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History (4,904 posts)

Francis Galton’s regression towards mediocrity and the stability of types

AHP readers will be interested in a new article in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A: “Francis Galton’s regression towards mediocrity and the stability of types,”by Adam Krashniak and Ehud Lamm. Abstract: A prevalent narrative locates the discovery of the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean in the work of Francis … Continue reading Francis Galton’s regression towards mediocrity and the stability of types →

From Urban Renewal to the BeltLine: Atlanta’s Use of Public Health Narratives to Reshape the City

Journal of Planning History, Ahead of Print.
Since the early days of the planning profession, city agencies relied on a public health crisis narrative as a rationale for mass displacement efforts that targeted black communities. Over time, as cities gentrified with white, middle-class residents, the narrative shifted toward the city as a place of health. This article compares Atlanta’s redevelopment narratives from urban renewal to its current citywide greenway project, the BeltLine, to understand how city officials utilized public health language to rationalize displacement and how the narratives ran counter to residents’ lived experience.

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‘Psychosis of civilization’: a colonial-situated diagnosis

History of Psychiatry, Ahead of Print.
In the late 1930s, when colonial psychiatry was well established in the Maghreb, the diagnosis ‘psychosis of civilization’ appeared in some psychiatrists’ writings. Through the clinical case of a Libyan woman treated by the Italian psychiatrist Angelo Bravi in Tripoli, this article explores its emergence and its specificity in a differential approach, and highlights its main characteristics. The term applied to subjects poised between two worlds: incapable of becoming ‘like’ Europeans – a goal to which they seem to aspire – but too far from their ‘ancestral habits’ to revert for a quiet life. The visits of these subjects to colonial psychiatric institutions, provided valuable new material for psychiatrists: to see how colonization impacted inner life and to raise awareness of the long-term socio-political dangers.

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The history of Minnesota’s only women’s prison, in Shakopee

MINNPOST | Minnesota Historical Society
MINNPOST | Minnesota Historical Society

In the winter of 1915, prominent social worker Isabel Davis Higbee stood and spoke in front of the Minnesota House of Representatives’ prison committee. It was not her first time at the Capitol. She was asking the legislature to open a reformatory just for women, something she and others had been pushing for more than two decades. At the time, women in Minnesota were typically incarcerated either with men or with girls. Higbee pleaded for a place where women could receive training instead of punishment; at the end of her speech, she collapsed and died on the legislative floor. That year, the legislature voted to build a State Reformatory for Women. Above: State Reformatory for Women, Shakopee, ca. 1937.