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ABSTRACTS
| Christina Kotchemidova, "From Good Cheer to 'Drive-By Smiling': A Social History of Cheerfulness"
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This paper attempts to outline the social history of cheerfulness using the constructivist perspective on emotions. The role of cheerfulness in American society grew in relation to modern ideological frameworks and various economic and social factors. Embraced by the middle class since the eighteenth century for reasons of social identity and philosophical outlook, cheerfulness became a national emotional standard perceived by outsiders of the culture as part of the American character. It was fostered by a tradition of optimism, self-reliance and self-centeredness. Being socially and individually beneficial, it was cultivated in the Victorian family. In the industrial age, cheerfulness was found to be economically productive and was administered in the workplace by the managerial leadership. The lower classes engaged in it through the job market and other social pressures. Cheerfulness escalated in business and corporate culture with competition. Thus, it proved to be the most useful of emotions in an increasingly rational culture and was individually sought and socially encouraged until it became the emotional highlight of the American social landscape. In late capitalism cheerfulness has been commodified, commercialized and recycled by media, possibly with some repercussions on depression.
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| Gwenda Morgan, Peter Rushton, "Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World"
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In eighteenth-century Britain and North America, newspaper advertisements were the primary means of publishing accounts of troublesome people and requesting further information about them. Army deserters and runaway convicts, slaves, servants, apprentices or husbands, are all described in great detail through this culture of advertisement. Knowledge of the bodies of social subordinates therefore was an essential means of controlling them, and through print culture, this private knowledge became public. Bodies of ordinary people were revealed to a wider audience by those who knew them, and were made available for public consumption. These descriptions also demonstrate different cultures of self-presentation, the ways men and women decorated their bodies, and, through marks and clothing, sustained their identities. This study compares American and English newspapers, the contrasting languages of description, particularly of color, and the different ways that intimate knowledge of the body was made public. The advertisements show that while eighteenth-century bodies were often marked by hardship, accident and corporal punishment, they were also decorated by words and symbols expressing pride and defiance. Only at the end of the eighteenth century was this culture of advertisement replaced by official processes of inspection and description of bodies of the poor and the deviant.
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| Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, Jamie J. Fader, "Women and the Paradox of Economic Inequality in the Twentieth-Century"
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This article uses the history of women in twentieth-century United States to explore the paradox of inequality in American history: the coexistence of durable inequality with immense individual and group mobility. Using census data, the article traces inequality along four dimensions: participation, distribution, rewards, and differentiation. Differentiation, the article argues, resolves the paradox of inequality by showing how mobility reinforces rather than challenges existing social structures. The analysis highlights differences in women's experiences by cohort and race and emphasizes the role of education, technological change, and, especially, government's impact on labor markets. The article concludes by evaluating and extending Charles Tilly's theory of durable inequality in light of the trends in women's experience.
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| Isaac Land, "Bread and Arsenic: Citizenship from the Bottom Up in Georgian London". . . |
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