This paper explores the American Girl book series and its relation to the history of American education and the school's role in the creation of the ideal American girl. Focused on the Kirsten Larson series of American Girl books, this paper explores how the settler grammars that characterize Kirsten's encounters with an "Indian girl"…

The number of Black suburbs has expanded since the 1960s, however, research on gender and how Black women contribute to their formation is understudied. Grounded in an intersectional framework, this article places women at the center of the analysis of Black suburban life. Using a multisite ethnography conducted during the Great Recession, I make…

This article examines the life and work of Mary J. Serrano (1840-1923), a successful translator and popularizer of Spanish literature in late nineteenth-century United States. It provides a short biography of Serrano and focuses on her work for the Spanish Legation in in Washington D.C. during the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98), a period of…

The 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, a year after being passed by Congress. It extended the right to vote to many women, but not all. Excluded from this landmark constitutional victory were women like Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who was born in Guangzhou (then Canton), China, in 1896, but who immigrated to New York as a child. From 1882 to…

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich…

Historical memory is constantly being reframed though images and objects presented as capturing the past. In the USA, the nineteenth-century country or one-room school has come to symbolize an authentic American experience and seen as evidence of the lost pure and simpler time. Central to the work of the rural school was the teacher, and in the…

Through its analysis of the rhetorical means by which the US Congress overcame jurisdictional objections to federal action on the issue of woman suffrage, this essay argues that the stasis of jurisdiction operates as a mode of assemblage of discourses, institutions, and populations. In Congress, the woman suffrage issue helped re-organize federal…

Swiss emigres and Mennonite missionaries Marie and Rodolphe Petter were welcomed into Cheyenne Chief Red Moon's band in Oklahoma. Away from the interference of other whites, they decided to live like their new neighbors and pitched a tipi before building a more substantial structure. There they continued their studies of the Cheyenne language and…

Analyzes statistics on the characteristics of immigrants to the United States, by sex. Discusses reasons for the predominance of women among immigrants since 1930, and presents a statistical groundwork for future analyses of the implications of this predominance. Includes numerous statistical charts and tables. (KH)

Today, the Census Bureau compiles extensive information every year about the people and the economy of the United States. That is how the authors know that in 2006 the United States is going to reach an extraordinary milestone--300 million people. In this article, the authors discuss the "now and then" of the U.S. society. The authors…

In 1919 the "Jewish Daily Forward" published in New York City was the leading Yiddish language newspaper in the world. This analysis explores how the themes of socialism, feminism, and Americanization were defined and developed on the women's pages, and what advice and information the page transmitted to its immigrant readers about each…

Describes the history of the Pilipino Americans in the United States as the story of "old timers of the Sacada," the first wave of immigrants; of the second wave, the veterans of World War II and their families; and the story of the "brain drain," the third wave of immigrants. Asserts that Pilipino Americans face many problems, including subtle…

As a student in the Chicana/o studies program at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), Jesse S. Arrieta decided that her classroom instruction about the culture and history of people of Mexican origin wasn't enough. Arrieta, 27, who graduated from UTEP in 2002 before earning a master's in American history from the University of California,…

Historians have traditionally either denied the existence or distorted the experience of women of color in U.S. history. As a result, Chinese American women, despite the fact that they have been in the United States since 1834, have remained nearly invisible. The Chinese Women of America Research Project embarked on an ambitious journey four years…

The ideal of the proper family mealtime, originally devised by the Victorian middle class, gained cultural hegemony in modern America, but with the partial exception of the 1950s, only a minority of American families could ever live by it.