Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

1985 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Taves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Holy Water ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

A French visitor to a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic parish in the United States described the scene as follows: Behold them, when the sanctuary bell announces the moment of consecration; they raise their hands, they extend their arms in the form of a cross, they pray and sigh aloud; at times some leave their pew and prostrate themselves in the aisle, in order to assume a more suppliant and adoring attitude. … If you wait until the end of mass, you will be further edified. You will see them approach as near as possible to the high altar, before which they bow profoundly, making several genuflections, and frequently remain for a moment almost prostrate to the ground. From here they go to kneel at the altar of the Blessed Virgin, then before that of St. Joseph. Then follows a last and touching station before the body of the dead Christ which the Italians call the pietá; they pray here for a few moments, and respectfully press their lips to the five wounds of the Saviour. At the door of the church they take holy water, sign themselves with it repeatedly, and sprinkle their faces with it; then turning to the tabernacle they make a last genuflection, as if to bid farewell to our Lord, and finally withdraw.

Americanism Redux

2020 ◽  
pp. 184-208
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Constitutional Republic ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Teaching

This chapter investigates the use of Americanism to appropriate Roman Catholicism for the good of a nation. It recounts older Roman Catholic heresy claimed that the American political system was not at odds with church teaching, even though the United States seemed to stand for most of the social and political realities that nineteenth-century popes had condemned. It also talks about the Americanists in the nineteenth-century who argued that Vatican officials misread the United States, stating that the nation was far friendlier to Roman Catholicism than Europeans imagined. The chapter details how Americanists urged the church to update its polity to the nation's political sensibilities, a strategy that would make Roman Catholicism look less odd in the United States. It also highlights ways Americanists adapt Roman Catholicism to life in a secular, constitutional republic.

Equal Rights, Privilege, and the Pursuit of Inequality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

While cherishing ideas of equal rights and equality, Americans have simultaneously sought inequality. The Revolution of 1776 committed Americans to the idea of equal rights, but just as fundamentally it dedicated the United States to the protection and increase of individual property and the power to direct it to heirs. Although equal rights and individual property rights have proved compatible with religious and ethnic equality, social and economic inequality, both meritocratic and inherited, have been integral to the American social and political order. Moreover, based on the emerging biologies of race and sex, the idea of equal rights for people of color and for women faced new barriers in nineteenth-century America and beyond into the twenty-first century.

Teaching National Identity and Alterity

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-126
Author(s):  
Bahar Gürsel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Race Ethnicity

The swift and profound transformations in technology and industry that the United States began to experience in the late 1800s manifested themselves in school textbooks, which presented different patterns of race, ethnicity, and otherness. They also displayed concepts like national identity, exceptionalism, and the superiority of Euro-American civilization. This article aims to demonstrate, via an analysis of two textbooks, how world geography was taught to children in primary schools in nineteenth century America. It shows that the development of American identity coincided with the emergence of the realm of the “other,” that is, with the intensification of racial attitudes and prejudices, some of which were to persist well into the twentieth century.

On Tour before Domestic Audiences

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Abelson Macleod
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
Cultural Activities ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Evolution Of Music ◽  
The U.S

This chapter focuses on Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler's piano recitals in the United States. It begins with a discussion of the development of an almost sacred canon of composers and the elevation of classical music to a virtual religious status as articulated by critic and transcendentalist John Sullivan Dwight and others. It then considers the bifurcation of various U.S. cultural activities into separate spheres—popular and elite—as described by historian Lawrence Levine, and how recent scholars have modified Levine's position with regard to the evolution of music in nineteenth-century America. The chapter also chronicles the practical aspects of touring in the nation, such as train travel, itineraries, packing lists, and hotels. Finally, it describes Bloomfield-Zeisler's recitals and how they compared with those of her contemporaries, both male and female; the U.S. audiences during that time—their makeup, behavior, etiquette, and their reactions to Bloomfield-Zeisler's performances; and how Bloomfield-Zeisler played.

Women’s High-Wheel Bicycle Racing in Nineteenth-Century America: More than Salacious Entertainment

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158
Author(s):  
M. Ann Hall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Players ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Bicycle Racing ◽  
Working Class Women

During the nineteenth century in North America, a small group of working-class women turned to sport to earn a living. Among them were circus performers, race walkers, wrestlers, boxers, shooters, swimmers, baseball players, and bicycle racers. Through their athleticism, these women contested and challenged the prevailing gender norms, and at the same time expanded notions about Victorian women’s capabilities and appropriate work. This article focuses on one of these professional sports, namely high-wheel bicycle racing. Bicycle historians have mostly dismissed women’s racing during the brief high-wheel era of the 1880s as little more than sensational entertainment, and have not fully understood its importance. I hope to change these perceptions by providing evidence that female high-wheel racers in the United States, who often began as pedestriennes (race walkers), were superb athletes competing in an exciting, well-attended, and profitable sport.

Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Altman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
The United States ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Orientalism ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Oriental Mysticism

During the nineteenth century, Americans encountered Asia through a number of exchanges. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, this chapter surveys the development of American Orientalism across three areas: academic Orientalism, representative Orientalism, and Orientalist discourses of power. Academic Orientalism first developed in the United States as the work of British Orientalists in India filtered into the country. Later, Americans such as William D. Whitney placed American Orientalism on par with its European competitors. Meanwhile, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, imagined Asia as a land of Oriental mysticism and contemplation in contrast to American materialism and reason. Finally, the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893 used representations of the Orient to bolster claims of American cultural supremacy. Through all of these examples, Orientalism collapsed the line between religion and race such that the Orient always represented racial and religious inferiority to white Christian America.

Terrible Revolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher James Blythe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Norms ◽  
Violent Images ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The relationship between Mormons and the United States was marked by anxiety and hostility. Nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints looked forward to apocalyptic events that would unseat corrupt governments across the globe but would particularly decimate the tyrannical government of the United States. Mormons turned to prophecies of divine deliverance by way of plagues, natural disasters, foreign invasions, American Indian raids, slave uprisings, or civil war unleashed on American cities and American people. For the Saints, these violent images promised an end to their oppression. It also promised a national rebirth as part of the millennial Kingdom of God that would vouchsafe the protections of the U.S. Constitution. Blythe examines apocalypticism across the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, particularly as it would take shape in localized and personalized forms in the writings and visions of ordinary Latter-day Saints outside of the church’s leadership. By following the official response of church leaders to lay prophecy, Blythe shows how the hierarchy, committed to a form of separatist nationalism of their own, encouraged apocalypticism during the nineteenth century. Yet, after Utah obtained statehood, as the church sought to accommodate to national norms for religious denominations, leaders sought to lessen the tensions between themselves and American political and cultural powers. As a result, visions of a violent end to the nation became a liability, and leaders began to disavow and regulate these apocalyptic narratives especially as they showed up among the laity.

The Telegraph in Nineteenth-Century America: Technology and Monopoly

1984 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-586 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Du Boff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
And Diffusion

In the United States, the technological optimism that accompanied the birth and diffusion of the magnetic telegraph between 1844 and 1880 had few predecessors-if any. Commercial telegraphy was barely a year old in 1847 when the telegraph was seen as “facilitating Human Intercourse and producing Harmony among Men and Nations\….[I]t may be regarded as an important element in Moral Progress.” “The telegraph system is invaluable,” a business journalist declared twenty years later, “and when the missing links shall have been completed of the great chain that will bring all civilized nations into instantaneous communication with each other, it will also be found to be the most potent of all the means of civilization, and the most effective in breaking down the barriers of evil prejudice and custom that interfere with the universal exchange of commodities.”

Idol Pursuits: Artifacts and Authority after the Civil War

Relic Hunters ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Snead
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Cave Wall

A particularly baroque literary appearance of the Kentucky Mummy highlights the transformation of public perceptions of indigenous antiquities in the United States in the Civil War decade. An imaginary romance of Mammoth Cave, Legends of the South (Smith 1869), describes a mysterious, annual journey of a “venerable Indian” down into the cavern. Ultimately the old man disappears into its depths, never to return. Decades later the author pursues the subterranean trail, encountering marvels that include the warning Siste viator—“Stop, traveler”— chalked on the cave wall. Nearby he finds the deceased elder, reduced to a “mummy-like dessication” clad in deerskin. Armed with an amulet taken from the body he pushes onward, ultimately entering a vast sepulcher in which . . . lay the warrior tribe, in their panoply complete. Supine—with their hands crossed upon their breasts, with their faces turned upward, as if acknowledging the presence of a superior being, they lay, like the marble effigies of the knights of old upon their sarcophagi. . . . In this catacomb the author is haunted by a ghostly “Sachem” who chides: “Are you not satisfied that your cruel warfare has exterminated us from the surface of the earth? Must you follow us to these chambers of death to scatter our ashes?” The supernatural figure then describes the wars of his dead people, prophesying that those events would be repeated in post-Civil War United States. “Nations from the rising sun shall make war upon the conquerors,” he pronounces “and then shall the Southern panther rise from his lair, and avenge his wrongs.” This subterranean tale amplified the myriad accounts of the Kentucky Mummy—a discovery two generations in the past by that time. By the mid-nineteenth century such visions of indigenous antiquity were increasingly commonplace, but the linkage between these histories and current events indicate increasingly deep associations with the American landscape. It was not simply abstract indigenous history that was being co-opted, however, but the material legacy of that experience—the ruins and artifacts that were ubiquitous in the increasingly populated countryside.

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