William Graebner

State University of New York at Fredonia | SUNY Fredonia · Department of History, Emeritus

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that there was no postwar communal culture of silence among American Jews with regard to the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Americans, and Hollywood’s filmmakers, were reluctant to engage and present the most horrific aspects of the Nazi death camps, including the barbarous treatment of camp inmates and the obscenities...

From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers: The Social Ecology of An Industrial Union, 1869-1897. By AurandHarold W.. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1971. Pp. x + 221. $10.00. - Volume 47 Issue 1 - William Graebner

The Work Ethic in Industrial America: 1850–1920. By RodgersDaniel T.. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Pp. xv + 300. $15.00. - Volume 53 Issue 1 - William Graebner

Freud brought the term sublimation into psychoanalytic discourse in an 1897 letter to Wilhelm Fliess, in which he described culture and the libidinal drive as essentially antagonistic and conceptualized sublimation as a filter for primal memories. However, the concept, as well as the word, has significant pre-Freudian origins. The idea that the con...

The Buffalo Skyway, a mile long and 110 feet high, opened in 1955 in an atmosphere of triumph and celebration, city planners certain that the enormous structure would invigorate the area's economy by eliminating troublesome rail and automobile bottlenecks between the city's downtown core and lakeshore plants and factories to the southwest. Today, t...

The poster of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn scootering around Rome in William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953) has been a best seller in the Eternal City for years, probably decades. It has a lot to do with the Vespa they're riding, of course, but Robert R. Shandley's delightful and perceptive Runaway Romances offers a more complex understanding not...

Judith E. Smith's rich, fascinating, and important book explores two decades of stories—novels, plays, films, and television programs, many of them written or produced by those with ties to the 1930s Group Theatre or similar leftist cultural projects, and most of them taking the family as their subject. What the stories share, Smith argues, is an i...

G. Stanley Hall was an advocate of sex-segregated schooling long after most Americans had accepted coeducation. His position was based in part on personal experience: observations of his father and mother, a repressed and guilt-ridden boyhood sexuality, and his conviction that his own career success was a product of sublimated sexual desire, of ero...

Journal of Social History 37.4 (2004) 1090-1092 This fine book is the latest installment in a small but vital revisionist perspective on postwar American suburbs and the lives of the women who lived in them. Until quite recently, the academic and intellectual consensus—shaped early on by C. Wright Mills, Lewis Mumford, and especially Betty Friedan—...

The Cover illustration for the May 1916 issue of the American School Board Journal presents a scene that could have taken place at most of the hundreds of high school lunchrooms recently established in the nation's larger cities. In the drawing, two well-dressed young men glance upward from their seats at a shy but fetching young woman. As she move...

Journal of Women's History 13.3 (2001) 156-157 When I last taught the second half of the American history survey course, I began by emphasizing that the late nineteenth century was a moment of flux and possibility, a moment in which woman suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton could envision a "triple power" of blacks, women, and white workers, labor le...

Reviews in American History - Volume 26, Number 3, September 1998

By the summer of 1929, Norman Rockwell was a full-fledged success. At age thirty-five, he had been creating covers for the Saturday Evening Post for thirteen years. A generation of American youth had grown up beguiled by his illustrations for Boys' Life, St. Nicholas, and the Boy Scouts' calendar. For more than a decade, Rockwell's artistry had hel...

In this multidisciplinary work, John Jordan traces the significant influence on American politics of a most unlikely hero: the professional engineer. Jordan shows how technical triumphs - bridges, radio broadcasting, airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, and electrical power - inspired social and political reformers to borrow the language and logic...

While some changes improved the work environment as technological progress transformed industries, by the turn of the century the workplace was often dangerous and unhealthful. Occupational hazards raised ethical issues of freedom of choice for workers, managers, employers, and society. Graebner discusses the rationales commonly offered--that worke...

A speech made to an early meeting of the newly formed Commission on College Retirement recommends that the commission abandon the approach to retirement as an instrument of educational and social reform and concentrate instead on making the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund competitive and protecting facult...

Arguing that the American bituminous coal industry suffered from “excessive competition,” this study traces the industry's repeated failures to control output or prices, whether by various kinds of trade associations, mergers, or by attempts to secure government sanctions for cooperation. Although an over-zealous Department of Justice must bear som...