Years before the major events that are tied to the New Left in American collective memory, Bay Area college students’ protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee garnered national media attention for their perceived radicalism in the face of the federal government. Student protesters’ altercation with police at San Francisco City Hall in May of 1960 became a turning point at which the Old Left, New Left, and McCarthyism converged, providing valuable insight into the transition of broad leftist activism from union-based to direct action protest. Through secondary sources including histories of early student protest as well as student newspapers, government publications, supporting organizations’ communications, and oral histories from participants, I construct a timeline of the challenges early student activists faced. This critical angle centers how these protests’ complicate the historical understanding of the university as the postwar institutional mediator for left-wing protest and radicalism, thereby revealing the disparities and power relations between students, professors, and administrators in the pursuit of their respective political agendas. This perspective, therefore, challenges the prevailing notion of universities as a natural partner of progressive social movements by emphasizing the institutional obstacles and inadequacies that restrict student political activism and expression.

 In recent decades, scholars of fascism have increasingly studied how concepts of identity enable and constrain violent political movements. Building on that work, this paper outlines how the Nazi propagandist and ideologue Alfred Rosenberg portrayed a rigid conception of German identity in order to justify his fascist political project. By reading several of Rosenberg’s published books, articles, and his diary to explicate his conception of identity, I suggest that creating a “New German Man” was central to Rosenberg’s calls for Nazism. I argue that Rosenberg built a systematic fascist philosophy out of a series of binaries that were designed to avoid intellectual engagement, thereby preventing criticism and allowing him complete control of the definition of “German.” Thus, this presentation argues that Rosenberg’s conception of Nazi identity as well as the philosophical system he built to justify such a conception of identity are key to understanding how logic and propaganda have been used to enable fascist violence, which allows us to better understand and address harmful ideologies. 

This research and public history website explores Jewish immigration experiences and Americanization from the perspectives of young Jewish immigrant women around the turn of the 20th century. I used archival material from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations to highlight these women’s voices, and archives from the Tenement Museum and the Jewish Daily Forward to illustrate Jewish life in this period. Additionally, archives from the New York Times were used to examine how Jewish immigrants were viewed. I searched these archives for primary sources to shed light on how Jewish immigrant women worked and lived, including how life in the Lower East Side’s cramped tenements was photographed and written about by outsiders - White society, and how this propagated the notion of Jewish people as Others. My goal for this research was to tell the stories of these women and listen to their voices. They tell of long hours in crowded and often dangerous garment factories, of unionizing and striking for better labor conditions, and the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. These women were often the main breadwinners for their families, but many saved a little for themselves to spend on ‘American’ activities such as seeing shows, frequenting dance halls, and developing an interest in ‘American’ fashion and buying clothes. White society dubbed these women’s fashion as tacky, outlandish and vulgar. Their dresses were described by White society, as well as their own community, as cheap knockoffs of the dresses they made, with too many bows, too much jewelry, and too much makeup. These immigrant women were often called ‘Ghetto Girls,’ as the Lower East Side was called the Jewish Ghetto at this point. This research also brings the present into focus and examines how immigrants are viewed and often judged. 

American and Western European culture today is very child centric. Taking note of the myriad products advertised for children and their parents, as well as the countless “how to” advice in all types of media on how to wean, feed, sleep train, potty train, dress, educate, discipline, speak to, and regard children, it is apparent that modern Western children are very much atop a hypothetical pedestal. Perceptions and treatment of children affects economies, healthcare systems, educational practices, politics, the arts and nearly all facets of life. In this literature review, these subjects are addressed to understand how children and the concept of childhood contributed to the social structure of people in Western Europe during the Medieval and Renaissance Eras and how that has changed in modernity. With the premise that, by understanding our past can we better prepare for our future, each of the aforementioned issues from weaning to politics matters. Examining historical research on childhood, including primary art and literary sources, clarifies known trends and brings to light new concepts. Claims famously made by Philippe Ariès in the 1960’s and 70’s that childhood as we understand it did not exist in the Middle Ages have since been challenged by contemporary historians and cultural anthropologists. These varying notions invite comparisons and challenges of long-lasting assumptions as well as new suppositions.

Public Perception surrounding the sexual exploitation of adolescent girls in history is marred by the manipulation of social elite classes. Bestselling books on Madame De Pompadour, the royal mistress to King Louis XV, falsely claim Madame De Pompadour facilitated a brothel of adolescent poor girls for her royal lover to sexually exploit. While her true involvement was much less proactive, the shifting of blame from established elitists like Louis XV to outsiders like Madame De Pompadour is a long-standing practice within elite upper-class culture. A study of eighteenth-century court behavior aids in illuminating the reasoning behind modern day cases of sexual exploitation within elite classes including that of Jeffrey Epstein and his sex trafficking ring. These “self-fashioning” outsiders, Pompadour and Epstein, infiltrated high social ranks without elite backgrounds and disrupted the established authority within elite culture. By comparing eighteenth-century to twenty-first century elite culture, this literature review is an attempt to understand how attacking an outsider to upper class culture, instead of high-ranking members, has been historically used to maintain the social elite established order. A review of academic research provides some answers for how members avoid public scrutiny for sexually exploiting adolescent girls and how manipulating public attention has been a historically prevalent tool in diverting responsibility to the “self-fashioning” outsider. With future research, we can expose how “self-fashioning,” in the context of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, carried over into elite culture practices of the eighteenth century and is still prevalent in the twenty-first century. This future research can aid in shedding light on centuries of abuse and recycling of misinformation.