Thesis advisor: Kevin Kenny / This dissertation examines the development of ethnic consciousness in Boston's Irish and Jewish communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on several interrelated areas of analysis: religion, public service, ethnic nationalism, and popular culture. As the city's leading non-Protestant groups, Irish and Jews challenged ideas of Yankee superiority, arguing they could retain their ethnic culture and still be respected, patriotic citizens. Both groups consisted of a small middle class of businessmen and professionals and a large immigrant working class. From these factions emerged the competing voices of individuals who sought to find the best way to promote the compatibility of their religion, culture, and ethnic nationalist aspirations with American loyalties. After decades of trying to achieve full acceptance, Irish and Jews saw World War I as the ultimate test of ethnic patriotism; instead of conforming to a prescribed notion of Anglo-Protestant citizenship, they insisted on the centrality of their religion and culture to civic identity. Yet while their war service brought confidence in their rights as ethnic Americans, it did not bring total acceptance. By the 1920s, the Irish controlled local public life, but assumed a defensive posture toward the Yankee elite; Jews, meanwhile, were optimistic regarding interfaith cooperation, despite increasing antisemitism. This study expands on and moves beyond present studies of immigrant acculturation by adding a new comparative dimension. It examines the contested expressions of ethnic patriotism based on class, gender, and generation within two ethnic communities, demonstrating how ethnic groups utilized similar strategies to project a positive public image and articulate their place in society. It also shows the intersection of local, national, and international concerns in the development of ethnic consciousness. Irish and Jews created hybrid ethnic cultures rooted in religion, cultural practices, and mass consumerism that would survive for decades in the city's entrenched ethnic neighborhoods. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

This dissertation explores the boundaries of industrial unionism within and outside of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the struggle over what direction the American labor movement would take in the Progressive Era. The experiences of Iowa button worker and labor activist Pearl McGill in two nationally significant strikes between 1911 and 1912 enable us to see more clearly the nuances and ambiguities of these boundaries as industrial workers sought to build more inclusive unions. McGill’s advocacy for both the AFL-affiliated and industrially organized button workers in Iowa and the campaign of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, assisted by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), to organize on an industrial basis, shine a light on the conundrum faced by AFL leaders. The AFL and its craft union affiliates held fast to an anachronistic approach to organizing in an environment of rapid and technologically transformative industrialization in which the labor of women and ethnic and racial minorities was critical. The AFL’s early federal labor unions, for which Iowa button workers provide a case study, exemplify the strength of the impulse for unionization among mass production workers and show how AFL leaders fostered an institutional response to the growing demand for industrial unions while ensuring that craft unionists continued to dominate the AFL. The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) walked a fine, and sometimes precarious, line between its loyalty to the AFL and the demand of working women—notably in the garment and textile industries—for new, inclusive forms of organization. The strikes of women button workers and Lawrence textile workers illustrate the predicament faced by WTUL leaders. Pearl McGill’s short but prominent career as a youthful leader of the Muscatine button workers, a spokesperson for the WTUL, an advocate for women strikers, and a prominent activist with the IWW in Lawrence illuminates these tensions and the appeal of industrial unionism for young working women. This study elevates the importance of Progressive Era federal labor unions as a bridge connecting the local assemblies of the Knights of Labor of the 1880s to the industrial unions that would emerge in the 1930s. It examines the institutional history of the AFL and its bitter struggle with the Knights and establishes the link between the local assemblies of the Knights and the first generation of AFL-affiliated federal labor unions that provided a precedent for later industrial unions. The arc of industrial unionism in the United States can thus be seen as a long, interconnected movement rooted in the principles of general unionism embodied by the Knights and animated by the vital impulse for industrial unionism carried forward by industrially-organized workers of which Iowa button workers provide an important example.

ABSTRACT Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), the leading American figure in industrial medicine during the early to mid-1900s, left behind a body of rhetoric that is important in the history of American feminist discourse and American public address. Her discourse is the exemplary of feminist-pragmatist rhetoric, a genre of cross-gender communication developed by New Women associated with Hull House and the University of Chicago between 1892 and 1918. Hamilton’s rhetoric illuminates a key event in the history of the American rhetorical tradition—the emergence of the modern woman from her late-Victorian beginnings through her Progressive self-transformation. This study is approached as a rhetorical biography. It tracks Hamilton’s evolution from “reticent scientist” to outspoken feminist-pragmatist by examining family, educational, peer and social influences on her development; and through critical analysis of her speeches, technical writing, books, and popular and specialty magazine articles over a 36-year period, from 1907 to 1943.

<p>A fire in Salem, Mass., in 1914 and an explosion in Halifax, N.S., in 1917 provide an opportunity to explore working-class institutions and organizations in the United States-Canada borderlands. In a historical moment in which the state greatly expanded its responsibility to give protection and rescue to its citizens, after these two disasters ordinary survivors preferred to depend on their friends, neighbors, and family members. This dissertation examines which institutions--including formal organizations like unions and fraternal societies as well as informal groups like families and neighborhoods--were most relevant and useful to working-class survivors. Families, neighbors, friends, and coworkers had patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity that they developed before crisis hit their cities. Those traditions were put to unusual purposes and extreme stress when the disasters happened. They were also challenged by new agents of the state, who were given extraordinary powers in the wake of the disasters. This dissertation describes how the working-class people who most directly experienced the disasters understood them and their cities starkly differently than the professionalized relief authorities.</p><p>Using a wide array of sources--including government documents, published accounts, archived ephemeral, oral histories, photographs, newspapers in two languages, and the case files of the Halifax Relief Commission--the dissertation describes how elites imposed a progressive state on what they imagined to be a fractured and chaotic social landscape. It argues that "the people" for whom reformers claimed to speak had their own durable, alternative modes of support and rescue that they quickly and effectively mobilized in times of crisis, but which remained illegible to elites. By demonstrating the personal, ideological, political, and practical ties between New England and Nova Scotia and Quebec, it also emphasizes the importance of studying American and Canadian history together, not only comparatively but as a transnational, North American whole.</p> / Dissertation

