Research and Teaching Interests:
American social and cultural history; history of medicine and public health; history of Philadelphia
Personal Statement:
I've been studying the interplay of descent-based and ideologically defined nationality, specifically in the period from the 1850s into the 1950s when the Anglo-Saxon ideal dominated thinking about American identity. I am interested in how racially defined notions of national identity gained ascendance and then lost it.
This interest grows out of my current undergraduate teaching, my work with various museums, and my previous scholarship. In recent years, I have been organizing both halves of my US history undergraduate survey around the central theme of American identity. I have also helped developed exhibits and installations exploring this theme at institutions as diverse as the Betsy Ross House and the National Museum of American Jewish History. I first wrote on the subject in my 1991 book, Cultural Connections. In all this work, I have been particularly concerned with the roles played by systems of formal knowledge—the area in which I had published several previous books—in shaping personal and social identities.
My study of American identity also grows out of more personal experience. When I was growing up in a small New England city in the 1950s, my immigrant parents and their friends would sometimes comment about one of their peers who had become “a regular Yankee.” Spoken in their Yiddish accents, the phrase was meant ironically: someone who clearly didn’t fit in was putting on airs, pretending to be comfortable in this culture which carefully marked off outsiders. The phrase called attention to what a real American was; the accent to the vast distance between them and their rarely stated American hopes. In the years since, I have happily watched Americans evolve toward a more generous and inclusive understanding of their national identity.
I confess that the intellectual significance of this work is heavily presentist. For the better part of our history, American identity conformed to Robert Penn Warren’s observation: “To be American is not . . . a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea—and history is the image of that idea.” The period in which primordial notions of blood, race, and descent contaminated America’s identity weakened it. By contextualizing that kind of racialistic thinking, I think that I can particularize and help contain it, and thus contribute to strengthening the legitimacy of the liberal nation state in the process. The alternatives now on the horizon—the ascendance of the ethno-religious particularism, which too many intellectuals today faddishly embrace, or the triumph of the transglobal corporations—are chilling.
Selected Books:
Cultural Connections: Museums and Libraries of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991)
Co-author, Philadelphia Stories: A Photographic History, 1920-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988)
Co-author, Still Philadelphia: A Photographic History, 1890-1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983)
The Invention of the Modern Hospital: Boston, 1870-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; paperback edition, 1985)
Co-editor, The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979)
Selected Articles and Essays
“The Transformation of the American Hospital,” in Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950, Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jutte, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Co-author, “The Professional Development School as a Strategy for School Restructuring,” in Chartering Urban School Reform: Reflections on Public High Schools in the Midst of Change, Michelle Fine, ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994
“Learning Happens When It Matters,” Education Week, September 25, 1991
“Health Care in the Distended Society: The American Hospital in its Social Contexts,” in History of Hospitals: The Evolution of Health Care Facilities, Yosio Kawakita, Shizu Sakai, & Yasuo Otsuka, eds., (Tokyo: Taneguchi Foundation, 1989); reprinted (with minor revisions) in Health Matrix: The Quarterly Journal of Health Services Management, 7, #4 (Winter, 1989-1990)
“Managing Medicine: Creating a Profession of Hospital Administration in the United States, 1895-1915,” in Hospitals in History, Lindsay Granshaw and Roy Porter, eds. (London: Routledge, 1989)
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Morris Vogel (Ph.D., University of Chicago)