Separation of church and state has long been viewed as a cornerstone of American democracy. At the same time, the concept has remained highly controversial in the popular culture and law. Much of the debate over the application and meaning of the phrase focuses on its historical antecedents. This article briefly examines the historical origins of the concept and its subsequent evolutions in the nineteenth century.
591-593 of 593 Results
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The Separation of Church and State in the United States
Steven K. Green
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Food and Agriculture in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Gabriella M. Petrick
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Please check back later for the full article.
American food in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is characterized by abundance. Unlike the hardscrabble existence of many earlier Americans, the “Golden Age of Agriculture” brought the bounty produced in fields across the United States to both consumers and producers. While the “Golden Age” technically ended as World War I began, larger quantities of relatively inexpensive food became the norm for most Americans as more fresh foods, rather than staple crops, made their way to urban centers and rising real wages made it easier to purchase these comestibles.
The application of science and technology to food production from the field to the kitchen cabinet, or even more crucially the refrigerator by the mid-1930s, reflects the changing demographics and affluence of American society as much as it does the inventiveness of scientists and entrepreneurs. Perhaps the single most important symbol of overabundance in the United States is the postwar Green Revolution. The vast increase in agricultural production based on improved agronomics, provoked both praise and criticism as exemplified by Time magazine’s critique of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in September 1962 or more recently the politics of genetically modified foods.
Reflecting that which occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, food production, politics, and policy at the turn of the twenty-first century has become a proxy for larger ideological agendas and the fractured nature of class in the United States. Battles over the following issues speak to which Americans have access to affordable, nutritious food: organic versus conventional farming, antibiotic use in meat production, dissemination of food stamps, contraction of farm subsidies, the rapid growth of “dollar stores,” alternative diets (organic, vegetarian, vegan, paleo, etc.), and, perhaps most ubiquitous of all, the “obesity epidemic.” These arguments carry moral and ethical values as each side deems some foods and diets virtuous, and others corrupting. While Americans have long held a variety of food ideologies that meld health, politics, and morality, exemplified by Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, among others, newer constructions of these ideologies reflect concerns over the environment, rural Americans, climate change, self-determination, and the role of government in individual lives. In other words, food can be used as a lens to understand larger issues in American society while at the same time allowing historians to explore the intimate details of everyday life.
Article
Racial Diversity and Suburban Politics in 20th-Century Los Angeles
Hillary Jenks
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Please check back later for the full article.
Despite its cultivated reputation as the nation’s “white spot” in the early 20th century, Southern California was in fact home to diverse and numerous communities of color, some composed of relatively new immigrants and some long predating the era of Anglo settlement and conquest. In the years following World War II, the region engaged in suburban home construction on a mass scale and became a global symbol of what Dolores Hayden called the economically democratic but racially exclusive “sitcom suburb,” from the tax-lowering mechanism of its “Lakewood plan” to the car-friendly “Googie” architecture of the San Fernando Valley. Existing suburban communities of color, such as the colonias of agricultural laborers, were engulfed by new settlements, while upwardly mobile African Americans, Latinas/Latinos, and Asian Americans sought access to the expanding suburban dream of homeownership, with varying degrees of success. The political responses to suburban diversity in metropolitan Los Angeles ranged from Anglo resistance and flight to multiracial political coalitions and the incorporation of people of color at multiple levels of local government. The ascent by a number of suburbanites of color to positions of local and regional political power from the 1960s through the 1980s sometimes exposed intra-ethnic discord and sometimes the fragility of cross-race coalition as multiple actors sought to protect property values and to pursue economic security within the competitive constraints of shrinking municipal resources, aging infrastructure, and a receding suburban fringe. As a result, political conflicts over crime, immigration, education, and inequality emerged in many Los Angeles County suburbs by the 1970s and later in the more distant corporate suburbs of Orange, Ventura, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties. The suburbanization of poverty, the role of suburbs as immigrant gateways, and the emergence of “majority-minority” suburbs—all national trends by the late 1990s and the first decade of the 20th century—were evident far earlier in the Los Angeles metropolitan region, where diverse suburbanites negotiated social and economic crises and innovated political responses.