Lydia Sigourney in the Land of Steady Habits

2021 ◽  
pp. 88-118
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
New England ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
New Era ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Lydia Sigourney

This chapter examines Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s early writing (Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse and Sketch of Connecticut) and her life writing to understand her projects of affiliating with Connecticut Federalism and narrating continuity between Connecticut Federalism its political successors after the War of 1812. It examines her historical portrayal of conflicts over social class, religion, and government, including the Hartford Convention and the state watershed election of 1818, Congregationalism and religious toleration, and Mohegan evangelism and Samson Occum, as well as Sigourney’s autobiographical portrayal of her own shifting position in these conflicts. This analysis complicates two scholarly tendencies: to portray Sigourney as a democratic, working-class poet and to oppose mass market sentimental piety with the old order of New England Puritanism and established religion. It shows instead that Sigourney represented herself as a Federalist daughter harkening back to and adapting the vision of a classically republican organic society. Her treatment of religious tolerance is shown to be central to this project insofar as it was both a means to deflect criticism of the Federalists and to adapt arguments for state religion to a new era of religious privatization.

The “Railroad Scheme” of Massachusetts

1945 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward C. Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Developing Nation ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The World ◽  
Daniel Webster ◽  
New Religion

By the 1820's, New England was in ferment. Unitarianism had shattered the old religious orthodoxy and, while the Dedham case provided a material dowry for the new religion, the sermons of William Ellery Channing furnished a theology and creed. In politics the dogmas of regional Federalism were weakened and soon Daniel Webster was to celebrate the virtues of an embracing nationalism which Pickering and his fellow conspirators of an earlier period would have found incomprehensible. Along the Merrimack were arising the cotton-mill towns, symbols of a new industrialism. An old order was giving way to a new. Once begun, change accelerated and touched one by one the institutions and ideas of the region. Of the economic factors that gave momentum to this transformation, the railroad was the most important. For it was the railroad that after 1830 tied New England into the nation. No longer was it to be a fringe of Hanseatic ports communicating with the rest of the world and with America by sea; it was to become a section in a developing nation. When Emerson wrote of Massachusetts, “From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State,” he should have added that there was not a railroad. For the railroad, even though it may not have opened wider prospects, at least revealed different ones.

Karl Marx's Vision of America: A Biographical and Bibliographical Sketch

1980 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-503
Author(s):  
Robert Weiner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
New Era ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Made In

Karl Marx and the United States is a subject which immediately elicits interest, but also surprise. Interest, because of its contemporary importance; surprise, because Marx and America have appeared so remote from one another. Marx has definitely influenced America, but that will not be the theme of this essay —instead, we will concern ourselves with the role of America in the thought of Marx. The magnitude of this role is illustrated by a statement made in Marx's letter to Abraham Lincoln, written in 1864 on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association:The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American war of independence initiated a new era of the ascendency of the middle-class, so the American Anti-slavery war will do for the working-class.

‘Called hither by the commotion of the times’: Martineau and the Press, 1837–1850

2020 ◽  
pp. 180-219
Author(s):  
Iain Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Rapid Evolution ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Times

This chapter connects Martineau’s contribution to shaping the Victorian press during its extraordinary rapid evolution during the 1840s to her work for Dickens at Household Words and shows that her agenda for the press developed earlier and was far more nuanced than has been previously recognized. Establishing herself in the elite intellectual quarterlies, simultaneously working with Charles Knight on the Penny Magazine and other projects aimed at mass-market working-class readers, and contributing to Thornton Leigh Hunt and G.G. Lewes’s progressive weekly The Leader in 1850-51, Martineau developed a remarkably flexible and constantly evolving journalistic presence that, in the 1850s and early 1860s, would allow her to become a consistent presence in both mass-market and elite press venues, to appear, simultaneously, in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly outlets.

Conclusion

Never Trump ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 240-248
Author(s):  
Robert P. Saldin ◽  
Steven M. Teles
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Western World ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
New Era ◽  
Professional Interest ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Right

This concluding chapter highlights how the Republican Party has been substantially transformed by the experience of having Donald Trump at its head. The president's reelection in 2020 would only deepen that transformation. Deep sociological forces—in particular, a Republican Party base that is increasingly white, working class, Christian, less formally educated, and older—will lead the party to go where its voters are. What Trump started, his Republican successors will finish. Just as parties of the right across the Western world have become more populist and nationalist, so will the Republicans. That, of course, bodes poorly for most of the Never Trumpers, who combined a deep distaste for Trump personally with a professional interest in a less populist governing style and a disinclination to see their party go ideologically where he wanted to take it. Ultimately, the future is unwritten because it will be shaped by the choices of individuals. Never Trump will have failed comprehensively in its founding mission, which was to prevent the poison of Donald Trump from entering the nation's political bloodstream. However, it is likely to be seen, in decades to come, as the first foray into a new era of American politics.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Judith Sargent Murray ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Lydia Sigourney ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Democratic Life

Beginning with a discussion of partisan politics in Catharine Sedgwick’s juvenile letters and her autobiographical fiction, the introduction makes a case for considering five prominent New England women authors (Sedgwick, Judith Sargent Murray, Sally Sayward Wood, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe) as profoundly influenced by and invested in a Federalist understanding of religion in a republic. This investment, which treats Protestant Christianity as a force necessary for public morality in democratic life, shaped their writing careers and forms an unacknowledged contribution to political and religious debates about church and state in the early republic and nineteenth century. Situating this argument as a contribution to scholarship in literary studies, postsecular studies, and political history, the introduction explains contributions to each area.

“It Beats Digging Clams”

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
New England ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Do So

This chapter looks at how country and western music has provided a way of making a living for several thousand people in New England over the course of the music's history in the region. Gift exchange and the spirit of community are important elements of the country and western event. And yet, for the New England country and western musician, it is also about the money. Modern-day New England country and western musicians who make a working-class “living” do so by augmenting their earnings from a day job with money earned from music, or they work as musical chameleons ready to adapt to a wide variety of musical shades. Country and western music actually provided a better income and a more cosmopolitan lifestyle than most working-class people could expect from factory, agricultural, woods, or maritime work.

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