Browsing by Subject "Progressivism"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Defining the Physician's Duty: Medical Professionalization in America and the Politics of Prostitution Reform Activism, 1870s-1910s
    (2017-10) Luepke, Laura
    Historians have identified the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries as a period of intensified professionalization in American medicine, marked by the growth of professional associations and specialization, the development of licensing standards, and efforts to improve medical education. This dissertation intervenes in that literature by moving beyond this focus on institutional structures to instead address how extra-professional intervention shaped professionalization processes. Focusing on physicians’ prostitution reform activism from the 1870s-1910s, this study demonstrates that professionalization was often the product of unplanned actions in unexpected areas of intervention, not of a clear plan with a predetermined direction. As doctors entered prostitution reform, confluences of circumstances and actions beyond physicians’ control generated opportunities that individuals exploited for many reasons besides professionalization, but nonetheless shaped how physicians claimed professional status and identity. This dissertation contends that to understand medical professionalization, it must be situated in its Christian, sexual, and imperial politics because it was at the crossroads of faith, gender, and empire that balances of power between groups of physicians, and with it their ability to shape the trajectory of their profession, could tilt. Prostitution reform activism thus became a key battleground upon which doctors worked collectively for expanded authority and power, even as they engaged in internecine conflicts over professional duty and its areas of social, political, moral, and spiritual purview. Attending to these relations of power reveals women physicians, eccentric male health reformers, military surgeons, venereal specialists, and other assumed-to-be marginal groups playing leading roles in defining the physician’s duty.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Perilous pop: ragtime, jazz and progressive social thought in the early 20th Century Press, 1900-1930.
    (2009-11) Marchiselli, Chani
    This dissertation is a discursive history of the early twentieth century music controversy as it appeared in the popular press and as it articulated the assumptions and contradictions of progressive social thought. Through close textual analysis, the author illustrates the ways in which musical spaces, musical sounds, and dance practices, operated as the fulcrum for debates about how to reconstitute an "ideal" public in the wake of industrial modernity. For some progressives, the popularization of syncopated pop music signaled the dangerous public incursion of black and working-class cultures, and immigrant groups. For others, ragtime and jazz threatened to dismantle the aesthetic hierarchies to which the project of political "progress" had been hitched. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that progressive social reformers, in an effort to create a public culture that more closely resembled the bourgeois ideals of the liberal tradition, used the newly prolific print media as a vehicle through which to counter the pervasive influence of ragtime and jazz music and dance.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Total Train System: Technology and Progressivism in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century American Literature
    (2017-05) McCulloch, Stephen
    This dissertation traces two connected stories through the literary imagination of four American authors: William Dean Howells, Charles W. Chesnutt, Henry Adams, and James Weldon Johnson. Firstly, this dissertation examines the ideological role the expansion and ossification of the railway played in the development of American progressivism in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. I argue that the logic of the railway provided American writers with a new vocabulary through which to describe the abstract development of American history. Whereas in the eighteenth century, historical progress was conceived of as a course of human events, with the advent of the railway system, many began to imagine historical movement as a result of scientific certainties managed and developed by humans who conceived of themselves as not directly in control of those movements. By the twentieth century, the railway became what Henry Adams called an “Empire of Coal,” a material system of exchanges that spanned to globe and whose logic determined the moving limit of possibility for all civilization. Secondly, my dissertation tells the story of racial division in American during this period. Although the railway was often conceived of as a radically democratic space where the American people could interact as equals, this period also saw the development of state-sanctioned segregation laws against black citizens of the country. As the railway and its logic of historical development ossified in the minds of those who benefited from it, many black authors were perceptive critics of not only the politics of the railway but the underlying assumptions about how societies functioned that seemed to guarantee the dominant ideology’s concept of history. Taking my theoretical starting point in the works of Jacques Lacan and Karl Marx, I argue that in this period, the logic of the railway created a shift in the dominant assumptions of the nature of social differences. Whereas in the eighteenth century, racial difference had been conceived of as a historical constant, with the railway, racial difference became spatialized along the path of the railway.