Is She Not an Unusual Woman? Say More

2021 ◽  
pp. 213-232
Author(s):  
Lydia L. Moland
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Moral Crisis

Germaine de Staël and Lydia Maria Child were both among the most well-known female intellectuals of their times and places: Staël in eighteenth-century Europe, Child in the nineteenth-century United States. Both women were influential in spreading the ideas of eighteenth-century German philosophy, and both used philosophical ideas to articulate their insights on the progress of history and the moral potential of art. Both also used their philosophical skills to address the moral crisis of slavery and to articulate the burden of being an unusual woman. As Staël’s first American biographer, Child helped extend Staël’s ideas beyond Europe and into the United States. Comparing their philosophical views provides us with an echo of women’s involvement in eighteenth-century German philosophy in the tumultuous American nineteenth century.

The Movement

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
National Boundaries

This chapter explains that the driving force behind the protection of human rights worldwide, today and for roughly the past thirty-five years, has been the nongovernmental human rights movement. Intermittently during the last two-and-a-half centuries, citizens' movements did play important roles in efforts to promote human rights, as during the development of the antislavery movement in England in the eighteenth century and the rise of the feminist movement in the United States in the nineteenth century. The contemporary human rights movement responds to victories and defeats by shifting focus from time to time, but it shows signs that it will remain an enduring force in world affairs. Efforts by those outside governments have been particularly important in extending the protection of rights beyond national boundaries, and it is in the present era that they have been most significant.

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.

Tatiana's Garden: Noble Sensibilities and Estate Park Design in the Romantic Era

Slavic Review ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-349
Author(s):  
Priscilla R. Roosevelt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Garden Design ◽  
Universal Form ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Estate Owner ◽  
Park Design

In “Baryshnia-krestianka” Aleksandr Pushkin introduces us to Grigorii Ivanovich Muromskii, a “nastoiashchii russkii barin” reduced to living on his one remaining estate, who squanders his remaining wealth creating an “Angliiskii sad.” The gardening revolution of eighteenth century England, inspired by the overgrown ruins of Rome and Naples and by a new feeling for untrammeled nature, set in motion a vogue for informal, picturesque landscaping that swept across Europe, altered garden design in the United States, and reached Russia in the reign of Catherine as the harbinger of a later, more pervasive aristocratic Anglomania. As Muromskii's landscaping proclivities suggest, by the early nineteenth century the English or “irregular” garden had become a universal form for the Russian country estate, its basic motifs carried out on whatever scale an estate owner could afford.

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.

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.

‘Religious America, Secular Europe’

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Usa

This chapter offers an overview of the religious trajectories of the United States and of the countries in Western and Northern Europe from the later eighteenth century to the early twenty-first. There is special focus on changes in the years around 1800, those around 1900, and in the later twentieth century. In the nineteenth century the USA was moving in very different directions from many of the countries of continental Europe, but American pluralism was paralleled by that of Britain. From about 1890, Britain and the USA began to move apart. Secularizing trends were common to both countries, but the countervailing factors were much stronger in the USA. Meanwhile, many other European countries were differently religious from the USA, but not necessarily less religious. Only in the 1970s can we begin to speak of a clear divide between a more ‘religious’ America and a more ‘secular Europe’.

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.

Republicanism: Religious Studies and Church History meet Political History

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 621-624
Author(s):  
Dana W. Logan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
The Individual

Republicanism, both of these authors teach us, by the mid-nineteenth century became indistinguishable from the aims of religion in the United States. A broad array of protestants agreed that the aims of religion cohered with the political principle of republicanism—or the principle that men could only achieve freedom through self-rule. Noll usefully shows that this concept of republicanism underwent a series of changes from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Beginning in the late eighteenth century republicanism referenced liberty from tyranny, man as citizen, and virtue as a kind of constraint on individual interests. Noll, however, argues that two versions of republicanism competed in this earlier period: communitarian republicanism, based in “the reciprocity of personal morality and social-well being,” and liberal republicanism, which valued the independence of the individual. Noll and Modern argue that by the mid-nineteenth century, the liberal version won out. Citizens imagined their freedom to be enabled by a market-based society more than by a community of virtue. For political historians these definitions are not new or controversial, but for historians of American religious history republicanism is an unlikely category of analysis because we see it as “political theory” rather than theology. But as both Noll and Modern argue, republicanism became the very substance of theology in the United States.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document