Don’t Forget to Say “Thank You”: Toward a Modern History of Gratitude

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1060-1083
Author(s):  
Ruthann Clay ◽  
Peter N Stearns
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Modern History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

Abstract Gratitude is much discussed these days as an area of research in the positive psychology movement. But the quality has not been given much historical attention—despite the surge of historical attention to other types of emotional response. This article lays out the evidence for extensive reliance on gratitude in the nineteenth-century United States and its measurable decline in the twentieth century—at least until the recent revival. From childrearing materials to comments on etiquette, both references and conventions shifted measurably. The essay goes on to establish the context for these changes, relating gratitude to developments in gender relations and, particularly, to a heightened sense of self and, arguably, of self-entitlement. Current efforts to promote gratitude operate against the contemporary historical dynamic, and the resulting tensions deserve attention from historians and psychologists alike.

scholarly journals As mulheres e a afirmação histórica da profissão jornalística: contributos para uma não-ossificação da História do jornalismo.

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 165-182
Author(s):  
Maria João Silveirinha
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Activities ◽  
Female Journalists ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Journalism ◽  
Almost All

The place and role that women played in the history of journalism is still, amongst us, quite invisible and unquestioned. In the spirit of not only documenting, but theorizing history, the text aims to consider the intersection of the early stages of journalism as a profession with the entrance of the first women in the profession, and revisits the national and international press in the nineteenth century and the turn to the twentieth century, recalling the papers and female journalists of the time. As with almost all industrial activities, women were strongly sidelined in the early stage of industrialization of journalism in the terms under which it was defined. Learning about the experiences that make up the affirmation of journalism as a profession not only in Portugal but also in countries such as France, England or the United States establishes knowledge of a bodily and gendered experience. Assigning gender to the news, as it was originally defined, extends the range of problems we study and allows a deeper understanding not only of what may or may not be journalism, but also of a set of transnational problems and issues shared by women in their historical relations with the profession.

Forest Extraction to Theme Parks: The Modern History of Land Change

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Klepeis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Land Change ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Forest Clearing ◽  
Calakmul Biosphere Reserve ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Modern-day deforestation in the southern Yucatán peninsular region began in earnest in the late 1960s. The composition of the region’s forest and options for land uses, however, were partly shaped by eighty years of activity leading up to the 1960s, just as it was by the ancient Maya over a millennium ago (Ch. 2). Most of the modern impacts began in the twentieth century and are traced here through three major episodes of use and occupation of the region: forest extraction, 1880–1983; big projects and forest clearing, 1975–82; and land-use diversification, conservation, and tourism, 1983 to the present. Each episode corresponds to different visions of how the region should be used and to different human–environment conditions shaping the kind, location, and magnitude of land change. Understanding these changing conditions underpins all other assessments of the SYPR project. The episode of forest extraction spans the bulk of the modern history of the region. It began in the late nineteenth century and ended with the demise of parastatal logging companies in the 1970s and early 1980s, due primarily to the depletion of reserves of mahogany and Spanish cedar throughout the region. Before this episode fully expired, a new one, that of big projects and forest clearing began, marked by large-scale rice and cattle schemes undertaken in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. This episode accelerated the road construction that began in the latter part of the 1960s, and it witnessed expanded settlement linked to colonization programs. The Mexican debt crisis of 1982 brought this episode to an abrupt halt, triggering the search for a new alternative to developing the frontier. This search, made in the context of neoliberal economic reforms, led to the establishment of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in 1989 and other, more recent initiatives, defining the most recent episode of land-use diversification, conservation, and tourism. From the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization to the twentieth century, the occupation of the region was sparse (Turner 1990), the forest serving as a refuge during the colonial period for those Maya fleeing Spanish domination along the coasts and in the north, especially during the Caste War of the middle nineteenth century, when the northern Maya revolted against Mexico (Jones 1989).

Beautiful Babies

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-26
Author(s):  
Irene Stroud
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Infant Baptism ◽  
Agricultural Fairs ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

Baby shows and baby contests in the late nineteenth century United States, beginning as a form of entertainment at agricultural fairs, were co-opted in the early twentieth century as a public relations vehicle for the eugenics movement. This article connects this history of display of the infant body with white Protestant practices of bodily display in infant baptism as represented etiquette manuals, women's magazines, and works of art. The author argues that infants became unwitting participants in practices of display that marked them as members of affluent white society.

Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland

2016 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-129
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

The best work in the new “history of capitalism” field borrows from the tool kits of social and cultural historians and rests on the assumption that states, societies, and markets cannot be treated separately from one another. That central observation feeds the contemporary impulse to reconnect subfields, such as business, labor, and politics, which had drifted apart since the 1970s. Already this methodology has returned scholarship on the nineteenth-century United States to the topics of slavery's relationship to capitalism and the realization of selfhood either through manumission, the labor market, or finance.

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.

Asian Americans in the History of Education: An Historiographical Essay

2001 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
United States Population ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

Asian Americans have lived in the United States for over one-and-a-half centuries: Chinese and Asian Indians since the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese since the late nineteenth century, and Koreans and Filipinos since the first decade of the twentieth century (an earlier group of Filipinos had settled near New Orleans in the late eighteenth century). Because of exclusion laws that culminated with the 1924 Immigration Act, however, the Asian American population was relatively miniscule before the mid-twentieth century. As late as 1940, for example, Asian immigrants and their descendants constituted considerably less than 1 percent (0.0019) of the United States population. In contrast, in Hawai'i, which was then a territory and therefore excluded from United States population figures, 58 percent of the people in 1940 were of Asian descent.

The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen T. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Royal College ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Performance History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Renaissance

The performance history of Dido and Aeneas in the nineteenth century is marked by two, seemingly conflicting, trends: attempts to create a more authentic score and the increased use of added orchestration. Many of the most important contributions to the reception history of the opera in this era, including new editions and major revivals, can be attributed to the faculties at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. The founding of the Purcell Society by William Cummings, his biography of the composer, and his edition of the opera mark a watershed in the modern history of the opera. Within the so-called “English Musical Renaissance” of musical composition, Dido and Aeneas became a stylistic touchstone to which composers through the mid-twentieth century returned.

History, Pius X, and the Practice of Confession, 1900–20

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick W. Carey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
New Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
The Church

This chapter demonstrates how a few Catholic seminary professors in the first two decades of the twentieth century began to reconsider and critique the nineteenth-century Catholic understanding of the history of confession in light of Henry Charles Lea’s history of auricular confession and John Henry Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine. That re-examination of the early church’s history of penance met strong resistance from Pope Pius X’s anti-modernist campaign because the new approach clashed with Trent’s understanding of the divine origin of the early church’s practice of auricular confession. The pope, however, also promoted a liturgical revival in the Church that focused on active participation in the Eucharist that had consequences for American Catholic emphases on frequent confession for children as well as adults in preparation for communion. By 1920 that Pian revival in the United States reinforced the nineteenth-century promotion of frequent and devotional confessions.

scholarly journals Following the Money: Fenian Bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States*

2020 ◽  
Vol 247 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-112
Author(s):  
David Sim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Fenian Brotherhood ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Irish Americans

Abstract This article tracks and analyses the history of bonds issued by the Fenian Brotherhood in the 1860s to argue that US Americans could take part in a marketplace in distant revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century. In this period, various, disparate nationalist groups issued bonds, suggesting a commonly understood method of generating funds, sustaining sentimental attachment, and projecting the authority of authentic nation-states. The Civil War-era United States was a particularly fertile environment for the issuance of such bonds because of its traditions of free banking, the ease with which bonds might be floated to a public increasingly au fait with their operation, and a broad rhetorical sympathy with the distant revolutions for which these bonds stood. The debt these bonds represented acted as a sentimental form of ‘special money’ and, for Irish-Americans, as for other immigrant communities in the United States, they allowed participation in a transnational movement without ever leaving their immediate neighbourhood. Tracing their issuance and circulation, then, allows us to write a material, sentimental and social history of everyday transnationalism and anti-imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. For later generations, this sentimental quality could and did devolve into a more immediately financial form, and the article concludes by identifying the redemption of these bonds as a significant step in legitimating the new Irish republic to a US audience.

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