IRISH IN THE CITY: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN AMERICAN URBAN HISTORY

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 571-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
AMY S. GREENBERG
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Good Opportunity ◽  
Urban America

Parish boundaries: the Catholic encounter with race in the twentieth-century urban north. By John T. McGreevy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. vi+362. ISBN 0-226-55873-8. $27.50.What parish are you from? A Chicago Irish community and race relations. By Eileen M. McMahon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Pp. xii+226. ISBN 0-8131-1877-8. $32.95.The Boston Irish: a political history. By Thomas H. O'Connor. London: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Pp. xixx+363. ISBN 1-55553-220-9. £23.50.The New York Irish. Edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xxii+743. ISBN 0-8018-5199-8. $45.00.The public city: the political construction of urban life in San Francisco, 1850–1900. By Philip J. Ethington. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xvi+464. ISBN 0-8018-5199-8. £40.00.Civic wars: democracy and public life in the American city during the nineteenth century. By Mary P. Ryan. London: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xii+376. ISBN 0-520-20441-7. £16.15.Few events have had a greater impact on urban America than the Irish Catholic exodus, which eventually brought one third of the Irish to the United States. Irish Catholics were the first ethnic group to immigrate in large numbers to America's cities and to experience overt discrimination. Overcoming that discrimination, they emerged as the consummate political force in urban America. In the late nineteenth century, Irish politicians and their political machines controlled a majority of America's large cities, long before the election of John F. Kennedy as president brought the Irish political presence to the national stage. At once integrated into American culture and proud of their ethnic culture and identity, the Irish in America continue to have a clear cultural presence in both positive and negative ways, in many American cities. The Irish hold the best parades, but sometimes refuse to allow Irish homosexuals the right to parade in them. The Irish are proud of their neighbourhoods, sometimes to the point of physical violence.For the first time in over two centuries, however, Irish immigration patterns have reversed. Over the last two years, 13,000 more Irish moved back to Ireland from America than went the other way. This watershed change provides a good opportunity to reconsider the history of the Irish in America's cities, as the authors of some recent publications demonstrate. This review will examine six current studies that illuminate the Irish urban experience in America. The authors of these histories document the role of the Irish and the Catholic church in urban racial disturbances in the twentieth century; they reconsider the importance of the Irish to urban political culture; and they explore the contested meanings of being Irish in urban America.

Ghetto Realism—and Beyond

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-218
Author(s):  
Lori Harrison-Kahan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth

By focusing on the reception of Yekl, Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel of immigrant life in New York, this chapter considers the turn-of-the-twentieth-century controversy surrounding depictions of Jews in ghetto literature, arguing that this debate illuminates not only the challenges of ethno-racial representation and self-representation but also the slipperiness of realism itself. The chapter also posits a more inclusive interpretation of Jewish American realism by demonstrating the importance of an overlooked late nineteenth-century realist writer, Emma Wolf. It explores how Wolf’s novels Other Things Being Equal (1892) and Heirs of Yesterday (1900), which focus on experiences of Jewish families in San Francisco during the Progressive Era, offer important alternatives to the New York–centric ghetto genre, expanding the parameters of Jewish American literature in terms of region, class, gender, and religion.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and Chinatown Theaters

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Exclusion Act ◽  
Cross National

This chapter focuses on immigration policies in the United States and how they impacted Chinatown opera theaters from their burgeoning in the nineteenth century through the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and into the early twentieth century. Whereas Chinese theaters rose to prominent entertainment in the 1870s, with four concurrent theaters in San Francisco, late nineteenth century exclusionary regulations severely curtailed previously vibrant Chinatown opera theaters. It eventually cut off the flow of performers and limiting companies’ performance opportunities by early 20th century. The chapter identifies a turning point when the continuing demand for Chinese performers prompted American entrepreneurs and others to circumvent U.S. policies and advocate for exceptions to the stultifying rules in the second decade of the20th century. As a result, increasingly itinerant performers were allowed to cross national borders, and theaters were allowed to stage performances, but each existed in a precarious relationship with immigration officials and boards that enforced exclusionary principles and practices.

Immigration, Medical Regulation, and Eugenics

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Kline
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Regulation ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In the late nineteenth century, as fears of contamination latched onto eugenic anxieties about racial degeneration, the medical regulation of foreigners attempting to enter the United States became particularly intense. Ideas about contagion and degeneration characterized the medical regulation of immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century, and many of these ideas remain with us today.

Bishop John Lancaster Spalding and the Catholic Minority (1877–1908)

1950 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas T. McAvoy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lay Leadership ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Intellectual Leader

RomanCatholicism in the United States has produced able leaders among its clergy and laymen during the first decades of the twentieth century, but most of them seem to lack the lustre and verve of the Catholic leaders during the waning decades of the nineteenth century. The lay leadership which produced John Gilmary Shea, William J. Onahan, Henry F. Brownson, Patrick V. Hickey and Henry Spaunhorst had strong backing from such clergymen as James Cardinal Gibbons, John Ireland, John J. Keane, Bernard McQuaid, and Michael A. Corrigan. But the intellectual leader of American Catholicism during the late nineteenth century was John Lancaster Spalding, Bishop of Pepria, and the twentieth century Catholicism has not produced his counterpart.

