“A Beautiful Garden Consecrated to the Lord”: Marriage, Death, and Local Constructions of Citizenship in New York’s Nineteenth-Century Jewish Rural Cemeteries

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-34
Author(s):  
Allan Amanik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Social Belonging ◽  
Physical Barriers ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter explores immigration, race, and religion through the nation’s first Jewish rural cemeteries of the 1850s. These grounds embodied an important duality for Jewish New Yorkers’ social belonging to an emerging white middle class while also safeguarding Jewish particularity and continuity. Still recent Jewish immigrants eagerly participated in the Rural Cemetery Movement, laying out lavish cemeteries and embracing its universalism by setting those grounds in closer proximity than ever before to non-sectarian Christian counterparts. Conversely, Jews of all stripes made sure to cluster together behind clear physical barriers, and nearly all synagogues and Jewish fraternities prohibited Christian burial and maintained old links between interment rights and intermarriage. Aware of increasing acceptance in the United States, Jewish New Yorkers celebrated their costly new cemeteries as symbols of mobility and belonging. At the same time, they doubled down on physical, ritual, and intangible divisions within them to temper that integration.

My Little Girl Wife

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas L. Syrett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Child Marriage ◽  
Statutory Rape ◽  
Age Of Consent ◽  
Minor Children ◽  
Meaningful Category

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

The Rise and Fall of Ace Records: A Case Study in the Independent Record Business

1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald J. Mabry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Rock N Roll

The record industry in the United States was controlled until the 1950s by a half dozen major companies, which produced music directed primarily toward the white middle class. The following article uses the history of Ace Records, a small, regional, independent company, to examine the nature of the record industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The article explains the shifts in demography and technology that made possible the growth of the independents, as well as the obstacles and events that made their demise more likely. It also traces the changes that such companies, by recording and promoting rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, introduced to the cultural mainstream.

Queering Middle Class Gender in Nineteenth-Century US Theater

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Construction ◽  
Narrative Forms

This chapter considers cross-dressed roles in nineteenth-century music-theatrical forms in the United States, and particularly in non-narrative and semi-narrative forms such as minstrelsy, circus, variety, and burlesque. It discusses the origins of cross-dressed roles in English theatrical traditions, as well as connections to similar roles in European opera and operetta. It also considers other kinds of performances present in variety that challenged middle class gender construction of the period, and suggests that variety represented working class gender roles, and humor was found at the expense of hegemonic middle class ideals. This becomes particularly clear in the performances by male impersonators in variety of the 1860s–1880s. By the end of the century the middle class had expanded to include portions of the variety audience, and audiences no longer found the satirical treatment of middle class men funny. This, and growing mainstream recognition of homosexual populations, particularly in urban areas, caused the decline of cross-dressed performance.

Charles Dickens and the Victorian “Mormon Moment”

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 489-506
Author(s):  
Scott Dransfield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Salt Lake ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Healthy Working ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
New Religion

Abstract The growth of Mormonism in England in the middle of the nineteenth century presented a number of challenges relating to the cultural status of the new religion and its followers. Charles Dickens’s “uncommercial traveller” sketch describing a group of 800 Mormon converts preparing to emigrate to the United States, “Bound for the Great Salt Lake,” represents the challenge effectively. While Mormons were quickly identified by their heresies and by those qualities that characterized cultural and religious otherness, they were also observed to possess traits of Englishness, reflecting the image of a healthy working class. This article considers the tensions among these contradictory qualities and traces them to a middle-class “secular gospel” that Dickens articulates in his novels. Dickens utilizes this “gospel”—an ethic that valorizes work and domestic order as bearing religious significance—to perceive the followers of the new religion.

