Ghetto Realism—and Beyond

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-218
Author(s):  
Lori Harrison-Kahan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth

By focusing on the reception of Yekl, Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel of immigrant life in New York, this chapter considers the turn-of-the-twentieth-century controversy surrounding depictions of Jews in ghetto literature, arguing that this debate illuminates not only the challenges of ethno-racial representation and self-representation but also the slipperiness of realism itself. The chapter also posits a more inclusive interpretation of Jewish American realism by demonstrating the importance of an overlooked late nineteenth-century realist writer, Emma Wolf. It explores how Wolf’s novels Other Things Being Equal (1892) and Heirs of Yesterday (1900), which focus on experiences of Jewish families in San Francisco during the Progressive Era, offer important alternatives to the New York–centric ghetto genre, expanding the parameters of Jewish American literature in terms of region, class, gender, and religion.

Rising from the Gutter

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
English Speaking

This chapter shows how the early comic strip was developed and then came to influence comic fiction in the early twentieth century. As the editor of the New York Journal‘s comic supplement, Rudolph Block regularized the use of panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, resulting in the multi-panel format that defines the comic-strip genre. Block’s role in the development of the comic strip has gone largely unrecognized; as a writer of Jewish American literature, Block has been forgotten. Using the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, Block published nearly a hundred stories between 1905 and 1920 in popular magazines. These humorous stories, full of rich dialect and accompanied by vibrant illustrations, translated the multiethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. Block represented dialect and caricature as opportunities for negotiation and play, providing ways to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.

Reimagining the “Lost Men” of the Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Late Nineteenth Century Presidents

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. Calhoun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Bright Light ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
Late Nineteenth

For much of the twentieth century, scholars treated the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era as starkly contrasting phases in the unfolding of the American story: the post-Civil War dark ages followed by the bright light of the early twentieth century. More recently, historians have recognized the oversimplification if not downright wrongheadedness of that dichotomy. The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of studies on a variety of topics with coverage dates roughly from the 1870s to the 1920s. Most of these newer works underscore the continuities between the two periods and the relatively seamless evolution of forces and institutions.

The Folies Bergère in New York City in 1911

1983 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-156
Author(s):  
James S. Moy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Going Public ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Night Club

Nineteenth century American theatre managers generally sought to attract mass audiences. Toward this end they usually featured variety, novelty, and the spectacular in attempts to provide a little something for everyone on each evening's program. By the end of the century many managers had begun to alter this policy, choosing instead to offer entertainments which appealed to only a particular segment of the theatre-going public. Accordingly, the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century brought the development of many distinct strains of theatrical entertainment like vaudeville, the circus, the Little Theatre movement, and the beginnings of the night-club industry.

IRISH IN THE CITY: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN AMERICAN URBAN HISTORY

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 571-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
AMY S. GREENBERG
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Good Opportunity ◽  
Urban America

Parish boundaries: the Catholic encounter with race in the twentieth-century urban north. By John T. McGreevy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. vi+362. ISBN 0-226-55873-8. $27.50.What parish are you from? A Chicago Irish community and race relations. By Eileen M. McMahon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Pp. xii+226. ISBN 0-8131-1877-8. $32.95.The Boston Irish: a political history. By Thomas H. O'Connor. London: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Pp. xixx+363. ISBN 1-55553-220-9. £23.50.The New York Irish. Edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xxii+743. ISBN 0-8018-5199-8. $45.00.The public city: the political construction of urban life in San Francisco, 1850–1900. By Philip J. Ethington. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xvi+464. ISBN 0-8018-5199-8. £40.00.Civic wars: democracy and public life in the American city during the nineteenth century. By Mary P. Ryan. London: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xii+376. ISBN 0-520-20441-7. £16.15.Few events have had a greater impact on urban America than the Irish Catholic exodus, which eventually brought one third of the Irish to the United States. Irish Catholics were the first ethnic group to immigrate in large numbers to America's cities and to experience overt discrimination. Overcoming that discrimination, they emerged as the consummate political force in urban America. In the late nineteenth century, Irish politicians and their political machines controlled a majority of America's large cities, long before the election of John F. Kennedy as president brought the Irish political presence to the national stage. At once integrated into American culture and proud of their ethnic culture and identity, the Irish in America continue to have a clear cultural presence in both positive and negative ways, in many American cities. The Irish hold the best parades, but sometimes refuse to allow Irish homosexuals the right to parade in them. The Irish are proud of their neighbourhoods, sometimes to the point of physical violence.For the first time in over two centuries, however, Irish immigration patterns have reversed. Over the last two years, 13,000 more Irish moved back to Ireland from America than went the other way. This watershed change provides a good opportunity to reconsider the history of the Irish in America's cities, as the authors of some recent publications demonstrate. This review will examine six current studies that illuminate the Irish urban experience in America. The authors of these histories document the role of the Irish and the Catholic church in urban racial disturbances in the twentieth century; they reconsider the importance of the Irish to urban political culture; and they explore the contested meanings of being Irish in urban America.

Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates in San Francisco Bay

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW MORSE BOOKER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
American West ◽  
San Francisco Bay ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Privately Owned

In the late nineteenth century San Francisco Bay hosted one of the American West's most valuable fisheries: Not the bay's native oysters, but Atlantic oysters, shipped across the country by rail and seeded on privately owned tidelands, created private profits and sparked public resistance. Both oyster growers and oyster pirates depended upon a rapidly changing bay ecosystem. Their struggle to possess the bay's productivity revealed the inqualities of ownership in the American West. An unstable nature and shifting perceptions of San Francisco Bay combined to remake the bay into a place to dump waste rather than to find food. Both growers and pirates disappeared following the collapse of the oyster fishery in the early twentieth century.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Theodore H. Friedgut, Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (ed. and annotated Theodore H. Friedgut). Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. 199 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foster Mother ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Identity Transitions ◽  
Israeli Kibbutz

This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.

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