Saturday, May 31, 2008

DuBois on industrial ed

From Kevin Gaines' essay on Pauline Hopkins, "Uplift Ideology as 'Civilizing Mission,'" in Pease and Kaplan, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism, p 442:

"W.E.B. Dubois would revive the analogy in 1903 in challenging Washington's program of industrial education as the exclusive means of the 'uplifting and civilization of black men in America.' Du Bois denounced Washington's policy, indicative of a tendency 'born of slavery and quickened and renewed to life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends.'"

Note directs to The Souls of Black Folk, Signet edition, p 126.

Darkness and Dawn trilogy

by George England, 1914. Descrip from Amazon:

"The Vacant World, the first novel, begins when a secretary, Beatrice Kendrick, and her boss, a young engineer named Allan Stern, awaken on an upper floor of a ruined Manhattan skyscraper, thousands of years in the future when civilization has been destroyed. The pair has been in a state of suspended animation for fifteen hundred years. Changes in the earth's features as well as monstrously mutated "humans" make it clear they have little hope of survival. The pair organize their resources to face the savage alternatives about them and the closeness created by their mutual interdependency inevitably kindles romance between Allan and Beatrice.

In Book Two, Beyond the Great Oblivion, Allan and Beatrice begin to discover the nature of the catastrophe that has split the Earth open. Rebuilding an airplane, they find a "bottomless" chasm near Pittsburgh where a huge portion of the Earth has been torn away to become a second moon. Alan and Beatrice earn the loyalty of the People of this Abyss and lead them from the chasm to New York.

In Book Three, The Afterglow, Allan and Beatrice, with the People of the Abyss, prepare to recolonize the Earth's surface. But first, they must defeat the devolved, cannibalistic survivors who populate Earth's cities.

Analog calls Darkness and Dawn "a classic trilogy," while historian/critic Sam Moskowitz terms it "a masterpiece."

Steam-Man of the Prairies

in Bill Brown's essay in Cultures of United States Imperialism, he describes a scifi book from 1868 in which a disabled child constructs a steam-powered man to do all of the things he can't do: Ellis, Steam-Man of the Prairies.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Bibliographic notes: Eugenics

Bannister, Robert C, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (1984)
Chamberlin and Gilman, eds, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (1985)
Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought
Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society
Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives
Selden, Steven. Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (1999).
Selden, Steven. All other cites.

Utah Phillips quip

heard on obit which ran on NPR yesterday: "I always tell children, when you hear them calling you 'America's most precious natural resources,' you should run the other way - look what they done with the rest of their resources!"

Monday, May 19, 2008

Bibliographic notes: Religion, nature, and technology

Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (1990)
Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (2004)
Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (2004)
Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (1997)

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Non-white children, science, technology

Jaimes, ed, The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (1992) - Noriega essay on education
Lewis, Neither Wolf Nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change (1994)

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Prosecutor Stewart's response to defense attorney Malone

"Shut the door on science when science sets a canker on the soul of a child." (Larson, Summer of the Gods, 179.)

Anti-evolution education books - primary sources

TT Martin - Hell and the High School
Price - The Phantom of Organic Evolution

George McReady Price

Seventh Day Adventist, advocate of creationist science & science ed - appeared also in Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture

Henry Linville

Organizer of progressive Dewitt Clinton High School biology curriculum (from Larson, Summer of the Gods, p 73)

Maynard Shipley

Founder (?) Science League of America (from Larson, Summer of the Gods)
Archives at Bancroft Library

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Biographies to Read

Theodore Roosevelt
Clarence Darrow
John Dewey
Ernest Thompson Seton
Randolph Bourne
Robert Baden-Powell
John Muir (Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement [1981, cited in Jacoby])
Gifford Pinchot (Fausold, Gifford Pinchot: Bull Moose Progressive [1961, cited in Jacoby])
Aldo Leopold
William Jennings Bryan
Charles Loring Brace
Lewis Hine
Franz Boas
L. Frank Baum
Jack London
HP Lovecraft
Booker T Washington

Monday, May 12, 2008

The Magic Kingdom

From Janet: Steven Watts' The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life talks about modernity and Disney. She thinks there is a Journal of American History article that's sort of a precis of the argument.

Kids and Nature: Bibliographic Notes

Milton, Kay - Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (2002)

Leopold and Loeb

Janet says: maybe there is information on the trial at the HRC?

