Business Failure, Judicial Intervention, and Financial Innovation: Restructuring U.S. Railroads in the Nineteenth Century

1997 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Tufano

This article describes the problems faced by reorganizers of distressed railroads in the late nineteenth century and how they were addressed by a combination of judicial intervention and financial innovations. In particular, the judicial innovations of supersenior financing, the equity receivership process, and the setting of upset values permitted firms to raise funds. The private financial innovations of deferred coupon debt, contingent charge securities, and voting trusts made subsequent default less likely. The private innovations can be interpreted as responses to both the distress of the railroads as well as the intervention by the courts that emasculated prior debt contracts.

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Peter H. Argersinger

Although rarely considered by historians, legislative and congressional apportionments were among the most important, absorbing, and contentious political issues of the late nineteenth century. Local, state, and national party leaders struggled to shape apportionments and thereby secure disproportionate influence for the counties, districts, and states their followers controlled. Gerrymanders, in turn, not only distorted representation but often incited a furious opposition, which disrupted legislative bodies, transformed political campaigns, and ultimately produced unprecedented judicial intervention. In surveying these overlooked developments, this essay points to important questions that historians must hereafter address.


1980 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-174
Author(s):  
Julian C. Skaggs ◽  
Richard L. Ehrlich

As production workers in late-nineteenth-century American heavy industry moved towards regular use of concerted action, including the strike, to gain their demands, employers generally adopted rigid policies of opposition. That it was a frightening period for manufacturers, with prices for their goods steadily falling and widespread business failure, has been emphasized by Edward C. Kirkland and others. But lack of scholarship in business archives has improverished labor-management history on this point. Professors Skaggs and Ehrlich offer one case history, based on a study of the “inner truth” of such a conflict in the 1880s. It confirms the suspicion that it was not practical economic imperatives but a long-run policy to maintain the principles of paternalism that often accounted for the intransigence of management.


2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.


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