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freshman orientation to college can be a stressful experience meeting new people signing up for classes getting your ID and even moving into the dorms can represent a whirlwind of change but one
thing that isn't usually expected at freshman orientation today is that you would go to the gymnasium strip naked and have your photo taken but for thousands of college goers especially
between the 1940s and the 1970s that was a normal and expected part of freshman orientation all in the name of good posture it is history that deserves to be
remembered good posture is a concept that has changed over time prior to the 1750s languid slouching and relaxed posture was emphasized in Social settings in England movement that spread
to America European Styles began to change around the same time as an emphasis on stiff backs and restrictive clothing came to define the Victorian era early America caught this bug as well as evidenced by John Adams parading
himself for poor posture and what it stood for poor self-control Lord Chesterfield's widely published 1775 book lord Chesterfield's advice to his son on men and manners
recommended new standards advising against odd motions strange postures and ental carriage good posture became a defining characteristic of a morally upright and successful person in art
failures and evil men were depicted hunched and bent an 1817 pamphlet by Emma Parker advise women that posture was becoming an important measure of virtue and that women's bodies should partake as little
as possible in the motion of the limbs similar advice was aimed at men claiming that awkwardness of carriage is very alienating manuals on etiquette emphasized posture training in childhood insisting that children sit erect at all
times women's fashions emphasized straight backs and stiff posture with corsets and stiff laced bodices straight hard-backed Furniture encouraged or even enforced good posture poor posture and
women was blamed on excessive letter writing While others argued that masturbation led to poor posture there was an Insidious side to posture as well before Charles Darwin or the concept of evolution phrenologists argued that
Europeans had a particular predilection for posture in their bones and spines unlike less civilized race of men in the late 1800s there was a reaction against the stiff formal of Victorian etiquette
rocking chairs previously relegated to back rooms and used mostly by the elderly appeared in living rooms in 1881 one commentator wrote that the new furniture goes a great deal towards civilizing people generally seems to us
impossible for the human race to be good-natured and good-tempered if forced to sit in a bolt upright position in the extreme corner of a horsehair covered sofa it is not surprising that our for forefathers were given to atrocities and
cruelties when they were brought up to endure such tortures as could be inflicted by the furniture of even 20 years ago fashion 2 became less stiff and strict and allowed more freedom for relaxed postures depictions into the
first Decades of the 20th century showed fashionable people slouching leaning and reclining this relaxation of posture standards was accompanied by a reactive backlash more comfortable Furniture
which included new fangled inventions like Springs were seen as a threat to good posture critics argued that these comfortable chairs would lead to lounging attitudes and a loss of discipline etiquette books abounded and
targeted children especially in 1872 Dr Dan Nukem wrote when and how a child rearing manual one panel showed contrasting children one had healthy and happy children playing outside while the other had Twisted ugly children sitting
indoors with piles of books the caption read which there is a growing opinion that our physical degradation must find a stopping Place Nukem wrote we must act with the same care in rearing our children that we exercise in raising our
domestic animals impressed that parents needed to make children stand ack as Nature Made Them to stand and not to stoop and throw their shoulders forward and sink the chest in thus compressing the lungs until will not hold air enough for arting the
blood Dr DF Lincoln blamed schooling where students lacked enough exercise and slumped while they studied Lincoln claimed that bad desk were causing 83 to 92 % of students to suffer spinal
deformations in cultivation of the chest or the highest physical development of the human form Dr Edmund chasbury argued that posture improved not only physical and hygienic issues but had a moral
effect on the whole body other articles attack the slanting script talk to Children which force them to twist to write properly illnesses that affect posture like scoliosis and rickets and lordosis usually manifest in youth an
1890 German pediatric dictionary claimed that more than half of children suffered from spinal curvature probably the greatest results of fear about the health implications of poor posture was the physical education
movement in 1887 Dr Edward Hitchcock first president of the American Association for the advancement of physical education said let the thought be eminent and predominant with us that the highest aim of our special work is
to develop the most perfect types of men and women in Body Soul and Spirit the American physical educ review founded in 1898 was one of the central Publications talking about posture deterioration and
