History

In 1910, the Baltimore City Council passed the nation’s first racial-zoning law. It was not the city’s first effort to eliminate even the possibility of racially integrated neighborhoods. In fact, the movement in favor of residential-segregation ordinances was a response to (its proponents believed) the school system’s failure to use Jim Crow schools to create Jim Crow neighborhoods. The Supreme Court invalidated housing segregation laws like Baltimore’s in 1917, but they turned out to be forerunners of all the other tools generations of city officials, white property owners, and realtors used and still use to maintain racially homogeneous neighborhoods nationwide—like exclusionary zoning. Thanks to these public policies, and to the still segregated schools that inspired them, American cities today are sorted beyond the wildest imaginings of any Progressive-era segregationist.

In 1941, the Baltimore City Council passed a law, the Ordinance on the Hygiene of Housing, declaring that all property in the city should be ‘maintained in good repair by the owner or agent, and fit for human habitation’. The campaign of housing-code enforcement that followed, known as the Baltimore Plan, made the city famous. When historians write about American housing-reform efforts during the mid-20th century, they tend to focus on big-ticket federal policies; by contrast, the Baltimore Plan seems too small to be significant. But it is more than a curiosity. First in Baltimore and then across the country, the neat cause-and-effect it posited between good stewardship and good housing crowded out more challenging ways of thinking about the problem. Eventually, the Baltimore Plan turned into a policy tool that reinforced the interests of the real estate industry at the expense of poor people. In that regard, the Baltimore Plan laid the foundations for federal disinvestment in the provision of decent housing and the midcentury tragedy of urban renewal.

This study examines the validity assumptions of the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) using data collected from teacher candidates, mentor teachers, university supervisors and university faculty in two programs at one university during the 2012 field test in Washington State. Applying the work of Michael Kane (2006) on argument-based validation, this study developed interpretations and assumptions of TPA test score use using the following five inferences: Construct Representation, Scoring and Evaluation, Generalization, Extrapolation, and Decision Making. This multi-method study utilizes survey, case study, and test score data. The overarching research question that guided the study was “Is the TPA a valid measure for determining teacher readiness?” The overall findings suggest that the operationalized construct of readiness is stable but scores are not generalizable across populations and guidance was not in place regarding score meaning and use prior to the field test. Low correlation between the TPA and university instruments provided divergent evidence for the use of TPA scores, indicating that decisions made based solely from TPA scores may not be reliable.

The flâneur and the tourist were both characterized foremost by movement and curiosity. A range of meanings and resonances were associated with both figures, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility. While the sense of vision was emphasized, literary representations often evoked the idea that vacuous and passive seeing, stimulated by trivial goings-on and merchandise, lets the flâneur neglect the other senses, whereas an inner preparation and discernment lead to a more balanced way of flânerie. The projection of flânerie onto world travel paralleled the mode of reading illustrated magazines, which elicited imaginary flânerie. The re-reading of Baudelaire's 'Le Peintre de la vie moderne' in this light provides some new insights regarding the concept of the artist as the 'man of the world'. What are the connections between the flâneur and the tourist in the nineteenth century? The figures of the tourist and the flâneur have been compared as tropes of modernity in sociological theory. However, little historical analysis exists on the association between the two figures. The flâneur was strongly associated with travel from early on, as the very etymology and definition of the flâneur had to do with the idea of walking, movement. A range of meanings and resonances, including contradictory ones, were associated with both figures especially in the early decades, characterized foremost by movement and curiosity, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility.

