Infidel Deathbeds: Irreligious Dying and Sincere Disbelief in Nineteenth-Century America

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Kime
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Society

This article inquires into the piecemeal, provisional de-marginalization of American irreligion and analyzes the social stakes and strategies of dis/belief's invocation during the long nineteenth century. It does so by considering the era's corpus of American deathbed narratives. It argues that late-century irreligionists mimed and subverted the deathbed strategies of their Christian detractors to convince a skeptical American audience to concede the contested sincerity of their disbelief. For much of the nineteenth century, Christian-produced infidel deathbed narratives mapped the mixture and multiplicity of inner irreligion and interrogated the sincerity of disbelief. In response, irreligionists—initially ambivalent about the interpretability of the deathbed—eventually came to invest it with as much power to prove sincerity as had American Christians. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, irreligionists developed a nationwide network of irreligious dying and selectively, strategically deployed the deathbed's accrued power to prove the uniform sincerity of their disbelief. By the turn of the century, they had largely neutralized the derisive force of the infidel deathbed genre, leaving disbelief a partially, provisionally less marginal and less multiplex marker in American society, and re-tethering themselves to their Christian detractors in the process.

Concluding Note

2020 ◽  
pp. 309-320
Author(s):  
Maroona Murmu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminine Ideals

The conclusion focuses upon reception-based approach to understand the significance of women authors in the social map of reading community in nineteenth-century Bengal. It demonstrates how, even after the emergence of a sizeable reading community catering to books authored by women, due to the spatial ‘respectability’ of the presses from which their books got published the reception of prohibited penmanship by women by the bhadralok society in ‘renascent’ Bengal was disappointing. Since some women flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tutored tastes, the bhadralok critics, in their reviews of book by women, often censured the authors if their autonomous selfhood in print became threatening and praised them for imparting ‘feminine’ ideals alone. However, such sarcastic comments and caustic critique could not strip women authors of their creative foray in the literary world. By the turn of the century, they had begun creating a literary tradition of their own in Bengali.

The Social Functions of Voluntary Associations in a Nineteenth-Century American Town

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don H. Doyle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Class Leaders ◽  
American Society ◽  
New Research

Recent research in American urban history has given us a polarized view of the social order of nineteenth-century cities. At one extreme the studies of urban spatial and social mobility have revealed a restless shifting population of individuals moving through the city attached by little more than a brief term of employment. “American society…,” concluded one such mobility study, “was more like a procession than a stable social order. How did this social order cohere at all?” To a large extent the answer to this question has come from another body of studies which have reexamined a variety of institutions from police to public schools and found them to be part of a broad effort among Protestant middle-class leaders to bring control and order to this strange new urban world. The new research on mobility and social control has enlarged our understanding of American social history in many important ways, however, our emphasis on mobility and the mechanisms of coercive social control may obscure the social order that citizens of nineteenth-century communities defined for themselves.

The Earnings of Skilled and Unskilled Immigrants at the End of the Nineteenth Century

1986 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 441-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Eichengreen ◽  
Henry A. Gemery
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Returns To Experience ◽  
Relative Earnings ◽  
Wage Earners

Most historical studies of immigration in nineteenth-century America have failed to distinguish among the labor-market experiences of different immigrant groups. Using a sample of some 4000 wage earners from turn-of-the-century Iowa, we examine the relative earnings of skilled and unskilled immigrants and suggest the factors which contributed to their very different post-immigration experiences. The results indicate that prior knowledge of a trade conferred upon immigrants an initial earnings advantage, but that unskilled immigrants managed subsequently to close some but not all of the gap by reaping greater returns to experience on the job.

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