Consent to Ascent The Baltimore Affair and the U.S. Rise to World Power Status

1984 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Joyce S. Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Coastal Cities ◽  
World Power ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Commercial Center ◽  
The U.S

The city where trouble began in 1891, Valparaíso, Chile, was a memorable place. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, the nineteenth-century Chilean historian and political leader, has rightly written that the history of Valparaíso has been the history of the sea. An old port, once a more important city than it is now, built around and especially on top of steep hills reached by rickety lifts, Valparaíso still has a grace and character unlike that of most other ports—its landscape resembles an untamed San Francisco. At one time it was a thriving commercial center and hub of naval activity, important not only for the direction of Chilean history but for that of much of South America as well. In the nineteenth century, with Chilean independence and the later decay of the Peruvian port of Callao, Valparaíso rapidly became the maritime capital of the Pacific and an important focus of naval enterprises for continental defense. Then, after decades of prosperity, its importance declined and the fortunes of other coastal cities arose.

Celebrity Culture and the Gold Rush Metropolis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Exchange Networks ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The City

With the gold rush, San Francisco almost instantaneously became an important stop for a host of international entertainment tours that expanded well beyond the Atlantic world, to Australia as well as the Pacific Coast. The term celebrity was first employed as a noun in the 1840s and 1850s, and from its inception, this cultural phenomenon was intrinsically linked with and profited handsomely from transnational exchange networks—the conduits for the transmission of print and visual culture, as well as the migration of people and capital. Theatrical entertainment flourished in nineteenth-century San Francisco, as did the trade in celebrity portraits. In this context, certain charismatic individuals emerged: notably female stars, including Lola Montez and Adah Isaacs Menken, who embodied the trend of self-representation that overtook the city. The celebrity thrived in a place where human identity could become a consumable commodity—in turn, it often became all-consuming..

Emotional Cities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Dynamic Transformation ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.

“Filipinos are the Dandies of the Foreign Colonies”: Race, Labor Struggles, and the Transpacific Routes of Hollywood and Philippine Films, 1924–1948

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-403
Author(s):  
Denise Khor
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Movie Theaters ◽  
Japanese Immigrants ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western City ◽  
Urban Leisure ◽  
The U.S

In the 1930s and 1940s Filipino laborers, many of whom were en route to agricultural hubs on the Pacific Coast, packed into movie theaters owned by Japanese immigrants to view Hollywood and Philippine-produced films. These cultural encounters formed an urban public sphere that connected both sides of the Pacific. Filipino patrons remade their public identities and communities through their consumption of film and urban leisure in the western city. This article traces this localized history of spectatorship and exhibition in order to reconsider prevailing understandings of the history of the U.S. West and the rise of cinema and mass commercial culture in the early twentieth century.

Urban Formalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The City

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-195
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Student ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.

“Design His Course to Mexico”

2018 ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Mekala Audain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Contested Spaces ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The U.S

In the mid-1850s, Texas slaveholders estimated that some 4,000 fugitive slaves had escaped south to Mexico. This chapter broadly examines the process in which runaway slaves from Texas escaped to Mexico. Specifically, it explores how they learned about freedom south of the border, the types of supplies they gathered for their escape attempts, and the ways in which Texas’s vast landscape shaped their experiences. It argues that the routes that led fugitive slaves to freedom in Mexico were a part of a precarious southern Underground Railroad, but one that operated in the absence of formal networks or a well-organized abolitionist movement. The chapter centers on fugitive slaves’ efforts toward self-emancipation and navigate contested spaces of slavery and freedom with little assistance and under difficult conditions. It sheds new light on the history of runaway slaves by examining the ways in which American westward expansion and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands shaped the fugitive slave experience in the nineteenth century.

Albert Abraham Michelson, 1852 - 1931

1932 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-25
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
High School ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
Naval Academy ◽  
Physical Laboratory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nautical Almanac ◽  
The U.S

Albert Abraham Michelson was born on December 19, 1852, at Strelno in Posen, now restored to Poland. When he was two years old, he was taken by his parents, Samuel Michelson and Rosalie (Przlubska), to the United States, and, after some fifteen years spent in Virgina City, Nevada, where his brother Charles was born, San Francisco became their home. There his sister Miriam, the author, was born, and the boy attended the high school. He was given, in unusual circumstances, an appointment in the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and after graduating in 1873 he became a midshipman in the U.S. Navy for two years and was afterwards appointed instructor in physics and chemistry in the Naval Academy in 1875, holding the appointment until 1879. His next year was spent in the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington, and then he studied for two years at the College of France, and at Heidelberg and Berlin. In 1882 he became Professor of Physics in the Case School of Applied Science at Cleveland, Ohio. After seven years he went as Professor of Physics to Clark University, Worcester, Mass., and remained there until 1892. He was then appointed Professor at the head of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory, Chicago ; this appointment he held until shortly before his death, which occurred on May 9, 1931. He married Miss Edna Stanton of Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1899, and they had a son and two daughters. This in brief contains the history of his official appointments : how he filled the various posts is another matter.

The Unlikely Environmentalisms of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Michelle C. Neely
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Food System ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Imagination ◽  
The U.S

Against Sustainability argues for a transformation of our environmental ethics and our environmental imagination. The introduction demonstrates that the manifest difficulties of centering transformative environmental ethics in mainstream U.S. environmentalism are compounded by the hegemony of the sustainability paradigm. Sustainability captures a well-meaning impulse to ensure the stable persistence of human societies over time, yet its reassuring emphasis on stability comes with a high cost: sustainability prizes continuity with pasts the Anthropcene reveals as environmentally and ethically problematic. The introduction illustrates the limits of future-oriented paradigms dominated by pastoral thinking by reading contemporary critics of the U.S. food system against their nineteenth-century counterparts. An archival approach to industrial farming and animal agriculture proves that many of their hallmark practices originate in the antebellum period or earlier. The introduction ultimately argues that an honest reckoning with the history of U.S. environmental ideas and practices compels us to recognize the imbrication of many of our most cherished environmental ideals with the systems that produced the problems to which they apparently respond: capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. If we want something different—for ourselves and for the planet—we will have to imagine it, and we will have to build it.

scholarly journals Traces and Representations of the U.S.-Mexico Frontera

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-172
Author(s):  
Katherine G. Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The United States ◽  
Border Region ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Visual History

The following was the author’s presidential address at the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, in Northridge, California, on August 4, 2017. The twentieth-century visual history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, la frontera, offers a rich set of representations of the shared border environments. Photographs, distributed in the United States and in Mexico, allow us to trace emerging ideas about the border region and the politicized borderline. This essay explores two border visualization projects—one centered on the Mexican Revolution and the visual vocabulary of the Mexican nation and the other on the repeat photography of plant ecologists—that illustrate the simultaneous instability and power of borders.

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