The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the Middle Class. Edited by Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston. New York: Routledge, 2001. 384 pp. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $23.95. ISBN: cloth 0-415-92641-6; paper 0-415-92642-4.

2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-598
Author(s):  
Scott Miltenberger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals Out-of-Class Project: American Teachers' Summertime Activities, 1880s–1930s

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-35
Author(s):  
Christine A. Ogren
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New York State ◽  
The United States ◽  
York State ◽  
Class Project ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chautauqua Institution ◽  
Previous Summer

In March 1887, Eva Moll wrote about the previous summer in her diary: “The season was fall of rich things of course. Heard some fine violin and harp playing by two Italians. I never expect to hear ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ sweeter on this earth, than it was played by the violinist. We first went to Niagara, visiting all the points.” Moll was not a wealthy person of leisure. She was a single Kansas schoolteacher in her late twenties who struggled to make ends meet, and yet had spent nine weeks at the quintessentially middle-class Chautauqua Institution in western New York State. A slice of my larger investigation of the history of teachers' “summers off,” this essay will explore the social-class dimensions of their summertime activities during a distinctive period for both the middle class and the teaching force in the United States, the decades of the 1880s through the 1930s.

scholarly journals The Carceral State and the Crucible of Black Politics: An Urban History of the Rockefeller Drug Laws

2013 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Javen Fortner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Drug Laws ◽  
Moral Content ◽  
Rockefeller Drug Laws ◽  
History Of

While scholars have illuminated the effects of mass incarceration, the origins of the criminal justice policies that produced these outcomes remain unclear. Many explanations obscure as much as they reveal—in great measure because they either ignore or minimize the consequences of crime. Emphasizing the exploitation of white fears, the construction of black criminality, or the political strategies of Republican political elites, prevailing theories ignore black crime victims. In order to excavate the historical roots of the modern carceral state, this study traces the development of New York State's Rockefeller drug laws. Rather than beginning in Albany, this history focuses on Harlem, a community hit hardest by rising crime rates and drug addiction. Drawing upon a variety of primary sources, this study traces how African American activists framed and negotiated the incipient drug problem in their neighborhoods and interrogates the policy prescriptions they attached to indigenously constructed frames. It describes how middle-class African Americans facing the material threats of crime and crime-related problems drew upon the moral content of indigenous class categories to understand these threats and develop policy prescriptions. It reveals how the black middle class shaped the development of this punitive policy and played a crucial role in the development of mass incarceration.

Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
STEPHEN KNADLER
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Opioid Crisis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Accountability ◽  
History Of Race

“Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism” argues that stories of the opioid crisis disseminate an emerging white disability nationalism that functions to morph and reconsolidate the “machinery of whiteness” around an affectively charged disability politics. Through a close reading of HBO's 2017 documentary Warning: This Drug May Kill You, directed by Perri Peltz, as well as Beth Macy's New York Times best book of 2018, Dopesick, this essay contends that opioid storytelling redeploys a panic about lost agency and increased vulnerabilities into a melancholic reinvestment in a fantasy ideal of white immunity nationalism. Opioid storytelling's “relapsed” whiteness, which invokes a long history of fears about racial degeneration, restores whiteness's category crisis by presenting middle-class whites as abled disableds, or dopesick addicts, in contrast to an unredeemable noncompliant blackness, and, in doing so, resolves the contradictions within conservative neoliberal discourses between sympathetic addicts and a simultaneous insistence on individual accountability and family values. Opioid storytelling reveals not only a contemporary morphing of a complex history of race and public health, but offers new identifications for “fragile” white subjects to reinvest in intractable hierarchies of white supremacism, while simultaneously thinking of themselves as liberal antiracists.

Devi, Ragini (1893–1982)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Mattson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
High Caste ◽  
White American ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Classical Dance ◽  
Looking Back

Ragini Devi (née Esther Luella Sherman) was a white American dancer and ethnographer who devoted her life to studying and preserving Indian classical dance. In doing so, she contributed to the effort to revive—or, more accurately, to reimagine—Indian classical dance in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and to invent, in the US, the idea of "ethnic" or "world" dance. Born in the Midwest in 1893, Devi was raised in Minneapolis to be a proper, middle-class, white, American lady. But in the early 1920s, she cultivated a richly detailed, thoroughly fictional identity as a "high caste Oriental woman" who had learned to perform so-called "Hindu" dances in the caves of Tibet. Her New York Times obituary (January 26, 1982) noted that Devi’s greatest achievement was that she "was instrumental in introducing dances of India to US." But, looking back, it is clear that in addition to her artistic and ethnographic achievements, Ragini Devi’s life is notable for its demonstration of key elements in the history of Americans’ fascination with the East, and the exotic longings that reside at the heart of American whiteness.

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