Department of History and Art History Faculty Research

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    A Human Being, and Not a Mere Social Factor: Catholic Strategies for Dealing with Sterilization Statutes in the 1920s
    (Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History, 2004-06) Leon, Sharon
    This article reviews the developing strategies of Catholic opposition to state laws for compulsory sterilization of so-called ‘feeble-minded’ residents of state institutions during the 1920s. In 1927 the Supreme Court, in its landmark decision Buck v. Bell, affirmed the constitutionality of such laws. This article traces the work of Catholic moral theologians, such as John A. Ryan, and representatives of various lay organizations in opposing such laws and educating Catholic laity on the natural law issues in the debate. In 1930 the National Catholic Welfare Conference published four pamphlets in a series entitled ‘Problems of Mental Deficiency’ that provided a full compliment of medical, legal, and moral objections to the laws. On 31 December 1930 Pope Pius XI in his encyclical ‘Casti Connubii’ provided an authoritative pronouncement on eugenics and sterilization that reaffirmed Catholic opposition to eugenics policy initiatives.
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    A Queer Wall in the Head: Using Oral Histories to Map Gay Desire Across Cold War Germany
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022-10) Huneke, Samuel Clowes
    This article uses oral histories to examine divergences in how gay men from East and West Germany remembered the sexuality of their youths. Finding that East German men recalled their sexual exploits in far more detail than did West German men, the article argues that this divergence is the result of a complex interlacing of factors. Ultimately, the article contends that these factors reveal a queer wall in the head that continues to delimit how gay German men understand their actions, their pasts, and their identities.
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    Age of Consent Law and the Making of Modern Childhood in New York City, 1886-1921
    (Oxford University Press, 2002) Robertson, Stephen
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    Build, Analyse, and Generalise: Community Transcription of the Papers of the War Department and the Development of Scripto
    (Ashgate, 2014) Leon, Sharon
    RRCHNM’s foray into community transcription with the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 and the development of Scripto offers some significant lessons for cultural heritage institutions and professionals who want to engage with their constituents in meaningful ways. Primarily, we gained a dedicated and engaged audience for PWD, and a tremendous insight into their motivations. Equally important, the development process for the generalized tool, and its role in the larger ecosystem of open-source software that enables widespread user participation in cultural heritage projects, points to viable directions for the development of subsequent tools. Together this case study of PWD and the story of the creation of Scripto suggest that a wide range of cultural heritage organizations can launch and sustain lightweight transcription projects that encourage increased engagement with core audiences.
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    Disorderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem
    (University of Texas Press, 2012-09) Robertson, Stephen; White, Shane; Garton, Stephen; White, Graham
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    Harlem in Black and White: Mapping Race and Place in the 1920s
    (Sage, 2013-09) Robertson, Stephen; White, Shane; Garton, Stephen
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    Hopelessly Entangled in Nordic Pre-Suppositions: Catholic Participation in the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s
    (Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2004) Leon, Sharon
    This article examines the involvement of U.S. Catholics in the American Eugenics Society during the 1920′s. While Catholics were often opponents of eugenics, John A. Ryan and John Montgomery Cooper, both Catholic priests and intellectuals, were prominent in the debate within the Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen of the American Eugenics Society. Ryan and Cooper repeatedly examined the scientific bases for eugenicists’ claims and sought to shift the movement away from its racist and classist elements. Soon after Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii formalized Catholic opposition to eugenics and other efforts to control reproduction, such as birth control, Ryan and Cooper finally broke with the AES.
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    Horror vérité: politics and history in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017)
    (Continuum, 2018) Landsberg, Landsberg
    This essay proposes that certain cinematic conventions of the horror film are uniquely suited to bring into visibility everyday, endemic horror – a horror that many in US society refuse to see. I call this use of horror, ‘horror vérité’ or truthful horror. As a form of politically inflected horror, it has potential to perform the kind of materialist history that Walter Benjamin theorizes, in which the historical materialist ‘appropriate[es] a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’ in order to recast the present. Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, is an example of ‘horror vérité’, because it uses the mechanics of the horror genre to expose actually existing racism, to render newly visible the very real, but often masked, racial landscape of a professedly liberal post-racial America. The film analysis considers: first, the use of the conventions of horror to expose everyday racial violence; second, its reliance on a dialectic of sleeping (hypnosis) and waking up (provoked by photography); and third, its performing of the historical materialism Benjamin describes, in which the jarring confrontation of the past and the present radically alters the landscape of the present.
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    Institutional Review Blog
    (2014-02-24) Schrag, Zachary
    This is an archive of Institutional Review Blog (www.institutionalreviewblog.com), a blog that seeks to inform the debate over IRB review of research in the humanities and social sciences by collecting breaking news, commentary, and background information on the subject. Institutional Review Blog is maintained by Zachary M. Schrag, Professor of History, George Mason University. The first file includes all text of the blog from its founding in December 2006 through 28 August 2012. The second file begins with the next entry, 31 August 2012, and continues through the end of January 2017. That end point was chosen to include the blog's coverage of the revised U.S. regulations on human subjects research, published in the Federal Register on 19 January 2017.
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    Institutionalizing Knowledge in Washington's Early Republic
    (2015-12-18) Oberle, George D., III
    In Democracy in America, Alexander de Tocqueville observed that “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made.” Tocqueville noted that Americans formed numerous associations for distinct purposes and whose goals included establishing schools and churches, and spreading knowledge through the publication of information of interest to like-minded citizens. The residents of the District of Columbia, America’s federal city, sought to create a thriving metropolis crowded with a vibrant and extensive community of scholars. Many hoped a national institution would materialize to promote the expansion of knowledge and learning. This paper explores the purpose and composition of the myriad societies in the early federal city, especially scientific, literary and proto-professional societies, 1815-1850. This paper examines the shared relationships between these groups using computational tools and methods to develop network analysis using society membership lists.
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    References for The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro
    (2014-06-11) Schrag, Zachary
    For production reasons, the paperback edition of The Great Society Subway does not include footnote or endnote references for the new preface. While I tried to make clear in the main text of the preface the main sources of my information, I offer complete citations here for those who are interested.
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    Scholars as Students Introductory Digital History Training for Mid - Career Historians
    (2015-09-01) Leon, Sharon; Brennan, Sheila A.
    Mid-career college and university faculty generally have achieved a significant level of expertise in their field of study. At the same time, research suggests that experts may not be so clear about every step of the cognitive work they undertake to attack a new research question or problem. In fact, the more expert an individual is, the less easy it is for that person to surface their process and articulate it for someone else. Only by being consciously pushed to consider, reconsider, and articulate these methodological assumptions, can we open a flexible space for new approaches that can complicate and compliment existing habits of mind. Together, these ideas make up some of the underlying approach that the team at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University (Mason) took to design and in conducting the Doing Digital History (Doing DH) two-week intensive summer institute for mid-career American historians. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities as an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities in August 2014 and under the direction of Sharon M. Leon and Sheila A. Brennan, the effort brought together twenty-three mid-career digital novices to learn the theories and methods of digital history. Experts in their field of American history, these novices in digital methodologies were nervous, unsure of their own abilities, and intimidated by digital history. They all left as confident digital ambassadors with new skills, insights, and motivation to pursue digital work and become active participants in the growing community of digital humanists.
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    Seduction, Sexual Violence and Marriage in New York City, 1886-1955
    (University of Illinois Press, 2006) Robertson, Stephen
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    Shifting the Scene of the Crime: Sodomy and the American History of Sexual Violence
    (University of Texas Press, 2010-05) Robertson, Stephen
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