This project examines the impact of Christian Science on American culture through the interventions of three major literary figures—Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser—in the major debates that surrounded the movement. I argue that both Christian Science itself and the backlash against it were responses to the shifting conditions of modern life, that Christian Science and public discourse on it laid bare distinctly modern tensions and anxieties about changes in U.S. culture. Recent scholarship has pointed to the durability of the secularization thesis in the study of American literature despite the easily discernible impact of religion on American culture more broadly throughout the history of the U.S. This critical perspective has been particularly difficult to dismantle in the study of post-Civil War American literature. While it is true that Protestant Christianity lost some of its dominance in the late nineteenth century, this period also saw the rise of various influential heterodox religious groups, including Christian Science. This dissertation will make sense of why and how Christian Science captured the imaginations of so many Americans, including some of the greatest storytellers of the day. Christian Science was not the story of how a group of deluded fanatics attempted to turn back the tide of modernity. Instead, Christian Science was a product of modernity that provided a unique and, in its particular context, scientifically plausible response to the problem of human suffering. Furthermore, the controversies that surrounded Christian Science crystallized anxieties about the fate of individual autonomy in the modern U.S., the exercise of therapeutic and religious freedom, the concentration of individual wealth and power among a privileged few, the extension of American power abroad, and sexuality. Each chapter will examine a narrative or set of narratives that demonstrate how the Christian Science debates heightened and spoke to those concerns. / text

abstract: Historians often characterize first ladies in the Progressive Era as representatives of the last vestiges of Victorian womanhood in an increasingly modern society. This dissertation argues that first ladies negotiated an image of themselves that fulfilled both traditional and modern notions of womanhood. In crafting these images, first ladies constructed images of their celebrity selves that were uniquely modern. Thus, images of first ladies in the Progressive Era show them as modest and feminine but also autonomous, intelligent, and capable. Using the historian Charles Ponce de Leon's research on modern human-interest journalism, I contend that first ladies in the Progressive Era worked with the modern press in a symbiotic relationship. This relationship allowed the press exclusive access to what was, ostensibly, the first lady's private, and therefore authentic, self. By purporting to reveal parts of their private lives in the press, first ladies showed themselves as down-to-earth despite their success and fulfilled by their domestic pursuits despite their compelling public lives. By offering the press exclusive access to their lives, first ladies secured the opportunity to shape specific images of themselves to appeal, as broadly as possible, to their husbands and parties' constituents and the American public. First ladies in the Progressive Era thus acted as political figures by using both public and private, or what historian Catherine Allgor terms, "unofficial spaces" to support and reflect their husbands and parties' political agendas. In examining representations of first ladies in popular magazines and newspapers from 1901 to 1921 in tandem with letters, memoirs, and other personal papers from these women, a clear pattern emerges. Despite personal differences, first ladies in the Progressive Era represented themselves according to a specific formula in the modern press. The images, constructed by first ladies in this time period, reflect shifts in economic, social, and political life in Progressive Era America, which called for women to be independent and intelligent yet still maintain their femininity and domesticity. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. History 2011

This study traces the influence of the American philosophy of pragmatism in the writing of the Progressive Era intellectual Randolph Bourne (1886-1918),. In courses with John Dewey at Columbia University and through the books of William James, pragmatism became a major intellectual factor in Bourne's social and cultural criticism. The philosophy remained so to the end of his brief career. From pragmatism, Bourne learned a method of challenging a restrictive status quo. In his essays, Bourne sought harmony between analytical reasoning and the imagination in order to promote self-growth along with the creation of a more humane society. Bourne promoted individualism and the need for transcendent values in modern industrial society.

This dissertation examines the relationship between experimental psychology and everyday life through the prism of Hugo Münsterberg and the Harvard Psychological Laboratory during the Progressive Era. Catalyzed by calls from the burgeoning educational community in the 1890s, academic psychologists were increasingly drawn into diverse cultural and political debates bearing on diverse facets of social reform and modernization. Educators, for example, courted psychologists to improve pedagogical techniques. Advertisers sought insight into the consumer mind. Electric utility companies even hired psychological consultants in studying street lighting conditions. At the same time, there was also pushback to such psychological interventions. Many lawyers, for example, opposed psychologists' incursions into the courtroom. Labor advocates protested psychotechnics as the handmaiden of industry. And vocational counselors favored common sense guidance to impersonal psychological tests. By tracing these debates over the place of psychological expertise in an array of contested sites, this dissertation argues that Münsterberg's psychotechnical movement represented a radical new view of the psychologist as an expert in modernization responsible for identifying, measuring and controlling the "human factor" mediating all human activity. / History of Science

The Progressive Era in America from 1870 to 1920 introduced unprecedented change in the way Americans lived, worked, and thought about themselves in relation to the rest of the world. New platforms of charitable benevolence, religious activism, and legislative reform were enacted to meet the changed demographic landscape initiated by waves of new immigration from Europe. The tenor of religious worship shifted in mainstream and evangelical churches to reflect not only new ways of response to these changes, but new ideas of women as authoritative leaders in secular and religious institutions. Charismatic evangelical women influenced by an era of change worked to establish autonomous ministries unbeholden to clergymen who declined to accept their scriptural authority to preach or occupy the pulpit. Women who identified within Holiness and Pentecostal traditions were no longer content to preach from street-corners or rented meeting rooms. Instead, women who considered themselves prophets and preachers established ministries that supported their initiatives of religious reform and advancement of women.

No description available.