Building a State and a Nation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Developing World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Character ◽  
New Nation

This chapter analyzes three U.S. performances: the launch of a new nation, continental expansion, and national consolidation. The mid-nineteenth century, notably the 1860s, seems to have brought a spasm of special character across much of the developed or developing world. Centralizing states swung into place offering strong nationalisms, new constitutional formulas, a spirit of reform in state and economy, and a bent for commodifying property and homogenizing the rights of citizenship across entire populations. In these respects, the 1860s seem to have brought a transnational ideological high. Ensuing years brought a recession from it, as the promises and commitments of the decade wore down. In the United States, the thrusts of rights expansion lost force in the 1870s.

Warring for America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
School Students ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Many

The aftershocks of the American Revolution reverberated through the early nineteenth century, leaving the new country unsettled and at odds with itself. The essays in Warring for America offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the internal divisions amongst the inhabitants of the early Republic that hindered the emergence of a coherent American nation as much as did the lingering impact of British imperial influence. Traditional understanding of the War of 1812 era as a moment that reaffirmed the political independence of the United States, thereby ushering in a neat period of stability, have failed to explain the enduring struggle to define the social and physical parameters of the new nation that dominated much of the nineteenth century. By turning from high politics to cultural productions and material problems, the authors in this volume explore the many social and economic conflicts within the United States that were fought on cultural terrain. Wartime calls for unity only cast into sharper relief the arduous efforts of varied Americans to control the terms of inclusion or exclusion within their country. From presidents to African Free School students, from hack magazine writers to Choctaw mothers, Americans fought for country on the battleground of belonging.

“Hindoo Marriage” and National Sovereignty in the Early-Nineteenth-Century United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Connolly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private International Law ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
The Law ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Definition Of

This essay explored the concept of sovereignty in relation both to the legal definition of marriage within the emergent field of private international law and representations of “Hindoo” marriage in the early nineteenth century. I argue that in establishing national sovereignty the United States, paradoxically, had to give up a bit of sovereignty in order to be recognized as a sovereign nation. This was apparent in legal writings on marriage, wherein influential jurists like Joseph Story argued that a marriage legally recognized in one country was valid everywhere, even if it violated the domestic laws of a new nation. In order to deal with this paradox the cultural apparatus – in this case, print culture – worked to supplement the law. Missionary writings on supposedly “Hindoo” marriages and marital relations such as sati, child marriage, and infanticide supplemented the law by marking these kinds of relations, which would potentially have been legal in the US, as outside the logic of liberal democracy.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

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.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

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.

Emigrant Psychoanalysts in the USA and the FBI Archives

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Goggin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
External Threats ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Nation

Interest in the fate of the German psychoanalysts who had to flee Hitler's Germany and find refuge in a new nation, such as the United States, has increased. The ‘émigré research’ shows that several themes recur: (1) the theme of ‘loss’ of one's culture, homeland, language, and family; and (2) the ambiva-lent welcome these émigrés received in their new country. We describe the political-social-cultural context that existed in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Documentary evidence found in the FBI files of three émigré psychoanalysts, Clara Happel, Martin Grotjahn, and Otto Fenichel, are then presented in combination with other source material. This provides a provisional impression of how each of these three individuals experienced their emigration. As such, it gives us elements of a history. The FBI documents suggest that the American atmosphere of political insecurity and fear-based ethnocentric nationalism may have reinforced their old fears of National Socialism, and contributed to their inclination to inhibit or seal off parts of them-selves and their personal histories in order to adapt to their new home and become Americanized. They abandoned the rich social, cultural, political tradition that was part of European psychoanalysis. Finally, we look at these elements of a history in order to ask a larger question about the appropriate balance between a liberal democratic government's right to protect itself from internal and external threats on the one hand, or crossover into the blatant invasion of civil rights and due process on the other.

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE AUDITOR'S ROLE: THE EARLY EXPERlENCE OF THE AMERICAN RAILROADS

1983 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Boockholdt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Internal Control ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The United States ◽  
Advisory Services ◽  
Audit Independence ◽  
Inherent Part

The paper explores the origins of the auditing profession in the United States. It is suggested that the development of the audit function in this country can be traced to reporting by internal and shareholder auditors in the American railroads during the middle of the nineteenth century. Evidence is presented that a recognition of the need for audit independence existed, and that the provision of advisory services and reports on internal control by American auditors have been an inherent part of the auditor's role from that time.

An Overview of the History of Religious Life in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Wittberg ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Order ◽  
Religious Institutes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socioeconomic Composition

This chapter briefly describes the history of religious institutes in the United States. It first covers the demographics—the overall numbers and the ethnic and socioeconomic composition—of the various institutes during the nineteenth century. It next discusses the types of ministries the sisters, brothers, and religious order priests engaged in, and the sources of vocations to their institutes. The second section covers changes in religious institutes after 1950, covering the factors which contributed to the changes as well as their impact on the institutes themselves and the larger Church. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.

Deafness and Ethnic Identity: The Idea of a Deaf State and its Resonances with American Exceptionalism and Frontier Ideology

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Marion Rana
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Deaf Identity ◽  
American Nation

Abstract This article focuses on the nineteenth century as a pivotal time for the development of a Deaf identity in the United States and examines the way John Jacob Flournoy’s idea of a “Deaf-Mute Commonwealth” touches upon core themes of American culture studies and history. In employing pivotal democratic ideas such as egalitarianism, liberty, and self-representation as well as elements of manifest destiny such as exceptionalism and the frontier ideology in order to raise support for a Deaf State, the creation and perpetuation of a Deaf identity bears strong similarities to the processes of American nation-building. This article will show how the endeavor to found a Deaf state was indicative of the separationist and secessionist movements in the United States at that time, and remains relevant to Deaf group identity today.

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