Rebecca DeWolf

Ph.D., History, American University.

Teaching and Research Resource: History of the Great Lakes States

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HistGrtLks2

For an excellent teaching and research resource on the Great Lakes region, check out History of the Great Lakes States website.

As the site’s creators put it, the site “is an online library for the history of the region once called the ‘Northwest Territory,’ that in the early 1800s became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.”

The site houses various primary sources such as memoirs, travel journals, magazine articles, novels, biographies, maps, etc. Its extensive list of historical subtopics includes religion, politics and government, culture, society, and economics.

For more information watch the below video, or visit the site.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdniFLbjPlY

Book Review: Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1976).

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 Linda Gordon traces the development of the birth control movement from the 1870s to the 1970s. In the process she weaves together material from a range of topics including feminism, socialism, psychology, and eugenics. Ultimately, Gordon unearths the threads of various ideas that influenced the struggle for reproduction control. Gordon also places birth control within a broader social and political framework through an examination of a variety of sources such as the American Birth Control League papers, local and national Planned Parenthood archives, medical journals, diaries, and letters. In the end, Gordon contends that reproductive freedom is central to the struggle for social justice.

Gordon argues that the history of birth control must be placed in a larger social, political, and ideological context. “Reproductive patterns,” she explains, “are determined by sexual morality, by the overall-status of women, by class formations, and by the nature of the struggles for social change.”[1] In Gordon’s view, the struggle for reproductive freedom should not be separated from class systems, capitalist economics, male-dominated politics, and sexual relations. Moreover, according to Gordon, birth control is a symptom and a cause of various elements and patterns in American history.

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Book Review: Gary Gerstle’s Working-Class Americanism (1989)

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The Power of Americanism

How should we understand the labor movements of the mid-twentieth century? Were they ultimately radical or conservative in nature? In Working-Class Americanism, Gary Gerstle looks at how progressive working-class leaders in Woonsocket, Rhode Island were more pragmatic than radical while their traditionalist counterparts were more innovative than conservative.[1] By presenting a community study with a close analysis of political language, Gerstle illuminates the conception of Americanism, underscores the diversity in mid-twentieth century labor unions, and demonstrates the transformative ideological nature of the 1940s. In the end, Gerstle’s work raises significant questions about the construction of political language.

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Review: Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 2003.

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Lizabeth Cohen connects a number of elements to illustrate what she understands to be America’s postwar obsession with mass consumption. By examining government documents, sociological surveys, marketing research, and historical monographs, Cohen shows how the Progressive and New Deal eras’ emphasis on consumerism as the cornerstone of citizenship changed in post-World War II America. Cohen ties together federal policy, business cycles, reform movements, marketing strategies, and the local history of northern New Jersey to chart the rise of mass consumerism in American society. In the end, Cohen presents a history of mass consumerism’s effects on race, gender, class, and politics.

Put simply, Cohen’s overreaching thesis is that the way we buy shapes the way we understand ourselves as citizens. As Cohen maintains, “I am convinced that Americans after World War II saw their nation as the model for the world of a society committed to mass consumption…consumption did not only deliver wonderful things for purchase…It also dictated the most central dimensions of postwar society.” Consumerism, Cohen contends, influences public life as much as it responds to private needs. For Cohen, American values, attitudes, and behaviors are attached to consumerism; moreover, she argues that public policy and mass consumption mutually reinforce each other. Ultimately, Cohen suggests that communal identities spring from modes of consumption, and not modes of production.

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D-Day 70th Anniversary

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By the end of 1943, Allied forces had succeeded in stopping the Axis powers’ advancement both in Europe and in the Pacific. Over the next two years, Allied forces seized the offensive and launched a series of powerful drives that helped them defeat the Axis powers.

Early in 1944, United States and British bombers began attacking German industrial installations and other targets almost round the clock. These attacks hampered German production and transportation. In addition, the massive bombing campaigns of the Allied forces devastated German cities such as Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin. For example, a February 1945 incendiary raid on Dresden created an immense firestorm that destroyed three-fourths of the previously undamaged city. The Dresden bombing killed approximately 135,00 people, almost all civilians.

Almost two years before the Dresden bombing, an enormous invasion force had started to gather in England. This force consisted of almost 3 million troops and a great array of naval vessels and armaments. On June 6, 1944, D-Day, General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, sent this vast armada into action. The invasion force included British, American, and Canadian troops and they landed not at the narrowest part of the English Channel, where the Germans had prepared for them, but along sixty miles of the Cotentin Peninsula on the Coast of Normandy.

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