“Better Gestures”: A Disability History Perspective on the Transition from (Silent) Movies to Talkies in the United StatesJohnson, Russell L.
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shw065pmid: N/A
AbstractThis essay focuses on two cultural shifts at the end of the 1920s, the watershed decade in the emergence of modern culture in the United States. First, in deaf education, oralism (lip-reading and audible speech) reached its peak level of control as the method of instruction, replacing manualism (sign language). Second, at the cinema, talkies replaced silent movies. In each case—manualism to oralism and silents to talkies—the central change involved using audible spoken language in place of a purely visual form of communication. Contemporaries wrote about these two historical shifts using remarkably similar terms. The silent movies that were produced during the transition period (1927–1930) were even sometimes called “dumbies,” recalling a common slur regarding the deaf. Yet historians have not made the connection. Scholarship on the transition to talkies emphasizes technological, production, and business challenges presented by sound, especially dialogue, in the cinema. Likewise, historians of the Deaf cultural experience in the United States emphasize the fight to preserve sign language, and although a few have noted that the arrival of the talkies led to (further) cultural exclusion of the deaf, these scholars focus more on the misrepresentation of deafness in films and the limited opportunities for deaf actors in Hollywood. This article argues that the concurrence of these two independent and seemingly unrelated historical changes—oralism and talkies—was not a coincidence. Both changes reflected larger beliefs about normalcy, language, communication, deafness, intelligence, and ultimately humanity in the early-twentieth century.
“Screech Owls Allus Holler ’round the House before Death”: Birds and the Souls of Black Folk in the 1930s American SouthPasierowska, Rachael L.
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shw089pmid: N/A
AbstractIn the first half of the twentieth century, many African Americans in the South regarded owls as harbingers of death. This paper examines interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s to investigate why former slaves repeatedly spoke of the screeching or hooting of an owl as a sign that death was nearby. This belief suggests that African Americans understood these birds to either possess or embody supernatural spirits that were able to move between the spiritual and material worlds, a passage that was very permeable in African-American culture. In an attempt to answer why African Americans regarded owls in this way, this article looks to the characteristics of owls as birds of prey in juxtaposition to black folklore from during and following the slavery era. Many slaves understood that after death, the soul of the deceased returned to the continent of Africa. Spiritual birds of flight facilitated this journey to the land of ancestors acting as guides for spirits or carriers of spirits of dead slaves in the afterlife. As Christianity became more widespread across the antebellum South, the notion of flight enabled slaves to remain confident that their souls would be carried to Heaven upon the snowy white wings of angels and cherubs. Birds and winged creatures were the epitome of liberté totale for enslaved African Americans, a freedom that was achieved through flight.
“Integrated Out of Existence”: African American Debates over School Integration versus Separation at the Bordentown School in New Jersey, 1886–1955Burkholder, Zoë
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shw091pmid: N/A
AbstractThe Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth in New Jersey allows us to consider the history of black education from a new perspective: that of northern black educational activists in the first half of the twentieth century. While we know a great deal about how black southerners made school integration central to the civil rights movement in the decades following Brown, as well as later battles for school integration in northern cities like New York and Boston, we know less about how black educational activists in the North advocated for educational equality before Brown. This article expands our understanding of northern black educational activism by analyzing debates over school integration at one of the region’s most prestigious all-black public schools. It traces the rise and fall of the Bordentown School in order to consider how and why northern black students, parents, and teachers came to support this “colored” school before 1940 and to determine why this support faded during World War II and the postwar era. This study reveals a division within northern black educational activism over the question of school integration and uncovers a range of educational activism that had conflicting strategies and objectives.
“Literature Acknowledges No Boundaries”: Book Reading and Social Class in Britain, c.1930–c.1945James, Robert
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shw086pmid: N/A
AbstractSitting down to read a work of fiction was a well-established leisure activity within British society by the early-twentieth century but one that was mainly enjoyed by the country’s more leisured classes. After the First World War, however, changes to the publishing industry’s working practices, coupled with the growth of the “open access” system in public libraries in the 1920s and the spread of twopenny libraries in the 1930s, created a new type of reader, drawn principally from the country’s working-class communities. This article reveals that the spread of the working-class book-reading habit prompted a series of discussions among the country’s cultural elites, publishers, and public and commercial librarians regarding how that social group engaged with the written word. Many of these commentators were highly disparaging of the working classes’ reading and book-borrowing habits and, based on a prejudiced understanding of that social group’s cultural capital, sought to influence the types of reading material available to them, particularly with regard to what was accessible in the country’s public libraries. The article argues that while the outbreak of the Second World War may have tempered these discussions somewhat, class distinctions surrounding the reading habit continued to shape people’s participation in it, thus revealing that even during a period when class divisions were supposedly blurring, attitudes toward social class and leisure remained essentially unchanged.
Feeling through Practice: Subjectivity and Emotion in Children’s WritingBarron, Hester; Langhamer, Claire
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shw070pmid: N/A
AbstractThis article analyzes how children in 1930s’ Britain narrated their everyday behavior, feelings and fantasies when asked to do so by their teachers. It is based upon a study of over one thousand essays that were written by children in 1937 and 1938, which were collected by the British social investigative organization, Mass Observation, as part of its Worktown Project. The argument is situated within the history of emotions and we interrogate the utility of recent conceptual frameworks for the better understanding of children’s subjectivities. The essays show that children were able to juggle contradictory demands and expectations, learn emotional codes and match emotional style to spatial context when moving between school, home and leisure arenas. To some extent, then, children adapted and shaped their behavior to comply with specific emotional communities. However, we argue that this model offers only a partial account of children’s emotional practices. In the second part of the article we suggest a move away from thinking about emotional communities or emotional styles as predominantly value-based and spatially defined (by the school, home, street—spaces which children inhabited and might have influenced but which were conceived and built by adults) and argue instead for increased attention to be paid to the material context and, particularly, the relationships that operated within and across these spaces. Ultimately, we argue, children’s emotional experiences were less about “learning to feel” than feeling through practice.
Foundational Myths in the Republic of Vietnam (1955–1975): “Harnessing” the Hùng Kings against Ngô Đình Diệm Communists, Cowboys, and Hippies for Unity, Peace, and VietnamesenessDror, Olga
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shw058pmid: N/A
AbstractMany Vietnamese consider the Hùng Kings, who allegedly ruled from 2879 to 258 BCE, to be their ancestors and the founders of their nation. Not concerned with the historicity of the Hùng Kings, this article focuses on the role of the narrative of the Hùng Kings in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) between 1955 and 1975. During different periods of the RVN, attitudes toward the Hùng Kings varied from a denial of their importance to attempts to use them to mobilize people for agendas that ranged from anti-Communism to antiwar sentiment to anti-Westernism. Those not inclined to employ this narrative questioned its historicity. Those who did employ it relegated proof of the kings’ historical existence to secondary place. By bringing the Hùng Kings into their discourses they were establishing them not necessarily as historical but primarily as a social fact transmitted through collective memory. Based on archival materials and publications, this article examines the agendas of those who “harnessed” the Hùng King narrative. It also compares the Hùng Kings’ status in the RVN to that in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), highlighting differences and similarities between the two. I argue that the Hung Kings represent the complexity of South Vietnamese society and of the idea of being Vietnamese. This is the first study of the Hùng Kings in South Vietnam.