Consuming Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Revolving Door ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Production Methods ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The City

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, innovations including photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in the nineteenth century. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco explores the significance of that revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush and the hub of Pacific migration and trade. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which to navigate the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century. Images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance. Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that had divided groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader national transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city’s inhabitants and visitors, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative.

Celebrity Culture and the Gold Rush Metropolis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Exchange Networks ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The City

With the gold rush, San Francisco almost instantaneously became an important stop for a host of international entertainment tours that expanded well beyond the Atlantic world, to Australia as well as the Pacific Coast. The term celebrity was first employed as a noun in the 1840s and 1850s, and from its inception, this cultural phenomenon was intrinsically linked with and profited handsomely from transnational exchange networks—the conduits for the transmission of print and visual culture, as well as the migration of people and capital. Theatrical entertainment flourished in nineteenth-century San Francisco, as did the trade in celebrity portraits. In this context, certain charismatic individuals emerged: notably female stars, including Lola Montez and Adah Isaacs Menken, who embodied the trend of self-representation that overtook the city. The celebrity thrived in a place where human identity could become a consumable commodity—in turn, it often became all-consuming..

Marketplaces and central spaces: markets and the rise of competing spatial ideals in Danish city centres, c. 1850–1900

Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENS TOFTGAARD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Fish Market ◽  
Open Air Markets ◽  
The City ◽  
City Centres

ABSTRACTThe traditional open-air markets on the central squares of Danish cities were thriving in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, the markets were soon challenged by new urban ideals of the city centre as a place for shopping and capital investment. At the same time, urban reformers made efforts to improve the market trade to meet modern standards. The rivalling interests struggled over the question of modernization or relocation of the central square markets and ultimately the definition and use of the central urban space. In particular, this article will examine the struggle over the construction of a fish market hall in Odense as it serves to reveal the different conceptions of the central urban space that affected the fate of the street markets.

scholarly journals The Meat City: urban space and provision in industrial Copenhagen, 1880–1914

Urban History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
MIKKEL THELLE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.

Industrial urbanization, working-class lads and slang toponyms in early twentieth-century Helsinki

Urban History ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEIKKI PAUNONEN ◽  
JANI VUOLTEENAHO ◽  
TERHI AINIALA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:The article investigates the linkages between urban transformation and informal verbalizations of everyday spaces among male juveniles from Sörnäinen (a working-class district in Helsinki) in 1900–39. Sörkka lads' biographically and contextually varying uses of slang names mirrored their itineraries across the city in the search of earning and spare-time opportunities. As a simultaneously practical and stylistic street language, the uses of slang both eroded (in uniting bilingual male juvenile groups) and strengthened (as with providers and teachers, working-class girls, upper-class urbanites and rural newcomers) existing socio-spatial boundaries. Unlike in the late nineteenth century Stockholmska slang studied by Pred, openly irreverent toponymic expressions vis-à-vis the hegemonic conceptions of urban space were relatively few in early Helsinki slang.

Slush on the Mizzentops, Butter in the Hold: Food on American Clipper Ships

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 37-45
Author(s):  
andrew beahrs
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The City

In the early years of the Gold Rush, the food carried by clipper ships sustained and shaped San Francisco. At first, clippers that could reach the city in less than a hundred days helped to save the burgeoning community of tents and shanties from hunger. Later, they Americanized its cuisine—and made fabulous profits—by carrying butter, hams, whiskey, and other Eastern staples to restaurants built in the holds of abandoned ships. The food served to sailors was often less exalted than that carried in the holds just below their feet, with simple dry biscuit and dry salted beef relieved only by the boiled puddings of flour and apples known as duff. The crews themselves were remarkably diverse, with Lascars and Scandinavians served dried peas and greasy “scouse” by African American or Chinese cooks who prepared meals in tiny, freestanding deckhouses. In later years, the clippers' influence on American food reversed itself, as they carried humble guano to rejuvenate depleted eastern agricultural land. But in their prime, the clippers were a unique confluence of necessity, engineering excellence, and beauty, as valued for the sight of their towering moonraker sails as for the food they carried.

“Base Falsehoods” and the Genuine Article: The Visual Economy of San Francisco

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Visual Medium ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
The City

In the burgeoning urban centers of the United States in the nineteenth century, anonymous denizens interpreted one another and presented themselves through the visual medium. Publicly displayed and circulated imagery was broadly accessible to San Francisco’s diverse array of immigrants. Photographs and other illustrations provided newcomers with a universal language—a way to view and explore each other and a means of conceptualizing San Francisco. As the city developed and tents gave way to buildings, the modes of production, circulation, and display of visual ephemera grew apace, revealing their adaptability to the burgeoning market economy and their preeminence in San Francisco’s urban culture. A competitive commercial culture among San Franciscan photographers catered to and often exploited public anxieties over the divide between appearance and reality.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Pictures wielded considerable power in nineteenth-century society, shaping the way that Americans portrayed and related to one another, and presented themselves. This is not only a history through pictures, but a history of pictures: it departs from most historians’ approaches to images as self-explanatory illustrations, and instead examines those images as largely overlooked primary source evidence. Consuming Identities charts the growth of a commodified image industry in one of the most diverse and dynamic cities in the United States, from the gold rush to the turn of the twentieth century. The following chapters focus on the circulation of human representations throughout the city of San Francisco and around the world, as well as the cultural dimensions of the relationship between people, portraits, and the marketplace. In so doing, this work traces a critical moment in the shaping of individual modern identities.

Culture Maintenance, Occupational Change, and Social Status

2017 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-25
Author(s):  
Robert Llewellyn Tyler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Status ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Language Retention ◽  
Culture Maintenance ◽  
Immigrant Culture ◽  
The City

Through a consideration of residential propinquity, religious and cultural activity, language retention, and levels of exogamy, this article provides a microstudy of the Welsh community in San Francisco and identifies the Welsh as a distinct ethnolinguistic community in the city during the late decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. What was the nature of Welsh immigrant culture, and to what extent were working-class Welsh people involved in its expression? In addition, through an analysis of intragenerational changes in socioeconomic status, as indicated by occupational mobility, the article tests the assumption that the Welsh were prime illustrations of the “American Dream,” thus providing a clearer picture than the images promulgated by contemporary Welsh leaders who strove to emphasize the industry and upward mobility of their fellow countrymen. Did the Welsh as a group occupy a privileged position in the occupational hierarchy, and were they universally successful in improving on this position?

“A True Revival of Religion”: Protestants and the San Francisco Graft Prosecutions, 1906–1909

1994 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-49
Author(s):  
Douglas Firth Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Great Earthquake ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Party ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

Almost a year after the great earthquake and fire of April 1906, San Francisco clergyman William Rader declared, “We are having a true revival of religion.” Writing in the San Francisco-based Congregationalist weekly Pacific, Rader was not referring to the visit of a mass evangelist; rather, he meant the graft prosecutions officially launched in October 1906 against the Union Labor party administration of the city. He compared Rudolph Spreckels, a reform-minded member of the city's financial elite who was helping to fund the prosecution, and Francis J. Heney, the lead prosecuting attorney, to the late-nineteenth-century revival team of Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey. “God is moving the city,” Rader asserted, “and when a number of our Supervisors and other officials are sent to prison we will be more free…. Thank God the Christ spirit is not dead; it lives.”

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