The New York Public Library has twenty-two issues of the Green Book digitized. The purpose of this book is explained in this image taken from the 1957 edition.
Sources: The Green Book
Post Type: Miscellany
Editorial News
Mark Stoneman has been busy the past couple weeks with a special issue of Geschichte & Gesellschaft on migrant knowledge. The issue, which should appear later this summer, is edited by Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, and all but one of the articles is in English. Also contributing are Jan Logemann, Rebekka v. Mallinckrodt, Glenn Penny, Miriam Rürup, and Brian Van Wyck. The articles in this issue began their lives at a GSA panel last fall and since then have been thoroughly reworked, at least one round for the special issue’s editors and another based on the journal’s blind peer review process.
Boys’ Life
Following up on Mischa Honeck’s interesting post, “Innocent Ignorance: Whitewashing an Empire with the Boy Scouts of America,” which includes a link to a 1914 Boy Scout Handbook, we have found a year’s worth of Boys’ Life from 1915 at the Internet Archive. This official BSA magazine contains stories, Scouting news, advice, photographs, advertisements, and more—some 580 pages of it in 1915. Below are four of the covers, one of them created by Norman Rockwell, an artist who was famous for capturing much that was ostensibly “innocent” about America.
Mrs. Consumer-Researcher
Film from 1960 about the role of women in the consumer product development research process at Corning Glass Works. As highly gendered and white as Mad Men, but less glamorous. Runtime: 13:32. Source: Internet Archive, https://archive.org/embed/American1960_2.
Sources: Child Labor in the United States
On this May Day, it is interesting to read a Progressive Era speech by Florence Kelley from December 1905 entitled “The Federal Government and the Working Children.” 1 Kelley was arguing for a federal solution to the dearth of accurate and timely data about child labor in the United States. The industrial and agricultural interests that objected to a federal role, she pointed out, were quick to band together when it came to demanding protection for their own commercial interests.
Never again can it be a matter of merely local concern what hours the children are working. They will be the Republic when we are dead, and we cannot leave it to the local legislators, here and there, to decide unobserved what sort of citizens shall be produced in this or that State, whether they shall be strong in body, mind and character, or whether they shall grow up enfeebled by overwork in early childhood.
Of course, compiling and disseminating the data would have political consequences.
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Race, Gender, Respectability, and Knowledge
The stimulating blog Black Perspectives has published an online roundtable on Black Women and the Politics of Respectability that includes two posts clearly relevant to the history of knowledge. Instead of exploring the link between education and respectability that is familiar, for example, in European social history, these pieces scrutinize the special role played by respectability in African American communities as part of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “this sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”1 One response to this acute awareness of scrutiny in a racist society were “pedagogies of respectability,” produced for and circulated via black periodicals and films in the early twentieth century. See Jane Rhodes, “Race, Media, and Black Womanhood in the Early Twentieth Century” for more.
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‘More than forty miles of shelves’
The handwriting on this fascinating image taken inside the British Museum Library, ca. 1906, reads, “More than forty miles of shelves, two millions of books, and ‘of the making … is no end.’” The accompanying summary at the Library of Congress appears to get something wrong, however: “Photograph shows the book stacks in the reading room of the British Museum library, London, England.” This scene shows an important aspect of this library’s support for reading and research, but it should not be mistaken for part of a reading room.
Knowledge and Citizenship
The ‘Academic Nachwuchs’ Label in Germany
Ein Forscher, eine Forscherin ist meines Erachtens mit Abschluss der Promotion wissenschaftlich mündig.
After earning a PhD, a scholar has, in my opinion, reached academic adulthood.
I have only ever heard the German term Nachwuchs in an academic context, which I understood to be a label for people rather junior in the profession, “trainees” or “young ones,” if you will. The word sounds strange enough when talking about people with one or more books behind them, families, substantial teaching experience, and so on. Nachwuchs can even mean “offspring,” however, which fits perfectly with the parental term one uses in German for a dissertation advisor—Doktorvater or Doktormutter. Thus my translation of the above quotation, which comes from a worthwhile read by Karoline Döring on what Americans might call the status of scholars with “nontraditional” academic careers in Germany: “Wollen wir wirklich BeStI(e)n sein? Ein Plädoyer an und gegen ‘den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs,'” Mittelalter, February 13/14, 2017. (Don’t miss the comments.)
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Notes on Colonial-Imperial Knowledge Formation
Historiographical notes blogged by a PhD student in New Zealand, S.D. Carpenter:
A number of scholars of British India have sought to understand the ways in which British power was exercised through constructing knowledge about Indian societies, including their histories and literatures, languages and geographies. At one end of the spectrum, intellectual followers of Edward Said argue that the British imposed their own knowledge and cultural forms on India. At the other end, some historians argue that the British had necessarily to work with what they found, relied on local informants, and had to tailor any ‘exotic’ ideas from Britain to different Indian contexts so as to make their rule acceptable.
Featured image: “Mission station, Rangihoua, 1830,” The Encylopedia of New Zealand, s.v. “Cultural go-betweens” by Mark Derby.
Update, August 31, 2017: The image is no longer included in the entry at https://teara.govt.nz/en/cultural-go-betweens, although other images are.