Books by Michael E . Staub
University of North Carolina Press, 2018
In tracing how research and experiments around such concepts as learned helplessness, deferred gr... more In tracing how research and experiments around such concepts as learned helplessness, deferred gratification, hyperactivity, and emotional intelligence migrated into popular culture and government policy, Staub reveals long-standing and widespread dissatisfaction—not least among middle-class whites—with the metric of IQ. He also documents the devastating consequences—above all for disadvantaged children of color—as efforts to undo discrimination and create enriched learning environments were recurrently repudiated and defunded. By connecting psychology, race, and public policy in a single narrative, Staub charts the paradoxes that have emerged and that continue to structure investigations of racism even into the era of contemporary neuroscientific research.
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Madness Is Civilization explores the general consensus that societal ills—from dysfunctional marr... more Madness Is Civilization explores the general consensus that societal ills—from dysfunctional marriage and family dynamics to the Vietnam War, racism, and sexism—were at the root of mental illness. Staub chronicles the surge in influence of socially attuned psychodynamic theories along with the rise of radical therapy and psychiatric survivors’ movements. He shows how the theories of antipsychiatry held unprecedented sway over an enormous range of medical, social, and political debates until a bruising backlash against these theories—part of the reaction to the perceived excesses and self-absorptions of the 1960s—effectively distorted them into caricatures. Throughout, Staub reveals that at stake in these debates of psychiatry and politics was nothing less than how to think about the institution of the family, the nature of the self, and the prospects for, and limits of, social change.
Columbia University Press, 2002
When Jewish neoconservatives burst upon the political scene, many people were surprised. Conventi... more When Jewish neoconservatives burst upon the political scene, many people were surprised. Conventional wisdom held that Jews were uniformly liberal. This book explodes the myth of a monolithic liberal Judaism. Michael Staub tells the story of the many fierce battles that raged in postwar America over what the authentically Jewish position ought to be on issues ranging from desegregation to Zionism, from Vietnam to gender relations, sexuality, and family life. Throughout the three decades after 1945, Michael Staub shows, American Jews debated the ways in which the political commitments of Jewish individuals and groups could or should be shaped by their Jewishness. Staub shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the liberal position was never the obvious winner in the contest.
Papers by Michael E . Staub
Environmental Humanities, 2023
This article seeks to sidestep the dilemma of restricted access to oil company archives through a... more This article seeks to sidestep the dilemma of restricted access to oil company archives through a close examination of a heretofore underutilized source base: the fossil fuel industry’s own trade journals and magazines. These oil and gas industry trade publications have served to envelop their readership in what we would now call an information bubble. Still, it is important to highlight the contradictory tactics that trade industry publications effectively test-marketed in the 1960s and 1970s to nullify a perception of petroleum as hazardous to public health and the natural environment. Most paradoxical was how trade publications reinvented their industry both as not a problem for the natural environment and as the solution to all and any future problems faced by that environment. Unlike any other currently available source base, Big Oil’s trade publications offer insights into the timing and triggering motivations of the industry’s shift to self-representation as stewards of nature, as well as the rapidity and multidimensional comprehensiveness of the industry’s mobilization to develop counternarratives to potential critics. And not least of all, these publications reveal the fantastical lengths to which Big Oil was willing to go in its efforts to preemptively block the research and development of electric vehicles, principally by diverting to the imaginary prospect of a gasoline-powered but nonetheless “smogless” car. This history represents an early and previously unexplored chapter in the evolution of what we have come to recognize as corporate “greenwashing.”
Environmental History, 2022
An epidemic of bubonic plague engulfed Vietnam during the 1960s. Strikingly, it has all but vanis... more An epidemic of bubonic plague engulfed Vietnam during the 1960s. Strikingly, it has all but vanished from historical accounts of the Vietnam War. By reading US military medical sources with and against writings by critics of the war and placing both in relation to scholarship in environmental history, this article seeks to recover a narrative of the bubonic plague epidemic in Vietnam. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on more familiar stories of defoliation,
Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World, edited by Shirli Gilbert and Avril Alba, 2019
"My own contention has been that it was precisely in the context of debates over Jewish involveme... more "My own contention has been that it was precisely in the context of debates over Jewish involvement in African American civil rights activism that a series of rich and complicated discussions of the possible interpretations of Holocaust memory for the American context was carried out—already since the late 1940s. Far from keeping silent about the mass murder of European Jewry—either out of horror or out of sensitivity to survivors—and far from finding it irrelevant to the US context, American Jewish commentators drew extensively on the memory of the Holocaust already in the 1940s when they analogized on its meaning for African American civil rights."
Boston Review, May 8, 2019
"Twenty-five years later, The Bell Curve's analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die. Reck... more "Twenty-five years later, The Bell Curve's analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die. Reckoning with its legacy may help redirect the conversation in urgently needed ways."
UNC Press Blog, 2018
"The difficulty is that the racial logic advanced by The Bell Curve has never really gone away. Z... more "The difficulty is that the racial logic advanced by The Bell Curve has never really gone away. Zombielike, it has ambled on. A full quarter-century after it appeared, The Bell Curve continues to exert an outsized – if often unacknowledged – influence on policy debates surrounding race and intelligence."
