OU - Faculty and Staff Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/11244/7920

Browse

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

Open Access
Central or Peripheral: Reconsidering the Place of African Americans within the American Intellectual Establishment
(2015-12) Keppel, Ben
Do we think of Frederick Douglass as a founding father of the modern social democratic tradition in the United States? Or is he taken as proof in our textbooks that a slave could indeed become a “great American”—proof that, for all their flaws, our slave-holding founders were right after all: “all men are created equal”? Is Martin Luther King Jr.—a public philosopher of international reputation and esteem, and one recognized today in his homeland by a federal holiday—understood as a significant social thinker on the same plane as Thoreau, Jefferson, or Lincoln? Despite the ample textual evidence provided in the published papers of Douglass and King, they remain for most Americans (including some scholars among us) evidence that those who were once the “other” have successfully negotiated the incorporation of “their people” into a pre-existing revolution.
Open Access
The closing gates of democracy : frontier anxiety before the official end of the frontier
(1991) Wrobel, David M.
Open Access
Global West, American frontier
(2009-02) Wrobel, David M.
From article, "The author is a member of the history department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This was his presidential address at the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, in Pasadena, California, August 9, 2008. This article questions the common assumption that nineteenth-century audiences in America and around the world viewed the American western frontier as an exceptional place, like no other place on earth. Through examination of travel writings by Americans and Europeans who placed the West into a broader global context of developing regions and conquered colonies, we see that nineteenth-century audiences were commonly presented with a globally contextualized West. The article also seeks to broaden the emphasis in post-colonial scholarship on travel writers as agents of empire who commodified, exoticized, and objectified the colonized peoples and places they visited, by suggesting that travel writers were also often among the most virulent critics of empire and its consequences for the colonized."
Open Access
A lesson from the past and some hope for the future : the history academy and the schools, 1880-2007
(2008-02) Wrobel, David M.
Open Access
Movement and adjustment in twentieth-century Western writing
(2003-08) Wrobel, David M.
Western American literature in the twentieth century has effectively mirrored life in the region. The West has for centuries seen more geographic movement, and accompanying cultural adjustment, than other American regions. These themes of movement and adjustment have dominated western writing. Literary historians’ frameworks for categorizing and analyzing this writing have emphasized a tidy process of organic development in western writing, from “frontier fiction” to more mature “regional writing,” or from frontier to regional to post- regional literature. Such models underestimate the degree to which movement and adjustment continued to shape western writing in the twentieth century and tend to separate literature produced by white Europeans from that of other cultural groups. This essay suggests that the more fluid movement and adjustment model can better illuminate the connections between ostensibly separate cultural literary streams.
Open Access
"Social Science and Civil Rights," Oxford Bibliographies
(2016-06-28) Keppel, Ben
Considered from within the prism of American history, the terms social science and civil rights, when combined, have a particular meaning bound up in the nation’s continuing struggle over whether to treat a certain native-born group as full and equal members of American society. More than one hundred and fifty years after the end of the explicit constitutional sanction of chattel slavery, a force field of hostility toward this group (whether identified as “colored,” Negro, or “African American”) remains intact, and it is often the framework through which many other persons classified as “nonwhite” are treated. American social science, at its foundation, most often gave an official imprimatur to the exclusion and denigration of people of color. Its “founding fathers” strove to construct a systematic method for understanding human conduct modeled on the natural sciences. These particular experts came to their task with the preexisting assumption that a racial hierarchy—white over black—was the natural order of things. We start here from the premise that race is just as deliberately human and political an invention as are the concepts civil rights and social science. Race has been the most consequential (and dangerous) of these terms because it has been used to render as natural patterns of inequality between people created by human beings themselves. Second, social scientists and their disciplines do not stand apart from the forces that they study; rather, their interests and conclusions are also decisively influenced by them. This neither diminishes nor discredits the continuing enterprise of social science; it serves that work best by reminding us of its difficulty and complexity. Finally, we best capture the full range of social science thinking when a net is cast broad enough to include those rigorous analysts who come from outside the core social sciences (sociology, anthropology, economics) to embrace salient contributions in literature, law, philosophy, and a vast literature of social observation and critique that is an indispensable part of modern life. When a variety of figures without academic degrees in a “social science” are treated here as legitimate contributors to it, it is because we must not forget the broadly philosophical and humanistic origins of social science. The relationship between social science and civil rights over a history spanning two hundred years follows closely the evolution of how Americans and their institutions have answered the first question of any human society: who belongs?
Open Access
The view from Philadelphia
(1998-08) Wrobel, David M.
Open Access
Western themes in contemporary rock music, 1970-2000 : a lyric analysis
(2000) Wrobel, David M.
Open Access
Women’s Rights as Proletarian Rights: Yamakawa Kikue, Suffrage, and the “Dawn of Liberation”
(2018) Faison, Elyssa
Yamakawa Kikue is famous for having worked relentlessly to critique Japan’s prewar socialist movement for its lack of attention to women’s issues. In addition to her continual presence as an oppositional figure operating simultaneously at the margins and the center of Japanese socialist political and organizational activities, she also offered similarly relentless critiques of what she considered “bourgeois” women’s groups and their pursuit of liberal political rights like suffrage that would benefit primarily elite women. She was highly ambivalent during the prewar period regarding the importance of advocating for women’s suffrage. But with the end of the war, and thus the end of the authoritarian and militarist state against which she had fought her entire adult life, Yamakawa could embrace the cause and the reality of suffrage without hesitation. This marked not a radical shift, but a continuation of her commitment to democratic and anti-authoritarian principles.
Open Access
The world in the West, the West in the world : Friedrich Gerstäcker, Richard Francis Burton, and Isabella Bird on the nineteenth-century frontier
(2008) Wrobel, David M.