We have become accustomed to the association between royalty and celebrity in modern times. Yet the history of the triadic association between the institutions and cultural formations of royalty, celebrity culture and colonial imperialism is one that is comparatively little researched. In charting such a history in the nineteenth century, the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, is an exemplary figure and his tour of the subcontinent is a formative case study in the history of travel and celebrity. The Prince toured India and Ceylon for four months from 8 November 1875, when he arrived in Bombay, until 13 March 1876. Contemporary assessment of the tour was that it was an immense success, paving the way for the conferral of the title of the Empress of India on Queen Victoria in 1877. 2 Since then it has mostly only been discussed in Edward VII's biographies, echoing the view of some of the short-term political effect of the tour, with little effort to examine the tour in the context of broader political and cultural trends of the period. 3 The Prince of Wales was one of the most famous people in Britain at the time, and the Prince's tour was a sensational domestic media event. The immense quantity of texts and images generated through the tour highlight significant trends in representing the colonial dynamic, royal spectacle and colonies as travel destinations. 4 This essay examines the representation of the British monarchy, the Empire, and tourism as seen mainly through the extensive coverage of the English illustrated weeklies The Illustrated London News and The Graphic.

• The English and French illustrated press between 1880 and 1905 depicted Euro-peans as superior to non-Europeans and rarely questioned the colonizing right of Europe-ans. The illustrated press, such as news magazines The Illustrated London News, The Graphic, and L'Illustration, as well as the newspaper Le Petit Journal, was consumed by colonial news, reported as a series of crises, battles, and frontier troubles, and represented colonial officers and soldiers as heroes. However, a series of imperial rivalries increasingly undermined any collective " European " understanding of the imperial mission. By implicitly and explicitly questioning and criticizing other empires' motives and capacity for colonization, the press came to portray colonization as a power dynamic. Heroism was increasingly tied to nationalism rather than to broader moral principles. The rhetoric and imagery of imperialism were thus fraught with paradoxes and double standards. The press coverage also reveals close links between war and tourism imaginaries.

The rickshaw came to be the most popular form of transportation in Hanoi and Saigon from the 1910s through the mid 1930s. As these cities developed and grew rapidly, and as French Indochina was integrated into the world economy, rickshaws met an increasing demand for accessible, convenient, and efficient modes of transportation. The rickshaw trade provides an example of European colonizers adopting an “Asian” form of transportation, a hybrid between a sedan chair and Western-style wheels, put into motion using cheap Asian labor. The emergence of a Vietnamese middle class ensured customers for public rickshaws. For much of the urban population as well as a portion of the rural population, rickshaws became an indispensable and integral part of daily life. This essay explores how the circulation of rickshaws gave rise to issues of hygiene, safety, traffic control, taxation, convenience, comfort, aesthetics, accessibility, uses of public space, labor disputes, and ethics.

The mission of the Journal des voyages et des aventures de terre et de mer, the most popular adventure periodical of the fin-de-siècle, was twofold: publishing new adventure fiction and disseminating geographical knowledge. The Journal closely associated adventure fiction—its core content—with the activities of geographical societies. Through a complex dynamic between the Journal’s sensationalism and its supposed commitment to truth, alongside a pervasive confusion of adventure stories with accurate descriptions of real places, the Journal promoted an ideologically charged world view in which the French possessed the ability to rise to the top of the social hierarchies of societies that were labelled as primitive. The key theme of the Journal’s adventure fiction was continuous mobility, a theme that supported imperialism. In addition, an examination of a parody of adventure fiction by Albert Robida questions the Journal’s claims of realism and educational value.

It is widely considered that there is no critical mass of architecture in a homogeneous style in Ho Chi Minh City, in contrast to Hanoi. This essay seeks to establish Ho Chi Minh City’s architectural heritage as a significant one, by arguing that the city does actually possess a critical mass of cohesive, remarkably well-designed buildings in modernist styles. Highlighted here is a unique feature of these modernist buildings: rounded, curved corners as a recurring motif in a dense urban center. I argue that such buildings, dating from the 1920s through the 1970s, have provided the center of Ho Chi Minh City unique, cohesive, and striking characteristics and that they form one of the great ensembles of modernist architecture anywhere. This essay seeks to re-locate the place of Ho Chi Minh City on the world map of the circulation of modernism, by emphasizing the internal dynamic of the city’s architectural evolution that transcends the colonial-postcolonial divide, and highlighting the evolution of forms revealing a continuity in spite of event-based ruptures in history. The significant presence of modernist buildings with curved corners in Phnom Penh, and their similarities to those of Ho Chi Minh City, suggest that regional circulation also played a crucial role.
Key words: modernism, rounded corners, architectural heritage, Ho Chi Minh City, Streamline Moderne, regional exchange, Phnom Penh

