21. Radicalism and the "Great Cause": The German-American Serial Novel in the Antebellum Era

This conclusion explains how American temporalities changed after the war and sketches how expectations and anticipations of the future have alternated as the dominant view in American culture through the twentieth century to today. This chapter also shows how the short war myth, the story that Civil War Americans expected a short, glorious war at the outset, gained currency with the public and consensus among scholars during the postwar period. It contrasts the wartime expectations of individuals with their postwar memories of the war’s beginning to show how the short war myth worked as a tool for sectional reconciliation and a narrative device that dramatized the war by creating an innocent antebellum era or golden age before the cataclysm. It considers why historians still accept the myth and showcases three postwar voices that challenged it.

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Race, Work, and Disability in Progressive Era United States

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190234959.013.14 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Paul Lawrie

Keyword(s):

World War I ◽

Progressive Era ◽

Turn Of The Century ◽

Assembly Lines ◽

Actuarial Science ◽

World War ◽

Antebellum Era ◽

Black Bodies ◽

Mental Testing ◽

Twentieth Century America

Throughout U.S. history, the production of difference, whether along racial or disability lines, has been inextricably tied to the imperatives of labor economy. From the plantations of the antebellum era through the assembly lines and trenches of early-twentieth-century America, ideologies of race and disability have delineated which peoples could do which kinds of work. The ideologies and identities of race, work, and the “fit” ’ or “unfit” body informed Progressive Era labor economies. Here the processes of racializing or disabling certain bodies are charted from turn-of-the-century actuarial science, which monetized blacks as a degenerate, dying race, through the standardized physical and mental testing and rehabilitation methods developed by the U.S. army during World War I. Efforts to quantify, poke, prod, or mend black bodies reshaped contemporary understandings of labor, race, the state, and the working body.

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