For several decades in the 20th Century, American universities, including elite institutions, took nude photos of their students, sometimes as often as twice a year, in order to evaluate their posture. In some cases students had to achieve a minimum posture grade in order to graduate. How did that practice develop, and how did it end? This week we’re discussing Americans’ obsession with posture with Dr. Beth Linker, the Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Debutante Intermezzo,” composed and performed by Howard Kopp in 1916; the audio is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is from “The posture of school children, with its home hygiene and new efficiency methods for school training,” from 1913, by Jessie H. Bancroft; the image is in the public domain and is available via Wikimedia Commons.
Additional sources:
The Reconstruction Era & its Aftermath
The Southern Plantation System
Slavery & Incarceration in New Orleans
The Jazz Maestros of Jim Crow America
Negro League Baseball
Log Cabin Republicans and the Gay Right
The History of DARE
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Eleanor Roosevelt's Visit to the Pacific Theatre during World War II
Eliza Scidmore
Foreign Missionaries & American Diplomacy in the 19th Century
Tammany Hall, FDR & the Murder of Vivian Gordon
The Combahee River Raid of 1863
The History of Ice in the United States
The History of Blue Jeans
The History of Pinball
The History of US Foreign Disaster Relief
LSD, the CIA & the History of Psychedelic Science
Clotilda: The Last U.S. Slave Ship
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