history

Oliver Noble edited a fun look at the history of product placement in American film, featured at Political Remix Video.   Among other tidbits, in this 6-and-a-half minute video, he reveals that:

• the first known product placement was in 1919;
• Hershey’s paid a million dollars to make Reeses Pieces a plot point in E.T. (image source);
• movies sometimes switch up the product placed for different audiences;
• and the record for the most product placements in a single film goes to Michael Bay’s Transformers with 47.

Fun stuff:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In early 20th century America, eugenics was promoted as a new way to scientifically shape the human race. The idea was to change the human population for the better through selective breeding and sterilization. As you can imagine, this led to serious abuses. People of color, the poor, and those deemed otherwise unfit for reproduction were disproportionately targeted, and usually the sterilization was accomplished by targeting women’s bodies in particular.

One interesting facet of the effort to promote eugenics is the language used, or the framing of the issue. Indeed, just last week I introduced my students to the notion of “Birthright.”  The term birthright suggested that all children have the right to be born into a sound mind and body.  Why was it important to sterilize individuals deemed morally, culturally, or biologically inferior?  Why, we must do it for the children, of course!

I was reminded of the idea of children having such a birthright by a vintage ad (posted at, predictably, Vintage Ads).  The ad is for a school designed to improve the future of the human race by improving parenting.  The school would, therefore, teach parents how to engage in civilized “intelligent” “parenthood.”  The idea that such parenting can be taught points to the way that eugenics evolved from a biological to a cultural basis.  And in several places you see the term “birthright” (excerpted below).

Excerpts:

For a time, pro-sterilization laws were very popular.  The U.S. map below, for example, shows which states had pro-sterilization laws in 1935 (striped) and states with laws pending (black). As you can see, most of the United States was on board at this time.  Later, condemnation of the practices in Nazi Germany would take the blush off of the eugenics rose.

(source)

For a wonderful book on the history of eugenics, read Wendy Kline’s Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom.

For more on eugenics and sterilization, see our post with additional pro-eugenics propaganda and two contemporary examples of coercive sterilization campaigns by your health insurance carrier and politician who’ll pay the “unfit” to get tied.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The blog-o-sphere is abuzz with praise for Vivian Maier’s mid-century photographs of public New York and Chicago life.   The photos were taken by a live-in nanny working for wealthy families in Chicago’s north shore.  Her photos, over 100,000 of them, were discovered after her death two years ago.  To my untrained eye, they are gorgeous, interesting, and well-composed.  A fascinating look at another time.  More sociologically, they gracefully depict differences in socioeconomic class. I wonder if Maier, working-class herself, had a special sensitivity to these divides. In any case, I appreciate the texture that the photographs add to an understanding of how people of different classes lived.

Visit the website devoted to Maier here.  Photos borrowed from there and Chicago Magazine.  Via Crooked Timber.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

While the quintessential Old West “cowboy” is White in most imaginations, in fact there were Black pioneers in the west during the wild days (usually dated mid-1800s till the end of the century).  According to wikipedia, thousands of Black men and women lived in mostly segregated communities in the West, but participated in all parts of Western society.  They were traders, gold miners, soldiers, cowboys and farm hands, bartenders, cooks, and, of course, outlaws.   I enjoy how these photographs color American history:

Identity unknown, around 1865, Kansas (source):

Nona Marshall, late 1800s, Arizona territory (source):

Black cowboys (1890-1920):

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In a comments thread, shorelines linked to a fascinating Scientific American article about adolescence by psychologist Robert Epstein. In it, he points to the invention of the very idea of adolescence and its non-universality. In a sample of 186 pre-industrial societies, for example, only 60% had words for the life stage and most had little or no problems with anti-social teen behavior. This data, however, contrasts strongly with new research suggesting that adolescent brains are quite different from adult brains.

How do we make sense of this?

Epstein suggests that differences in brain structure may be the result of social realities, not their cause. He writes:

I have not been able to find even a single study that establishes a causal relation between the properties of the brain being examined and the problems we see in teens… [Meanwhile, c]onsiderable research shows that a person’s emotions and behavior continuously change brain anatomy and physiology… So if teens are in turmoil, we will necessarily find some corresponding chemical, electrical or anatomical properties in the brain. But did the brain cause the turmoil, or did the turmoil alter the brain? Or did some other factors—such as the way our culture treats its teens—cause both the turmoil and the corresponding brain properties.

By “the way our culture treats its teens,” Epstein is referring to the possibility that we infantilize and criminalize them. He includes a figure illustrating how we’ve increasingly targeted teens with laws:

Teens are subject to, Epstein explains, “…more than 10 times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many restrictions as incarcerated felons.”

Believing them to be different from adults, we then segregate them:

Today, with teens trapped in the frivolous world of peer culture, they learn virtually everything they know from one another rather than from the people they are about to become. Isolated from adults and wrongly treated like children, it is no wonder that some teens behave, by adult standards, recklessly or irresponsibly.

