Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Dan Allosso
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Agricultural Frontier ◽  
Fluid Movement ◽  
Family Networks ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Commercial Farming ◽  
The People ◽  
Shared Information

This chapter focuses particularly on the people who became peppermint kings. It recounts stories of the peppermint kings and illustrate elements of rural life in nineteenth-century America. It also shows that people moving to the nineteenth-century agricultural frontier remained deeply embedded in family networks that shared information, retained ties of affection and obligation, and did business across the miles. The chapter provides a multigenerational look at families that shows dynamic, fluid movement of people, and capital between old eastern and new western communities. It mentions Brian Donahue, who observed that commercial farming continued in many New England towns until the end of the nineteenth century and the decline in agriculture was balanced by substantial appreciation in the value of farmland being abandoned.

Before Hinduism: Missionaries, Unitarians, and Hindoos in Nineteenth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-295
Author(s):  
Michael J. Altman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Religion ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Interest

AbstractAmerican interest in and knowledge of religion in India began before Americans imagined Hinduism as a coherent world religion. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Americans used a variety of terms to describe, represent, and imagine the religious culture of India: Gentoos, Hindoos, religion of the Hindoos, Hindoo religion, Brahmanism, heathenism, and paganism. Each term meant different things to different writers at different times. But there was no Hinduism, a world religion originating in India and comparable to others, in America prior to the late nineteenth century. Americans read and wrote about “Hindoos” and “Hindoo religion,” something altogether different from Hindus and Hinduism. This article analyzes two examples of American representations of Hindoo religion before Hinduism. First, it examines American missionary reports about “Hindoo heathenism” written by American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionaries and published in American missionary journals in the early nineteenth century. Second, it examines the Unitarian interest in Rammohun Roy and his growing popularity in New England during the 1820s and 1830s. Unitarian interest in Roy and ABCFM missionary reports exemplify the ways Protestant questions and interests shaped the American understanding of religions and the eventual construction of “world religions” such as Hinduism to suit American Protestant concerns.

The Local Parish as a Female Institution: The Experience of All Saints Episcopal Church in Frontier Minnesota

1986 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-322
Author(s):  
Joan R. Gundersen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Church Membership ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Local Parish ◽  
Popular Theology

In recent years historians have begun exploring the feminization of religion in nineteenth-century America. While much of the published debate has centered on the particular definition presented by Ann Douglas in her study, The Feminization of American Culture, other scholars have adopted the term but applied it in different ways. Douglas based her argument on a small sample of liberal Protestant female writers and clergymen in New England whom she saw as giving cultural expression to a new popular theology. She did not explore its impact upon any particular congregation, and much of the controversy surrounding her thesis has focused on the narrow base upon which she made expansive claims. The concept of a feminized church, however, has attracted a number of scholars. Some, like Gerald Moran, have found evidence of the process much earlier in New England, while Mary Ryan and others have explored church membership during the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. The research continues the Northeastern focus, however, in terms of both geography and denomination. Thus historians still have no sense as to the universality of these trends. In addition, the focus has remained on church membership and cultural perceptions of women's religious role. We have precious little information on how women translated ideas about their role into the life of an ongoing religious institution.

Opera for the People

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Preston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Women Managers ◽  
English Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The People ◽  
The Rich ◽  
American Musical Theatre

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a completely forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. This work challenges a common stereotype that opera in nineteenth-century America was as it is in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest to a niche market. It also demonstrates conclusively that the historiography of nineteenth-century American music (which utterly ignores English-language opera performance and reception history) is completely wrong. Based on information from music and theatre periodicals published in the United States between 1860 and 1900; letters, diaries, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and other performance materials; and reviews, commentary, and other evidence of performance history in digitized newspapers, this work shows that more than one hundred different companies toured all over America, performing opera in English for heterogeneous audiences during this period, and that many of the most successful troupes were led or supported by women—prima donna/impresarios, women managers, or philanthropists who lent financial support. The book conclusively demonstrates the continued wide popularity of opera among middle-class Americans during the last three decades of the century and furthermore illustrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which eventually led to the emergence of American musical comedy.

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