Beginning Again with Modernist Epic

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-69
Author(s):  
Václav Paris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The United States ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Prevailing Paradigm ◽  
Westward Movement ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

This chapter offers a revisionary account of the emergence of modernist epic through a detailed reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, the prevailing paradigm for narrations of national destiny was Darwinian. Mostly written between 1903 and 1911, Stein’s book opens as if it were in agreement with such narrations of the national story. Stein announces it as a developmental narrative of the United States, tracing two families’ progressions and westward movement, from a first generation of immigrants to their children and then grandchildren. The Making of Americans, however, does not fulfil its developmentalist prospects in any straightforward manner. Rather, the book stalls, digresses, and—to use Stein’s words—“begins again and again.” In its second half, the narrative comes to resemble less the work of nineteenth-century historians, and more the extensive later portions of modernist modern epics by Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, or James Joyce. The chapter describes how Stein’s turn to a digressive open-form narrative corresponds to her shifting interests in biological science and experimental writing. Her work, it argues, marks the advent of new kind of modernist epic, motivated by attempts to find a way to represent national life beyond social Darwinism and its heteropatriarchal protocols.

Intergenerational Occupational Mobility across Three Continents

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago Pérez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
Occupational Mobility ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

I compare rates of intergenerational occupational mobility across four countries in the late nineteenth century: 1869–1895 Argentina, 1850–1880 United States, 1851–1881 Britain, and 1865–1900 Norway. Argentina and the United States had similar levels of intergenerational mobility, and these levels were above those of Britain and Norway. These findings suggest that the higher mobility of nineteenth-century United States relative to Britain might not have been a reflection of “American exceptionalism,” but rather a manifestation of more widespread differences between settler economies of the New World and Europe.

“Lost by Being Found”: The Public and the Material Past in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Relic Hunters ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Snead
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Antiquity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
First Case ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

In the flurry of activity following the Centennial Exposition, the Kentucky Mummy’s onward journey to Washington went unremarked. Her addition to the national collection was eventually acknowledged in the Smithsonian’s annual report for 1876, without further comment. Cryptic references to this item’s new status can be found in institutional memoranda over the next few years: “Dr. Rau has the mummy on exhibition in first case to the left as you enter his hall,” reads one such note. But in the wilderness of artifacts at the Smithsonian there was little space for nostalgia, and the Mummy does not seem to have attracted the notice of the Washington audience. The implicit alignment of perspectives between local antiquarians and Smithsonian scholars at the end of the 1870s—that the documentation of archaeological evidence was fundamentally tied to experience on the ground, demonstrating the need for local knowledge and widespread cooperation—did not, however, affect the trajectory of archaeological practice in the United States. The implications of the deep files in Mason’s office remained largely unremarked. The passing of this opportunity for archaeological synthesis testifies perhaps more to inadequate institutional frameworks than to conceptual shortcomings. The Smithsonian’s efforts to collect information on American antiquity in the 1870s differed only in detail and scale from the correspondence of the American Antiquarian Society in the 1810s. In both cases—and in many others launched during the intervening years—an institution sought to acquire antiquarian capital through a network of collaborators, exchanging prestige and modest access for information and associated commodities. In the context of the late nineteenth century, however, the failures of such approaches were more evident than their episodic successes, and the sense that opportunities to understand the American past had been squandered was widespread. The words of Moses Fisk, published in 1820, could describe the antiquarian enterprise of his and subsequent generations. “It is to be regretted,” he wrote, “that these ancient ruins and relicks have been exposed to so much depredation. Valuable articles are lost by being found.”

American Legal Thought in Transatlantic Context, 1870-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Rabban
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Historical School ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sociological Jurisprudence

Most American legal scholars have described their nineteenth-century predecessors as deductive formalists. In my recent book, Law’s History : American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History, I demonstrate instead that the first generation of professional legal scholars in the United States, who wrote during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, viewed law as a historically based inductive science. They constituted a distinctive historical school of American jurisprudence that was superseded by the development of sociological jurisprudence in the early twentieth century. This article focuses on the transatlantic context, involving connections between European and American scholars, in which the historical school of American jurisprudence emerged, flourished, and eventually declined.

Rebuilding the City, Leaving it behind

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wells
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Fringe ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Suburban Developments ◽  
The City

As U.S. cities burgeoned in the late nineteenth century, their environmental problems multiplied. In response, some urban elites worked to rebuild the city to alleviate its environmental ills; others relocated to more environmentally enticing surroundings in new suburban developments. For members of both groups, new forms of transportation infrastructure profoundly shaped how they responded to the era's environmental crisis. Whereas efforts to rebuild and retrofit downtown were hampered by the difficulties and expense of working in densely built and populated areas, efforts to build on the urban fringe faced few serious obstacles. As a result, the most significant late nineteenth-century attempts to use transportation to remake city dwellers' relationships with nature in the United States - including tools developed with an eye on rebuilding dense city centers - exercised far greater influence on the expanding periphery of cities than on their environmentally fraught cores.

John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.

State, Market, and Popular Sovereignty in Agrarian North America

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-199
Author(s):  
Christopher Clark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Productive Capacity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
American Political Economy

This essay focuses on agriculture and particularly the “freehold ideal” of independent farmers in the nineteenth-century United States. An odd contradiction of American territorial settlement was the farmers’ simultaneous drive to exploit resources for the market and the aim of many of those actively engaged in settlement to shield themselves from the market’s dangers by acquiring land on the frontier. Clark shows how the ideal of freehold farming, which was so central to the American political economy, was actually threatened not so much from the dangers of the market overwhelming the small farm as from the family farm running out of labor to uphold its own productive capacity. Labor, not land, was the problem confronting the freehold vision, as he argues in a provocative re-reading of late nineteenth-century small farmers’ calls for state intervention.

The Empire's New Frontiers

2003 ◽  
Vol 102 (667) ◽  
pp. 383-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael T. Klare
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Behavior ◽  
Central Eurasia ◽  
South Central ◽  
Strategic Position ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The United States … wants to enhance its own strategic position in south-central Eurasia, much as Great Britain attempted in the late nineteenth century. This effort encompasses anti-terrorism and the pursuit of oil, but many in Washington also see it as an end in itself—as the natural behavior of a global superpower engaged in global dominance.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document