War Mobilization, Gender, and Military Culture in Nineteenth-Century Western Societies

Author(s):  
Robert A. Nye

Gender served as an important structural and organizing principle for the mobilization of peoples for war and nation in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century. This chapter explores, from a gender perspective, how military and civilian cultures became more intimately conjoined and societies were militarized. Men experienced induction in mass conscription armies as a rite of passage to manhood and citizenship and prolonged their military identities in veteran’s organizations. Women participated in voluntary and nursing organizations that supported military and combat activities throughout the century and figured as national symbols and in the commemoration of civilian and military suffering. Popular culture, art, music, and military display made use of deeply gendered images linking military culture to nationalist themes.

Author(s):  
Steven K. Green

Separation of church and state has long been viewed as a cornerstone of American democracy. At the same time, the concept has remained highly controversial in the popular culture and law. Much of the debate over the application and meaning of the phrase focuses on its historical antecedents. This article briefly examines the historical origins of the concept and its subsequent evolutions in the nineteenth century.


Ballet Class ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 277-304
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper

Ballet’s popularity as entertainment has grown steadily in the United States since the early nineteenth century, and it has appeared in a wide variety of cultural spaces. Three arenas of American popular culture where ballet has consistently been important are movies, television, and the ubiquitous holiday performances of The Nutcracker. Dance was the subject of some of the earliest movies ever filmed and has remained a frequent theme. Millions of Americans have seen ballet on television, and as many have also seen performances of The Nutcracker. Over the course of the twentieth century many Americans have been inspired to take ballet classes or send their children to ballet classes as a result of their engagement with ballet in popular culture.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi

This dissertation examines opposition to nuns and convent life in America as it was expressed through vigilante violence, propaganda literature, and party politics. While nuns may seem like an unlikely target of hostility, a vast cohort of Americans singled them out as a serious threat to the republic. Between 1830 and 1860 anti-convent propaganda, including Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu by “escaped nun” Maria Monk, flooded the literary market. Monk’s work warned of a Catholic conspiracy in the United States through the cloister, depicted alleged horrors of convent life, and cast nuns variously as masculine tyrants, foolish slaves, and whores. Investigators quickly unveiled Maria Monk as an impostor, but her book became the second best-seller after Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the Civil War, and it has never gone out of print. In order to “protect” American women from the nun’s life, mobs stormed convents from Massachusetts to Maryland. By the 1850s, suspicion of nuns became formally politicized by Know-Nothing legislators who established “Nunnery Committees” for convent investigations. Although the Civil War quieted the outcry against nuns for a time, the campaign against convents had far-reaching implications. Members of the second Ku Klux Klan relied on anti-convent propaganda to buttress their positions, and common stereotypes of nunsâ€"first evident in nineteenth-century convent narrativesâ€"have also persisted in popular culture. This dissertation argues that the campaign against nuns and convent life was a much greater part of nineteenth-century American popular culture and politics than previous historians have recognized.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”


Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Tony Carrizales

Public Service, in popular culture, can be viewed through many artistic lenses. Although there has been a consistent negative portrayal of government through art forms such as film and television, this research looks to review how government institutions in the United States have used art to provide a positive portrayal of public service. Eight forms of public service art are outlined through a content analysis of the holdings at the Virtual Museum of Public Service. The findings show that government and public entities have historically and continually engaged in promoting public service through art. Many of these public art examples are accessible year round, without limitations, such as buildings, statues, and public structures.


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