possible solutions Jesse banro formed the American posture league in 1914 which among other things produced many posture wall charts though school might be partially to blame for poor posture it also
quickly became the best place to improve posture and identify cases of spinal deformity like scoliosis school was also an ideal place to teach children good posture in the form of posture tests and education and
not just in elementary schools Harvard had posture tests as early as 1880 and many other colleges would follow suit Harvard's program was developed by da Sergeant who created a template of
the statistically average American and measured Harvard students in an effort to get students to reach a perfect muscular form women's college Vasser began keeping posture and other physical records in
1884 the ideal test was for a patient to stand naked in front of a mirror or have a nude photo taken and for an expert to comment and offer remedies for poor posture between 1885 and 1900 schools
tracked thousands of students and their posture at Yale Welsley oberin and the University of Nebraska the efforts were apparently paying dividends a 1913 poster Crusade
worked wonders in Detroit each student was given a posture percent and students with bad posture were labeled bees and shamed until they could straighten up a machine called a stereo Opticon was used which took Shadow pictures of each child
that were then discussed with the class children were made to strip down to underwear or swimsuits to be assessed in the 1940s students were even told that good posture was necessary to win the war the most intense posture programs
took hold in private East Coast colleges like the ivy league and the Seven Sisters colleges in 1921 a meeting of the Eastern Society of college directors of physical education women examin the
state of posture programs binar and Cornell offered posture instruction in gymnastics and dancing classes while Goucher College only urged General exercise Simmons and Wheaten colleges measured students carefully and even
referred cases to surgeons while Vasser Barnard and the University of Pittsburgh conducted tests and offered awards for posture many used Shadow graphs schemat graphs and posture tracings imp posture
education and Vasser had a robust posture photography prr program in 1915 Vasser had invited the American posture League to examine its students and by 1915 had created a posture
committee tag days were held where students tagged anyone not standing or walking correctly in 1920 they held a posture drive and gave pins to the students who had the best posture in
1930 a new Vasser PE director even claimed the right to dismiss students if their posture was bat at enrollment about one-third of students were given special assignments to correct their posture at
orientation in 1932 Vasser introduced its fundamentals course a required course for freshmen that emphasized posture and included nude photographs and examination Professor Elizabeth
Daniels described the vaser photography sessions in your freshman year you went over to the gym you changed into an angle robe before entering the booth shed the robe temporarily while your nude profile and rear views of your body
were recorded put the angel robe back back on and left a professor would discuss posture deficiencies and then the photos were committed to the furnace these posture programs remained in force for decades at some of the top
colleges in the country like Yale Harvard Princeton Welsley and brown television personality dick cavat described his own experience at Yale in the mid1 1950s where Mr cold hands
affixed non-invasive needles to his back he joked about it in a comedy routine later some guys hated it some seemed to enjoy it one guy tried to go through twice one guy fainted one guy tried to buy his pictures and one guy tried to
get his retouched and that he also recalled that it was awful Ron rosenbom who wrote an expose in 1995 for the New York Times called the Great ivy league nude posture photo
scandal remembered his own photo session also at Yale 10 years after cavat entire generations of prominent Americans were subjected to this bizarre ritual George Bush Hillary Clinton Merill stre Bob
Woodward and Diane Sawyer among thousands of others among college students rumors abounded that thousands of the photos have been stolen from one college or another and offered for sale on some ivy league Black Market
Washington writer Sally Quinn said you always thought when you did it that one day they'd come back to haunt you that 25 years later when your husband was running for president they'd show up in Penthouse the American obsession with
posture had more Sinister consequences and uses the photos were used in studies such as one that used the Harvard photos to determine if smoking made one more manly in 1992 George Hershey an art
professor at Yale published a letter in the times that claimed a secret lies hidden in Vasser and Yale nude posture photos in the 1940s psychologist William Herbert Sheldon formulated his theory of somatotyping which categorized humans
into three types which he believed were connected to temperaments and indicated a person's intelligence morality and potential as Rosen bom put it Sheldon believed that physique equals
Destiny Sheldon's work was inspired or based on earlier work like Ernst ketchers who also thought he could categorize personality based on body type there were the ectomorphs then people who were more intelligent gentle
