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Closer to the Masses
Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers
Matthew Lenoe
Harvard University Press, 2004

In this provocative book, Matthew Lenoe traces the origins of Stalinist mass culture to newspaper journalism in the late 1920s. In examining the transformation of Soviet newspapers during the New Economic Policy and the First Five Year Plan, Lenoe tells a dramatic story of purges, political intrigues, and social upheaval.

Under pressure from the party leadership to mobilize society for the monumental task of industrialization, journalists shaped a master narrative for Soviet history and helped create a Bolshevik identity for millions of new communists. Everyday labor became an epic battle to modernize the USSR, a fight not only against imperialists from outside, but against shirkers and saboteurs within. Soviet newspapermen mobilized party activists by providing them with an identity as warrior heroes battling for socialism. Yet within the framework of propaganda directives, the rank-and-file journalists improvised in ways that ultimately contributed to the creation of a culture. The images and metaphors crafted by Soviet journalists became the core of Stalinist culture in the mid-1930s, and influenced the development of socialist realism.

Deeply researched and lucidly written, this book is a major contribution to the literature on Soviet culture and society.

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Culling the Masses
The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas
David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín
Harvard University Press, 2014

Culling the Masses questions the widely held view that in the long run democracy and racism cannot coexist. David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín show that democracies were the first countries in the Americas to select immigrants by race, and undemocratic states the first to outlaw discrimination. Through analysis of legal records from twenty-two countries between 1790 and 2010, the authors present a history of the rise and fall of racial selection in the Western Hemisphere.

The United States led the way in using legal means to exclude “inferior” ethnic groups. Starting in 1790, Congress began passing nationality and immigration laws that prevented Africans and Asians from becoming citizens, on the grounds that they were inherently incapable of self-government. Similar policies were soon adopted by the self-governing colonies and dominions of the British Empire, eventually spreading across Latin America as well.

Undemocratic regimes in Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Cuba reversed their discriminatory laws in the 1930s and 1940s, decades ahead of the United States and Canada. The conventional claim that racism and democracy are antithetical—because democracy depends on ideals of equality and fairness, which are incompatible with the notion of racial inferiority—cannot explain why liberal democracies were leaders in promoting racist policies and laggards in eliminating them. Ultimately, the authors argue, the changed racial geopolitics of World War II and the Cold War was necessary to convince North American countries to reform their immigration and citizenship laws.

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Defending the Masses
A Progressive Lawyer's Battles for Free Speech
Eric B. Easton
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Free speech and freedom of the press were often suppressed amid the social turbulence of the Progressive Era and World War I. As muckrakers, feminists, pacifists, anarchists, socialists, and communists were arrested or censored for their outspoken views, many of them turned to a Manhattan lawyer named Gilbert Roe to keep them in business and out of jail.

Roe was the principal trial lawyer of the Free Speech League—a precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union. His cases involved such activists as Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair, John Reed, and Eugene Debs, as well as the socialist magazine The Masses and the New York City Teachers Union. A friend of Wisconsin's progressive senator Robert La Follette since their law partnership as young men, Roe defended "Fighting Bob" when the Senate tried to expel him for opposing America's entry into World War I.

In articulating and upholding Americans' fundamental right to free expression against charges of obscenity, libel, espionage, sedition, or conspiracy during turbulent times, Roe was rarely successful in the courts. But his battles illuminate the evolution of free speech doctrine and practice in an era when it was under heavy assault. His greatest victory, including the 1917 decision by Judge Learned Hand in The Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, is still influential today.
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Educating the Masses
The Unfolding History of Black School Administrators in Arkansas, 1900-2000
C. Calvin Smith
University of Arkansas Press, 2003
Under segregation and in its aftermath, black teachers and principals created havens of dignity and uplift for their students and communities. In Arkansas, where even education for white children has always been underfunded, the work of these administrators has been particularly heroic. This book, researched and prepared by the Research Committee of the Retired Educators of Little Rock and Other Public Schools, outlines the challenges to generations of black administrators in the state, and it maps their achievements. It also offers the first reference guide to the personnel who have educated generations of black children through the most extreme of circumstances.
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Elites, Masses, and Modernization in Latin America, 1850–1930
By E. Bradford Burns and Thomas E. Skidmore
University of Texas Press, 1979

The interactions between the elites and the lower classes of Latin America are explored from the divergent perspectives of three eminent historians in this volume. The result is a counterbalance of viewpoints on the urban and the rural, the rich and the poor, and the Europeanized and the traditional of Latin America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

E. Bradford Burns advances the view that two cultures were in conflict in nineteenth-century Latin America: that of the modernizing, European-oriented elite, and that of the “common folk” of mixed racial background who lived close to the earth. Thomas E. Skidmore discusses the emerging field of labor history in twentieth-century Latin America, suggesting that the historical roots of today’s exacerbated tensions lie in the secular struggle of army against workers that he describes. In the introduction, Richard Graham takes issue with both authors on certain basic premises and points out implications of their essays for the understanding of North American as well as Latin American history.

