scholarly journals “Tobacco has Blossomed like the Rose in the Desert”: Technology, Trees, and Tobacco in the Norfolk Sand Plain, c. 1920-1940

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-62
Author(s):  
Jonathan McQuarrie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Products ◽  
Resource Management ◽  
Rural Development ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The State ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Sand Plain ◽  
The Rose

Drawing on rural, biotechnological, and environmental history, this article examines how farmers, corporations, and the state deployed developments in silviculture and agriculture to reshape Norfolk County, Ontario. It traces the emergence of a relatively vibrant flue-cured tobacco sector during the Great Depression, a sector that both broke from and drew on earlier reforestation efforts that had emerged at the start of the twentieth century. In this context, tobacco and trees can best be viewed as biotechnologies connected to a continental flow, rather than simply as natural products. The article also argues that raising both trees and tobacco drew on ideas of conservation and resource management that were tightly bound to the development of rural capitalism, but highlights how the soil and environment influenced the capitalist objective of profitable rural development in ways that frustrated the idea of nature being manageable. It ends by noting that despite the ascendency of capitalist-informed ideas about rural development in Norfolk, other ways of understanding soil and the environment persisted.

The Early Twentieth Century, 1900–1945

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-159
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The New Deal

Chapter 5 examines the first half of the twentieth century, focusing initially on the judicial and political critics of Progressivism. Although conservatives such as Justice David Brewer drew upon Christian elements in articulating their judicial theory, it was in a limited and circumscribed way. Similarly, political conservatives such as Elihu Root substituted a constitutional formalism and veneration of the Founders for the more theological approach of the Gilded Age dissenters. Meanwhile, leaders such as Presbyterian scholar John Gresham Machen helped draw evangelicals away from the older theocratic approach toward more libertarian views regarding politics and the state. Conservative responses to the Great Depression included Fundamentalists who viewed the New Deal apocalyptically and organizers of the Liberty League who warned of a coming totalitarianism. The modest connections established between Liberty Leaguers and evangelicals foreshadowed the deeper alliance that would profoundly shape the post–World War II conservative movement.

scholarly journals From Material to Non-Material Needs? The Evolution of Mate Preferences through the Twentieth Century in France

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Quentin Lippmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Mate Preferences ◽  
Demographic Changes ◽  
French Society ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Economic Boom ◽  
Economic Criteria

This paper studies the evolution of mate preferences throughout the twentieth century in France. I digitized all the matrimonial ads published in France’s best-selling monthly magazine from 1928 to 1994. Using dictionary-based methods, I show that mate preferences were mostly stable during the Great Depression, WWII, and the ensuing economic boom. These preferences started transforming in the late 1960s when economic criteria were progressively replaced by personality criteria. The timing coincides with profound family and demographic changes in French society. These findings suggest that, in the search for a long-term partner, non-material needs have replaced material ones.

The Political ‘Left’ in the Interwar Period, 1924–1939

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Radcliff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Political Left

In the turbulent interwar period, the political ‘Left’ was one of the most visible protagonists, with historians continuing to disagree about the role it played in shaping the outcome of the political struggles. Embedded in strong ‘moral narratives’ about the ‘rise of fascism’, the ‘crisis of democracy’, and the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution, the political Left has been vilified or lionized. For the period from the mid-1920s until 1939, both supporters and detractors agree that the Left was on the defensive, internally divided and weakened by the Great Depression and subject to repression by the state, whether democratic, authoritarian, or Stalinist. This chapter argues that the failure narrative should not subsume the vibrant experimentation and rich and contradictory diversity of the Left experience. A portrait emerges of the interwar Left that wrestled with inevitably imperfect and varied solutions to the ‘problem of community life’ in twentieth-century mass society.

Our Daily Bread: ‘Cooperation’, ‘Independence’ and Politics in Mid-1930s Cinema

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Neve
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cooperative Activity ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.

Selling Historic Natchez to Depression-Era Pilgrims

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-210
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Cultural Image ◽  
The World ◽  
Depression Era

This chapter recounts the early years of the Natchez Pilgrimage, a heritage tourism enterprise created by the Natchez Garden Club at the height of the Great Depression. The Pilgrimage dramatized a mix of decades-old southern racial ideology and white historical memory that was repackaged for 1930s consumption. Pilgrimage founder Katherine Miller and other leading clubwomen defined their community’s cultural image, while also redefining the meaning of traditional southern womanhood. The Pilgrimage is also the story of how one southern community’s selective expression of historical memory captivated white tourists eager to immerse themselves in the world of the Old South so vividly portrayed by popular writers and entertainers of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the Pilgrimage home tours and pageant suggests the power of popular culture to shape a tenacious historical memory that remained in force for much of the twentieth century and lingers even today.