but self-conscious mesomorphs muscular fit individuals who are competitive and extroverted and endomorphs short heavys set people who are outgoing and laid-back but also lazy and selfish
Sheldon also continued that criminals tended to be mesomorphic Sheldon began by using 4,000 photos from the University of Chicago using body measurements Sheldon categorized the bodies using a three-digit number that
represented each one of the body types and by extension personality types while the concept may seem absurd today at the time the concept that body types and posture were connected to Inner traits was more acceptable in the 1940s and
connected to the field of eugenics Sheldon LED an in Institute for physique studies at Columbia according to Hershey the photos had nothing to do with posture that is only what we were told Sheldon along with Anthropologist
EA hooton at Harvard collected or photographed thousands of people Sheldon's theories were for a Time popular writer Aldis Huxley was a particular admirer as were a number of psychologists and social theorists his
studies were supported and he appropriated thousands of poster photos to apply to his own research without the consent of the photographed the details of how Sheldon got access to many of these photos is somewhat murky few of the people
involved ever spoke on the subject it is known he sent his own team to colleges such as Smith college Mount hoolio swathmore Vasser and Midwestern universities in Iowa Illinois and Wisconsin Sheldon used the photos to
produce research and his atlas of men in 1954 which included many nude photos of freshmen from Ivy League schools in Sheldon's collections Rosen bom found 27,000 photographs about about 20,000 of
them of men and nearly half from Yale hery accused Sheldon of creating a stud book which could be used to connect the best and brightest when he published his accompanying atlas of women at least some schools were confused about how
Sheldon even acquired the photos rosenbom pound photos of Vasser classes from 1942 and 1952 and the school wasn't even sure how he got them correspondence between Vasser faculty and Sheldon seemed to illustrate how personal
relationships helped him collect his photographic collections Sheldon wrote to vasor head physician explained that to create an atlas of women he needed between 10,000 and 20,000 photographs to
determine satisfactorily the somatotype distributions it's particularly important to have an unloaded sample that is to say when the matter is put on a voluntary or semi- voluntary basis the validity of the sample is destroyed
Sheldon didn't think he could afford to let women consent as it would skew the findings in 1952 a Vasser faculty member wrote to Sheldon that we expect to do physical exams on sophomores during the week of March 20th to 24th we will be
taking our own posture pictures as part of the examination if you can plan it and think you could fit it into your schedule we'll be glad to have you use these girls as some of your guinea pigs even taking the photos seem to put
strain on young women an official at Dennison University in Ohio refused Sheldon's request to retake photos as it would create instrumental psychological problems one of Sheldon's assistants remembered doing a great deal of work in
Reading Hospital and court records and looking up the medical and social backg grounds of the people photographed there was without a doubt an undercurrent of racism in the work her she accused Sheldon of creating an archive similar to the Nazis archives
that sought to prove racial Perfection hooton said that somatotype studies would lead to efforts to control and limit the production of inferior and useless organisms the Harvard Crimson claims that people who knew Sheldon
described him as a racist and a Nazi sympathizer and he believed that Hispanic and African brains sto maturing earlier than whites a contemporary researcher physician Robert Holt called Sheldon's work a dangerous piece of
fascistic pseudo science the whole program came apart in 1950 when Sheldon was taking photographs of freshman women at the University of Washington according to Rosen bomb one of the women told her parents and the next day a
battalion of lawyers and University officials stormed Sheldon's lab seized every photo of a nude woman convicted the images of shamefulness and sentenced them to burning Sheldon's atlas of women
never appeared in his research was largely discredited in part because his assistant Barbara Heath denounced his methods as fraudulent and his somatotypes as inaccurate Sheldon died in 1977 his career in
shambles posture photos contined to be taken at some universities into the 1960s and70s until the practice finally faded and many thousands have been burned or otherwise destroyed but some are still held in collections like by
the Smithsonian institution despite the best effort of Administrators and others a few have made it to the public to be sold on eBay Rosen bomb's 1995 article did make some waves and led the
smithonian institution to seal their collection and Destroy many thousands of those photos of course posture remains an issue in America but we'll hope for all our sakes that it will no longer require nude
photos I hope you enjoyed watching this episode of the history guide if you did please feel free to like And subscribe and share the history guide with your friends and if you also believe that history deserves to be remembered then you can support the history guy as a
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