Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth

Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth
Author: Elizabeth Loentz
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0878201475

In 1953, Freud biographer Ernest Jones revealed that the famous hysteric Anna O. was really Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936), the prolific author, German-Jewish feminist, pioneering social worker, and activist. Elizabeth Loentz directs attention away from the young woman who arguably invented the talking cure and back to Pappenheim and her post-Anna O. achievements. Her writings, especially, reveal her to be one of the most versatile, productive, influential, and controversial Jewish thinkers and leaders of her time. Pappenheim's oeuvre includes stories, plays, poems, prayers, travel literature, letters, essays, speeches, and aphorisms. She translated Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women as well as the Memoirs of Gluckel of Hamelnand other Old Yiddish texts into German. She was discussed as both writer and newsmaker in German-Jewish newspapers of every religious and political affiliation and in German feminist publications. As founder and leader of the League of Jewish Women in Germany and the international League of Jewish Women, she was at the forefront of the campaign to combat human trafficking and forced prostitution. A pioneer of modern Jewish social work, she founded a home for at-risk girls and unwed mothers and advocated on behalf of Jewish women, children, refugees, and immigrants. Her accomplishments are all the more remarkable because she attained them after struggling to recover from the debilitating mental illness chronicled in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria(1895). Loentz examines how Pappenheim engaged, in words and deeds, with the key political, social, and cultural issues concerning German Jewry in the early decades of the twentieth century: the status of the Yiddish language, Zionism, the conversion epidemic, responses to the plight of Eastern European Jews, and Jewish spirituality. Pappenheim's unique approach to each of these issues balanced allegiances to feminism, the Jewish religion, and German culture. Loentz also explores how biographers and artists have rediscovered Pappenheim, rewritten her life story, and renegotiated her identity.

A Class by Themselves?

A Class by Themselves?
Author: Jason Ellis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2019-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1442628715

In A Class by Themselves?, Jason Ellis provides an erudite and balanced history of special needs education, an early twentieth century educational innovation that continues to polarize school communities across Canada, the United States, and beyond. Ellis situates the evolution of this educational innovation in its proper historical context to explore the rise of intelligence testing, the decline of child labour and rise of vocational guidance, emerging trends in mental hygiene and child psychology, and the implementation of a new progressive curriculum. At the core of this study are the students. This book is the first to draw deeply on rich archival sources, including 1000 pupil records of young people with learning difficulties, who attended public schools between 1918 and 1945. Ellis uses these records to retell individual stories that illuminate how disability filtered down through the school system's many nooks and crannies to mark disabled students as different from (and often inferior to) other school children. A Class by Themselves? sheds new light on these and other issues by bringing special education's curious past to bear on its constantly contested present.

George Herbert Locke and the Transformation of Toronto Public Library, 1908-1937

George Herbert Locke and the Transformation of Toronto Public Library, 1908-1937
Author: Lorne D. Bruce
Publisher: Libraries Today
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2020-12-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0986666629

George H. Locke, chief librarian of the Toronto Public Library between 1908 and 1937, was Canada’s foremost library administrator in the first part of the twentieth century. During this period, free public libraries and librarianship in Ontario expanded rapidly due to the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, improvements in library education, and the influence of American library services. Locke was closely associated with all these trends; however, his outlook was primarily guided by his Methodist upbringing, the Anglo-Canadian academic tradition of British Idealism, and his association with John Dewey’s contribution to American progressive education. These religious and intellectual strands encouraged personal action to improve social conditions. As director of Toronto’s libraries, he brought his ambitious ideas to bear in many ways: the building of neighbourhood branches, library service for children, formal education for librarians, suitable reading for immigrants and young adults, and the idea of the public library as a municipal partner in the self-education of adult Canadians. By 1930, Toronto’s public library system was recognized as one of the best in North America and George Locke’s reputation as a visionary leader had vaulted him to the Presidency of the American Library Association. Although he had created a large organization that might have succumbed to bureaucratic practices and formalized centralization, Locke resisted this development. He remained faithful to his moral, intellectual, and humanistic values acquired during his early schooling and university career. For Locke, libraries and librarians were less about organization and formal duties. Both needed to be faithful to the main principle of serving the public interest by delivering knowledge and by guiding individual self-development through experiential learning and transcendent ideals.