The Elusive Harmony between Government and Market Roles

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-200
Author(s):  
Vito Tanzi
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
The State ◽  
Market Failures ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
New Harmony ◽  
The 1960S

At any moment in time there ought to be some harmony between the intervention of the state that the market requires (to correct its market failures), and that citizens demand (to promote equity and a desirable income distribution) and the actual government intervention. This chapter argues that such harmony may have existed in the years when laissez faire was in place and was broadly accepted by those who had political power. The harmony became less and less evident in the later decades of the nineteenth century and during the Great Depression. There seemed to have been greater harmony in the 1960s. That harmony went down in the late 1970s and in the 1980s. It might have been partly restored in the 1990s, with a different conception of the role of the state, with less state and more market, at least in some countries. The harmony broke down again with the Great Recession in 2008–10, There is now, once again, a search for a new paradigm that would indicate the existence of a new harmony.

scholarly journals Adolescents’ Impact on Family Economy in Sweden: During the First Decades of the Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Dan Bäcklund ◽  
Kristina Lilja
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Youth Unemployment ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Family Economy ◽  
Impact On Family ◽  
Household Budget Surveys

Adolescents’ income contributions to working-class families decreased between the 1910s and the 1930s in Sweden. This was significant for adolescents’ right to self-determination. By using household budget surveys, this article shows that at the time of the Great Depression, working adolescents paid less at home than had been common at the beginning of the twentieth century. Youth unemployment is one explanation, although it was also a consequence of children keeping more of their earnings for themselves. This development led to rising costs for having children and is interpreted as an aspect of the trade-off between quantity and quality of children.

Censorship: Publish and Be Damned

2014 ◽  
Vol 150 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-40
Author(s):  
Peter Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
The Internet ◽  
New Realism ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Moment

State censorship in Australia has been rare, controversial and short-lived. There was almost none in the liberal nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the two world wars, the Great Depression and the new age of terrorism led to more determined, if comparatively temporary, attempts to censor publications that advocated sedition or violence. Moral censorship of obscenity was also rare in the nineteenth century, but enjoyed an ‘heroic’ period following the arrival of a new realism in literature and the age of lurid comic books. The internet has made such censorship almost totally ineffective. Blaspheming the Christian religion is no longer treated as a punishable offence, although attacking Islam may still sometimes be deemed actionable in law. The advent of multiculturalism has encouraged legislation to restrict free speech deemed to be ‘hate speech’, but its application has been episodic, unpopular and ineffective. The contest between writers demanding freedom and censors demanding standards is unending. But at the moment, the balance favours writers.

Learning about Growth and Democracy

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 1195-1212
Author(s):  
SCOTT F. ABRAMSON ◽  
SERGIO MONTERO
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
Past Experiences

We develop and estimate a model of learning that accounts for the observed correlation between economic development and democracy and for the clustering of democratization events. In our model, countries’ own and neighbors’ past experiences shape elites’ beliefs about the effects of democracy on economic growth and their likelihood of retaining power. These beliefs influence the choice to transition into or out of democracy. We show that learning is crucial to explaining observed transitions since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, our model predicts reversals to authoritarianism if the world experienced a growth shock the size of the Great Depression.

The Post-Heroic Generation: American Independent Inventors, 1900–1950

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 732-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric S. Hintz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Research And Development ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Polaroid Camera ◽  
Samuel Ruben

By World War I, the public (and later, many historians) had come to believe that teams of anonymous scientists in corporate research and development (R&D) laboratories had displaced “heroic” individual inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as the wellspring of innovation. However, the first half of the twentieth century was actually a long transitional period when lesser known independents like Chester Carlson (Xerox copier), Earl Tupper (Tupperware), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Edwin Land (Polaroid camera) continued to make notable contributions to the overall context of innovation. Accordingly, my dissertation considers the changing fortunes of American independent inventors from approximately 1900 to 1950, a period of expanding corporate R&D, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Contrary to most interpretations of this period, I argue that individual, “post-heroic” inventors remained an important, though less visible, source of inventions in the early twentieth century.

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