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Heretics and Hellraisers
Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917
By Margaret C. Jones
University of Texas Press, 1993

The Masses was the most dynamic and influential left-wing magazine of the early twentieth century, a touchstone for understanding radical thought and social movements in the United States during that era. As a magazine that supported feminist issues, it played a crucial role in shaping public discourse about women's concerns. Women editors, fiction writers, poets, and activists like Mary Heaton Vorse, Louise Bryant, Adriana Spadoni, Elsie Clews Parsons, Inez Haynes Gillmore, and Helen Hull contributed as significantly to the magazine as better-known male figures.

In this major revisionist work, Margaret C. Jones calls for reexamination of the relevance of Masses feminism to that of the 1990s. She explores women contributors' perspectives on crucial issues: patriarchy, birth control, the labor movement, woman suffrage, pacifism, and ethnicity. The book includes numerous examples of the writings and visual art of Masses women and a series of biographical/bibliographical sketches designed to aid other researchers.

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The Lucca Choirbook
Lucca, Archivio di Stato, MS 238; Lucca, Archivio Arcivescovile, MS 97; Pisa, Archivo Arcivescovile, Biblioteca Maffi, Cartella 11/III
Edited and with an Introduction and Inventory by Reinhard Strohm
University of Chicago Press, 2009

More than forty years ago in the state archives of Lucca, Italy, musicologist Reinhard Strohm noticed that bindings on some of the books were unusual: they consisted of the pages of a centuries-old music manuscript. In the following years, Strohm worked with the archivists to remove these leaves and reassemble as much as possible of the original manuscript, a major cultural recovery now known as The Lucca Choirbook.

The recovered volume comprises what remains of a gigantic cathedral codex  commissioned in Bruges around 1463 and containing English, Franco-Flemish, and Italian sacred music of the fifteenth century—including works by the celebrated composers Guillaume Du Fay and Henricus Isaac.

This facsimile of the choirbook includes all the known leaves, ordered according to their proper placement in the original codex. In the introduction, Strohm tells the fascinating story of this choirbook, identifying its early users and reconstructing its travel from Bruges to Lucca.

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Masses and Man
Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality
George L. Mosse
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
In fourteen essays that speak to the full breadth of George L. Mosse’s intellectual horizons and scholarly legacy, Masses and Man explores radical nationalism, fascism, and Jewish modernity in twentieth-century Europe. Breaking from the conventions of historical analysis, Mosse shows that “secular religions” like fascism cannot be understood only as the products of socioeconomic or intellectual histories but rather must be approached first and foremost as cultural phenomena.

Masses and Man comprises three parts. The first lays out a cultural history of nationalism, essentially the first of its kind, emphasizing the importance of sacred expressions like myths, symbols, and rituals as appropriated in a political context. The second zeroes in on fascism’s most dramatic irruptions in European history in the rise of Italian Fascism and the Nazi Party in Germany, elucidating these as not just political movements but also cultural and even aesthetic ones. The third part considers nationalism and fascism from the particular standpoint of German Jews.

Taken in full, the volume offers an eloquent summation of Mosse’s groundbreaking insights into European nationalism, fascism, and Jewish history in the twentieth century. A new critical introduction by Enzo Traverso helpfully situates Mosse’s work in context and exposes the many ways in which Masses and Man, first published in 1980, remains relevant today.
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Masses and Motets
A Francesca Fruscella Mystery
Jeffrey DeShell
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A crime novel loosely based on the masses and songs of the 17th century Flemish composer Pierre de la Rue

Masses and Motets is a tale composed of four basic interwoven threads, corresponding to the four-part choral writing of Pierre de la Rue’s service music. The first thread comes from the diaries of a recently murdered priest, Father Andrea Vidal, former secretary to the notorious Father Marcial Maciel. The second thread is the mystery story, a police procedural focusing on the efforts of Denver detective Francesca Fruscella to solve the murder and retrieve Vidal’s diary. The third strand is the story of Father Signelli, a priest sent from the Vatican to “fix” the murder. And the fourth strand explores the best and worst of Catholic culture: art and music created by Catholic artists and sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

