Smith, Judith E. 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born June 3, 1948; daughter of Edward A. and Beth K. Smith. Education: Radcliffe College, B.A., 1970; Brown University, M.A., 1974, Ph.D., 1980.

ADDRESSES:

Office—American Studies Department, University of Massachusetts, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125-3393. E-mail—Judith.smith@umb.edu.

CAREER:

Academic and historian. Boston College, Boston, MA, assistant professor, 1981-86, associate professor, 1986-93, director of American studies program, 1986-87, 1991-93; University of Massachusetts, Boston, associate professor, 1993-04, professor of American studies, 2004—, director of graduate program in American studies. Visiting instructor, University of Rhode Island, 1975, visiting assistant professor, 1978, 1979; visiting professor, Harvard University, 1989, Charles Warren Center in American History Fellow in Film and History, 2002-03; visiting professor, Stanford University, 1990.

WRITINGS:

(With Jeffrey D. Blum) Nothing Left to Lose: Studies of Street People, Sanctuary (Cambridge, MA), 1972.

Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1985.

(With Howard P. Chudacoff) The Evolution of American Urban Society, 3rd edition, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1988, 6th edition, 2005.

Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

(Editor, with Lois P. Rudnick and Rachel Lee Rubin) American Identities: An Introductory Textbook, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Judith E. Smith is an academic and historian. Born in 1948, she started her higher education studies at Radcliffe College, completing a bachelor of arts degree in 1970. Smith pursued graduate studies in American civilization at Brown University, earning a master of arts degree in 1974. By 1980, Smith had obtained a Ph.D., also from Brown.

While a graduate student, Smith worked as a visiting instructor at the University of Rhode Island in 1975. She returned in 1978 and 1979 to work as a visiting assistant professor there. After completing her doctoral studies, Smith started working as an assistant professor in 1981 at Boston College. She was promoted to associate professor in 1986, the same year she served as the director of the American studies program at the college. In 1989 Smith served one term as a visiting professor at Harvard University, then the following year served as a visiting professor at Stanford University. After returning to Boston College, she also served as the program director from 1991 to 1993. At that point Smith began working as an associate professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she also held the position of director of the graduate program in American studies. From 2002 to 2003, Smith returned to Harvard University, where she served as an American History Fellow in Film and History at the Charles Warren Center.

Smith published her first book, Nothing Left to Lose: Studies of Street People, in 1972 with Jeffrey D. Blum. Smith's second book, Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940, was published in 1985. In 1988 Smith joined Howard P. Chudacoff in writing the third edition of The Evolution of American Urban Society. They revised the book several times, including in 1994, 2000, and 2005.

In 2004 Smith published Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960. The account examines how popular family stories influenced cultural identities in the years following World War II, helping to shape a sense of being American and belonging in society.

Crista DeLuzio, writing on H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, observed that Smith wrote her account "with great care and erudition." DeLuzio pointed out that in the book Smith "fascinatingly traces the various incarnations of particular works as they were revised from novel to stage play to film to television show and considers how the political messages of each version were altered by the medium in which they were expressed, the particular actors involved in the process of cultural production, and the exigencies of the given historical moment," and "admiringly conveys the optimism and commitment to social equality upheld by this group of artists, especially their belief in the vital role to be played by art and popular culture in affecting social change." DeLuzio suggested that even though the author's "primary focus in this book is on cultural constructions of race and ethnicity, she might have said more about the connections between the social categories of age and gender and mid-century imaginings of more expansive or alternative forms of citizenship." DeLuzio noted that the author's "consistently nuanced and impeccably informed analysis of this broad range of wartime and postwar cultural texts emanating from the political left convincingly shows that all of these family stories, in one way or another, failed to imagine, articulate, or convey a viable ‘interplay between familial dynamics and social change’ (p. 320)." DeLuzio pondered: "What role can they play in revealing that the love, support, and comfort we garner from family life are also embedded and enabled by the social conditions in which we live? Can we better train ourselves and more consciously teach our children to read the family stories available to us against the grain, so as to see beyond or behind persistent efforts to depict the family in exclusively private terms? How can we mobilize the resources and transform the relations of family life to the end of bringing about the kinds of changes we want to see in the world?" To this, DeLuzio proposed that "as Judith Smith's work shows, attempts to tell family stories that provoke such questions, even if they fall far short of realizing their creators' expectations for social change, are well worth the endeavor."

Stephen J. Whitfield, writing in American Jewish History, remarked that "in the 1940s and 1950s, some distinctive political and cultural pressure points were applied to make the saga of the American family reflective of the needs of a nation at war—first against the Axis, then against the Communists. The result, as Judith E. Smith argues in this meaty and very well-researched book, was a more varied and inclusive definition of citizenship, which presaged the even more expansive recognition that would be granted—beginning in the 1960s—to Blacks, white ethnics, women and homosexuals." Christy Regenhardt, writing in the Journal of Social History, described the book as "a fascinating examination of the ties between politics and media." Regenhardt noted that "one of the most compelling and unifying themes of this book is Smith's discussion of race and ethnicity in the works she follows," although it is "not always as focused on family narratives as the subtitle would suggest." Regenhardt concluded that "throughout, Smith does an outstanding job of illuminating the interconnection of theater, radio, television and film. Smith's following of individual stories through these different media demonstrates the different needs of and restrictions on each form."

