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.

‘Smoked Yankees’, ‘Wild’ Catholics and the Newspaper ‘Lions’ of Manila

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Shott
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Fault Lines

When the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, American troops battled Spanish forces in Cuba and across the Pacific in Spain’s longtime colony, the Philippines. There, American troops initially fought alongside Filipino rebels, but after the defeat of Spanish forces the United States annexed the islands and fighting broke out between the rebels and their new occupiers. American soldiers, including nearly 6,000 African Americans, struggled to understand their adversaries, employing varied conceptual frames that mixed scientific racism, the notion of Manifest Destiny, and American exceptionalism and that encompassed long-standing fault lines in American identity, including religion. The chapter draws material from diaries of soldiers, black and ethnic newspaper presses, and diplomatic sources to describe a potent but ephemeral mix of racialist thinking during and immediately after the Philippine-American War.

Intergenerational Occupational Mobility across Three Continents

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago Pérez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
Occupational Mobility ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

I compare rates of intergenerational occupational mobility across four countries in the late nineteenth century: 1869–1895 Argentina, 1850–1880 United States, 1851–1881 Britain, and 1865–1900 Norway. Argentina and the United States had similar levels of intergenerational mobility, and these levels were above those of Britain and Norway. These findings suggest that the higher mobility of nineteenth-century United States relative to Britain might not have been a reflection of “American exceptionalism,” but rather a manifestation of more widespread differences between settler economies of the New World and Europe.

Alternative Wests

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-17
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Isenberg ◽  
Thomas Richards
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
American West ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Significant Extent ◽  
North American West ◽  
The North ◽  
The Caribbean

The mid-nineteenth century territorial growth of the United States was complex and contradictory. Not only did Mexico, Britain, and Native Americans contest U.S. territorial objectives; so, too, did many within the United States and in some cases American western settlers themselves. The notion of manifest destiny reflects few of these complexities. The authors argue that manifest destiny was a partisan idea that emerged in a context of division and uncertainty intended to overawe opponents of expansion. Only in the early twentieth century, as the United States had consolidated its hold on the North American West and was extending its power into the Caribbean and Pacific, did historians begin to describe manifest destiny as something that it never was in the nineteenth century: a consensus. To a significant extent, historians continue to rely on the idea to explain U.S. expansion. The authors argue for returning a sense of context and contingency to the understanding of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. expansion.

Eccezionalismo, identitŕ nazionale e interdipendenza : nuove sintesi italiane sulla storia degli Stati Uniti d'America

2009 ◽  
pp. 177-190
Author(s):  
Daniele Fiorentino
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Key Words ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
Dominant Society

- The essay examines some central concepts of U.S. history and culture through the analysis of three volumes published in Italy in 2008. The author uses the concept of American Exceptionalism in order to provide a closer reading of the books and a better understanding of the image of the United States offered today, as well as the place of U.S. history in Italy. Cultural Pluralism is an important framework in the historical and historiographical narratives. Touching upon other central ideals of American identity such as Manifest Destiny, the Frontier, and Internationalism, this essay deals with the issue of Imperialism and the reactions against it in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through the question of immigration, reference is made to multiculturalism and the processes that led toward a progressive integration of different minorities on the basis of models proposed by the dominant society. The essay thus recapitulates some of the most widespread stereotypes concerning ethnic groups and the construction of a new model of Cultural Pluralism.Key words: U.S. history, exceptionalism, American imperialism, immigration, cultural pluralism, Melting PotParole chiave: storia degli Stati Uniti, eccezionalismo, imperialismo americano, immigrazione, pluralismo culturale, melting pot

Inventing American Exceptionalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amalia D. Kessler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law

It is widely accepted that American procedure—and indeed American legal culture as a whole—are adversarial (and distinctively so). Yet, precisely because this assumption is so deep-rooted, we have no history of how American adversarialism arose. This book provides such a history. It shows that the United States long employed not only lawyer-empowering adversarial procedure, but also various forms of more judge-dependent, quasi-inquisitorial procedure—including the equity tradition borrowed from England and, to a lesser extent, conciliation courts transplanted from continental Europe. However, the United States largely abandoned quasi-inquisitorial procedure by the close of the Civil War and Reconstruction, committing itself to lawyer-driven adversarialism. In explaining this turn to the adversarial, the book looks to developments both internal and external to the law. Among the key internalist factors on which the book focuses are the rise of the previously unknown category of “procedure”, as well as a set of seemingly small changes in the approach to taking testimony before equity-court officials known as masters in chancery, which ended up having unintended systemic consequences. So, too, from a more externalist perspective, the book traces how advocacy of adversarialism became intimately linked with demands for a largely unregulated market and the preservation of white supremacy. The product of deep-rooted inheritances, as well as more immediate and contingent occurrences, the nineteenth-century embrace of adversarsarialism would prove deeply consequential, shaping Americans’ experience of the law down to the present, often in ways that constrain rather than expand access to justice.