Vidal’s narrative is the story of a priest who systematically, sincerely, and hopefully tries to destroy his very self through sex, drinking, and drugs in order to get closer to God. Fruscella’s story is that of a middle-aged, female detective trying to solve a ghastly murder while constantly battling the sexism of the Catholic Church. Signelli’s tale is that of an older career priest who, in doing the bidding of his superiors to fix problems that threaten the order of the Church, has perhaps compromised his own soul. By no means a simple narrative of wicked priests, this is a story of men who desperately want to believe, as well as a story of what this belief might shelter and cost.
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Modernity for the Masses
Antonio Bonet's Dreams for Buenos Aires
By Ana María León
University of Texas Press, 2021

2022 PROSE Award Finalist in Architecture and Urban Planning
2022 Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Book Award, Honorable Mention

Throughout the early twentieth century, waves of migration brought working-class people to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This prompted a dilemma: Where should these restive populations be situated relative to the city’s spatial politics? Might housing serve as a tool to discipline their behavior?

Enter Antonio Bonet, a Catalan architect inspired by the transatlantic modernist and surrealist movements. Ana María León follows Bonet's decades-long, state-backed quest to house Buenos Aires's diverse and fractious population. Working with totalitarian and populist regimes, Bonet developed three large-scale housing plans, each scuttled as a new government took over. Yet these incomplete plans—Bonet's dreams—teach us much about the relationship between modernism and state power.

Modernity for the Masses finds in Bonet's projects the disconnect between modern architecture’s discourse of emancipation and the reality of its rationalizing control. Although he and his patrons constantly glorified the people and depicted them in housing plans, Bonet never consulted them. Instead he succumbed to official and elite fears of the people's latent political power. In careful readings of Bonet's work, León discovers the progressive erasure of surrealism's psychological sensitivity, replaced with an impulse, realized in modernist design, to contain the increasingly empowered population.

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Moving the Masses
Urban Public Transit in New York
Charles W. Cheape
Harvard University Press, 1980

The development of public transit is an integral part of both business and urban history in late nineteenth-century America. The author begins this study in 1880, when public transportation in large American cities was provided by numerous, competing horse-car companies with little or no public control of operation. By 1912, when the study concludes, a monopoly in each city operated a coordinated network of electric-powered streetcars and, in the largest cities, subways, which were regulated by city and state agencies. The history of transit development reflects two dominant themes: the constant pressure of rapid growth in city population and area and the requirements of the technology developed to service that growth.

The case studies here include three of the four cites that had rapid transit during this period. Each case study examines, first, the mechanization of surface lines and, second, the implementation of rapid transit. New York requires an additional chapter on steam-powered, elevated railroads, for early population growth there required rapid transit before the invention of electric technology. Urban transit enterprise is viewed within a clear and familiar pattern of evolution—the pattern of the last half of the nineteenth century, when industries with expanding markets and complex, costly processes of production and distribution adopted new strategy and structure, administered by a new class of professional managers.

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The Nationalization of the Masses
Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich
George L. Mosse
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
First published in 1975, The Nationalization of the Masses is George L. Mosse’s major statement about political symbols and the means of their diffusion. Focusing on Germany and, to a lesser degree, France and Italy, Mosse analyzes the role of symbols in fueling mass politics, mass movements, and nationalism in a way that is broadly applicable and as relevant today as it was almost fifty years ago. In this analysis Mosse introduces terms like “secular religion,” “political liturgy,” “national mystique,” “the new politics,” and “the aesthetics of politics” that are now standard in studies of nationalism and fascism, demonstrating the importance of his cultural, anthropologically informed lens to contemporary discourse. This new edition contains a critical introduction by Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University, contextualizing Mosse’s research and exploring its powerful influence on subsequent generations of historians.
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No Sanctuary
Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses
Stephen Lane
University Press of New England, 2018
School can be a special sort of nightmare for LGBTQ youth, who are sometimes targets of verbal or physical harassment with nowhere to turn for support. No Sanctuary tells the inspiring story of a mostly unseen rescue attempt by a small group of teachers who led the push to make schools safer for these at-risk students. Their efforts became the blueprint for Massachusetts’s education policy and a nationwide movement, resulting in one of the most successful and far-reaching school reform efforts in recent times. Stephen Lane sheds light on this largely overlooked but critical series of reforms, placing the Safe Schools movement within the context of the larger gay rights movement and highlighting its key role in fostering greater acceptance of LGBTQ individuals throughout society.
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The Rise of the Masses
Spontaneous Mobilization and Contentious Politics
Benjamin Abrams
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An insightful examination of how intersecting individual motivations and social structures mobilize spontaneous mass protests.

