When Heredity Met the Bacterium: Quarantines in New York and Danzig, 1898-1921

[Excerpt] Recent careful examinations of American quarantines placed on incoming migrants have found that health officials were potent carries of bigotries rooted in the larger society; but usually historians have not paid sufficient attention to the complex challenges facing quarantine units in action. By examining the work of quarantine health officials dealing with migrating Jews from East Central Europe this analytical narrative seeks to show in detail important structural circumstances within which acts of bigotry manifested themselves between the 1890s and 1920s. The narrative also has a larger agenda. Connections between public health quarantines and bio-cultural determinisms have long participated in the construction of public enemies. For instance in the 1980s, during the early years of the AIDS panic in the United States, public health officials could take for granted a citizenry that had long trusted in abstract empirical scientific knowledge and, for half a century, in the disease curing power of pharmacology\u27s sulfa drugs and other antibiotics. Even so, in the first moments of panic all sorts of calls for screens and quarantine impacted on public policy discussions in ways reminiscent of the years between the 1890s and 1920s. During those years biological determinisms from the past had remained in the saddle. Even as modern public health programmes were becoming dramatically successful in fighting disease, they remained affected by hierarchies of bio-cultural notions, especially in apprehensions about immigrants as agents of dangerous contagious diseases. That is one reason why this article focuses on Jews. The other reason derives from the evidence about Jews and disease in the places and times covered by this study. To be sure, there were other quarantines, involving, for example, resident Chinese and Italians; and in the months after the First World War potential incomers from Italy were at least as much an object of concern among American advocates of immigration restriction as were the Jews in Poland. But, in part, because of a typhus epidemic in that war-torn country, the association between disease and bio-cultural assumptions about Jews retained its traditional particularity in Western Europe and in the United States

Norcutt, Ruth Annette, 1898-1921 (SC 3530)

Finding aid and scan (Click on Additional Files below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3530. Letter, 8 April 1918, of Ruth Norcutt, Henderson, Kentucky, written to her brother Gilbert during his World War I military service. She reports on various family and friends, on a local parade to promote Liberty Bonds, and on hearing wounded soldiers recount their experiences at her church. She expresses hope that Gilbert may return home soon, but refers to talk of President Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to accept a negotiated peace. The letter includes a note from “Claude,” an employee of Ruth’s father’s plumbing company, reporting on the business and on the recent departure of local men for Camp Zachary Taylor. He also anticipates his entry into military service and expresses his eagerness to serve in France

La temprana recepción de Émile Durkheim en la sociología argentina : Apropiaciones y reelaboraciones en los escritos de Leopoldo Maupas

El presente trabajo aborda la temprana recepción de la obra de uno de los clásicos de la Sociología, Emile Durkheim, en el ámbito local. En una primera instancia, se realiza un recorrido sobre las menciones que de la obra del sociólogo alsaciano se realizaron durante la primera etapa institucional de la disciplina sociológica en la Argentina (1898-1921), para luego avanzar, con especial énfasis, en la apropiación que Leopoldo Maupas, principal receptor de la teoría durkheimniana en el país en tanto mantuvo un diálogo directo con el sociólogo francés, realizara de la obra metodológica más importante de éste: Las reglas del método sociológico. Para este fin, se realiza una reconstrucción del debate mantenido entre éstos dos autores respecto de la posibilidad de la objetividad en el estudio de los fenómenos sociales. Para finalizar, se estudia la utilización, por parte del sociólogo argentino, de un conjunto de conceptos y categorías de cuño durkheimiano para el análisis de la realidad social argentina de la época en consideració

Father Anselm Weber, O. F. M., Missionary to the Navajo, 1898-1921

To Father Anselm Weber, 1862 - 1921, belongs most of the credit for establishing this Catholic mission at St. Michaels in Apache County, Arizona. In point of time he belonged to the first quarter of the twentieth century. As a missionary he has a rightful place in that long line of Catholic missionaries that ties together the centuries back to apostolic times. Anselm Weber maintained a huge correspondence with his Franciscan confreres, with the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, with government agencies, and with a host of friends and relative. These letters and papers, preserved in five principal collections, have furnished the base for research. Fortunately for the historian the missionary saved practically every letter he received, and made copies of all business letters he wrote, even before he used a typewriter in 1903. Moreover, he wrote regularly and on a great variety of subjects in mission and church magazines

Extending the Normativity of the Extended Family: Reflections on \u3ci\u3eMoore v. City of East Cleveland\u3c/i\u3e

Part I of this Article briefly recounts the plurality decision in Moore before analyzing Justice Brennan’s concurring opinion and detailing how the concurrence affirms, rather than deconstructs, the notion of African American deviance in families. Next, Part II specifies the ways in which Justice Brennan could have truly uplifted African American families and other families of color by identifying and explicating the strengths of extended or multigenerational family forms among people of color and by showing how such family forms can be a model, or even the model (if one must be chosen), for all families. Then, Part III concludes by enumerating how Justice Brennan missed a key opportunity to explore and expose the intricacies and complications of both race and racial discrimination when he chose not to address the intraracial dynamics involved in the case. After all, the City of East Cleveland that targeted and prosecuted Inez Moore, the African American plaintiff in the case, was a majority-African-American city with an African American City Manager and African American City Commission. Such an exploration of the case’s intraracial undercurrents not only could have disrupted societal understandings of the nuclear family as the normative ideal but also would have laid bare the pressures that African Americans have faced, both in history and at that time, to conform to the nuclear family structure. Further, it would have revealed the internalization of myths about African American familial deviance by the black middle class in East Cleveland and would have shown the damaging consequences of such pressures and internalization

Abbatissae uenerabili Heanfled agnominatae: An etymological-onomastic note on a unique Anglo-Saxon woman’s name (S904)

The unique Anglo-Saxon woman’s name Heanfled (S904, c. 1002 AD) is generally interpreted as a scribal error for Eanfled (or Eadfled, or Heahfled). Although the hypothesis has been dismissed in the older literature, the possibility stands that the form handed down is correct, and Heanfled might represent a (Christian) proper name in its own right, deliberately created or shaped according to the rules presiding over the formation of Germanic dithematic anthroponyms

Edwards Collection (MSS 22)

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 22. Twelve patients\u27 account books of Dr. Martin Van Buren and William T. Edwards, brothers, of Horse Cave, Kentucky, are the nucleus of this collection which also includes several G.A.R. Dept. of Ky. Robert Storie Post #104, Hiseville, items fo Cyrus Edwards, a second cousin, and several Horse Cave items