scholarly journals From Loss of Services to Loss of Support: The Wrongful Death Statutes, the Origins of Modern Tort Law, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Family

2000 ◽  
Vol 25 (03) ◽  
pp. 717-755 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Fabian Witt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Next Of Kin ◽  
The Family ◽  
Wage Earning ◽  
Gender Asymmetry ◽  
Wrongful Death ◽  
Domestic Roles

The wrongful death statutes enacted in most states during the mid-nineteenth century have long represented a classic moment in the narrative of American legal history. Historians have not observed, however, that American wrongful death statutes amended the English act on which they were modeled to introduce a gender asymmetry peculiar to the United States. Led by New York, most American jurisdictions limited wrongful death actions to “the widow and next of kin” of the decedent, categories that did not include husbands of deceased wives. Thus, a wife could bring a wrongful death action for the death of her husband, but a husband could not bring a wrongful death action on his own behalf for the death of his wife. The wrongful death statutes represent a heretofore unrecognized conjuncture of the beginnings of the modem law of torts with the nineteenth-century legal reconstruction of the family. The statutes mowed accident litigation away from an eighteenth-century model of masters suing for loss of the services of a servant, slave, wife, or child, toward the now more familiar model of suits for loss of wages and support. Moreover, the gender asymmetry of the statutes embodied and reproduced a new nineteenth-century conception of the family in which men worked as free laborers and women were confined to relatively narrow domestic roles, removed from the market and dependent for their support on the wages of their husbands. Indeed, the statutes anticipated by over half a century the American welfare state's two-track approach to support for wage-earning men and dependent women.

scholarly journals Collections, Compilations, and Convolutes of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Fragments in North America before ca. 1900

Fragmentology ◽  
10.24446/dlll ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-139
Author(s):  
Scott Gwara
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
The United States ◽  
New York University ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Private Collections ◽  
Public Exhibition

Using evidence drawn from S. de Ricci and W. J. Wilson’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, American auction records, private library catalogues, public exhibition catalogues, and manuscript fragments surviving in American institutional libraries, this article documents nineteenth-century collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscript fragments in North America before ca. 1900. Surprisingly few fragments can be identified, and most of the private collections have disappeared. The manuscript constituents are found in multiple private libraries, two universities (New York University and Cornell University), and one Learned Society (Massachusetts Historical Society). The fragment collections reflect the collecting genres documented in England in the same period, including albums of discrete fragments, grangerized books, and individual miniatures or “cuttings” (sometimes framed). A distinction is drawn between undecorated text fragments and illuminated ones, explained by aesthetic and scholarly collecting motivations. An interest in text fragments, often from binding waste, can be documented from the 1880s.

Codification and the Origins of Physician-Patient Privilege

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-102
Author(s):  
MILES WILKINSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Professional Status ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
American Law ◽  
Judicial Proceedings ◽  
Physician Patient

Abstract:This essay examines the origins of physician-patient privilege in the United States. It concentrates an 1828 New York law that protected medical confidentiality in the courtroom—the first statutory guarantee of physician-patient privilege—as well as the rapid spread of privilege statutes throughout the nineteenth century. Using the published notes of the authors of New York’s influential statute alongside other primary sources, I argue that these early statutes are best explained as the result of nineteenth-century efforts to codify American law. The medical profession took little note of physician-patient privilege until much later, indicating that privilege emerged not as a protection of doctors’ professional status, nor as a means of protecting patients in the courtroom, but rather as an inadvertent offshoot of attempts to streamline and simply judicial proceedings. It is perhaps because of these unsystematic origins that physician-patient privilege still remains such an unevenly applied rule in American courtrooms.

The English diaspora in North America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Bueltmann ◽  
Donald M. MacRaild
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
The Us ◽  
Transnational Communication ◽  
The Uk

From the early eighteenth century, a vibrant English associational culture emerged that was, by many measures, ethnic in character. English ethnic organisations spread across North America from east to west, and from north to south, later becoming a truly global phenomenon when reaching Australasia in the later nineteenth century. This books charts the nature, extent and character of these developments. It explores the main activities of English ethnic societies, including their charitable work; collective mutual aid; their national celebration; their expressions of imperial and monarchical devotion; and the extent to which they evinced transnational communication with the homeland and with English immigrants in other territories. The English demonstrated and English people abroad demonstrated and experienced competitive and sometimes conflictual ethnic character, and so the discussion also uncovers aspects of enmity towards an Irish immigrant community, especially in the US, whose increasingly political sense of community brought them into bitter dispute with English immigrants whom they soon outnumbered. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the extent of English ethnic associational culture in North America was such that it resonated within England herself, resulting in the formation of a central organization designed to coordinate the promotion of English culture. This was the Royal Society of St George. Ultimately, the book documents that the English expressed their identity through processes of associating, mutualism and self-expression that were, by any measure, both ethnic and diasporic in character. The English Diaspora is based on a very large amount of untapped primary materials from archives in the United States, Canada, and the UK relating to specific locations such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Toronto, Ottawa, and Kingston, and London. Thousands of newspaper articles have been trawled. Several long runs of English associational periodicals have been garnered and utilized. Comparative and transnational perspectives beyond the US and Canada are enabled by the discovery of manuscript materials and periodicals relating to the Royal Society of St George.

‘It was Play or Starve’: John Banvard's Account of Early Showboats

1983 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-64
Author(s):  
John Hanners
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
The Family

John Banvard was a nineteenth-century adventurer, painter, poet, and theatre owner. Born in 1815 in New York City, he was forced to leave home at fifteen years of age when his father died and left the family penniless. He followed an older brother to Louisville, Kentucky, where he worked as an apothecary's helper and amateur artist. In 1833 he joined the Chapman Family as a scenic artist on the Floating Theatre, also known as Chapman's Ark, America's first showboat. This experience inspired Banvard to operate his own showboats and display his landscape paintings.

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