Play Things: Children’s Racialized Mechanical Banks and Toys, 1880–1930

The reproduction of racism and class-based oppression are taught to children through various cultural media, including toys and games. Between 1880 and 1930, the popularity of racialized toys and banks were fear-based responses to the perceived encroachment by “foreign and exotic” migrations of African American, Chinese, Irish and Native Americans into the cultural landscape of white middle-class America. This article analyzes how artifacts associated with children, such as mechanical banks, clockwork figures, and other toys are part of a larger cultural structure that viewed race and class as inseparable, and that these objects were essential in the development of a learned habitus that exposed white middle class children in the Victorian era to a racially and class oriented world. We argue that these objects reflect both the times in which they were made, and illuminate the relationship between adults and a newfound emphasis on children and childhood, in which toys serves as symbolic mediators of culture.     

Priming political trust: Evidence from an experiment

Political trust is one of the most researched areas in political science. Yet little is known about what causes political trust to vary. Past research has relied almost solely on survey data, and focused on exploring the correlation between political trust and various micro- and macro-level factors. This research note reports the findings from an experiment designed to examine the causal effect of one of the most commonly cited causes of political trust: political probity. Results show that political trust and trust in specific institutions change when participants read an article about political probity and complete a word-association task. The treatment we used is low cost, straightforward and may be used by other researchers to alter political trust in experiments.     

National Factor Markets and the Macroeconomic Context for Environmental Destruction in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper discusses Amazonian agricultural development with emphasis on the interrelations between regional conditions and the economic context represented by the national economy. The extreme abundance of land relative to complementary factors, together with the position of the region as a price taker in both factor and output markets, create the conditions for environmentally destructive expansion of cultivation at the extensive margin. It is argued that policies to promote a more ecologically sensitive pattern of development must take into account these links with the larger Brazilian economy and society as well as conditions within the region itself.     

Adventures in Naboth's Vineyard

Books reviewed in this article:
Atkins, Pope G. and Wilson, Larman C. The Dominican Republic and the United States: From Imperialism to Transnationalism     

Governing population, public health, and malaria in the early Turkish republic

In the early Turkish republic of the 1920s, population was a central question of concern for the leadership of the Kemalist state. This article focuses on how a demographic discourse concerning population – in terms both numerical and medical – provided a basis for emerging programs in public health, confronting the very real threats posed by disease. Employing the example of the nascent republic’s anti-malarial campaigns, this study thus examines the discursive, cartographic, and legislative measures employed in combating this widespread disease in the wider contexts of nation-building. In doing so, it traces one vital trajectory of the development of modern governmentality (i.e., that of public health) in the case of Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the wartime slowing of state investments (due to national defense priorities), the post-World War II infusions of foreign aid and the incorporation of DDT in confronting malaria.     

Late Archaic wells on the Gila River Indian Community,Arizona

Eight prehistoric wells dug to a depth of ∼2 m below the modern ground surface were found in the alluvial sediments of McClellan Wash on Gila River Indian Community in southern Arizona. Charcoal from the sediments filling the wells yielded radiocarbon ages of ∼1000 B.C. The time in which wells were dug coincides with a period of general regional aridity and high ENSO activity in the American Southwest. Digging to access water may have occurred in response to period(s) of resource uncertainty, or as a logistical activity that engaged increasingly resource-tethered Late Archaic/Early Agricultural populations. These activities laid the foundation for agricultural practices that eventually became the dominant mode of subsistence in the low-lying areas of the Sonoran Desert.