Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland

2016 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-129
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

The best work in the new “history of capitalism” field borrows from the tool kits of social and cultural historians and rests on the assumption that states, societies, and markets cannot be treated separately from one another. That central observation feeds the contemporary impulse to reconnect subfields, such as business, labor, and politics, which had drifted apart since the 1970s. Already this methodology has returned scholarship on the nineteenth-century United States to the topics of slavery's relationship to capitalism and the realization of selfhood either through manumission, the labor market, or finance.

Don’t Forget to Say “Thank You”: Toward a Modern History of Gratitude

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1060-1083
Author(s):  
Ruthann Clay ◽  
Peter N Stearns
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Modern History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

Abstract Gratitude is much discussed these days as an area of research in the positive psychology movement. But the quality has not been given much historical attention—despite the surge of historical attention to other types of emotional response. This article lays out the evidence for extensive reliance on gratitude in the nineteenth-century United States and its measurable decline in the twentieth century—at least until the recent revival. From childrearing materials to comments on etiquette, both references and conventions shifted measurably. The essay goes on to establish the context for these changes, relating gratitude to developments in gender relations and, particularly, to a heightened sense of self and, arguably, of self-entitlement. Current efforts to promote gratitude operate against the contemporary historical dynamic, and the resulting tensions deserve attention from historians and psychologists alike.

scholarly journals Following the Money: Fenian Bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States*

2020 ◽  
Vol 247 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-112
Author(s):  
David Sim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Fenian Brotherhood ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Irish Americans

Abstract This article tracks and analyses the history of bonds issued by the Fenian Brotherhood in the 1860s to argue that US Americans could take part in a marketplace in distant revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century. In this period, various, disparate nationalist groups issued bonds, suggesting a commonly understood method of generating funds, sustaining sentimental attachment, and projecting the authority of authentic nation-states. The Civil War-era United States was a particularly fertile environment for the issuance of such bonds because of its traditions of free banking, the ease with which bonds might be floated to a public increasingly au fait with their operation, and a broad rhetorical sympathy with the distant revolutions for which these bonds stood. The debt these bonds represented acted as a sentimental form of ‘special money’ and, for Irish-Americans, as for other immigrant communities in the United States, they allowed participation in a transnational movement without ever leaving their immediate neighbourhood. Tracing their issuance and circulation, then, allows us to write a material, sentimental and social history of everyday transnationalism and anti-imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. For later generations, this sentimental quality could and did devolve into a more immediately financial form, and the article concludes by identifying the redemption of these bonds as a significant step in legitimating the new Irish republic to a US audience.

Government by Improvisation? Towards a New History of the Nineteenth-Century American State

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-316
Author(s):  
R. M. BATES
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
State Building ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Private Actors ◽  
Infrastructural Power ◽  
American State

AbstractOver the last thirty years, historians and historically minded political scientists have effectively overturned the long-held perception of the nineteenth-century United States as a polity defined by its lack of an effective state. By highlighting the myriad interventions of its energetic and enterprising federal government and by incorporating subnational governments and private actors and organizations as evidence of its impressive “infrastructural” power, a generation of scholars have, collectively, described a nineteenth-century state that was both more assertive and more robust than was previously thought. Yet other scholars have begun to ask whether this interpretation has concocted a state stronger and more coherent in prospect than it was in practice. By highlighting the piecemeal and often partial nature of the nation’s institutional development and the contradictions and incoherence that accompanied its infrastructural power, these scholars have laid the foundations for a new “improvisational synthesis” that stresses the equivocal nature of American state-building and considers its enduring vulnerabilities.

An Overview of the History of Religious Life in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Wittberg ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Order ◽  
Religious Institutes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socioeconomic Composition

This chapter briefly describes the history of religious institutes in the United States. It first covers the demographics—the overall numbers and the ethnic and socioeconomic composition—of the various institutes during the nineteenth century. It next discusses the types of ministries the sisters, brothers, and religious order priests engaged in, and the sources of vocations to their institutes. The second section covers changes in religious institutes after 1950, covering the factors which contributed to the changes as well as their impact on the institutes themselves and the larger Church. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.

Normal Rights, Just New: Understanding the Judicial Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fowkes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Inherent Property ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Existing Structure

Abstract A common skeptical view holds that socioeconomic rights are a different kind of right than civil-political rights. Even those who support justiciable socioeconomic rights often see them as a different kind of right with special challenges. I argue that this view is wrong. What all these observers are reacting to is not an inherent property of socioeconomic rights: it is a contingent property of a situation in which judges are asked to enforce a rights claim without a pre-existing set of familiar public understandings of the right’s content and/or an existing structure of officials and procedures to give effect to that content. It is because the rights claim is new, and this is something that can be, and often is, true of rights across the spectrum. Any rights claim is problematic to enforce to the degree that it is new, but these obstacles can and do disappear if society changes and the claim becomes less new. In the first part of the Article, I seek to establish the accuracy of this argument, drawing on examples of rights distinctions from the nineteenth-century United States and rights across the spectrum displaying newness in contemporary South Africa and India. I then show how controlling for newness can help us to understand standard features of the socioeconomic rights debate: the ubiquitous, but misleading, negative–positive distinction; arguments about resources; Fuller’s endlessly cited polycentricity argument; and current controversial cases, such as the budget-shifting judicial enforcement of Latin American healthcare entitlements. These topics are central to our widespread intuition that socioeconomic rights are different; newness can help us to see that this intuition is misleading us, and by recalibrating the debate can filter out some distractions that have long dogged it.

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