Epstein has no more data showing that how we treat teens, and how they learn to behave, changes their brain anatomy and physiology, than he does showing the reverse. But the former certainly has substantial neurological precedent. Meanwhile, the latter is comforting to a society awash in out-of-control adolescence: “What is there to do? It’s only natural.” Right?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The blog Of Another Fashion, by Minh-Ha T. Pham, serves as “an alternative archive of the not-quite-hidden but too often ignored fashion histories of U.S. women of color.” The collection includes images taken from public sources as well as photos sent in by readers and provides a contrast to fashion exhibits that usually present fashion trends as almost entirely White experiences.

While the collection is fascinating overall and definitely worth a look, I was particularly struck by the photos of life among Japanese Americans forced to live in internment camps during World War II.

A legal notice requiring Japanese Americans on the West Coast to relocate voluntarily to internment camps or face arrest:

Women playing volleyball:

(Library of Congress. Photo by Ansel Adams.)

Walking to school at the Manzanar camp:

(Library of Congress. Photo by Ansel Adams.)

Women in biology and dressmaking classes:

(Both images by Ansel Adams, 1943; Library of Congress.)

One camp’s version of a beauty salon:

Intake processing at the Santa Anita center:

(From the Library of Congress’ Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information Collection (April 1942). Photographer unknown.)

Pham discusses the fact that in many of the photos of the processing centers, the women are smiling and look very happy, despite going through what had to be an upsetting, frightening, and humiliating experience. Japanese Americans were not allowed to bring their own cameras into the camps; the photos were taken by others, including Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. And they found their subjects didn’t always cooperate with the images they were planning to provide of the camps:

According to Sue Kunitomi Embrey the chair of the Manzanar Committee, Adams hoped to capture the despair of camp life in order to stir some public sympathy for Japanese Americans but was frustrated by all the primping and posing Japanese Americans did when he was photographing.

…

…I hope that images of smiling and fashion-conscious Japanese American women…adds to and deepens our appreciation of the small acts of feeling, creativity, and resistance that happen everyday in spite of huge limitations. In an act as seemingly trivial and trite as smiling for the camera, these women interrupt and take some control of the historical, political, and visual frames through which they’re being viewed.

The décor in my childhood home was unusual. Interspersed with photographs of my sister and me were vintage political posters, inherited from my late grandparents. The most startling of these were the posters promoting women’s right to vote: as I grew up, I realized that the viewpoints they depicted contrasted starkly with the narrative of women’s suffrage that I had learned in my history classes.

This poster supports women’s right to vote not by asserting their equality with men, but by appealing to their ability to bear children:

By contrast, this poster actively highlights woman’s ability to contribute to society beyond stereotypically female roles: women were not only nurses and mothers, but doctors and mayors. Yet at the same time, the image disparages the mentally and physically ill by painting men with these conditions as inherently lesser.

Lastly, a picture that speaks for itself.  Women should have suffrage, says the poster, but they must always remember where they truly belong.

Although the right to vote politically empowered the women of Western society, many of the proponents of the women’s suffrage movement espoused ideologies that would not be considered feminist or politically correct today. My history classes dwelt only briefly on these unpalatable schools of rhetoric, but the images in my home allowed me to glimpse a debate that was just as complex and fragmented as the political disputes we face today.

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Alison Marqusee is a high school senior from Massachusetts.  In addition to sociology, her interests include linguistics, psychology, and physics.  She looks forward to attending Haverford College.

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One of my colleagues, Kate Hahn, sent me a link to an interactive map at The Chronicle of Higher Education website that presents data on the proportion of U.S. adults with a bachelor’s degree over time. In 1940, in the vast majority of counties no more than 10% of the population had graduated from college (the national average was 4.6%):

Now the national average is 27.5%:

You can also compare counties to the national average. Green counties are above the national average, brown ones are below and, not surprisingly, we see clear regional variations in rates of college education, with Colorado and the Northeast doing particularly well and the South and Appalachian regions lagging:

Wealthy counties (those with a median income of $60,000+) in general have higher than average rates of bachelor’s degrees, with the exception of a few counties in the Mountain West, Alaska, and a few scattered areas:

We see the opposite with poor counties (median income under $30,000):

You can break down any of the comparisons by sex or race/ethnicity, and/or look only at  counties with 20% or more Hispanic or Black residents.  You can also select a particular county for more detailed information. For instance, here’s the info on Clark County, Nevada, where I live:

By comparing the maps over time, you can easily track a number of changes: the increase in college degrees overall, of course, but also changes in education such as the dramatic gains women have made in earning college degrees in the past few decades — the gender gap in college degrees was over 7 percentage points in 1980 but only about 1.5 points today.