"Race and National Identity in Modernist Anthropology and Jean Toomer's 'The Blue Meridian'"

This is a pre-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 2020;62(3):344-367 following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available from University of Texas Press.Jean Toomer’s seldom-discussed long poem “The Blue Meridian,” which he drafted over a long period beginning in the early 1920s, proposes an amalgamation of race and national belonging in the new type of the “American.” Seeing himself as a precursor to this new hybrid, Toomer often polemicized against the limiting logic of race. In proposing such an understanding of race in relation to nation, Toomer drew on the work of anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Melville J. Herskovits

The Rise of the Small Investor in the US and the UK, 1895 to 1970

The role of the small shareholder has been largely ignored in the literature, which has tended to concentrate on controlling shareholders and family ownership. And yet, focus on the importance of small shareholders can capture significant aspects of financial development, since the more 'confident' the minority shareholders, the easier will capital flow to firms. Pre 1970, debates and policy conflicts linked to stock exchange development concentrated on shareholder democracy and diffusion as key indicators. The number of shareholders relative to the population was seen as a critical factor in explaining not only structures in corporate finance but also political and economic preferences, market developments and overall economic development. This paper explores the so-called democratisation of investment and the factors behind it through the lens of trends in estimates of the UK and US shareholding populations between 1895 and 1970. It covers three key periods: before World War I, before and after the stock market crash of 1929, and post-World War II. It identifies three periods in the US when shareholder numbers were paramount: in the boom years of the 1920s, as part of the inquest into the 1929 Crash, and post-World War II in an attempt to boost stock market activity. In the UK, although some concern was expressed during the 1920s and 1930s at the passive nature of small investors, who held diversified portfolios with small amounts in each holding, it was the fear of nationalisation after World War II which led to more in-depth shareholder estimates

Kurt Gödel and Computability Theory

Although Kurt Gödel does not figure prominently in the history of computabilty theory, he exerted a significant influence on some of the founders of the field, both through his published work and through personal interaction. In particular, Gödel’s 1931 paper on incompleteness and the methods developed therein were important for the early development of recursive function theory and the lambda calculus at the hands of Church, Kleene, and Rosser. Church and his students studied Gödel 1931, and Gödel taught a seminar at Princeton in 1934. Seen in the historical context, Gödel was an important catalyst for the emergence of computability theory in the mid 1930s

The New Generation And The New Russia: Modern Childhood As Collective Fantasy

American Studie

Experimentalism by contact

This essay considers literary "experimentalism" as a constructed category animated by epistemic virtues, using the case study of "contact" as both anthropological and literary values in the 1920s. Examines Language writing, the work of William Carlos Williams, and the Writing Culture group in anthropology

The cultural spaces of Siegfried Kracauer: The many surfaces of Berlin

Abstract not available