The Temperance Movement in India: Politics and Social Reform

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Carroll
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The temperance/prohibition agitation represents a fascinating chapter in the social and political history of India which has been largely ignored. If any notice is taken of this movement, it is generally dismissed (or elevated) as an example of the uniquely Indian process of ‘sanskritization’ or as an equally unique component of ‘Gandhianism’—in spite of the fact that the liquor question has not been without political importance in the history either of England or of the United States. And in spite of the fact that the temperance agitation in India in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century was intimately connected with temperance agitation in England. Indeed the temperance movement in India was organized, patronized, and instructed by English temperance agitators.

Balance of Power

2019 ◽  
pp. 7-33
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Western World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Audience Response ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses composers’ music—that is, music that demands a faithful adherence to detailed notation--in urban public settings in the late nineteenth century, among them formal performance series, music festivals, exhibitions, and outdoor “garden” concerts. Drawing examples from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Cincinnati, and Chicago, it shows Americans experimenting with strategies for musical dissemination that took audience response as an important consideration. Illustrating the relationship between social class and aesthetic perspectives in late-nineteenth-century American concert life, Ahlquist offers a potential model from the United States for the historical study of composers’ music throughout the Western world.

Rubber and the Environment in Malaysia

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Beinart ◽  
Lotte Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Combustion Engine ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Motor Industry ◽  
Chinese Origin ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The rise of the motor car created two very different commodity frontiers in the British Empire, one producing oil and the other rubber. The demand for rubber followed an often-repeated pattern in that it was shaped by scientific invention, technological change, and new patterns of consumption in the industrialized world. It was related directly to the development of new fossil fuels. Coal transformed shipping and overland transport by rail. Oil (Chapter 15) opened new realms for mobility. The invention in 1867 of the internal combustion engine by a German, Nikolaus Otto, and in 1885 of automobiles powered by gasoline-driven engines revolutionized transport, culture, and the South-East Asian environment. During the late nineteenth century, wild natural rubber booms swept through the tropical world, from Brazil to the Congo, leaving in their wake hardship and scandal. In Malaysia, there was a very different outcome—the development of plantations on a new capitalist agrarian frontier. Rubber became one of the single most important commodities produced in the Empire, and was enormously valuable to Britain not only for its own motor industry but also to sell to the United States. Whereas demand for some earlier imperial commodities was largely British, there was also significant consumption of rubber and oil in other parts of the Empire, especially the settler dominions. In the early decades of the twentieth century, rubber plantations, in parallel with expanding sugar production in Queensland, Natal, Trinidad, and Fiji, extended and intensified Britain’s engagement with the tropical zones of the world. Indentured workers replaced slaves as the major plantation workforce. South India was the major labour source for Malaysia, where the ports and tin-mining centres already had substantial Chinese communities. British colonialism in Malaysia left as its legacy a multi-ethnic society. By the 1930s about 55 per cent were indigenous Malays and Orang Asli, 35 per cent of Chinese origin, and close to 10 per cent Indian. Although capital was increasingly mobile by the late nineteenth century, extraction and production of the three major commodities of the twentieth century Empire proved to be highly location specific. Gold and oil were trapped in particular geological formations.

Establishing a Career

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Abelson Macleod
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Ludwig Van Beethoven ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Initial Failure ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Edvard Grieg

This chapter examines the state of classical music in the United States in the late nineteenth century as well as Fannie Bloomfield's first attempts to establish a career as a pianist during that time. It first describes the European ensembles that toured the United States beginning in midcentury, such as the Germania Musical Society, and the European virtuosos who barnstormed the country. It then considers Theodore Thomas's role in promoting an interest in classical music, and especially how he helped further Bloomfield's career. It also discusses the impediments to women's success as virtuosos, including the assumption that women were incapable of interpreting the likes of composers considered to be “virile,” such as Ludwig van Beethoven and Edvard Grieg. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Bloomfield's audition with Thomas; her initial failure to present a New York debut; her career-altering contract with the Wm. Knabe & Co.; her subsequent debut performances in Chicago and New York; and her marriage to Sigmund Zeisler in 1885.

“The Frog’s Courtship” and Other Sources

Sweet Thing ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 79-134
Author(s):  
Nicholas Stoia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Harmonic Language ◽  
Major Branch ◽  
Textual Content

The stanzaic form of “The Frog’s Courtship” represents a second major branch in the lineage of the “Sweet Thing” scheme. Chapter 2 concerns its progress from Elizabethan England all the way to late nineteenth-century ragtime and early twentieth-century blues and country music. The stanzaic form appears in the United States by the early nineteenth century and then largely disappears from print until reemerging in several songs collected by folklorists in the early twentieth century, demonstrating its strong endurance in oral tradition. More often than “Captain Kidd,” this second stanzaic form appears in extensively abbreviated versions, reflecting its oral mode of transmission, which allows for more flexibility in length of bars. In early ragtime, the form unites with the harmonic language of contemporaneous popular music and acquires melodic and textual content that subsequently imbues early blues and country music as pervasive elements of the twentieth-century “Sweet Thing” scheme.

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