Geography and State Power

Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 16-35
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Coercive Power ◽  
The Us ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Settler Colonization ◽  
The 19Th Century

Chapter 1 situates the US Post within the larger landscape of the 19th-century American state. Analyzing the geography of the US Post challenges traditional assumptions about how states are organized and the ways in which they exercise power. First, rather than functioning as a centralized bureaucracy, the US Post operated through the agency model: a decentralized organization in which small tasks are delegated to a scattered workforce of part-time local agents. Second, rather than exercising coercive power, the US Post operated through structural power, or the ability to shape the conditions under which people make decisions. Rather than weaknesses, these features were key to how the US Post was able to rapidly expand over recently conquered territory and, in doing so, tie together the machinery of governance and settler colonization in the western United States.

Stories and Structures

Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 36-52
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Central Plains ◽  
Railway Line ◽  
The Us ◽  
Postal Network ◽  
The 19Th Century

Chapter 2 follows the story of four siblings as they migrated westward and the role of the US Post in their lives. From the time they were orphaned as children in Ohio, the postal network connected Sarah, Jamie, Delia, and Benjamin Curtis across space. The Curtis siblings joined a migratory wave of people that washed across the western United States during the late 19th century. No matter where they moved, from a railway line on the central plains to a mill town in northern California to a backcountry ranch in Arizona, they could rely on the US Post’s expansive infrastructure to communicate with each other. Across dozens of surviving letters, the US Post’s structural power comes into focus, giving meaning to how its institutional arrangements and wider geography shaped everyday experiences and conditions in the 19th-century West.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE STANDARD AUDIT REPORT IN THE US: FORM, SCOPE, AND RENEWED ATTENTION TO FRAUD DETECTION

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ganesh M Pandit ◽  
Charles Richard Baker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Audit Report ◽  
Current Version ◽  
Full Circle ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Over Time

The purpose of this paper is to trace the historical development of the standard audit report (SAR) in the United States from its emergence in the 19th century to its current version and examine how the SAR came full circle to once again include attention to the risk of fraud. While prior research has addressed some of this history, this paper completes the picture to the present date. In the last 100+ years, the SAR has changed from a "certificate" to an "opinion". The scope of the audit has shifted from being an "examination" to the lesser responsibility of an "audit." The emphasis has shifted from absolute assurance to reasonable assurance. Over time, the relative responsibilities of management and auditors have been clarified in the report. Most importantly, the basis for opinion has now moved back to include an assessment of material misstatements caused by error and fraud.

Polygraph or Variograph?

2016 ◽  
Vol 294 ◽  
pp. 88-92
Author(s):  
Jan Widacki ◽  
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Physiological Function ◽  
Printing Industry ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 19Th Century

In Poland and only in Poland, a polygraph is occasionally called a “variograph”. For some, the argument in favor of the name “variograph” is that the term “polygraph” is allegedly misleading as it can be associated with the printing industry. The author argues that in other countries, the ambiguity of the name “polygraph” does not cause confusion. Furthermore, the author mentions several names synonymous with “polygraph” and recalls how the name of the device commonly known as the “lie-detector” has evolved in the US before it eventually became known as the “polygraph”. Finally, the author proves that the name “polygraph” was in use in the Polish physiological literature already in the 19th century, for denominating the device capable of simultaneously registering more than one physiological function of the human body.

The Feminization of Etiquette Literature: Foucault, Mechanisms of Social Change, and the Paradoxes of Empowerment

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Arditi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Change ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Space ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper explores the opening of a discursive space within the etiquette literature in the United States during the 19th century and how women used this space as a vehicle of empowerment. It identifies two major strategies of empowerment. First, the use or appropriation of existing discourses that can help redefine the “other” within an hegemonic space. Second, and more importantly, the transformation of that space in shifting the lines by which differentiation is produced to begin with. Admittedly, these strategies are neither unique nor the most important in the history of women's empowerment. But this paper argues that the new discourses formulated by women helped forge a new space within which women ceased being the “other,” and helped give body to a concept of womanhood as defined by a group of women, regardless of how idiosyncratic that group might have been.

THE TOWNSEND JOURNAL: ACCOUNTING FOR THE MARITIME TRADE IN 1840s BOSTON BASED ON B. F. FOSTER'S APPROACH

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandi L Holley ◽  
Dale L. Flesher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Joint Venture ◽  
Young Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
The 19Th Century

ABSTRACT: The 19th century brought on much economic growth and advancement in accounting in the United States. The teaching of accounting began to veer away from rules and instead sought the logical underpinnings of the system. It was a time when accounting evolved into accountancy through the development of theory, such as the proprietary theory and the theory of two-account series. The Townsend Journal (1840-1841), which chronicles the joint venture between two young men in the Boston maritime trade, is a case study of this progression in commerce and accounting during this pivotal time. B. F. Foster's contemporaneous Boston publications on bookkeeping provide the framework to understand this evolution in accountancy, as well as the recordings in the Townsend Journal. Through the examination of the Townsend Journal alongside B. F. Foster's texts, this paper preserves and illustrates a historical link in the evolution of the field.

Modernism and Exile

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-40
Author(s):  
John P. Enyeart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
The Us

Chapter 1 examines how Louis Adamic used the paradox of immigrants providing the labor to make the United States the wealthiest nation on earth while receiving mostly misery in return. The xenophobes who dominated US politics after World War I made it clear that Slavs were not quite “white” and thus not quite American. Adamic and his fellow countrymen found themselves in between white and black on the US racial spectrum and trapped in between Slovenian and US cultures. During the 1920s, he grappled with this liminality by employing literary modernism and writing from the perspective of an exiled peasant. In 1933, he added a political dimension to work when writing about slovenstvo (Slovene spirit) at a crucial moment in his homeland’s history.

The Legacies of the Second Slavery

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-46
Author(s):  
Rafael Marquese
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
National State ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cotton Plantations

Chapter 1 by Rafael Marquese compares the impact of the demise of slavery in the US and Brazil and the transformation of the coffee economies and cotton economies. Marquese connects American Reconstruction with larger global processes to explore the reorganization of the national state and American capitalism that took place in the Era of Globalization (1870–1914). He shows how “Second Slavery,” a concept articulated by Dale Tomich, provides a model for understanding both the integrated trajectory of slavery in Brazil and the United States and the ways the coffee plantationa and economies and the cotton plantations and economies of these nations interacted after emancipation.

Postal Maps, 1860–83

Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
American West ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
The Us ◽  
Postal Network

During the 1860s and 1870s the US Post underwent a period of breakneck, unstable expansion in the western United States. Chapter 3 details the efforts of postal administrators to track all of these changes through a new mapmaking initiative under a cartographer named Walter Nicholson. The Topographer’s Office offers a window into the efforts of government officials in Washington, DC, to administer the nation’s western periphery. Nicholson’s postal maps were highly sought after across the federal government, offering valuable spatial information about the region that was often in short supply. Yet the struggles of Nicholson and his employees to keep pace with the never-ending flurry of changes to the region’s postal network is a testament to the ongoing barriers to centralized oversight imposed by the geography of the American West.

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