Rereading the Gettysburg address: Social change and collective memory

Recent scholarship depicts the Gettysburg Address as an unchanging symbol of American democracy. This investigation shows new meanings of the Gettysburg Address arising as successive generations interpret it in light of new situations and challenges. Lincoln's supporters interpreted the Gettysburg Address as a call to arms, a plea to grasp the victory that the Union's dead had brought into sight. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the Gettysburg Address was recognized for its aesthetic appeal, but rarely commemorated. As early twentieth-century Progressive reforms redistributed political power, as Northerners and Southerners renounced old hatreds, and as foreign wars enhanced America's global role, the Gettysburg Address became a multivalent symbol of industrial democracy, regional solidarity, and patriotism. Abraham Lincoln's Address assumed its present meaning, which incorporates the often conflicting ideals of racial equality and regional unity, in the late twentieth-century. As the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s expanded, Lincoln's prestige fell dramatically. Lincoln, paradoxically, was reduced by the power of the egalitarian ideal he symbolized—even as that ideal became embodied in his own words. To resolve this paradox, postmodernist conceptions of author-reader relations are brought to bear on current understandings of collective memory.     

Popularity and Acceptance as Distinct Dimensions of Social Standing for Chinese Children in Hong Kong

This study attempted to validate distinctions between popularity and social acceptance in the cultural context of Hong Kong. We recruited 280 Chinese children (132 girls, 148 boys, mean age = 9.5) from Hong Kong primary schools. These children completed a peer nomination inventory assessing popularity, social acceptance, social rejection, aggression, peer victimization, and social behavior. Consistent with research conducted in western samples, we found that social acceptance was correlated primarily with positive behavioral characteristics (i.e., assertiveness‐leadership and low levels of submissiveness‐withdrawal). In contrast, popularity was associated with a more mixed pattern of features including high levels of aggression. The overall pattern of findings closely replicates past research conducted in North American and European settings.     

Violence against and the Harassment of Women in Canadian Public Housing: An Exploratory Study*

Aucune étude nord-américaine n'a examiné de façon systé'matique l'importance des divers types degressions sexuelles, notamment le harcèlement sexuel et racial, que subissent les femmes dans les logements sociaux. Les logements sociaux et les rues des quartiers pauvres du centre-ville sont les endroits typiques où se jouent les relations de force entre les sexes et où l'influence de la drogue a exacerbé la violence exercée contre les femmes. À l'aide de données provenant du Quality of Neighbourhood Life Survey, dans lequel sont interrogés des ménages habitant dans six logements sociaux situés dans un centre urbain de Test de l'Ontario, cet article permet de combler une lacune importante dans la recherche. On y étudie les données exploratoires sur l'incidence de la violence conju-gale et de la violence extérieure ainsi que trois types de harcèlement vécus par des femmes vivant dans des logements sociaux. No North American study has systematically examined the extent of various types of woman abuse in public housing, including sexual and racial harassment. Public housing communities and inner-city ghetto streets are key arenas where gendered power relations are played out, and where the influx of drugs has exacerbated the degradation and abuse of women. Using data from the Quality of Neighbourhood Life Survey, administered to households in six public housing projects in an urban centre in Eastern Ontario, this paper helps fill a major research gap. Exploratory data on the incidence of intimate violence, stranger violence, and three types of harassment experienced by women in these dwellings are discussed. As men on the street lose their former authoritarian power in the household, they lash out against the women and children they can no longer control. Men are not accepting the new rights and roles that women are obtaining; instead, they are desperately attempting to reassert their grandfathers' lost autocratic control over their households and over public space.     

Club Amigas: a promising response to the needs of adolescent Latinas

The Latino population in the USA is growing faster than any other group. Latinas are at risk for mental health and substance-abuse problems and school dropout. Research has shown that the ability to adapt to life in the USA while retaining one's cultural heritage is essential for successful acculturation and may increase the chances for success in school. There is strong evidence that mentoring relationships can enhance teens' social and emotional competence. This paper describes Club Amigas , a mentoring project that paired Latina college students with Latina middle-school girls. Initial quantitative and qualitative evaluations of programme effectiveness found that, as predicted, mentees' self-esteem was related to a positive commitment to their Latina identity, and that self-esteem and positive commitment to Latina identity increased over the programme year.     

Social Problems Awareness Manifested Through Sociological Research,Newspapers, and Creative Literature*

Content analysis of newspaper items, sociological research and sociology course titles, and reviews of novels associated with Chicago, 1910–1930, was used to test several propositions concerning changes in the structural loci, heterogeneity, and amount of social problems awareness in modern society. Although considerable social problems awareness was found to be manifested by newspapers, sociological research, and creative literature, little similarity was found in the types of social problems focused upon. There was no evidence found concerning a shift in such activity from newspapers and creative literature to sociological research, nor was evidence found that would support the proposition that social problems awareness tends to increase significantly in modern society.     

Elite Revisionists and Popular Beliefs: Christopher Columbus, Hero or Villain?

According to revisionist historians and American Indian activists,Christopher Columbus deserves condemnation for having broughtslavery, disease, and death to America’s indigenous peoples.We ask whether the general public’s beliefs about Columbusshow signs of reflecting these critical accounts, which increasedmarkedly as the 1992 Quincentenary approached. Our nationalsurveys, using several different question wordings, indicatethat most Americans continue to admire Columbus because, astradition puts it, "he discovered America," though only a smallnumber of mainly older respondents speak of him in the heroicterms common in earlier years. At the same time, the percentageof Americans who reject traditional beliefs about Columbus isalso small and is divided between those who simply acknowledgethe priority of Indians as the "First Americans" and those whogo further to view Columbus as a villain. The latter group ofrespondents, we find, show a critical stance toward modal Americanbeliefs much more broadly. We also analyze American history school textbooks for evidenceof influence from revisionist writings, and we consider representationsof Columbus in the mass media as well. Revisionist history canbe seen as one consequence of the "minority rights revolution"that began after World War II and has achieved considerablesuccess, but the endurance of Columbus’s reputation—toa considerable extent even among the minorities who have theleast reason to respect him—raises important questionsabout the inertia of tradition, the politics of collective memory,and the difference between elite and popular beliefs.