Smith then edited American Identities: An Introductory Textbook with Lois P. Rudnick and Rachel Lee Rubin in 2006.

Smith once told CA: "My scholarly work has explored the complex and shifting connections between gender, familial and ethnic cultures, and broader allegiances of solidarity, including racial and class and politics. These explorations have been situated within a long-standing commitment to exposing the permeable boundaries between the family and the larger society, especially the dynamic interaction between how families are understood to be private and how they are shaped by public social forces. I have taught in both history and American Studies departments, and my scholarship has relied on varied disciplinary methods of analysis, especially social history, historical anthropology, and the close textual readings of cultural studies.

"Influenced by the work of Herbert Gutman and his students on the social history of working people, the early work on family economy in women's history by Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, and on gender and kinship by feminist anthropologists Louise Lamphere, Carol Stack, and Sylvia Yanagisaka, my first solo book was Family Connections (1985). That work explored the cultures of solidarity growing out of immigrant work and family lives, from the opening of the twentieth century through the flush years of the 1920s, and the hard times and industrial contraction in the 1930s. The book pays special attention to how these changed over time, from commercialization in premigration southern Italy and eastern Europe to resettlement as immigrants located themselves in Providence, Rhode Island's bustling commercial-industrial economy. Using census data, city directories, oral histories, photographs, and newspaper accounts to map kinship ties inside and outside individual households, workplaces, and mutual benefit associations, I argued that Providence immigrant family cultures initially took shape amidst an overlapping of class, occupations, and neighborhood affiliation. These family cultures would be realigned over time and generation, with mothers and fathers, sons and daughters renegotiating conflicting family obligations and community affiliations in ethnic communities increasingly stratified by class position in a rapidly changing economy.

"My second solo book, Visions of Belonging (2004), moves from social history to cultural history to explore the centrality of the culture industries in producing the family as a crucial cultural formation cutting across lines of class and race. Visions of Belonging argues that cultural productions showcasing white ethnic families as representing a new kind of universality made it harder to make black families visible within the realm of the ordinary. This book joins other recent scholarship by George Lipsitz, David Roediger, Michael Denning, and Matthew Jacobson in analyzing the interconnections between ethnic and racial formation, cultural and political expression. Visions of Belonging shows how major popular culture texts of the postwar era that showcased supposedly ordinary families, such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Death of a Salesman, Marty, and Raisin in the Sun, helped to shape everyday understandings of citizenship and membership in the nation at a time when the possibilities for social transformation seemed endless yet were fiercely contested. I argue that ‘recognizable membership in an "ordinary" family is a marker of public respect and civic inclusion,’ and that ‘living outside that privileged realm leaves one suspect, unprotected by basic citizenship rights, and excluded from national belonging.’ Because the family is so often used as a metaphor for the nation, popular family stories circulating in literary, dramatic, and cinematic forms provided a forum for a high stakes contest over who counted as a representative American during WWII and into the cold war years. Using literary and film archives, production files and promotional materials, and newspaper and magazine reviews, Visions of Belonging foregrounds the commentary of white and black authors and directors, readers and viewers debating the meanings of race and ethnicity, and the boundaries between public life and family matters. In the 1940s, war-driven challenges to racial and ethnic borderlines encouraged hesitant trespass against older notions of ‘normal,’ and created cracks in an imagined national unity that was racially exclusive. By the end of the 1950s, cold war cultural consensus discouraged the probing of racial and social inequality, and encouraged audiences to view family stories as a comforting retreat from politics."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, April 1, 1986, John Bodnar, review of Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence,Rhode Island, 1900-1940, p. 481; October 1, 2006, Renee Romano, review of Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960, p. 1215.

American Jewish History, December 1, 2004, Stephen J. Whitfield, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 520.

American Quarterly, March 1, 2006, Catherine Jurca, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 221.

Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 35, number 3, 2005, Elspeth Brown, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 335.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, May 1, 2005, J. Sochen, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 1658.

Contemporary Sociology, May 1, 1987, Walter F. Carroll, review of Family Connections, p. 298.

Feminist Studies, fall, 1987, Majorie Murphy, review of Family Connections, p. 657.

Journal of American Ethnic History, summer, 2005, Daniel Lee, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 129; summer, 2007, Dara Orenstein, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 98.

Journal of American History, March 1, 1986, Donna Gabaccia, review of Family Connections, p. 976; September 1, 2005, Joseph M. Hawes, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 681.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, January 1, 1988, Olivier Zunz, review of Family Connections, p. 561; fall, 2006, Elaine Tyler May, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 320.

Journal of Social History, winter, 2007, Christy Regenhardt, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 451.

Journal of Women's History, Volume 19, number 4, 2006, Ardis Cameron, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 128.

Pacific Historical Review, November 1, 2006, W.J. Rorabaugh, review of Visions of Belonging, p. 681.

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, January 1, 2007, Jonathan Markovitz, review of Visions of Belonging.

Signs, fall, 1987, Susan Porter Benson, review of Family Connections, p. 178.

ONLINE

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.h-net.org/ (March 1, 2007), Crista DeLuzio, review of Visions of Belonging.

University of Massachusetts Boston Web site,http://www.umb.edu/ (August 11, 2008), author profile.