Poverty and Progress: A Critique

1986 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-13
Author(s):  
Edward Pessen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working People ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many ◽  
19Th Century America

That Stephan Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress is widely regarded as a classic is clear from the very fact that a symposium of this type is being held. Nor is the book’s reputation unwarranted. Thernstrom (1964: 1) himself wrote that “one of the most glaring gaps in our knowledge of 19th century America is the absence of reliable information about the social mobility of its population, particularly at the lower and middle levels of society.” Thanks to his study of Newburyport and the many studies of other communities that his research has helped inspire, that gap in our knowledge has been narrowed and we are all the wiser. Before Thernstrom, American historians were prone to speak of large-scale upward mobility on the basis of a handful of success stories. He showed us a better way.Some scholars, and they include admirers of Thernstrom’s work, have recently questioned both the importance of social mobility and the extent to which it influenced the minds of working people (Henretta, 1977; Katz, 1975; and Dawley, 1976). Their argument is interesting but highly conjectural. Most of us continue to believe, and rightly so, that research such as Thernstrom’s has significantly illuminated nineteenth-century American society.

Adventurers, Foreign Women and Masculinity in the Colombian Wars of Independence

2005 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
The Social ◽  
At Home

This paper examines changing conceptions of honour and masculinity during the Colombian Wars of Independence in the early 19th century. It explores the position of the foreign women who accompanied British and Irish expeditions to join the war against Spanish rule, and shows how colonial, imperial and republican conceptions of masculinity were affected by the role that women played in these volunteer expeditions and in the wars in general. The paper considers women's experiences during war and peace, and examines their experiences in the light of changing conceptions of masculinity at home, in the British empire and in Hispanic America in the early nineteenth century. The social mobility of the Wars of Independence shifted the ground on which these concepts rested for all groups involved. The participation of foreign women alongside male adventurers was a further ingredient in this disorientating period.

scholarly journals SOCIOCULTURAL SPLIT AND RADICALIZATION OF SOCIETY IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 288-293
Author(s):  
Natal'ya Savchuk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article discusses the causes of the sociocultural contradictions that led to the radicalization of society and the emergence of terrorist revolutionary organizations in the second half of the 19th century. The social structure of society is considered. The danger of underestimating society propaganda of extremist ideas of revolutionaries is shown.

Dazzling the Multitude Original Media Spectacles

1990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Marvin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Point To Point

Anthropologists and literary theorists are fond of emphasizing the particularistic and dramatic dimensions of lived communication. The particularistic dimension of communication is constituted in whatever of its aspects have the most individually intimate meaning for us. The dramatic dimension is the shared emotional character of a communicated message, displayed and sometimes exaggerated for consumption by a public. Its dramatic appeal and excitement depend partly on the knowledge that others are also watching with interest. Such dimensions have little in common with abstractions about information and efficiency that characterize contemporary discussion about new communications technologies, but may be closer to the real standards by which we judge media and the social worlds they invade, survey, and create. Media, of course, are devices that mediate experience by re-presenting messages originally in a different mode. In the late nineteenth century, experts convinced of the power of new technologies to repackage human experience and to multiply it for many presentations labored to enhance the largest, most dramatically public of messages, and the smallest, most intimately personal ones, by applying new media technologies to a range of modes from private conversation to public spectacle, that special large-scale display event intended for performance before spectators. In the late nineteenth century, intimate communication at a distance was achieved, or at least approximated, by the fledgling telephone. The telephone of this era was not a democratic medium. Spectacles, by contrast, were easily accessible and enthusiastically relished by their nineteenth-century audiences. Their drama was frequently embellished by illuminated effects that inspired popular fantasies about message systems of the future, perhaps with giant beams of electric light projecting words and images on the clouds. Mass distribution of electric messages in this fashion was indeed one pole of the range of imaginative possibilities dreamt by our ancestors for twentieth-century communication. Equally absorbing was the fantasy of effortless point-to-point communication without wires, where no physical obstacle divided the sympathy of minds desiring mutual communion.

Anglicans and Episcopalians in America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan R. Gundersen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
World War ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

Episcopalians have built, reimagined, and rebuilt their church at least three different times over the course of 400 years in America. From scattered colonial beginnings, where laity both took major roles in running Church of England parishes and practiced a faith that was focused on worship, pastoral care, and good works, Anglicans created a church that blended hierarchy, democracy, and autonomy. It took time after the disruptions of the American Revolution for Episcopalians to find their place among the many competing denominations of the new nation. In the process women found new roles for themselves. Episcopalians continued to have a large impact on American society even as other denominations outpaced them in membership. As individuals they shaped American culture and became prominent advocates for the social gospel. Distracted at times as they tried to balance catholic and Protestant in their thought and worship, they built a church that included both religious orders and revival gatherings. Although perceived as a church of the elite, its members included African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, and union members. Episcopalians struggled with issues of race, class, and gender throughout their history. After World War II, their understandings of the teachings of Jesus pulled a majority of Episcopalians toward more liberal social positions and created a traditionalist revolt eventually resulting in a schism that required new rebuilding efforts in parts of America.

