Private club culture in London and New York during the Victorian era

2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Clayton Barrows ◽  
David Bachrach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Participation Of Women ◽  
The Press ◽  
Married Men ◽  
History Of

The private club literature is disparate and rarely draws comparisons between or among club cultures. In this article, club culture in New York and London are compared. Specifically, the history of private clubs in London and New York is explored, focusing on the latter part of the nineteenth century. Historical documents are reviewed in an attempt to establish the club culture in the respective cities, how clubs were viewed within their communities, and similarities that existed between ‘Club Land’ in London and similar club clusters in New York. While the press coverage in the respective cities seems to have been equally admiring of clubs and ‘clubmen’, some differences are identified between the respective club cultures and club identities, particularly with respect to the inclusivity of the clubs, and the expectations for the participation of women and married men in club life.

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.

scholarly journals The Materiality of English Suicide Letters, c. 1700 – c. 1850

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Ella Sbaraini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Distress ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Scholars have explored eighteenth-century suicide letters from a literary perspective, examining issues of performativity and reception. However, it is fruitful to see these letters as material as well as textual objects, which were utterly embedded in people's social lives. Using thirty manuscript letters, in conjunction with other sources, this article explores the contexts in which suicide letters were written and left for others. It looks at how authors used space and other materials to convey meaning, and argues that these letters were epistolary documents usually meant for specific, known persons, rather than the press. Generally written by members of the ‘lower orders’, these letters also provide insight into the emotional writing practices of the poor, and their experiences of emotional distress. Overall, this article proposes that these neglected documents should be used to investigate the emotional and material contexts for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suicide. It also argues that, at a time when the history of emotions has reached considerable prominence, historians must be more attentive to the experiences of the suicidal.

Rose-Colored Glasses: Competing Media Perceptions of the Pete Rose Betting Scandal

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Craig Greenham
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Major League Baseball ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
Local Media ◽  
The Press ◽  
Major League ◽  
Market Coverage ◽  
The City

In a 2004 autobiography, legendary player Pete Rose confessed to gambling on baseball games, even those that included his Cincinnati Reds. The passage of time has clarified much about the betting scandal that plagued Major League Baseball (MLB) in 1989. Over the course of the six-month saga, Rose’s denials and his adversarial relationship with the Commissioner’s Office shrouded MLB’s investigation in controversy. This study explores the press coverage of the scandal in 1989 and determines that the Cincinnati press was more sympathetic to, and supportive of Rose than out-of-market coverage, represented in this investigation by The New York Times. These findings are consistent with previous research that indicates that local media favors hometown institutions during times of crisis. This study expands that theory by demonstrating that favoritism extends to individual players whose connection to the city is significant, and furthers our understanding of the media’s role in shaping the narratives of scandal.

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