Houses Divided

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas P. Volkman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Phenomenon ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Border State

This work argues that congregational and local denominational schisms among Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the border state of Missouri before, during, and after the Civil War were central to the crisis of the Union, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Employing an array of approaches that examine these ecclesiastical fractures beyond the customary antebellum temporal scope of analysis, and as a local phenomenon, this study maintains that the schisms were interlinked religious, sociocultural, legal, and political developments rife with implications for the transformation of evangelicalism and the United States in that period and to the end of Reconstruction. The evangelical disruptions in Missouri were grounded in divergent moral and political understandings of slavery, abolitionism, secession, and disloyalty. Publicly articulated by factional litigation over church property and a combative evangelical print culture, the schisms were complicated by race, class, and gender dynamics that arrayed the contending interests of white middle-class women and men, rural churchgoers, and African American congregants. These ruptures forged antagonistic northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased antebellum sectarian strife and violence, energized the notorious guerrilla conflict that gripped Missouri through the Civil War, and fueled postwar vigilantism between opponents and proponents of emancipation. As such, the schisms produced the intertwined religious, legal, and constitutional controversies that shaped pro- and antislavery evangelical contention before 1861, wartime Radical rule, and the rise and fall of Reconstruction.

Gendering asexuality and asexualizing gender: A qualitative study exploring the intersections between gender and asexuality

Sexualities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1197-1216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Gupta
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Sexual Norms ◽  
Sexual Autonomy ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Depth Interviews

In this article, I explore the intersections between gender and asexuality, drawing on data collected from in-depth interviews with 30 asexually-identified individuals living in the United States. I examine the differential effects that gendered sexual norms have on asexually-identified men and women and begin to explore the relationship between asexuality, gender non-conformity, and trans* identities. Based on these findings, I argue that while white, middle-class asexually-identified men may live in greater conflict with dominant gendered sexual norms than white, middle-class asexually-identified women, the sexual autonomy of these asexually-identified men – specifically their right to refuse sexuality – may be greater than the sexual autonomy of these asexually-identified women.

In Rough Country

Rough Country ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Good Standing ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
The U.S

This chapter focuses on a turbulent period in the late nineteenth century, as Texas was in the midst of one of the most important and hotly contested elections in its history. In compliance with an act of the U.S. Congress and by proclamation of President Ulysses S. Grant, the election ran from November 30 through December 3, 1869. It was held to determine whether the state would ratify a new constitution that complied with the Reconstruction laws of Congress and thus be reincorporated into the United States as a state in good standing. The situation was complicated by the murder of a well-respected businessman named B. W. Loveland. A witness claimed to have seen a black man in the vicinity of the store with what appeared to be bloodstains on his pants. Other witnesses claimed they had heard and seen nothing. Religion's place would be well illustrated both in the election itself and in the outcome of the Loveland murder investigation. Two members of the clergy in particular, one a white Methodist preacher and the other a black Baptist pastor, would quietly show the complex results that could occur when race and religion mingled with politics.

scholarly journals Acute Rheumatic Fever: Findings of a Hospital-Based Study and an Overview of Reported Outbreaks

1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Upton D Allen ◽  
Michael Braudo ◽  
Stanley E Read
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Rheumatic Fever ◽  
Acute Rheumatic Fever ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Group A ◽  
Sick Children

To review the characteristics of reported outbreaks of acute rheumatic fever in the United States, and to determine if there is an increase in the incidence of acute rheumatic fever in the population served by the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, the authors conducted a literature search and a retrospective review of inpatients and outpatients, satisfying the revised Jones criteria for the diagnosis of acute rheumatic fever, from 1972 to 1988. Patients satisfying the revised Jones criteria for the time period 1972–88 were included in the study. There have been eight articles reporting an increase in acute rheumatic fever in the United States. In three, the majority of children were white and from middle class suburban/rural communities in different geographic locations. Mucoid strains of group A streptococci were implicated but not confirmed as being associated with the outbreaks in three. The results of the chart review at the Hospital for Sick Children revealed that 83 cases satisfied the revised Jones criteria. The number of cases per 100,000 children (aged 18 years or less) per year, decreased progressively over the study period. Polyarthritis was the most frequently seen major criterion occurring in 73% of patients (61 of 83). The most frequently affected ethnic groups were Italians 23%, Afro-Canadians 19% and Orientals 8%. The reported outbreaks in the United States are multifocal and predominantly confined to white middle class children residing in suburban/rural communities. There was no evidence of an increase in the number of cases of acute rheumatic fever seen in the population served by the Hospital for Sick Children; there was a progressive decline in number of cases over the study period. The results facilitate the characterization of acute rheumatic fever within North America into three different patterns of occurrence.

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.

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