The Decline of U.S. Whaling: Was the Stock of Whales Running Out?

1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lance E. Davis ◽  
Robert E. Gallman ◽  
Teresa D. Hutchins

Re-emerging from the disruption caused by the Revolution and the War of 1812, the American whaling industry grew to dominate the seas between 1820 and 1860, only to suffer a severe decline during and after the Civil War. In the following article, Professors Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins examine the hypothesis that the U.S. whaling industry collapsed because the stock of whales was being depleted. After investigating the size of the original whale populations, their breeding habits, and the estimates of whales taken during the nineteenth century, the authors conclude that the overfishing of whales of various species occurred either not at all or too late to have been a contributing factor in America's whaling decline.

Author(s):  
Linda Steiner

This chapter use theories of status politics (conflicts as proxies for important debates over the deference paid to a particular group’s lifestyle) to show the importance of nineteenth-century suffragists’ own newspapers and magazines to the movement. The women who wrote for, edited, and published these outlets essentially invented and then celebrated at least four different versions of a new political woman and then proceeded to dramatize that new woman, showing how she named herself, dressed, dealt with her family, and interacted in the larger public sphere, and showing why she deserved the vote. The pre-Civil War suffrage periodicals essentially proposed a “sensible woman” while the postwar period saw competition between the “strong-minded” women aggressively promoted in the Revolution and the more moderate “responsible women” advocated by the Woman’s Journal. Later, the Woman’s Era dramatized an “earnest” new black woman.


Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood

This chapter traces a new visual genealogy of inner life as it appears in canonical late-nineteenth-century painter and portraitist Thomas Eakins’s work. It situates Eakins’s lauded portraits alongside the complex political and racialized questions about mind and body that emerged in the U.S. after the Civil War. It centers a reading of a marginal Eakins painting—Whistling for Plover—that Eakins gave as a gift to neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. This painting is a part of a web of inventive thinking about mind and body in the postbellum U.S., evincing the deep anxiety felt nationally over the bodily scars left by the Civil War’s racial violence, an anxiety that is essential to the development of the New Psychology as a discipline.


Author(s):  
Aaron Sheehan-Dean

In the mid-nineteenth century, a set of wars convulsed India, the U.S., Poland, and China. Although typically studied separately, the wars followed similar patterns and even responded to each other. This influence was felt most fully when powerful nations offered or withheld their support for insurgents, but it also operated in a more subtle fashion. The discussions about sovereignty, authority, and rebellion preoccupying literate observers created a global conversation that shaped the experiences of people engaged in widely different enterprises. Unlike the liberal wars of nation-building in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, these conflicts revolved around common problems of sovereignty and state-building. Participants at the time saw these connections and used references and analogies to other conflicts to advance their own interests. This global view restores the U.S. Civil War to its historical place as one of several insurgent challenges in the era.


2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-165
Author(s):  
Lisa Merrill

In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, free and fugitive persons of color were aware of the need to frame how they were seen in their everyday lives as part of an arsenal of rhetorical strategies to attract audiences to the abolitionist cause. In this article, I examine three spatial contexts that nineteenth-century mixed-race persons navigated for abolitionist ends in which their hybrid bodies were featured as an aspect of their public performances. These locations—Britain's imperially sponsored Crystal Palace, a Brooklyn church pulpit, and the dramatic reader's lectern—were not merely static places but were spaces animated and made meaningful by the interactions performed therein. Each framed a particular ocular and locational politics and strategically imbued some degree of social class privilege on the hybrid persons following its social scripts. But in so doing, each setting also reinforced colorism and contributed to notions of the supremacy of “whiteness” even while it furthered an antislavery agenda.


2020 ◽  
pp. 130-178
Author(s):  
Christopher James Blythe

This chapter focuses on the Utah territorial period—a time marked by hostility between the Latter-day Saints and the federal government. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, Mormon visionaries deployed prophecies of Gentile invasions on the Saints, as well as judgments on the major cities of the nation. The assurance that God would intervene against their enemies’ aggressions offered catharsis to the anxieties brought on by the U.S. Army’s occupation of Utah during the 1850s, the Civil War, and federal enforcement of anti-polygamy laws—what became known as “the raid.” In addition to prophecies introduced among the laity, there was also, during this period, an emphasis on Joseph Smith’s prophecy of a future American civil war that circulated widely in Mormon and non-Mormon circles. Apocalypticism prospered as tensions festered between Mormons and the federal government.


Abolitionism ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 128-134
Author(s):  
Richard S. Newman

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, American abolitionists began writing memoirs, histories, and reminiscences of the grand struggle for freedom. Part of a battle over Civil War memory, they sought not only to claim a piece of history but also to combat Lost Cause narratives that already denigrated emancipation. Even though American slavery was history, abolitionist battles continued. The epilogue describes how across the Atlantic world abolitionists realized that their struggle was not over. British abolitionists focused on the perils of illegal slave trading while Iberian and Latin American abolitionists renewed their struggle against bondage itself. In the U.S. South, abolitionists fought against new forms of discrimination that seemed very much like slavery.


2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-134
Author(s):  
Nancy Cervetti

Off and on for fifteen years I traveled the country to research the life and work of the nineteenth-century physician S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell is best known as the creator of the rest cure to treat hysteria and neurasthenia, but his wide-ranging interests led him to explore many other areas of medicine and literature. His groundbreaking work with rattlesnake venom earned him an international reputation, and his work with gunshot wounds, burning pain, and phantom limbs during the U.S. Civil War won him the title of the “Father of American Neurology.” Mitchell also possessed an impressive facility with language, and . . .


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