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The purpose of this paper is to explore how racially gendered classed power-relations structure history, knowledge and American Sociology's historical memory and disciplinary knowledge production. In order to do so, this paper will 1) utilize Cabral's (1970) theory of history to center humanity as historically developed into a racially gendered classed capitalist world-system, 2) employ intersectionality as a heuristic device to see how knowledge is manipulated to normalize dehumanization as well as to perpetuate exploitation and privilege by denying ' Othered' ' knowledges, and lastly 3) sociologically imagine this racially gendered classed process in the 'institutional-structure' of American Sociology by exploring the ancestry of the concept of 'intersectionality.' In all this paper argues 1) American Sociology under theorizes history, a central aspect of the sociological imagination and production of new sociological knowledge, 2) American Sociology reproduces a dehumanized theory of history per Marx's 'historical materialism' and 3) the structure of American Sociology's knowledge is racially gendered classed, as illustrated in the collective memory of the concept of 'intersectionality.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Coptic Church has a very unique historical trajectory that includes an early separation from the Greco-Roman Byzantine Christian world in the fifth century followed by a legacy of subordination in Egypt after the Arab Conquest. This paper looks at how the Coptic Church narrates this history particularly as it transcends the national boundaries of Egypt to serve migrant Copts in Western societies. The historical narrative of the Coptic Church celebrates its contributions to early Christianity; defends its stance in the Chalcedon Council in 451 CE; and celebrates a legacy of triumph and survival after the Arab conquest. Building on theories on collective memory, this paper shows how the present and the past shape one another in a very complex way. The paper is based on interviews with both lay and clerical members of Coptic immigrant communities in Canada and the United States and on textual analysis of books, bulletins and websites launched on and by the Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of progressive filmmaking in the interwar period is often associated with John Grierson, the British documentary movement and the influence it traced abroad. This paper argues, however, that more particular attention needs to attend the specific context for progressive filmmaking in the United States. To make this argument, this paper foregrounds two strands of progressive filmmaking that were pursued alongside, and often in tension with each other at the Rockefeller Boards between 1934 and 1945. The Rockefeller Boards pursued both a version of social-realist documentary in the Griersonian tradition as well as a project focused on 'human relations' films. As this paper suggests, the human relations project contrasted with Grierson's social documentary by linking film to a particular kind of psychological interior; a self not oriented to the social world but to the internal spaces of psychological and personality development. This implies a complex process of cultural diffusion in which Grierson's model was filtered through, and ultimately displaced by, a set of concerns and preoccupations unique to the American context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing scholarly approaches to the U.S. Secession Crisis suggest that the crisis reflected either the interests of slaveowners or mounting socioeconomic pressure in the electorate. Both arguments suffer from empirical and analytical challenges, chief among these being that the southern Whig Party and its planter base actively resisted secession until the early 1850s. Why did the largest slaveowners oppose disunion only to fold by 1861? Drawing on beat-level electoral returns, newspapers, and private correspondence from antebellum Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, I argue that the answer lies in conceiving of the prelude to secession as a 'crisis sequence,' so named because it precipitates crises of hegemony, when no one political actor possesses the mass consent to rule and once salient social cleavages cease to resonate. Such sequences destabilize the relationship between parties and their constituents and allow political allegiances to swing wildly from one party to the next, giving such sequences their nonlinear character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation from public to private executions is generally understood as a consequence of the rationalization of authority in conjunction with growing class tensions and the emergence of bourgeois sentimentality. What is missing from this analysis is the role gender played. The exclusion of women from the execution site captures a more general tension around womanhood in the nineteenth century, but that tension was expressed differently depending on women's class and race locations. Using newspaper coverage of executions as my primary data source, I show that the interpretive challenges posed by women at the execution site varied by the social positions they occupied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following focuses on the Presbyterian Church in the early 19th century United States and suggests that by historically examining its structural dynamics, historians and social scientists alike can better understand not only American religious history but also the diffusion process of intellectual innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth century American prisons were paradoxical institutions. Porous and impermeable, transparent and opaque, open to public view and occluded from sight; prisons clearly functioned as containers for raw coercion even as they were paraded as paragons of democratic transparency. How did New York State navigate between these countervailing positions and how did officials explicate the difference between them? In this essay I focus on the representation of institutional violence as a problematic of governance, I consider its impact on the development and transformation of public authority and track the role of state actors in navigating the scandals, crises and opportunities it engendered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines regulatory efforts directed toward southern Black granny midwives in the early 20th century. Using Black feminist theory, I analyze physicians' written anti-midwifery advocacy in The Journal of the American Medical Association and The Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association as evidence of the presence of inter-occupational conflict between physicians and Black grannies. I argue that doctors advocated for enhanced midwifery education and midwifery supervision to eliminate midwives while defining physicians as heroes in birthing rooms. This study illustrates how physicians' professional writings substantiated doctors as veritable experts in birthing work rather than strategically targeting Black midwives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes agricultural politics and activism in the United States during the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Although journalists and social scientists studied farm activism at the time, historians have neglected it. As this article demonstrates, however, the farm crisis is valuable for analyzing why ordinary Americans mobilized as citizens and activists in a period of economic dislocation. Informed by the recent 'emotional turn' in social movement studies, the essay frames farm organizing as an archetypal example of 'front porch politics'. Mostly, farmers organized out of a sense of being wronged; the resulting sense of injustice fueled a rural uprising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Casual sex has become a cultural commonplace since it was named in the 1960s and later became associated with the US college sex phenomenon of 'hooking up'. However, contemporary accounts of this sexual practice are curiously lacking in historical perspective. This article explores this modern history, both before and after uncommitted, non-romantic, sexual encounters - sex for sex's sake - were named as casual sex. It agues that studies that contrast the increased 'sexual possibilities' of hookup sex to the assumed restrictive practices of an earlier era distort both the restrictions of the earlier period and the freedoms of the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of 'socially inadequate' as a label for the dependent poor in the United States, 1910-40. It analyses the dense meanings that were given to this term and the political significance that the label 'socially inadequate' gained in relation to sterilization and immigration policy. The article explores the role played by eugenicist, Harry Laughlin, as a label maker for the term and a moral entrepreneur in relation to the problem of dependency. It argues that 'socially inadequate' was a stigmatising designation for members of perceived deficient groups, whom were seen as falling below the normal or acceptable standards of society and were, as such, viewed as undeserving of the status of citizen. Finally, it contends that the negative moral and emotional judgments encoded into definitions of the 'socially inadequate' can be situated within the history of the derogation of dependency, understood as economic reliance on the state or charity, in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the interrelation between the academic sciences of history and sociology in cultural studies. The challenges faced by both historians and sociologists in the United States concerning ideological independence and resistance to interdisciplinary influence are discussed. An overview of the successes and failures of interdisciplinary cooperation in American sociology is provided. The author suggests that sociologists must be willing to accept more influence from historical disciplines to maintain its strength and ensure future development.