Unseen Influence: Lucretia Blankenburg and the Rise of Philadelphia Reform Politics in 1911

Lucretia Blankenburg successfully made women a crucial element of her husband Rudolph's successful campaign to become Mayor of Philadelphia in 1911. Although the reform candidate did not enjoy the use of the type of political organization provided to major-party candidates, he benefited from the efforts of many of the city's club women. Many lobbied their husbands and other male relatives on behalf of Blankenburg's candidacy. The candidate also employed maternalist themes of good city management and civic purity in his campaign. Most significantly, women's clubs provided Rudolph Blankenburg with a large number of volunteers who made house-to-house canvasses, raised funds, and organized motor pools to bring voters to the polls. Although Lucretia Blankenburg played a large role in organizing these activities, she downplayed her influence so as to insulate her husband from potential charges of unmasculine ineffectuality. Machine Republicans and male municipal reformers in Philadelphia largely failed to notice the contributions of Lucretia Blankenburg and the city's club women, even after the election of 1911

“‘A New Order of Things’: St. Louis, Chicago, and the Struggle for Western Commercial Supremacy”

St. Louis leadership during the Gilded Age was nothing if not confident, even suggesting that the nation\u27s capitol be moved to the St. Louis region. Drew VandeCreek offers some of the writings of these boosters

Solomon Huebner and the Development of Life Insurance Sales Professionalism, 1905-1927

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Enterprise and Society following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version (Enterprise and Society 6.4 (2005) 646-681) is available online at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/enterprise_and_society/v006/6.4creek.htmlIn 1927 the National Association of Life Underwriters collaborated with Professor Solomon Huebner of the University of Pennsylvania to found the American College of Life Underwriters, an institution devoted to establishing and maintaining professional standards for the nation’s life insurance salesmen. Their work sheds light on the new politics of expertise and associations that emerged in the 1920s. While many historians have portrayed the period’s experts as purveyors of new, technical knowledge and apolitical agents of an inevitable modernity, Huebner in fact brought little real knowledge of insurance to his work. Instead, he introduced the industry’s prevailing ideology of public service into his classroom, and it informed his professionalization project as well. The professor worked as a campaigner for professionalism, attempting to persuade life insurance salesmen, industry executives, and the American public to accept the notion that salesmen could become professionals. Ultimately, Huebner’s career shows how a Progressive expert worked directly with a trade association representing a disorganized industry. But instead of merely seeking to build new capacity for economic planning and stabilization, Huebner and the association boldly positioned their industry as a voluntary and private means of providing Americans with basic social welfare benefits and paved the way for the growth of the modern financial services industry

Building a New Generation of Online Public History Resources: Promise and Problems Identified in the Development of the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project

open-source publicationThis article describes the development of the Lincoln/Net web site at Northern Illinois University Libraries. It argues that to date academic historians have largely used digital technology and the web to advance research, while ignoring their potential for reaching a large public. As a digital library project that also presents original interpretive works discussing the context in which primary source materials were created, Lincoln/Net can serve as an example of an important new form of public history

"Webs of Significance": The Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project, New Technology, and the Democratization of History

open-source publicationLincoln/Net (http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu), a product of the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project at Northern Illinois University Libraries, represents a new type of historically oriented digital library resource. Like many other digital libraries, it contains a large amount of searchable primary source materials. Like a number of other historically oriented online resources, project staff have organized Lincoln/Net around a specific topic, in this case Abraham Lincoln’s life and times in antebellum Illinois. In addition to Lincoln’s own papers, the project’s databases contain resources shedding light on his context, including letters, diaries, and publications prepared by his peers. Unlike most historically oriented digital libraries however, the project Web site also includes a wealth of multimedia materials, including image, sound, video, and interactive map resources. But Lincoln/Net is perhaps most unique in that it furnishes its users with an extensive set of interpretive materials. This approach suggests that historians may play an expanding role in the development of digital libraries. It can also provide them with a badly-needed means of communicating with an audience beyond their own scholarly community and students. This communication can facilitate what one digital history pioneer has described as the “democratization of history,” as defined by an expanded user group enjoying primary source materials and using them to engage in historical thinking [Ayers 1999, 1]

Intellectual Capital at Risk: Data Management Practices and Data Loss by Faculty Members at Five American Universities

A study of 56 professors at five American universities found that a majority had little understanding of principles, well-known in the field of data curation, informing the ongoing administration of digital materials and chose to manage and store work-related data by relying on the use of their own storage devices and cloud accounts. It also found that a majority of them had experienced the loss of at least one work-related digital object that they considered to be important in the course of their professional career. Despite such a rate of loss, a majority of respondents expressed at least a moderate level of confidence that they would be able to make use of their digital objects in 25 years. The data suggest that many faculty members are unaware that their data is at risk. They also indicate a strong correlation between faculty members’ digital object loss and their data management practices. University professors producing digital objects can help themselves by becoming aware that these materials are subject to loss. They can also benefit from awareness and use of better personal data management practices, as well as participation in university-level programmatic digital curation efforts and the availability of more readily accessible, robust infrastructure for the storage of digital materials

Research in pastoral care and counseling : Quantitative and qualitative approaches

s.l.xi, 135 p.; 23 cm

EMORY JOHNSON AND THE RISE OF ECONOMIC EXPERTISE IN THE PROGRESSIVE STATE, 1898–1913

Emory Johnson served in a series of executive-branch appointments pertaining to the Panama Canal. Like many other executive experts, he used his professional skills and reputation as political tools, promoting the canal and bringing its toll-making under his control. His activities diverged from what scholars have described as other experts’ practice of gaining influence by insulating themselves from the preceding era’s partisan politics, however. An avowed Republican, he worked in collaboration with appointed officials and lobbied members of the public and Congress alike. Although he presented economic data as objective fact, his persuasive efforts drew heavily on an often-forgotten strand of the party’s ideological tradition. It paradoxically promoted transportation projects simultaneously in associative terms, as using the market to secure the Union, and as benefiting the divergent interests of competing individual localities. Johnson’s work reveals a professional in the federal government as a more multidimensional historical figure than that which appears in accounts describing experts as symbols of an undemocratic administrative state, illustrating a complex set of ties between the preceding period’s political beliefs and practices and the rise of an administrative state