Josephine Baker does the Charleston : Celebrated singer Josephine Baker dances the Charleston, one of the novelty dances that swept pop culture in the s. Eugenics, a prejudicial pseudoscience with roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gained popularity and impacted American state and federal laws in the s.
Eugenics was a field sociological and anthropological study that became popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a method of preserving and improving the population through cultivation of dominant gene groups. The eugenics movement in the United States was used to justify laws enabling forced sterilizations of the mentally ill and prohibiting marriages and child bearing by immigrants, while in Europe, eugenics theories were used by the Nazi regime in Germany to justify thousands of sterilizations and, later, widespread murder.
In its time, eugenics was touted as scientific and progressive, the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life. Researchers interested in familial mental disorders conducted studies to document the heritability of illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.
Rather than true science, though, eugenics was merely an ill-considered social philosophy aimed at improving the quality of the human population by increasing reproduction between those with genes considered desirable—Nordic, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon peoples—and limiting procreation by those whose genetic stock was seen as less favorable or unlikely to improve the human gene pool.
The method considered most viable in attaining this goal was the prevention of marriage and breeding among targeted groups and individuals, but over time, the far more extreme action of sterilization became acceptable. While these ideas existed for centuries, the modern eugenics movement can be traced to the United Kingdom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The theory of evolution made famous by Charles Darwin was used by English sociologist and anthropologist Francis Galton, a half cousin of Darwin, to promote the idea of a human survival of the fittest that could be enacted through selective breeding. Francis Galton : A half cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton founded field of eugenics and promoted the improvement of the human gene pool through selective breeding.
Eugenicists and supporters began organizing and holding formal discussions and conferences and publishing papers that proliferated through Europe and America. Three International Eugenics Congresses were held between and , the first taking place in London. Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, presided over the meeting of about delegates from numerous countries—including British luminaries such as the Chief Justice Lord Balfour, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.
The meeting served as an indication of the growing popularity of the eugenics movement. Second International Eugenics Congress logo, : Eugenics was a popular pseudoscience in the early decades of the twentieth century and was promoted through three International Eugenics Congresses between and American eugenics research was funded by distinguished philanthropists and carried out at prestigious universities, trickling down to classrooms where it was presented as a serious science.
In , J. Davenport, using money from both the Harriman railroad fortune and the Carnegie Institution. Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office in The first state to introduce a compulsory sterilization bill was Michigan in , but the proposed law failed to garner enough votes by legislators to be adopted. Indiana became the first state to enact sterilization legislation in , followed closely by Washington and California in Men and women were compulsorily sterilized for different reasons.
Men were sterilized to treat their aggression and to eliminate their criminal behavior, while women were sterilized to control the results of their sexuality. Sterilization rates across the country were relatively low, California being the exception, until the Supreme Court case Buck v.
Bell that legitimized the forced sterilization of patients at a Virginia home for the mentally retarded. These statutes were not abolished until the mid-twentieth century, with approximately 60, Americans legally sterilized. This led to passage of the federal Immigration Act of , which reduced the number of immigrants from abroad to 15 percent from previous years. Harry H. Laughlin : Harry H. There are also direct links between progressive American eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin and racial oppression in Europe.
Before the realization of death camps in World War II, the idea that eugenics would lead to genocide was not taken seriously by the average American.
When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after the war, however, they justified more than , mass sterilizations in less than a decade by citing U. These sterilizations were the precursor to the Holocaust, the Nazi attempt at genocide against Jews and other ethnic groups they deemed unfavorable to the human gene pool. The Southern Renaissance literary movement of the s and s broke from the romantic view of the Confederacy.
The Southern Renaissance was a movement that reinvigorated American Southern literature in the s and s. Perhaps ironically, however, this movement that explored racial questions and themes seemed to exclude African-American writers of the time. In the s, the satirist H. Mencken led the attack on the genteel tradition in American literature, ridiculing the provincialism of American intellectual life. This created a storm of protest from within conservative circles in the South. In response to the attacks of Mencken and his imitators, Southern writers were provoked to reassert Southern uniqueness and engage in a deeper exploration of the theme of Southern identity.
Henry Louis Mencken : H. Mencken was an influential American writer and social critic who unwittingly helped to launch the Southern Renaissance literary movement. The emergence of the Southern Renaissance as a literary and cultural movement also has been seen as a consequence of the opening up of the predominantly rural South to outside influences due to the industrial expansion that took place in the region during and after World War I.
Southern Renaissance writers broke from this tradition by addressing three major themes in their works. The first was the burden of history in a place where many people still personally remembered slavery, Reconstruction, and a devastating military defeat. Because of the chronological distance these writers had from the Civil War and slavery, they were able to bring objectivity to writings about the South.
They also employed new, modernistic techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex narratives. Among the writers of the Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner is arguably the most influential and famous as the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in William Faulkner, : William Faulkner, author of the novel, The Sound and the Fury , was a leading voice in the Southern Renaissance movement.
Some of the most outspoken criticisms against the idea of the lost cause of the Confederacy came from African-American, Southern writers prior to World War I, including from Charles W. Yet African-American writers were not considered part of the Southern literary tradition as defined by the white, primarily male authors who saw themselves as its creators and guardians. This is a rather glaring omission, considering the prominence of other notable African-American writers from the South such as Richard Wright, a Mississippi native and author of the renowned novel, Native Son.
Richard Wright : Native Son author Richard Wright was one of the notable African-American authors who has been arguably overlooked as part of the Southern literary tradition.
The Harlem Renaissance was an arts and literary movement in the s that brought African-American culture to mainstream America. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the s and s.
Though the Harlem Renaissance was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Renaissance.
In France, black soldiers experienced the kind of freedom they had never known in the United States, but returned to find that discrimination against blacks was just as active as it had been before the war. Many African-American soldiers who fought in segregated units during World War I, like the Harlem Hellfighters, came home to a nation whose citizens often did not respect their accomplishments. Race pride had already been part of literary and political self-expression among African-Americans in the nineteenth century.
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Privacy Policy. Commenting Policy. By Guest Blogger Jacqueline Hudson Started in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, jazz has its musical roots in New Orleans, Louisiana where it combines American and European classical music with African and slave folk songs with a touch of West African culture. Love Letters Learn more about the amazing love story of this s couple by reading the transcription, seeing scans of the original letters, and listening to a voice actor read the words that Earl wrote to Marie Read More.
You can get an additional perspective of the love story by reading and listening to her letters to Marie I Love the 19 20s Blog Learn more about different aspects of the s with short posts by guest blogging scholars from all across the country covering topics of popular culture, literature, music, dancing, and more At the Jazz Band Ball - Early Hot Jazz, Song and Dance At the Jazz Band Ball brings together some of the greatest hot music, song, and dance captured at the height of the jazz age and in the early days of sound film Check out our reviews of over books in the JazzStandards.
Some of our books may be found at Amazon. The decade of s marked huge advances in the music industry. The phonograph record became the primary method of disseminating music, surpassing sales of sheet music and piano rolls. The music industry, ever keen to discover new ways of making profits, realized that record, sheet music and piano roll sales could all be tied together.
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