Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
New England ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Theatrical Performance

It is nearly impossible to talk about US sentimentalism without talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential 1852 best-selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Introduction thus discusses US reactions to an 1887 Mexican theatrical performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to illustrate how Transamerican Sentimentalism dislocates familiar scholarly narratives about US literary sentimentalism as a New England or abolitionist mode. The Introduction links transamerican and sentimental scholarship through questions of incommensurability before elaborating on how US sentimentalism connects to a broader Americas tradition. It then delineates the parameters of a transamerican sentimentalism by articulating the implications of reorienting such an important national and transatlantic mode. Finally, the Introduction offers an overview of how persistent recurrences of transamerican sentimentalism enabled African American, Native American, and Latinx writers to navigate the violent, multivalent realm of the nineteenth-century Americas.

scholarly journals Savagely Sentimental: The Creation and Destruction of the Sentimental Indian in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
White Woman ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Noble Savage ◽  
Race And Sexuality

Lydia Maria Child, known during her time for controversial writing, has largely fallen out of focus in current feminist studies. As an activist, many of her pieces questioned the role of gender, race, and sexuality in the early nineteenth century. Hobomok, published in 1824, is considered one of her most radical tales. Detailing the marriage and procreation of a white woman and a Native American man, Hobomok shocked audiences with its content. Many critics have come to view Hobomok as a piece of feminine rebellion, seeing Mary Conant as an example of feminine refusal. Although such interpretations hold merit, they often ignore the role of Hobomok, the titular character. Hobomok is the first visible experimentation of the sentimental male. Other adaptations of the sentimental male do not appear in literature until Harriet Beech Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I argue that Child attempts to create one of the first sentimental males through Hobomok by compounding the qualities of masculinity and femininity of the era. Child is able to attempt such a task due to the pre-established concept of the “Noble Savage,” which already imbued Indians with sentimental attributes, and provides a valid and even rational justification for his extinction. Once establishing Hobomok as a “Noble Savage” and compounding masculine and feminine qualities within him, Child can easily and completely dismiss him so as to minimize his threat to white nineteenth century society. It is the compilation of his “noble savagery” and his feminine qualities that engenders his extermination. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Great War ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Chattel Slavery

`So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!' These words, said to have been uttered by Abraham Lincoln, signal the celebrity of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first American novel to become an international best-seller, Stowe's novel charts the progress from slavery to freedom of fugitives who escape the chains of American chattel slavery, and of a martyr who transcends all earthly ties. At the middle of the nineteenth-century, the names of its characters - Little Eva, Topsy, Uncle Tom - were renowned. A hundred years later, `Uncle Tom' still had meaning, but, to Blacks everywhere it had become a curse. This edition firmly locates Uncle Tom's Cabin within the context of African-American writing, the issues of race and the role of women. Its appendices include the most important contemporary African-American literary responses to the glorification of Uncle Tom's Christian resignation as well as excerpts from popular slave narratives, quoted by Stowe in her justification of the dramatization of slavery, Key to Uncles Tom's Cabin.

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Cultural Violence ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Marginal Characters

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History argues that African American, Native American, Latinx, and Anglo-American women writers use genre to negotiate hemispheric encounters amidst the gendered, racialized, and cultural violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. Although US literary sentimentalism is often framed in national and transatlantic terms, this book argues that the mode was deeply transamerican. Given the popularity of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, the appearance of its central motifs—tearful embraces, fainting heroines, angelic children—in transamerican US texts is unsurprising. What is remarkable is how texts not generally considered sentimental deploy seemingly insignificant affective episodes to navigate gendered and racialized experiences of conflict throughout the Caribbean and the US–Mexico borderlands. Throughout Transamerican Sentimentalism, marginal characters, momentary gestures, offhand remarks, and narrative commentaries serve to disrupt plots, potentially connecting characters across cultural, racial, national, and linguistic borders. Transamerican sentimentalism cannot unseat the violence of the nineteenth-century Americas, but it does dislocate familiar figures such as the coquette and the mulatta to produce other potential outcomes—including new paradigms for understanding the coquette, a locally successful informal diplomacy, and motivations for violent slave revolt. Transamerican sentimentalism is a fleeting, mercurial, and marginal mode. Frequently overwhelmed by the violence pervading the hemisphere, it could be categorized as a failed venture. Yet it is also persistent; as it recurs throughout the nineteenth century, it opens into alternative African American, Native American, and Latinx avenues for navigating and comprehending US–Americas relations.