Central America and the United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Gobat
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central America ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Americans ◽  
The World ◽  
Interoceanic Canal ◽  
Dollar Diplomacy

Central America has endured more US interventions than any other region in the world. This history reflects the long-standing belief of US officials that their country’s global aspirations hinged on its control of an interoceanic canal cutting across the isthmus. Yet geography alone does not explain the fixation with Central America. Ever since Manifest Destiny expansion of the mid-nineteenth century, the region has also served as a proving ground for new forms of US power such as overseas settler colonialism, dollar diplomacy, and counterinsurgency strategies. Central America’s lengthy encounter with the United States has generally been viewed by scholars in dichotomous terms: Central Americans either abetted US impositions or bravely rejected them. These Manichean images of accommodation and resistance have also served as political weapons for Central Americans and foreigners alike. In reality, such images obscure the ambiguities that not only define the region’s history with the northern “colossus” but also best capture the limits of US power.

Jewish Mysticism and National Theology

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-61
Author(s):  
Boaz Huss
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Mysticism

Chapter 2 examines the formation of the concept of Jewish mysticism, the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as Jewish forms of mysticism, and the construction of an academic research field dedicated to what was defined as “Jewish mysticism.” It describes the application of the adjective mystical to Kabbalah by Christian scholars since the seventeenth century, the appearance of the term “Jewish mysticism” in the writings of German Romantic theologians in the early nineteenth century, and the adoption of the term by Jewish scholars in Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. It further examines the “revelation” of Jewish mysticism by Martin Buber and the establishment of the research field dedicated to Jewish mysticism by Gershom Scholem and his pupils. The chapter discusses the ideological and theological contexts in which the category of mysticism was shaped in the nineteenth century and the processes that led to the establishment of Jewish mysticism—as a category and as an academic research field—in the framework of modern theological-national discourse and as part of the Zionist nation-building endeavor.

“In a Few Years the Red Man Will Live Only in Legend and in Cooper’s Charming Accounts”: Portrayals of American Indians in Danish Travel Literature in the Mid- and Late Nineteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-105
Author(s):  
Jørn Brøndal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Travel Writers ◽  
Vanishing Indian

During the middle and late nineteenth century, a number of Danish travel writers visited the United States with a view to narrating about the New World to their readers back home. Four of the most prominent writers were Hans Peter Christian Hansen, Vilhelm C.S. Topsøe, Robert Watt, and Henrik Cavling. Among the many topics covered by these writers was that of American Indians. Establishing a narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” the writers endeavored to tie the Indians to a receding landscape of the past and—for the most part—to establish a contradiction between Indians and white “civilization.” Likewise displaying an interest in Scandinavian immigrants, the travel writers sometimes attempted to create links between the Indians and Scandinavian settlers. With no clear Danish interest in celebrating American exceptionalism in the shape of classical U.S. “Manifest Destiny,” the travel writers were nevertheless involved in processes of bonding with the dominant population element of the United States through their common “civilization” and whiteness.

Pioneers of Inner Space: Drug Autobiography and Manifest Destiny

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (5) ◽  
pp. 1531-1547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Zieger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Addiction Drug ◽  
As If

The drug autobiography emerged as a genre in the United States primarily through imitations of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). For De Quincey, the intoxicating consumption of opium and print was linked to imperial mastery. Texts such as Fitz Hugh Ludlow's Hasheesh Eater (1857) adapted this association to suit the westward expansion of the United States and its accompanying ideology of manifest destiny. Under the influence of hashish, Ludlow explored his inner psychic space as if it were the United States frontier. As nineteenth-century Romantic models of intoxicated dreaming gave way to early-twentieth-century theories of addiction, drug autobiographies such as D. F. MacMartin's Thirty Years in Hell (1921) readapted the genre, representing the disappointments of manifest destiny as addicted exile. While drug autobiographies accrued countercultural authority, appearing to signify the irrational underside of Enlightenment modernity, their fantasies of esoteric exploration derived from broader cultural ideals of imperial power and knowledge.

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