Object Lessons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Anne Carter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Object Lessons ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Object Lesson ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Material Evidence

Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World examines the ways material things—objects and pictures—were used to reason about moral issues, the differences between reality and representation, race, citizenship, and capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States. For modern scholars, an “object lesson” is simply a timeworn metaphor used to describe any sort of reasoning from concrete to abstract. But in the 1860s, object lessons were classroom exercises popular across the United States. Object lessons forced children to learn about the world through their senses instead of through texts and memorization, leading to new modes of classifying and comprehending material evidence drawn from the close study of objects, pictures, and even people. This book argues that object lessons taught Americans how to find information in things in the decades after the Civil War. More than that, this study offers the object lesson as a new tool with which contemporary scholars can interpret the meanings of nineteenth-century material, cultural, and intellectual life.

Intergenerational Occupational Mobility across Three Continents

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago Pérez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
Occupational Mobility ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

I compare rates of intergenerational occupational mobility across four countries in the late nineteenth century: 1869–1895 Argentina, 1850–1880 United States, 1851–1881 Britain, and 1865–1900 Norway. Argentina and the United States had similar levels of intergenerational mobility, and these levels were above those of Britain and Norway. These findings suggest that the higher mobility of nineteenth-century United States relative to Britain might not have been a reflection of “American exceptionalism,” but rather a manifestation of more widespread differences between settler economies of the New World and Europe.

Real Estate Questions

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-66
Author(s):  
Zach Sell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intergenerational Transfer ◽  
Family Stability ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

Abstract Historians of the United States have often described slavery as guided by the chattel principle. Yet in Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “No matter how degraded the factory hand, he is not real estate.” This article builds upon Du Bois’s description of slavery’s real estate basis and considers real estate as central to both slavery and territorial expansion in the nineteenth-century United States. Real estate formed the basis of slaveholder family stability and also enabled the intergenerational transfer of wealth. The article also considers the continuing influence of real estate after black emancipation. Real estate enabled post-slavery black dispossession and also facilitated the continuation of the United States as a settler empire.

Objects and Ideas

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Anne Carter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Classroom Practices ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Object Lessons ◽  
Literary Metaphor ◽  
Object Lesson ◽  
Political Economic

Chapter 5 explores broader political, economic, psychological, literary, and intellectual meanings of the object lesson, presenting it as a key way of reasoning in and about nineteenth-century American culture. It connects object lessons to the rhetoric that surrounded the tariff debates of the 1890s and presents the practice as a way to talk about commodities and capitalism. Teachers often conducted object lessons on easily purchased materials, connecting classroom practices to the choices children would make as consumers. At the same time, psychologist G. Stanley Hall and educator T. G. Rooper tried to understand the ways children’s sense perceptions linked to their understanding of the wider world. Finally, the practice was used as a literary metaphor, to describe the need to pause and to consider something carefully. In these ways, the classroom object lesson became a central way to reason about and through nineteenth-century American cultural and intellectual life.

Shakespearean Tragedy in the Nineteenth Century United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gay Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
American President ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy ◽  
Edwin Booth

Shakespeare’s tragedies fell out of favour with American audiences in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the 1861‒5 Civil War. Exceptionally, Julius Caesar—as a play about revolutionary senators attempting to restore their republic by assassinating their ‘monarch’—gained in popularity after the war. Junius Brutus Booth’s Cassius was highly regarded by Walt Whitman; a decade after Booth’s death his sons were the most celebrated Shakespearean tragedians in the United States, and in 1864 the three Booth brothers performed together in Julius Caesar. The play’s politics became a reality when John Wilkes Booth assassinated the American president, justifying his shooting of Abraham Lincoln with the claim that the President, like Caesar, aspired to be a king. In the following years Edwin Booth produced and acted his own script for Julius Caesar before audiences intrigued by how Shakespeare’s play reflected their own recent history.

Thinking with Things

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Anne Carter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Normal School ◽  
Material World ◽  
Moral Training ◽  
Rigorous Curriculum ◽  
Object Lessons ◽  
Object Lesson

This chapter examines what happened when object lessons were implemented in the United States, particularly through the development of the Oswego Normal School in New York. E. A. Sheldon developed a rigorous curriculum based on the work of M. E. M. Jones and Elizabeth Mayo that trained pupil-teachers to give object lesson. The intent was to train students how to think and observe rather than to rely on students’ rote memorization of knowledge. His work transformed Oswego into the center of object teaching in the 1860s. Critiques of the practice at Oswego as well as the details of its classroom implementations help to explain what this practice actually looked like and what it meant for the ways students and teachers understood the material world. It also considers the ways object lessons could be used for instruction in composition and historical writing as well as moral training.

Introduction: Reason from Things

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Anne Carter
Keyword(s):  
Classroom Practice ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Written Composition ◽  
Lesson Analysis ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Object Lesson

This chapter provides an introduction to the use of the term “object lesson” as a pedagogical strategy employed in US classrooms in the nineteenth century. While typically understood as a metaphor in the twenty-first century, an object lesson was a historic classroom practice in which material things were the basis of instruction. In the 1860s it was a major educational fad throughout the United States. In an object lesson, analysis moved from the close study of a material thing to a consideration of the object’s qualities, contextual information, modes of sorting and finally written composition, allowing for the development of abstract concepts rooted in the objects considered. As such, these lessons became a way to reason about the material world and American cultural and intellectual life more broadly.

A Means of Honorable Support: Art and Music in Women's Education in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret A. Nash
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Art Education ◽  
Young Women ◽  
New York State ◽  
The United States ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Prominent Component ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

“The value of the Art Education becomes more and more apparent as a means of honorable support and of high culture and enjoyment,” stated the catalog of Ingham University in western New York State in 1863. The Art Department there would prepare “pupils for Teachers and Practical Artists.” This statement reveals some of the vocational options for women that were concomitant with the increased popularity of music and art education in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. Practical vocational concerns, along with notions of refinement and respectable entertainment, all were aspects of the impetus for music and art education. Preparing young women for occupations, whether as teachers of art and music or as commercial artists or musicians, was a particularly prominent component of education for women in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.

The Indian Doctress in the Nineteenth-Century United States: Race, Medicine, and Labor

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Pulley Hudson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
American Indians ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Positive Representations ◽  
Indian Medicine

Abstract This article addresses the robust market in “Indian medicine” that flourished in the nineteenth century—partly due to the influence of urbanization, industrialization, and new technologies of print—and the specific roles that Indian doctresses played in that phenomenon. Indian doctresses in the United States operated at the intersection of cultural values and beliefs regarding womanhood, medicine, and American Indians. Not all of these women were of Native ancestry, but they all mobilized widespread ideas about Native peoples while seeking entrepreneurial success as healers. Using print culture, the author analyzes strategies employed by women who worked as Indian doctresses and patterns of reactions to their efforts. By combining profiles of women who worked as Indian doctresses with popular but not always positive representations of the type, the article offers a kind of composite biography of an occupation. Women from a wide variety of backgrounds fused caregiving skills with popular assumptions—particularly those involving “indigenous anti-modernity”—to make a living. In this way, Indian doctresses also became useful symbolic figures upon whom changing conceptions of race, gender, and class could be projected and debated. The author thus aims to shed new light not only on histories of American medicine but also on the labors of American women and the business of Indian representation during the nineteenth century.

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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