scholarly journals “A King in Every Countrey”: English and French Encounters with Indigenous Leaders in Sixteenth-Century America

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Cook
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
New World ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Early English

Beginning with Columbus’ 1493 report of kings among the “Indians,” European expeditionaries regularly perceived Indigenous leaders as kings during the first century of colonialism in the Americas. English and French narratives of the sixteenth century, following the models of early Spanish and Portuguese accounts, brought to light the existence of Aboriginal monarchs throughout the Americas, from the Arctic to Brazil and from New England to California. Popular compilations of travel accounts only cemented the trope in the European imagination. The ubiquity of such kings in early English and French colonial writing reveals the conceptual frameworks through which colonizers perceived the New World and the logic of the strategies they devised to conquer it. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, English and French views diverged, with the latter demonstrating a general reluctance to use the term “king” for Native American leaders. By contrast, English sources would continue to employ the vocabulary of kingship for this purpose into the nineteenth century.

THE NATURE AND ENVIRONMENT OF COST MANAGEMENT AMONG EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY U.S. TEXITLE MANUFACTURERS

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Tyson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Cost Management ◽  
Cost Accounting ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Cost Information ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Textile Mills

Several authors have suggested that a particular managerial component was needed before cost accounting could be fully used for accountability and disciplinary purposes. They argue that the marriage of managerialism and accounting first occurred in the United States at the Springfield Armory after 1840. They generally downplay the quality and usefulness of cost accounting at the New England textile mills before that time and call for a re-examination of original mill records from a disciplinary perspective. This paper reports the results of such a re-examination. It initially describes the social and economic environment of U.S. textile manufacturing in New England in the early nineteenth century. Selected cost memos and reports are described and analyzed to indicate the nature and scope of costing undertaken at the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The paper discusses how particular cost information was used and speculates why certain more modern procedures were not adopted. Its major finding is that cost management practices fully measured up to the business complexities, economic pressures, and social forces of the day.

Emancipation and Free African Americans

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Archer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African Descent ◽  
American Population ◽  
African American Population ◽  
Free African Americans

Except in parts of Rhode Island and Connecticut, slavery was a peripheral institution, and throughout New England during and after the Revolution there was widespread support to emancipate slaves. Some of the states enacted emancipation laws that theoretically allowed slavery to continue almost indefinitely, and slavery remained on the books as late as 1857 in New Hampshire. Although the laws gradually abolished slavery and although the pace was painfully slow for those still enslaved, the predominant dynamic for New England society was the sudden emergence of a substantial, free African American population. What developed was an even more virulent racism and a Jim Crow environment. The last part of the chapter is an analysis of where African Americans lived as of 1830 and the connection between racism and concentrations of people of African descent.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

African American Religions in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Suzanne Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church

The typical story of African American religions narrates the development and power of the Protestant black church, but shifting the focus to the long nineteenth century can reorient the significance of the story. The nineteenth century saw the boom of Christian conversions among African Americans, but it also was a century of religious diversity. All forms of African American religion frequently pushed against the dominance of whiteness. This included the harming and cursing element of Conjure and southern hoodoo, the casting of slaves as Old Israel awaiting their exodus from bondage, the communications between the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Afro-Creoles in New Orleans, and the push for autonomy and leadership by Richard Allen and the rest of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. While many studies of African American religions in the nineteenth century overwhelmingly focus on Protestantism, this is only part of the story.

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