American Studies , 2016
In 1995, when psychologist Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence , a treatise that topp... more In 1995, when psychologist Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence , a treatise that topped bestseller lists for more than a year and went on to sell 5 million copies worldwide, he introduced a popular audience to a concept that had been circulating in psychology circles for some time. The idea that people possessed an "emotional intelligence" (EI) was not original with Gole-man. There had already been research by several psychologists, including How-ard Gardner, Peter Salovey, and Jack Mayer, that had mapped out a position that intelligences were multiple and that noncognitive skills (like self-awareness, motivation, and empathy) played as large a role, if not a far greater role, in how a person's life turned out than did that individual's IQ.1 Not incidentally, psychologists and educators who championed the centrality of noncognitive skills were posing a direct challenge not only to experts across the political spectrum who believed in the value of IQ as a metric. They were-and quite significantly-challenging right-wing (and often explicitly racialized) theories that stated how traditional IQ testing represented the most accurate predictor of a person's capacity for achievement in life. Thus, the ascent of a concept of EI in the mid-1990s proved most timely, as it imparted a powerful (implicitly antiracist) alternative to a view that cognitive intelligence trumped all other aptitudes-especially in the wake of (and fierce controversy surrounding) the 0026-3079/20 1 6/550 1-059$2. 50/0 American Studies, 55:1 (2016): 59-80 59
History of Psychology, 2016
In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, theories derived from neuropsychological research on the bi... more In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, theories derived from neuropsychological research on the bisected brain came rapidly to achieve the status of common sense in the United States and Canada, inflecting all manner of popular and academic discussion. These theories often posited that the right hemisphere was the seat of creative expression, whereas the left hemisphere housed rationality and language. This article analyzes the political and cultural implications of theories about the split brain. Gender relations, educational reform, management theory, race relations, and countercultural concepts about self-expression all quickly came to be viewed through the lens of left-brain/right-brain neuropsychological research. Yet these theories were often contradictory. On the one hand, some psychophysiological experiments premised that the brain was inherently plastic in nature, and thus self-improvement techniques (like mindfulness meditation) could be practiced to unfurl the right hemisphere's intuitive potentialities. On the other hand, other psychophysiological experiments concluded that Native Americans as well as African Americans and persons from "the East" appeared inherently to possess more highly developed right-brain talents, and therefore suffered in the context of a left-hemisphere-dominated Western society. In both instances, psychologists put neuroscientific research to political and social use. This article thus connects a story from the annals of the neurosciences to the history of psychological experimentation. It analyzes the critical impact that speculative ideas about the split brain were to have not only on the post-1960s history of psychology but also on what soon emerged after the 1990s as the social neuroscience revolution.
Institute for Advanced Study, 2008
This paper examines how the cultural obsession with madness and the anti-psychiatry movement’s cr... more This paper examines how the cultural obsession with madness and the anti-psychiatry movement’s critique of “normalcy” during the 1960s reshaped legal theory and the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and anthropology, and informed anti-war, black liberation, and sexuality and
disability rights struggles.
Radical History Review, 1999
"This essay focuses primarily on how intellectuals and leaders in the American Jewish community i... more "This essay focuses primarily on how intellectuals and leaders in the American Jewish community in the early 1960s-in a broad array of publishing venues and public forums-invoked the analogy of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry as they soughtfirst to encourage, and only later to discourage, Jewish support for African-American struggles for social justice. Reconstructing these intense debates among Jews suggests that our current assumptions about the timing of the emergence of Holocaust consciousness among American Jews are in need of revision."
Whiteness: A Critical Reader, edited by Mike Hill, 1997
"One of the many tragedies of the Hill-Thomas hearings was that the revelation that the Right has... more "One of the many tragedies of the Hill-Thomas hearings was that the revelation that the Right has learned more from the Left than the liberal middle has. Rarely has the poverty of self-styled neutralism been so apparent. Anita Hill had no advocates. What we saw was a bunch of white men running for cover - while other white men chased them."
Representations, 1997
"The conjunction of Tom Wolfe, the Black Panthers, and radical chic introduces the subject of thi... more "The conjunction of Tom Wolfe, the Black Panthers, and radical chic introduces the subject of this essay: the mainstream media response to the Black Panthers in 1969-70, and, more particularly, the role played by the NewJournalism. As Fredric Jameson has commented, the sixties did not end in an instant but extended until 'around 1972-74.' And crucially-contemporary neoconservative punditry notwithstanding-the decade was hardly simply a utopian era when the Left flowered and flourished. It was also a moment when sophisticated anti-Left strategies were already being tested and refined. The memory of the sixties (both as historical event and as metaphorical reference point) was being fought over almost immediately; history, in short, was getting rewritten as it was happening. This in itself is no great surprise to students of the sixties. It may be more surprising to discover the role of the New Journalism in elaborating an anti-Left agenda."
MELUS, 1995
"Spiegelman's book represents an unerringly earnest attempt at an oral history of the 1930s and 1... more "Spiegelman's book represents an unerringly earnest attempt at an oral history of the 1930s and 1940s in Poland experienced by Vladek Spiegelman, a survivor of Auschwitz and the author's father."
Book Reviews by Michael E . Staub
American Jewish History, 2022
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Books by Michael E . Staub
Papers by Michael E . Staub
disability rights struggles.
Book Reviews by Michael E . Staub
disability rights struggles.