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.

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.

Herman Melville’s Politics of Imperialism: Colonizing and De-Colonizing Spaces of Ethnicity

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel A. Blumenthal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
White American ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Political Relationship ◽  
The One

There is, in Herman Melville’s works, a constant struggle to situate the narrative within the context of a racial and ethnic “Other.” Melville’s narrators—almost invariably white, Euro-American males—appear at times in tense opposition to, and at other times in social harmony with, the African, Native American, Polynesian, and Oriental presences in his texts. In essence, Melville situates these non-white characters against the dominantly-raced narrator as racial “Others.” This ethnic “othering” entails a dangerous politics of racial separation, hierarchizing, and colonization, yet simultaneously allows for and even encourages a social critique of nineteenth-century white American imperialist attitudes toward non-white peoples. Indeed, this is what makes Melville such a difficult figure to decipher both literarily and historically. By marking these races as alien and “other,” indeed by striving to “mark” them at all, Melville at once conducts a constructive anthropological study as well as sets the destructive foundation for a race-driven, American imperialist project aimed at alienated and “othered” races. Indeed, Melville constructs for his readership a difficult paradox; his texts on the one hand call for white intervention and colonization of ethnic and racial spaces, and on the other, they illuminate the counter-productivity of such colonization. What, then, was Melville’s relationship to the ongoing imperialist project of nineteenth-century America? To reach an answer to this question we will examine Melville’s political relationship to two Pacific Ocean land groups (the Marquesan Islands and the Sandwich Islands), establish a pattern to his paradoxical imperialist and anti-imperialist philosophies, and finally, construct a model of his international, inter-ethnic political philosophy.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

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