scholarly journals Listening to Emerson's “England” at Clinton Hall, 22 January 1850

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-662
Author(s):  
TOM F. WRIGHT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Transatlantic Relations ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Urban Riots ◽  
Performance Career ◽  
The Press ◽  
Anglo American

Ralph Waldo Emerson's delivery of his essay “England” at Manhattan’s Clinton Hall on 22 January 1850 was one of the highest-profile of his performance career. He had recently returned from his triumphant British speaking tour with a radically revised view of transatlantic relations. In a New York still in shock from the Anglophobic urban riots of the previous winter, media observers were prepared to find a great deal of symbolism in both Emerson's new message and his idiosyncratic style of performance. This essay provides a detailed account of the context, delivery and conflicting newspaper readings of this Emerson appearance. Considering the lecture circuit as part of broader performance culture and debates over Anglo-American physicality and manners, it reveals how the press seized on both the “England” talk itself and aspects of Emerson's lecturing style as a means of shoring up civic order and Anglo-American kinship. I argue for a reexamination of the textual interchanges of nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and demonstrate how lecture reports reconnect us to forgotten means of listening through texts and discursive contests over the meaning of public speech.

Britain as Order

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom F. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Account ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Anglo American

Chapter 3 considers Emerson’s lecture “England” in two distinct settings: its Clinton Hall performance and its subsequent recital during appearances in Ohio in May 1850. It argues that reports of “England” in the Manhattan media appropriated the lecture as a useful shoring up of transatlantic affection in the wake of anti-British urban upheavals of the late 1840s. Subsequent responses to his Ohio performances demonstrated a pattern of resistance to the metropolitan interpretations, appropriating anew the resonance of Emerson’s appraisal for Midwestern realities. This chapter offers a detailed account of the context, delivery, and conflicting readings of these Emerson performances. In doing so, it restates a running theme of this book: that the lecture circuit, so often omitted from discussions of broader performance culture, needs to be reconnected to wider debates within the antebellum media concerning Anglo-American show practices, physicality, and manners.

The Pilgrims Society and Public Diplomacy, 1895-1945

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Bowman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Involvement ◽  
The Press ◽  
Anglo American

This book examines the role of the elite Pilgrims Society in Anglo-American relations during the first half of the twentieth century. The Pilgrims Society was a dining club founded in London and New York in 1902 and 1903 which sought to improve relations between Britain and the United States. The Society provided an elite network that brought together influential politicians, diplomats, journalists, and businessmen during key moments in Anglo-American diplomacy. This book argues that the Pilgrims acted in cooperation with officialdom in both countries to promote its essentially elitist conception of Anglo-American friendship. The book presents a series of case studies that focus on the proceedings and wider diplomatic significance of lavish banquets held across the period at iconic London and New York hotels. In so doing, the book is the first-ever scholarly examination of the Pilgrims Society and establishes the role of unofficial public diplomacy activities and associational culture in official Anglo-American relations in an earlier period than has been recognised in the existing historiography. The book concludes that the Pilgrims Society is best regarded as a semi-official actor in international relations which – through its engagement with the press and by means of facilitating contact between policy-making elites – provided a milieu that supported ideas of Anglo-American friendship and legitimised greater state involvement in public diplomacy.

Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Daggett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Language Barrier ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The City

The advent of Modern American Spiritualism took place in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Faubourgs Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of the city. This book focuses on Le Cercle Harmonique, the francophone séance circle of Henry Louis Rey, a Creole of color who was a key civil rights activist, author, and Civil War and Reconstruction leader. His life has remained largely in the shadows of New Orleans historiography owning, in part, to a language barrier. The book weaves an intriguing historical tale of the supernatural, chaotic postbellum politics, and the personal triumphs and tragedies of Henry Louis Rey. Besides Rey’s séance circle, there is also a discussion about the Anglo-American séance circles in New Orleans. The book places these séance circles within the context of the national scene, and the genesis of nineteenth-century Spiritualism is examined with a special emphasis placed on events in New York and Boston. The lifetime of Henry Rey and that of his father, Barthélemy Rey, spanned the nineteenth century, and mirror the social and political dilemmas of the black Creoles. The book concludes with a comparison of Spiritualism with the Spiritualist and Spiritual churches, as well as voodoo. The book’s narrative is accompanied by wonderful illustrations, reproductions of the original spiritual communications, and photographs.

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