the twentieth century, the National Zoological Park opened to “preserve, teach, and conduct research about the animal world.” Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo is a study of this important cultural landmark from 1887 to 1920. Centered on the animals themselves, each chapter looks from a different angle at the influential science of popular zoology in order to shed new light on the complex, entangled relationships between humans and animals.
Daniel Vandersommers’s goal is twofold. First, through narrative, he shows how zoo animals always ran away from the zoo. This is meant literally—animals escaped frequently—but even more so, figuratively. Living, breathing, historical zoo animals ran away from their cultural constructions, and these constructions ran away from the living bodies they were made to represent. The author shows that the resulting gaps produced by runaway animals contain concealed, distorted, and erased histories worthy of uncovering.
Second, Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo demonstrates how the popular zoology fostered by the National Zoo shaped every aspect of American science, culture, and conservation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Between the 1880s and World War I, as intellectuals debated Darwinism and scientists institutionalized the laboratory, zoological parks suddenly appeared at the heart of nearly every major American city, captivating tens of millions of visitors. Vandersommers follows stories previously hidden within the National Zoo in order to help us reconsider the place of zoos and their inhabitants in the twenty-first century.
Abstract: Founded amid the urban commotion of Washington, DC, before the dawn of the twentieth century, the National Zoological Park opened to “preserve, teach, and conduct research about the animal world.” Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo is a study of this important cultural landmark from 1887 to 1920. Centered on the animals themselves, each chapter looks from a different angle at the influential science of popular zoology in order to shed new light on the complex, entangled relationships between humans and animals.
Daniel Vandersommers’s goal is twofold. First, through narrative, he shows how zoo animals always ran away from the zoo. This is meant literally—animals escaped frequently—but even more so, figuratively. Living, breathing, historical zoo animals ran away from their cultural constructions, and these constructions ran away from the living bodies they were made to represent. The author shows that the resulting gaps produced by runaway animals contain concealed, distorted, and erased histories worthy of uncovering.
Second, Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo demonstrates how the popular zoology fostered by the National Zoo shaped every aspect of American science, culture, and conservation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Between the 1880s and World War I, as intellectuals debated Darwinism and scientists institutionalized the laboratory, zoological parks suddenly appeared at the heart of nearly every major American city, captivating tens of millions of visitors. Vandersommers follows stories previously hidden within the National Zoo in order to help us reconsider the place of zoos and their inhabitants in the twenty-first century.
Year: 2023
Year: 2023
Primary URL:
https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700635696/Primary URL:
https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700635696/Primary URL Description: Website of University Press of Kansas
Primary URL Description: Website of University Press of Kansas
Access Model: book
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780700635696
ISBN: 9780700635696
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Sciences of the Mind (Web Resource)Title: Sciences of the Mind
Author: Courtney Thompson
Author: Alicia Puglionesi
Abstract: This discussion brings together historians Courtney Thompson and Alicia Puglionesi to discuss the fascinating world of the mind sciences in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time period, the human mind captured the imagination of the American public. Efforts to reveal the subconscious and to understand mental physiology inspired the creation of new technologies, modes of experimentation, and collaborations that aspired to make visible the inner workings of the brain. These developments had a profound impact on the production of scientific and medical expertise that continues to influence conceptions of race, gender, and mental illness in the present.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://www.chstm.org/video/121Primary URL Description: Webpage for recorded podcast on the Consortium Perspectives portal. Perspectives is an ever-growing library of podcasts, videos, and essays on the history of science, technology and medicine, along with resources for further learning and opportunities to engage in ongoing conversations. Perspectives provides discussions with leading scholars, interviews with recent authors, and archival highlights from the exceptional collections of Consortium member institutions.
Free-Market Socialists (Web Resource)Title: Free-Market Socialists
Author: Joseph Malherek
Abstract: Joseph Malherek explains the socialist roots of U.S. social research. He charts the lives and careers of Hungarian artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and his fellow Viennese Victor Gruen—an architect and urban planner—to tell the story an intellectual migration from Central Europe to the United States. These figures sought answers to the question: why do people do the things they do and make the economic decisions they make? Malherek demonstrates how U.S. businesses channeled socialist thought for creative solutions to the practical problems of industrial design, urban planning, and consumer behavior.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://www.chstm.org/video/143Primary URL Description: Webpage for recorded podcast on the Consortium Perspectives portal. Perspectives is an ever-growing library of podcasts, videos, and essays on the history of science, technology and medicine, along with resources for further learning and opportunities to engage in ongoing conversations. Perspectives provides discussions with leading scholars, interviews with recent authors, and archival highlights from the exceptional collections of Consortium member institutions.
Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive (Web Resource)Title: Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive
Author: Daniel Vandersommers
Abstract: In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Daniel Vandersommers, author of Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive. In this book, Vandersommers shows how zoo animals always ran away from the zoo. This is meant literally—animals escaped frequently—but even more so, figuratively. Living, breathing, historical zoo animals ran away from their cultural constructions, and these constructions ran away from the living bodies they were made to represent. Vandersommers shows that the resulting gaps produced by runaway animals contain concealed, distorted, and erased histories worthy of uncovering.
Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo also demonstrates how the popular zoology fostered by the National Zoo shaped every aspect of American science, culture, and conservation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Between the 1880s and World War I, as intellectuals debated Darwinism and scientists institutionalized the laboratory, zoological parks suddenly appeared at the heart of nearly every major American city, captivating tens of millions of visitors. Vandersommers follows stories previously hidden within the National Zoo in order to help us reconsider the place of zoos and their inhabitants in the twenty-first century.
Year: 2023
Primary URL:
https://www.chstm.org/video/176Primary URL Description: Webpage for recorded podcast o the Consortium Perspectives portal. Perspectives is an ever-growing library of podcasts, videos, and essays on the history of science, technology and medicine, along with resources for further learning and opportunities to engage in ongoing conversations. Perspectives provides discussions with leading scholars, interviews with recent authors, and archival highlights from the exceptional collections of Consortium member institutions.
Secondary URL:
https://search.worldcat.org/title/1376195662Secondary URL Description: Webpage for the book at worldcat.org