Transnational Business and US Diplomacy in Late Nineteenth-Century South America: W. R. Grace & Co. and the Chilean Crises of 1891

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 765-792 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK RICE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Economic Infrastructure

AbstractThe final decades of the nineteenth century were marked by diplomatic confrontations between Chile and the United States. In 1891 the killing of US Navy sailors in a riot in Valparaíso threatened to provoke armed conflict, an event known as the Baltimore Crisis. This article investigates how William Russell Grace, the head of a merchant firm based in New York, played a central role in negotiating between Chile and the United States. By placing his activities in a transnational framework, Grace responded to the demands of multiple nation-states in the Americas. Observing changes in Grace's transnational economic infrastructure can help to identify larger long-term shifts in diplomacy and power on South America's Pacific coast in the late nineteenth century, especially Chile's emergence as a regional hegemon. The actions of Grace also raise larger questions regarding the power of business in the Americas in the late nineteenth century, especially with regard to growing US interests in the region.

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.

In The Shadow Of Yung Wing

2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDWARD J. M. RHOADS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Mission ◽  
Qing Government ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) was one of the �rst efforts at "self-strengthening," China's late nineteenth-century attempt at modernization. Beginning in 1872, the Qing government sent 120 boys to live and study in New England for extended periods. The mission was the brainchild of Yung Wing (1828-1912), known as a pioneering Chinese in America. This article contends that Zeng Laishun (ca. 1826-1895), the CEM's original interpreter, was no less a pioneer. It examines Zeng's education in Singapore, New Jersey, and New York; his early career as, successively, a missionary assistant, a businessman, and a teacher at a naval school in China; his concurrent roles as the English translator for the CEM in the United States and (with his family) as a cultural interpreter of China to New England's elite; and brie�y, following his return to China in 1874, his association with Li Hongzhang as his chief English secretary.

Social mobility in America and Europe: a comparison of nineteenth-century cities

Urban History ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 24-38
Author(s):  
Hartmut Kaelble
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Second World

‘There is still a class of menials and a class of masters, but these classes are not always composed of the same individuals, still less of the same families; and those who command are not more secure of perpetuity than those who obey—At any moment a servant may become a master, and he aspires to rise to that condition’. This view of social mobility in North America by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1840 has been the predominant perception almost to the present. Only after the Second World War did two basically different arguments emerge. On the one hand, historians of social mobility in nineteenth-century American and European cities, such as Boston, Marseille, and Bochum came to the tentative conclusion that rates of upward social mobility were in fact higher in the United States than in Europe and that this was especially true for upward mobility from the working-class into non-manual occupations. In effect, their assessments corroborated the assertion which Tocqueville had made more than a century ago. The explanation for these differences, historians argued, was to be found in the values of the European working class: a strong traditional commitment to the occupational heredity, or the beginnings of class consciousness, kept European workers from using chances of social ascent into non-manual occupations much more than American workers. On the other hand, Seymour M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix have claimed that social mobility becomes similarly high in all societies, once a certain degree of industrialization and economic expansion has been reached. The idea behind this argument is that rates of social mobility depend on economic development and changes of occupational structure, which both follow the same basic pattern in Europe and North America. Whilst the empirical evidence for this assessment depends on post-1945 studies of social mobility in America and Europe, there are grounds for projecting the argument back to the late nineteenth century. First, if economic development does lead to similar mobility rates, this effect should have emerged by the end of the era of industrialization. Secondly, studies of the trend of social mobility in the United States as well as in various European countries show the same long term stability of rates of social mobility since the late nineteenth century. Hence, if rates of social mobility were similar after the Second World War, and if the long term trend was similar too, mobility rates at the end of the era of industrialization cannot have differed much.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 158-162
Author(s):  
Gina M. Martino
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early American ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The book’s epilogue considers how and why early American women’s war making has been remembered and forgotten by historians and members of the public in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In particular, the epilogue explores why the few women who are remembered are considered anomalies. It suggests that late-nineteenth-century nationalists encouraged Canada and the United States to “claim” their remembered heroines and commemorate their war making by erecting monuments and reusing their names for natural features. At the same time, creating national heroines and placing them within the borders of nation-states resulted in Canadians and Americans forgetting that those women—and many others—fought in a larger, fluid borderlands context. Finally, the epilogue returns to the central premise of the book: that women were active, invested participants in expansionist and colonialist wars in the northeastern borderlands of North America.

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.

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.

A Theater of Violence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter 5 examines lynching, a longstanding practice in the United States that became more regionally associated with the South in the late nineteenth century, as a force in film history from the earliest days of the medium through a cycle of anti-lynching films during the years around midcentury. Paradoxically, the Western genre is important here, absorbing many of the common rituals and generating a powerful ideological defense of lynching. During different periods across this half-century, different attitudes about lynching led to a variety of film representations, culminating with a number of films in the late 1930s and beyond questioning both lynching and its cinematic traces.

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