U.S. Progressive Era

Beyond the Echo Chamber (book review) Information Society

by Adam Fish

The social dynamics and genesis of internetworked
activist cultures are little understood. I work at themore The social dynamics and genesis of internetworked
activist cultures are little understood. I work at the
University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) Part.Lab,
where we are cataloguing and ethnographically describing
Internet-enabled collaboration such as networked
activism, free and open-source software engineering, and citizen journalism. Beyond the Echo Chamber by
Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke addresses networked
activism and is a strategy guide about how four levels of
Internet-enabled networks have an impact on progressive
journalism, political commentary, and activist organizing: (1) networked users, (2) self-organized networks, (3)
institutional networks, and (4) networks of institutions.
All but the first, networked users, articulate well with
the categories and process we devised in our 2011 article
“Birds of the Internet: A Field Guide to Understanding Action, Organization, and the Governance of Participation”
(Fish et al. 2011) to explain Internet-based cultural
behavior, namely, the self-generating or organized publics
assisted in their construction by formal social enterprises.
Like “Birds of the Internet,” Beyond the Echo Chamber is a field guide designed to identify new species of
networked culture, their interrelationships in the emergent
media ecology, their diverse communicative practices,
and the values they seek to reproduce throughout society.
The power of this book lies in the elegance and utility of these network categories and in the suspenseful fast histories of netroots progressive movements.

Resorts and Reform: Archaeology at the Wiawaka Holiday House, Lake George, New York

by Megan E. Springate

Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, 2012

The Wiawaka Holiday House on Lake George, New York is among the oldest continuously operating women’s holiday retreats... more The Wiawaka Holiday House on Lake George, New York is among the oldest continuously operating women’s holiday retreats in the United States. The Holiday House was founded on the grounds of a failing resort hotel at the turn of the twentieth century by wealthy women largely from industrial families to provide factory “girls” opportunities for healthful vacations in the countryside. Before the Holiday House was established, the property was the site of two resort hotels; their histories, spanning much of the nineteenth century, reflect the rise and transformations in the Adirondack resort hotel business. Presented in the early stages of doctoral research, this paper describes the current state of history and historical archaeology at the property and explores avenues of research related to the meanings and uses of leisure time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as questions of gender, class, power, and labor.

The Growth of the Federal Government in the Early Twentieth Century

by Eric Gallager

My paper for my intro to American History class I took with professor Christopher Klemek and teaching assistant Daniel Berkhout the second semester of my sophomore year.

In this paper I argue that the increase in the size of the Federal Government in the early twentieth century came... more In this paper I argue that the increase in the size of the Federal Government in the early twentieth century came about by a combination of a desire by the American public for reform and a perception that the Federal Government was the best agent for this reform.

The Wisconsin Idea

by Christopher Phelps

Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 March 2011