scholarly journals The Nation before Taste: The Challenges of American Culinary History

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew P. Haley

Abstract Food is material and familiar, and because it is, we are often overconfident about our ability to understand the culinary past. It is easy to believe that if we can discover the recipe for some forgotten dish, the history of the dish becomes intelligible. When it does not, it tempts those who consume culinary history to impose modern sensibilities on our predecessors. “The Nation before Taste” argues that historians and museum curators must be especially vigilant when presenting the history of food. Reviewing a series of historical challenges that stemmed from studying the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the author suggests three strategies for grounding food history in the past: recognizing that taste is constructed and temporal; engaging with material and social contexts, especially physiology, class, and gender; and admitting to our audiences that not all culinary mysteries have immediate or simple answers.

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-142
Author(s):  
Esther B. Schupak

Abstract Because of its potential for fostering antisemitic stereotypes, in the twentieth century The Merchant of Venice has a history of being subject to censorship in secondary schools in the United States. While in the past it has often been argued that the play can be used to teach tolerance and to fight societal evils such as xenophobia, racism and antisemitism, I argue that this is no longer the case due to the proliferation of performance methods in the classroom, and the resultant emphasis on watching film and stage productions. Because images – particularly film images – carry such strong emotional valence, they have the capacity to subsume other pedagogical aspects of this drama in their emotional power and memorability. I therefore question whether the debate over teaching this play is truly a question of ‘censorship’, or simply educational choice.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashid I. Khalidi

This essay argues that what has been going on in Palestine for a century has been mischaracterized. Advancing a different perspective, it illuminates the history of the last hundred years as the Palestinians have experienced it. In doing so, it explores key historical documents, including the Balfour Declaration, Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and UN Security Council Resolution 242, none of which included the Palestinians in key decisions impacting their lives and very survival. What amounts to a hundred years of war against the Palestinians, the essay contends, should be seen in comparative perspective as one of the last major colonial conflicts of the modern era, with the United States and Europe serving as the metropole, and their extension, Israel, operating as a semi-independent settler colony. An important feature of this long war has been the Palestinians' continuing resistance, against heavy odds, to colonial subjugation. Stigmatizing such resistance as “terrorism” has successfully occluded the real history of the past hundred years in Palestine.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael DeCesare

A neglected part of the history of teaching sociology is the history of teaching high school sociology. The American Sociological Association's centennial in 2005 affords sociologists an opportunity to reflect on the teaching of sociology–anywhere and everywhere that it happens. In the spirit of contributing to the history of teaching sociology in the United States, this paper outlines the roughly 95-year history of the teaching of high school sociology. I rely upon published course descriptions written by high school sociology teachers and empirical studies conducted by academic sociologists. They demonstrate that past high school sociology courses have focused primarily on examining social problems and current events, and on promoting citizenship education. This remains the case today. I offer several reasons why the courses have looked as they have over the past 95 years, and conclude with four predictions about the future of teaching high school sociology.


2012 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-254
Author(s):  
Susan Schroeder

Over the course of the past half century, the field of colonial Latin American history has been greatly enriched by the contributions of Father Stafford Poole. He has written 14 books and 84 articles and book chapters and has readily shared his knowledge at coundess symposia and other scholarly forums. Renowned as a historian, he was also a seminary administrator and professor of history in Missouri and California. Moreover, his background and formation are surely unique among priests in the United States and his story is certainly worth the telling.


Author(s):  
Maris A. Vinovskis

This article provides a brief history of K–12 education testing in the United States from colonial America to the present. In early America, students were examined orally. After the mid-nineteenth century, written tests replaced oral presentations. In the late nineteenth century, graded schools gradually replaced the single-teacher, one-room schools. In the beginning of the twentieth century, standardized intelligence tests were increasingly used to categorize and promote students. State departments of education have played a larger role in local school funding and policies in the past hundred years. Since the 1960s, the federal government has expanded its involvement in national education while also promoting the role of states. During the past three decades, the federal government and states increased the use of high-stakes national testing with initiatives such as America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and Every Student Succeeds.


2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Rory Dickson

The Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi order is a transnational religious organization. Founded by Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani (b. 1922), the order spread throughout the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, and then to Britain in the 1970s. In 1990, Nazim’s student Shaykh Hisham Kabbani moved to the United States and established a branch of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order there. The past fifteen years have seen the emergence of this order as one of the most widespread and politically active Sufi organizations in America. In this paper I ask: Why and how is it that the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order effectively functions as a public religion in America? To answer this question, I will use José Casanova’s theory of public religion to understand why and how the order has developed and maintained a public profile in the United States. I contend that the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order’s public activity is rooted in: (1) the Naqshbandi order’s history of public significance in Muslim societies; (2) the order’s theological and practical appreciation of religious and cultural pluralism; (3) the order’s transnational character; and (4) its adoption of certain elements of American civil religion.


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