Science and Culture: Bibliographic Notes

Beer, Gillian. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1999).
Jardine, Secord, et al, eds. Cultures of Natural History (1996).
Pauly, Phillip. Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (2000)

Evolution: Bibliographic Notes

Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth Century Literature (2000).
Kemp, Peter. HG Wells and the Culminating Ape (1996).

Sunday, May 11, 2008

The Night Land, by William Hope Hodgson

Published 1912 - in the plot, humanity lives in an arcology, waiting for demon gods to kill it off - this blogger postulates that the book draws on Darwinian-inspired worries about "deep time," and relates it to Lovecraft's Cthulu stories.

Reminds me also that I need to look at EM Forster's story about the arcology, "The Machine Stops," published in 1909, in which humans live underground provided for by a universal Machine. In this story, it's a young person who figures out how to escape.

Need for Theory: Understandings of Human Past, Human Future

Bhabha, Homi, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in The Location of Culture (1994)
Christian, David, "The Case for 'Big History,'" Journal of World History 2 (Fall 1991): 223-38.
Clark, Grahame, Space, Time, and Man (1992)
Gould, Stephen Jay, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (1987)
Hawking, Stephen W., A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988)
Rossi, Paolo, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (1984)
Goodfield, June, The Discovery of Time (1965)
(All cited in Dimock, Through Other Continents).

Need for Theory: Transmission of Ideology

Get ideas from Sammond's Babes in Tomorrowland?

Animals and Modernity: Bibliographic Notes

Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (2008).

Children and Technology: Bibliographic Notes

Downey, Gregory - Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Communication, and Technology, 1850-1950 (2002)
Law, John - A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination (1991)
Pursell, "Tots, Technology, and Sex Roles in America, 1920-1940," in Dynamos and Virgins Revisited (1979)

L. Frank Baum

Tip from Bridger: in The Magical Monarch of Mo, published 1898, a full-length children's fantasy novel by Baum, there is a land where there are sugar lakes, caramels grow on trees, and monkeys talk. Something about an instrumental/paradisical vision of nature - knowing how to get what you want from what there is? What about the talking monkeys? Wikipedia says that this book was supposed to be a sort of American Alice in Wonderland. What about The Wizard of Oz - how do I fit that in?

United Fruit advertises to kids

In Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, page 130 - United Fruit ads for children from the 1940s intended to hook them on bananas - anything earlier?

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Henry Olerich

From Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Thought, p 49: "What fleeting fame [the utopian Olerich] did acquire was due primarily to the talents of another: his adopted baby girl, whose experimental education at Olerich's hands made her a child prodigy and, for a few years, a Midwestern celebrity." H. Roger Grant, "Viola Olerich, 'The Famous Baby Scholar': An Experiment in Education," The Palimpsest 56 (May-June 1975), 88-95. Also Olerich himself wrote a book about her: Viola Olerich, the Famous Baby Scholar.

Refinements of the body

Chapter: Children and modern medicine
Public health campaigns
Miracle children
Publicity
Vaccination controversy
Eugenics
Christian Scientists' children

Animals as Children's Interior Selves

Chapter: Animals as children's "deep time" interiority?
Sled dogs
Ernest Thompson Seton
Susan Pearson's book on animal and child protection

Children adopt poor kids; animals

A chapter on the phenomenon of children "adopting" more unfortunate beings through newspaper campaigns, etc - like those elephants in Hansen's Animal Attractions, or Balto.

Possible foreign children they could exercise charity on:
Belgians during WWI - book about Hoover and Belgian relief? Janet says there is one.
Chinese, Indians during famines (see Davis)
Armenians during genocide??
Congolese during Leopold's reign
Japanese after 1923 earthquake - mentioned in Beverly Cleary's autobio

Read Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, on British anti-slavery movements? Definitely look again in King Leopold's Ghost for mentions of anti-Belgian children's books.

Play: Bibliographic notes

Gilbert, James, Work without Salvation: America's Intellectuals and Industrial Alienation, 1880-1910 (1977)
Huizinga, Johan

Education and Efficiency in the Progressive Era: Bibliographic Notes

Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency
Fisher, Industrial Education: American Ideals and Institutions
Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State
Tesconi & Morris, The Anti-Man Culture: Bureautechnocracy and the Schools
Wirth, Education in a Technological Society: The Vocational Studies Controversy in the Early Twentieth Century

King Camp Gillette

Technological utopian and creator of mass-market razor - author of The Human Drift (1894).