2004-2005
Co-sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago, Roosevelt University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University's School of Communications
Seminars are held on Fridays from 3:30-5:00 PM
at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL.
Papers are pre-circulated. For a copy e-mail scholl@newberry.org.
September 17, 2004 - Building an A1 Nation: Physical Culture and the Quest for National Efficiency in Britain, 1890s-1939
Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, University of Illinois at Chicago
The specter of physical deterioration and high rejection rates among military recruits in Britain inaugurated a national efficiency campaign which coupled imperialism with social reform and aimed to raise the standard of health and fitness of the worker and the soldier. The paper highlights the relationship between government initiatives and the patriotic physical culture movement which advocated modern techniques to enable men to develop their bodies before the First World War. Physical culture gained in popularity in the 1920s and faced with a growing threat from Nazi Germany, the government launched a national fitness campaign to build an "A1" nation in the late 1930s.
October 22, 2004 - Fuel Consumption and Class in the Early Republic
Sean Patrick Adams, University of Central Florida
In the United States during the early republic, a series of wintertime firewood shortages in large cities triggered popular protests that hastened a quest for new heating technologies. In response to these protests, upper-class urbanites created philanthropic organizations to meet the heating needs of the working poor. These organizations propagated the belief that the lower orders should switch from wood to coal. In so doing, they blurred the line between philanthropic outreach and the encouragement of new forms of fuel consumption--and, in the process, underscored the extent to which the adoption of new heating technologies could be shaped by political considerations largely unrelated to matters of economic efficiency.
CANCELLED November 19, 2004 - Transatlantic Travails: German Experiment Stations and the Transformation of American Agriculture
Louis Ferleger, Boston University
December 17, 2004 - Breaking News: Shortwave News Broadcasts and U.S.-Japanese Conflict on the Eve of the Pacific War
Michael A. Krysko, Dowling College
In 1939, the U.S. shortwave station W6XBE began trans-Pacific broadcasts to an enthusiastic American audience in East Asia. However, controversy soon enveloped the station. Japan jammed American news broadcasts for their presumed bias against Japan's expansionist objectives in East Asia. This paper explores audience and diplomatic responses to W6XBE's travails. It examines how culturally based notions of "objective" news informed American reactions to the station's troubles. Capturing shortwave broadcasting's potential as a divisive force in international relations, W6XBE's difficulties became intertwined with the broader deterioration of Japanese-American relations that resulted in the Pacific War of 1941-1945.
January 28, 2005 - Engineering a Powerful Nation: Techno-Nationalism in Electric Power in Sweden, 1897-1923
Mats Fridlund, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and Northwestern University
This paper describes the founding by the Swedish government of an electric power utility - the Royal Board of Waterfalls - and the construction of this utility's first electric power plants between 1906 and 1926. It contends that the exploitation of Swedish hydro power cannot be fully understood without taking into account the ideology of nationalism. In Sweden, electric power technology strengthened the political autonomy of the Swedish nation-state and helped create a new, and emphatically modern, Swedish national identity.
February 25, 2005 - Power, Politics, and the Mystery of New Media: Newspaper Ownership of Radio Stations in 1920s America
Michael Stamm, University of Chicago
Newspapers formed the most important group of radio station owners in the first decade of commercial radio broadcasting in the United States. Newspapers became involved in radio for several related reasons: scientific curiosity and experimentation on the part of publishers, strategic business calculations that radio might be a future competitor or adjunct to the press, and the desire to extend the civic functions and political presence of the newspaper using the new technology of radio. This paper explores the ways that newspapers - large and small - used radio to enhance their social, commercial, and political positions, in the process laying the foundation of what would later become the "mass media" or "media monopoly." Far from being supplanted by the new medium of radio, newspapers profoundly shaped the direction of American broadcasting.
March 18, 2005 - Telephomania: The Contested Origins of the Urban Telephone Exchange in the United States, 1879-1894 (previously titled: Western Union, the Railway Mail Service, and the Origins of the American Telephone Industry)
Richard R. John, University of Illinois at Chicago
Recent scholarship on the early history of telephony in the United States focuses primarily on the expansion of telephony into rural districts in the period after the expiration of Alexander Graham Bell's fundamental telephone patents in 1894. My paper redirects our understanding of early American telephony by focusing on the rise in the 1880s of the large urban exchange. At the center of my story is Charles N. Fay, the acerbic general manager of the Chicago Telephone Company. Fay's contempt for telephone users was legendary: at one point, he publicly declared that they suffered from a "telephomania" that predisposed them to be hostile toward his company. My paper reconstructs Fay's struggles with his customers, his competitors, and the Chicago City Council. In so doing, it demonstrates how the forgotten history of these early struggles shaped the subsequent rise of the telephone network in the United States.
April 22, 2005 - Conventions of Simultaneity: Government-Sponsored Timepieces in the United States, 1870-1920
Alexis McCrossen, Southern Methodist University
This paper argues that the standardization of time in the United States--a process that extended from the 1840s (when the telegraph was first commercialized) to the 1880s (when time zones were established)--spurred the installation of thousands of public timepieces, hastening what historian of science Peter Galison has recently termed "conventions of simultaneity." These often large, lavish, and expensive clocks graced not only city halls, county court houses, and federal buildings, but also office buildings, stores, and churches. This paper is based on the account books of the E. Howard Clock and the Set Thomas Clock Companies, the two firms that dominated the production of public timepieces in this period.
Please do not request the paper unless you plan to attend.
Individuals interested in giving papers in the future should contact Richard R. John, History Department M/C 198, University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7109; phone: (312) 996-8569; e-mail: rjohn@uic.edu.