Telegraphies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Yandell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Write Form ◽  
The Many ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Sarah Winnemucca ◽  
Range Free

Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures’ telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, and nation for potential enactment in the embodied world. Telegraphies opens with the literatures of such Native telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to reconceive common notions of telecommunications technologies as synonymous with capitalist industrialization, and to analyze the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation the book integrates visions of Morse’s electromagnetic telegraph, with its claims to speak new, coded words and send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the continent. To the many and various telegraphies this book considers, American authors often reacted with a mixture of wonder, hope, and fear. Writers as diverse as Sarah Winnemucca, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson, among others, craft poetic odes, memoirs, and novels that envision how the birth of perceived-instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, form community, and conceive of the divine. While some celebrate far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical manifest destiny to overspread America’s primitive cultures, others reveal how telecommunication empowers the previously silenced voice to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as the body remains confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography.

Here Is My Name When I Am Dead

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel McBride Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Modes Of Representation

This chapter explores death and mourning pictures within a shifting memorial culture that was rooted in historical modes of representation and theologies of redemption. Over the course of the nineteenth century, photographic portraiture emerged within this memorial culture as both the preferred iconography of mourning in nineteenth-century America and, significantly, as a relic of the departed that disclosed future glory to the bereaved. In this chapter, I explore the role of photographs as relics that illuminated the communion of shadows by mediating the body of the deceased with the grieving body of the bereaved. Here, photographs were devised not as tokens of the moldering body of the deceased but of promise of celestial reunion in glory. As memorial portraiture focused attention on the body of the deceased, another facet within the communion of shadows purported to provide evidence of the soul’s survival after death.

Introduction

Telegraphies ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Kay Yandell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Indian Sign Language

In nineteenth-century America, Native Americans communicated long distance with smoke signals and Indian sign language to combat U.S. invasions across the American plains. Recently immigrated Morse telegraphers began to organize “online” for safer working conditions. Women telegraphers entered electric speech forums. These interactions inspired the creation of what this book dubs “telegraph literature”—the fiction, poetry, social critique, and autobiography that experiences of telecommunication inspired authors from vastly different social locations to write throughout nineteenth-century America. The telegraphic virtual inspired such canonical authors as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, alongside such lesser known authors as Lida Churchill and Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield, to explore how seemingly instantaneous, disembodied, nationwide speech practices challenged American conceptions of self, text, place, nation, and God.

Remember Me

2020 ◽  
pp. 557-577
Author(s):  
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

This chapter explores the eighteenth-century concept of sensibility as it took form in popular culture in the United States in the early nineteenth century. Although later generations made fun of the weeping sentimentality of parlor poetry and embroidered memorials to the dead, nineteenth-century Americans believed that a pen mark on a page or a twined lock of hair could animate invisible chords in the body that connected one person to another through memory. To write about Mormonism in relation to sensibility may seem odd, since to outsiders the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seemed the epitome of grim-faced patriarchy, with its embrace of polygamy and attempt at theocratic government. A closer look at the rich materials preserved in its archives shows the many ways in which early Saints used common cultural forms to express unique religious belief such as baptism for the dead. Latter-day Saints celebrated plural unions in the language of sentimental friendship. Like other Americans, they used tangible things to cross boundaries of space and time.

scholarly journals Introduction to the Issue

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
Katherine K. Preston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Music ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

The history of music in nineteenth-century America, and the place of music within American culture of the period, is an area of scholarly inquiry that recently has received increased attention. It is also, as the varied articles collected in this issue illustrate, a complex topic and an area ripe for much additional research. The four articles deal with different aspects of nineteenth-century American music history and culture; in each, however, there are also areas of overlap and intersection. All four authors use as a starting point issues that have already been the subject of some scholarly attention, and examine these topics either more thoroughly or from a new theoretical or contextual point of view. The resulting aggregate should help readers to understand better a complicated and under-explored world, for all four articles highlight the complexity of musical life in America and explore some of the many ways that cultural life in the United States reflected and resonated with that of Europe. All four authors, furthermore, either hint at or explicitly mention areas that are ripe for further research.

Portraying the Dead

1989 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Ruby
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Place Of Death ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Dead ◽  
As If ◽  
Mourning Process

This article explores the custom of post-mortem photography. In nineteenth century America, this was a socially acceptable, publicly acknowledged form of photography. Professional photographers accepted commissions, advertised the service, and held professional discussions in their journals about the practice. The images were publicly displayed in wall frames and albums. Initially, death pictures were portraits which attempted to deny death by displaying the body as if asleep, or even conscious. By the turn-of-the-century, the deceased were displayed in a casket with an increasing emphasis upon the funeral. Today, families make their own photos; circulating them in a private manner so that many people assume that the custom has been abandoned. Counselors working with the parents of children who have died provide evidence that these images can be useful in the mourning process. The findings of this study suggest that a more thorough examination of the place of death-related photographs in the management of grief would be of value.

scholarly journals GEORGE HENRY FOX'S Photographic illustrations of skin diseases and the clinical photograph in late nineteenth-century America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine E. A. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Skin Diseases ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Clinical Photograph ◽  
The Aesthetic

George Henry Fox was a New York physician and author in the late nineteenth century. His interest in collecting photographs of notable dermatological cases led to the publication of several photographically illustrated dermatology texts between 1879 and the early twentieth century. This thesis focuses on the fIrst and second editions of Fox's Photographic Illustrations of Skin Diseases, published in 1879 and 1885, respectively. The hand-coloured Artotype plates from these two editions are analyzed and contrasted in terms of the influence of studio portraiture, issues of patient anonymity and consent, and the aesthetic changes between editions. The power relationships and scientifIc classifIcation involved in depicting the body on ftlm are also considered. The books are on textualized with discussions of nineteenth-century American medical history, the use of clinical photographs as illustrations, photomechanical processes, late nineteenth-century dermatology texts, and Fox's biography.

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