True Stories From The American Past Since 1865

This two-volume reader consists of original essays, with decade of American history represented by at least one essay. The stories cover a range of topics such as: popular culture; women's history; urban history; and the history of science and technology. The essays also shed light on political, social, economic and cultural trends.

This two-volume reader consists of twenty-nine original essays, each one crafted by a scholar who is an expert in a particular field of historical inquiry. Each decade of American history is represented by at least one essay. The stories cover a wide range of topics including popular culture, women's history, urban history, and the history of science and technology. The essays also shed light on political, social, economic, and cultural trends. After reading these engaging pieces, students will be left with a sense of a living past, not abstract historiographical debates.

This two-volume reader consists of original essays, with decade of American history represented by at least one essay. The stories cover a range of topics such as: popular culture; women's history; urban history; and the history of science and technology. The essays also shed light on political, social, economic and cultural trends.

In the early 1940s, all sorts of rumors about impending and presently occurring race wars were circulating throughout the South among white Southerners. Chapel Hill sociologist Howard W. Odum was so alarmed--and fascinated--by these rumors that he set out to collect and catalog them. First published in 1943 RACE AND RUMORS OF RACE documents Odum's findings.

One promoted goat gland transplants as a remedy for lost virility or infertility. Another blamed aluminum cooking utensils for causing cancer. The third was targeted by the Food and Drug Administration as "public enemy number one" for his worthless cures. John Brinkley, Norman Baker, and Harry Hoxsey were the ultimate snake oil salesmen of the twentieth century. With backgrounds in lowbrow performance—carnivals, vaudeville, night clubs—each of these charismatic con men used the emerging power of radio to hawk alternative cures in the Midwest beginning in the roaring twenties, through the Depression era, and into the 1950s. All scorned the medical establishment for avarice while amassing considerable fortunes of their own; and although the American Medical Association castigated them for preying on the ignorant, this book shows that the case against them wasn't all that simple. Quacks and Crusaders is an entertaining and revealing look at the connections between fraudulent medicine and populist rhetoric in middle America. Eric Juhnke examines the careers of these three personalities to paint a vision of medicine that championed average Americans, denounced elitism, and affirmed rustic values. All appealed to the common man, winning audiences and patrons in rural America by casting their pitches in everyday language, and their messages proved more potent than their medicines in treating the fears, insecurities, and failing health of their numerous supporters. Juhnke first examines the career of each man, revealing their geniuses as businessmen and propagandists-with such success that Brinkley and Baker ran for governor of their states and Hoxsey had thousands of supporters protest his "persecution" by the FDA. Juhnke then investigates the identity, motives, and willingness to believe of their many patients and followers. He shows how all three men used populist rhetoric—evangelical, anti-Communist, anti-intellectual—to attract their clients, and then how their particular brand of populism sometimes mutated to anti-Semitism and other sentiments of the radical right. By treating the incurable, Brinkley, Baker, and Hoxsey took on the mantles of common folk crusaders. Brinkley was idolized for his goat gland cures until his death, and Hoxsey's former head nurse continued his work from Tijuana until her death in 1999. In considering who visits quacks and why, Juhnke has shed new light not only on the ongoing battle between alternative and organized medicine, but also on the persistence of quackery—and gullibility—in American culture.

Annotation This is the largely forgotten story of the rubella (German measles) epidemic of the early 1960s & how in the United States it created a national anxiety about dying, disabled & 'dangerous' babies.