Buildings on the Fringes of Society – 19th Century Protestant Asylums for ‘Idiots’ as Places of Hyper-Inclusion

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 350-368
Author(s):  
Ramona Jelinek-Menke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systems Theory ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Early History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Analytical Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Welfare Institution

This article analyses one Christian welfare institution and discusses the effects of its spatial location on the social position of its clients. By examining the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, it focuses on the early history of the Asylum of Alsterdorf for imbecile and feeble-minded children (Asyl für schwach- und blödsinnige Kinder zu Alsterdorf) in nineteenth-century Hamburg. The analytical perspective follows the concept of inclusion–exclusion as presented in Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. It is argued here that a religious welfare institution may enclose its clients in a hyper-inclusive system for theological reasons and that, consequently, institutions of this kind contribute to the social exclusion of their clients.

Warring for America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
School Students ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Many

The aftershocks of the American Revolution reverberated through the early nineteenth century, leaving the new country unsettled and at odds with itself. The essays in Warring for America offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the internal divisions amongst the inhabitants of the early Republic that hindered the emergence of a coherent American nation as much as did the lingering impact of British imperial influence. Traditional understanding of the War of 1812 era as a moment that reaffirmed the political independence of the United States, thereby ushering in a neat period of stability, have failed to explain the enduring struggle to define the social and physical parameters of the new nation that dominated much of the nineteenth century. By turning from high politics to cultural productions and material problems, the authors in this volume explore the many social and economic conflicts within the United States that were fought on cultural terrain. Wartime calls for unity only cast into sharper relief the arduous efforts of varied Americans to control the terms of inclusion or exclusion within their country. From presidents to African Free School students, from hack magazine writers to Choctaw mothers, Americans fought for country on the battleground of belonging.

scholarly journals The Use of Marriage Data to Measure the Social Order in Nineteenth-Century Britain

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Prandy ◽  
W. Bottero
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Very High ◽  
Underlying Dimension

This article describes the construction of a measure of the social order in the nineteenth century, which will subsequently be used as a basis for studying processes of social reproduction (or social mobility). The technique of correspondence analysis is used to map the ordering of groups of occupations in two time periods 1777-1866 and 1867-1913. The data are derived from the occupations at marriage of the groom, his father and his father-in-law (the occupations of brides, unfortunately, being very much under-recorded). Marriage, it is argued, is a socially significant act linking, on average, families that occupy similar positions in the social order and analyses of the patterns of social interaction involved provide a means of determining the nature of the social space within which similarity is defined. The three occupations provide three pair-wise comparisons and each comparison gives a mapping of the row occupations and the column occupations six in all. Since any one of these should provide a measure of the social order, assuming there to be any consistency in such a concept, we would expect that, at both time periods, the result of the analyses would be six closely-related estimates of the same underlying dimension. This is what is found; the inter-correlations are very high. Furthermore, there is a very strong relationship between the measures of the social order constructed for the two time periods. The analyses are presented within a framework that emphasises the value of the procedures used for understanding the nature of measurement in social science.

scholarly journals Ontario Retailers in the Early Twentieth Century: Dismantling the Social Bridge

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-227
Author(s):  
David Monod
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working People ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract This article explores the theory that late-nineteenth century and eary-twentieth century retailing served as an avenue to upward mobility. An examination of retailing in Ontario suggests two things: first, that shopkeeping was a deeply stratified occupation in which the poor remained marginalized at the bottom: and second, that over the course of the early twentieth century interest in retailing declined among working people as the business of storekeeping “professionalized”.

scholarly journals O Sucesso da Empreitada Maçônica no Brasil do Século XIX potencializado pelo Ethos do Rito Escocês Antigo e Aceito

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (21) ◽  
pp. 255
Author(s):  
Anderson Claytron Tavares
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Rites Of Passage ◽  
High Load ◽  
Religious Capital ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Universe

 O presente artigo mostra que existiu uma sólida estrutura religiosa financiadora da empreitada maçônica nos diversos locais que a mesma teve acesso e que o êxito desse empreendimento só foi possível pela alta carga de capital religioso presente na estrutura da maçonaria; a constituição Maçônica de 1723, os ritos de passagem e as muitas cosmogonias presentes nas antigas obrigações maçônicas, ajudaram no desenvolvimento da ordem elevando a mesma a uma missão de caráter transcendental. Em 1865 quando se tentou laicizar a maçonaria retirando do ritual a invocação do Grande Arquiteto do Universo, verificou-se através da mudança do rito moderno francês que a base religiosa brasileira era muito mais forte e se impôs à Ordem.  O estatuto maçônico através de sua herança religiosa dialogou profundamente com os preceitos da estrutura social que lhe deu aporte no século XIX, fornecendo uma forte base que serviu de alicerce para fundamentação de suas convicções. The present article shows that there was a solid religious structure that financed the Masonic enterprise in the various places that it had access and that the success of this enterprise was only possible due to the high load of religious capital present in the structure of Freemasonry; the Masonic constitution of 1723, the rites of passage and the many cosmogonies present in the old Masonic obligations, helped in the development of the order, elevating it to a mission of transcendental character. In 1865, when it was tried to lay Freemasonry by removing from the ritual the invocation of the Great Architect of the Universe, it was verified through the change of the modern French rite that the Brazilian religious base was very strong imposing itself before the Order. The Masonic statute through its religious inheritance deeply dialogue with the precepts of the social structure that gave him support in the nineteenth century, providing a strong foundation that served as a foundation for the foundation of his convictions..

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