"Why Are There No Mozarts from Australia?"

"Why Are There No Mozarts from Australia?": This falsely premised (and largely ethnocentric) question was first posed by Alfred Kroeber in 1910. As a cultural anthropologist, Kroeber had been engaged in a fierce academic debate with evolutionary biologist August Weismann over the role that "culture" played in the development of individual genius/talent. For Weismann, no Mozart had emerged among the Australian aboriginals because there was a distinct lack of the proper "mental faculties" required to produce the classical pianist abilities of someone like Mozart. In other words, the Australian aboriginals had simply not "evolved" far enough to match European standards of culture. To Kroeber, however, evolution had little to do with it, as Australian aboriginals merely lacked certain historical/environmental circumstances that were needed to create the right cultural context for a Mozart to develop. On the surface, this debate was perhaps one of the first "nature vs. nurture" arguments to come out of the early 20th century. For Kroeber, who did a lot of research on Native Americans, the "last wild Indian" to enter Euro-American society happened near Oroville, California, in 1911. Fascinated, Kroeber named him "Ishi," and hired him to work as a research assistant at UC-Berkeley.

What Happened to America's Working Class?

What Happened to America's Working Class?: In the 1930s and 1940s, around 60 million Americans considered themselves "working-class." But in each decade since World War II, the number of Americans identifying as "working-class" has declined dramatically. At present, it's fair to claim that America's working class has been mostly subsumed by the middle class. Yet what precipitated such a major change in American social class structure? Many sociologists point to deindustrialization as the primary catalyst for eviscerating the working class. Although the causes of deindustrialization are multifaceted, enviro-labor economics is one key culprit. For instance, the costs of manufacturing in the U.S. simply became too high in the postwar era. Whether it was the 1947 Labor Management Relations Act or the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, the costs of producing consumer and industrial goods were cheaper abroad (outsourcing). Aside from deindustrialization, there was also a general shift in American society away from issues of "class" and toward problems of "race" and "gender" in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps the clearest examples of this shift were embodied in the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements, which succeeded in obtaining constitutional protections for historically underrepresented social groups in America.