Between 15 and 26 million Americans participated in protests surrounding the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others as part of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, which is only one of the most recent examples of an immense mobilization of citizens around a cause. In The Rise of the Masses, sociologist Benjamin Abrams addresses why and how people spontaneously protest, riot, and revolt en masse. While most uprisings of such a scale require tremendous resources and organizing, this book focuses on cases where people with no connection to organized movements take to the streets, largely of their own accord. Looking to the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Uprising, as well as the historical case of the French Revolution, Abrams lays out a theory of how and why massive mobilizations arise without the large-scale planning that usually goes into staging protests.

Analyzing a breadth of historical and regional cases that provide insight into mass collective behavior, Abrams draws on first-person interviews and archival sources to argue that people organically mobilize when a movement speaks to their pre-existing dispositions and when structural and social conditions make it easier to get involved—what Abrams terms affinity-convergence theory. Shedding a light on the drivers behind large spontaneous protests, The Rise of the Masses offers a significant theory that could help predict movements to come.
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Science, Bread, and Circuses
Folkloristic Essays on Science for the Masses
Gregory Schrempp
Utah State University Press, 2014

In Science, Bread, and Circuses, Gregory Schrempp brings a folkloristic viewpoint to the topic of popular science, calling attention to the persistence of folkloric form, idiom, and worldview within the increasingly important dimension of popular consciousness defined by the impact of science.

Schrempp considers specific examples of texts in which science interpreters employ folkloric tropes—myths, legends, epics, proverbs, spectacles, and a variety of gestures from religious traditions—to lend credibility and appeal to their messages. In each essay he explores an instance of science popularization rooted in the quotidian round: variations of proverb formulas in monumental measurements, invocations of science heroes like saints or other inspirational figures, the battle of mythos and logos in parenting and academe, the meme's involvement in quasi-religious treatments of the problem of evil, and a range of other tropes of folklore drafted to serve the exposition of science.

Science, Bread, and Circuses places the relationship of science and folklore at the very center of folkloristic inquiry by exploring a range of attempts to rephrase and thus domesticate scientific findings and claims in folklorically imbued popular forms.


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Selling to the Masses
Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930
Marjorie L. Hilton
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012

Marjorie L. Hilton presents a captivating history of consumer culture in Russia from the 1880s to the early 1930s. She highlights the critical role of consumerism as a vehicle for shaping class and gender identities, modernity, urbanism, and as a mechanism of state power in the transition from tsarist autocracy to Soviet socialism.
      Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russia witnessed a rise in mass production, consumer goods, advertising, and new retail venues such as arcades and department stores. These mirrored similar developments in other European countries and reflected a growing quest for leisure activities, luxuries, and a modern lifestyle. As Hilton reveals, retail commerce played a major role in developing Russian public culture—it affected celebrations of religious holidays, engaged diverse groups of individuals, defined behaviors and rituals of city life, inspired new interpretations of masculinity and femininity, and became a visible symbol of state influence and provision.
      Through monarchies, revolution, civil war, and monumental changes in the political sphere, Russia’s distinctive culture of consumption was contested and recreated. Leaders of all stripes continued to look to the “commerce of exchange” as a key element in appealing to the masses, garnering political support, and promoting a modern nation.
      Hilton follows the evolution of retailing and retailers alike, from crude outdoor stalls to elite establishments; through the competition of private versus state-run stores during the NEP; and finally to a system of total state control, indifferent workers, rationing, and shortages under a consolidating Stalinist state.

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Stewart Headlam's Radical Anglicanism
The Mass, the Masses, and the Music Hall
John Richard Orens
University of Illinois Press, 2003
Standing in stark contrast to the conservative churchmen of Victorian Britain, the Anglican clergyman Stewart Headlam was a passionately progressive reformer, a champion of the working poor--especially women --a defender of the music hall performers his colleagues attacked as licentious, and, in short, a man of God who remained firmly and controversially engaged with the society in which he lived and worked.
This book, the first significant study of Headlam since 1928, paints a rich and complex picture of this larger-than-life man of the cloth, charting the trail he blazed across the social, political, and religious landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.
Dissatisfied from an early age with his family’s Evangelical faith, Headlam became an Anglican curate, but his political views were increasingly radicalized as he befriended working-class atheists and trade union leaders. John Richard Orens details Headlam’s repeated conflicts with the establishment figures of his faith over his defense of music hall ballet performers’ right to reveal their legs, his role in the early years of the Fabian Society, his anti-puritanism, and his passionate socialism. Headlam was even instrumental in having Oscar Wilde bailed out of prison following the writer’s arrest for “homosexual offenses.”
With this intellectual biography, Orens places Headlam’s life, beliefs, and actions in the context of the period, contributing to the ongoing debate about the proper relationship between Christianity, on the one hand, and society, sexuality, and the arts, on the other.
 
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