Le Petit Journal, which boasted a circulation of one million in the 1890s, was famed for the sensationalistic full-color front and back engraved images of its weekly supplement. Modern modes of transportation in the 1890-1914 period were associated with modernity, mobility, progress, speed, individuality, patriotism, colonial expansion, heroism, leisure, luxury, and sportsmanship. Yet the fascination with catastrophes and violence, as seen through the weekly supplement’s representations, reveals a darker side. The images constructed contradictory narratives, oscillating between the ideas of technological progress and technological failure, freedom and danger, the domination of nature and that of defeat by nature, and so on. Above all, the artfully designed images were meant to dramatize, shock, provide vicarious thrills, and be voyeuristic, rather than inform. The images reveal significant undercurrents of anxiety beneath the confidence in science, progress, and the imperial project. They also show that while the imagined ease with which dangerous travel was accomplished—mobility throughout the world—in fiction was continually checked by actualities, this fell short of actually revealing a gap between fantasy and reality, in that the dramatic forms used for representing the “real” blurred that gap.

For years, the study of how culture operates in colonial contexts was dominated by the ideas of transmission and influence. Yet the more we learn, the less useful those concepts seem to be. This collection deliberately complicates the binary of colonizer and colonized in order to establish a more effective framework for understanding. The contributors address a wide range of questions, rooted in specific colonial experiences: How can a controversy about forms of deference in Java reveal tensions around colonial policies and the rise of nationalism? What was Vietnamese about the French colonial governor’s palace in Hanoi? What can the circulation of jazz in Asia tell us about its evolution, circuits of exchange, colonial culture, and its appropriation? Through such inquiries, the volume traces the multilinear trajectories of the flow of decorative objects, architectural styles, photographs, sartorial practices, music, deference rituals, and ethnographic knowledge, in a transimperial framework within and beyond Southeast Asia and Europe. Highlighting a wide range of actors along with their motivations and interactions, this volume treats cultural heritage as dynamic processes.

The corpus of Sicilian real estate inscriptions is small but significant. The first published contract from Sicily was found in the archaeological museum in Aidone in 1912 and likely comes from the nearby Serra Orlando – Morgantina, though we do not know exactly where or in which levels. Two contracts were discovered in the 1970s in archaeological excavations at Camarina and therefore have secure provenances and archaeological contexts; they come from a residential area and are dated to ca. 300 BCE. The remainder of the extant documents come via private collections from looters so they lack this crucial information. G. Manganaro has published a number of documents including defixiones and contracts from Sicily beginning in 1977; to my knowledge the most recent publication of a new contract was in 1997. Each contract was inscribed using a stylus on a lead sheet, which was then apparently folded or rolled and flattened. They have been dated variously to the late third and second centuries BCE on the basis of letter forms, though this dating can only be approximate given the medium and the potential for idiosyncratic ductus. Nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean was lead used for contracts involving real estate, which were always carved in stone outside Sicily. The lack of any extant Sicilian contract cut in stone fits the general dearth of stone inscriptions from this period in Sicily, which can be explained in part by the lack of locally occurring marble or even high-quality limestone on the island. In Sicily lead, which was also used for curses and mercantile seals, was the preferred medium for durably recording the sale of land.
Here I present improved texts of several contracts based on epigraphic research conducted in Ragusa, Sicily, and explore some of the implications these texts present for our understanding of Hellenistic Sicily. The contracts under discussion arrived from the Roman collector Ricotti Prina at the museum in Ragusa in 1983, and were published in 1989 by Manganaro, who attributed some to Morgantina and some to Camarina. My research confirms certain of the previous readings and restorations, and challenges others.
In their content, the texts provide new documentation of women’s activity in the exchange of real estate in Sicily during the Hellenistic period. I explore the possibility that this activity is a sign of greater economic independence for women in Sicily as compared with the rest of the Greek Mediterranean, though I remain cautious about extrapolating too much from what is still a small, fragmentary, and isolated body of evidence.